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More Police Departments than Previously Thought Use Portable Surveillance Systems to Spy on almost Everyone

By Steve Straehley and Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | October 21, 2014

More U.S. police departments are employing electronic surveillance technology that can collect information from cell phones and laptop computers belonging not just to criminal suspects but also law abiding citizens.

The Charlotte Observer found the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police have for eight years used such equipment, which goes by many names: Stingray, Hailstorm, AmberJack and TriggerFish.

But the technology, which mimics cell towers, is also used by other law enforcement around the country. It’s just not clear which departments, the newspaper says, because the federal government has helped to shield police from disclosing their owning and operating the spy hardware. In fact, the Obama administration “has ordered cities not to disclose information about the equipment,” the Observer’s Fred Classen-Kelly reported.

However, members of the administration might also be among those spied upon. Through an open records request, VICE News has learned that Washington, D.C., is another city whose police department is using the technology. The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) there purchased the Stingray system in 2003, purportedly to use for anti-terrorism efforts.

In 2008, however, the system was brought out of storage and is now used in regular criminal cases. But the system doesn’t discriminate between calls made by those suspected of wrongdoing and those of ordinary citizens, which means anyone’s whereabouts can be tracked.

Nathan Wessler, an attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, told VICE News “If the MPD is driving around D.C. with Stingray devices, it is likely capturing information about the locations and movements of members of Congress, cabinet members, federal law enforcement agents, and Homeland Security personnel, consular staff, and foreign dignitaries, and all of the other people who congregate in the District…. If cell phone calls of congressional staff, White House aides, or even members of Congress are being disconnected, dropped, or blocked by MPD Stingrays, that’s a particularly sensitive and troublesome problem.”

Some in Charlotte have those concerns as well. “The thought of police or another agency collecting data on communications devices is troubling,” Charlotte City Councilman John Autry told the Observer. “I understand the balance between security and privacy, but I think we should honor the privacy protection in the Constitution. … What happens to the data? Who sees it? Who has access to it?”

The ACLU estimates that at least 46 local law enforcement agencies nationwide have cell phone tracking systems.

To Learn More:

Charlotte Police Investigators Secretly Track Cellphones (by Fred Classen-Kelly, Charlotte Observer)

Police in Washington, D.C. Are Using the Secretive ‘Stingray’ Cell Phone Tracking Tool (by Jason Leopold, VICE News)

After Months of Denial, Sacramento Sheriff Admits Using Stingray Cellphone Surveillance (by Ken Broder, AllGov California)

Local Police Departments Use Non-Disclosure Agreements to Hide Cellphone Tracking (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

October 21, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | 1 Comment

Obama considers [officially] allowing torture overseas

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RT | October 20, 2014

The White House is reportedly wrestling over how to interpret a ban on “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” ahead of a meeting in Geneva next month concerning the United Nations charter on torture.

According to the New York Times, the Obama administration remains divided over what stance a Washington delegation will officially take at the UN-sponsored Committee Against Torture panel early next month in the Swiss city.

Although Barack Obama said before and after being elected to the White House that United States officials should never engage in torturous activity, Times national security journalist Charlie Savage reported on Sunday this week that administration officials might formally adopt another stance — one on par with the policies of Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush — when the panel convenes in a couple of weeks.

The Times reported that the attorneys who answer to the president are conflicted over whether or not the White House should revisit the Bush administration’s interpretation of a UN treaty, the likes of which authorized the use of enhanced interrogation tactics, like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, on individuals detained by military and intelligence agencies in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks at facilities such as the Guantanamo Bay detention center and CIA so-called “black sites.”

The upcoming meeting will be the first one of Obama’s presidency, Savage acknowledged, presenting the commander-in-chief with a rare opportunity to speak of the UN Convention Against Torture, a treaty that since the 1980s has aimed to ensure prisoners the world over aren’t subjected to inhumane conditions.

In Sunday’s report, Savage wrote that Obama, then a US senator, spoke out adamantly against Pres. Bush when it was revealed in 2005 that his administration had been interpreting the UN treaty in a manner that they argued made it acceptable for CIA and Pentagon officials to disregard the prohibitions against torture if they weren’t on American soil.

Obama the president later condemned that reasoning with an executive order “ensuring lawful interrogations,” Savage added, although next month’s meeting may change that.

“But the Obama administration has never officially declared its position on the treaty, and now, President Obama’s legal team is debating whether to back away from his earlier view,” Savage wrote. “It is considering reaffirming the Bush administration’s position that the treaty imposes no legal obligation on the United States to bar cruelty outside its borders, according to officials who discussed the deliberations on the condition of anonymity.”

“State Department lawyers are said to be pushing to officially abandon the Bush-era interpretation,” Savage added, which would simply continue to let the 2009 Obama-signed executive order stand as Washington’s official word and further ensure that American officials are obligated to adhere to the torture treaty regardless of where in the world they are located.

Other attorneys, he added, have a different idea of what to do at next month’s meeting, however. “But military and intelligence lawyers are said to oppose accepting that the treaty imposes legal obligations on the United States’ actions abroad,” Savage wrote. “They say they need more time to study whether it would have operational impacts. They have also raised concerns that current or future wartime detainees abroad might invoke the treaty to sue American officials with claims of torture, although courts have repeatedly thrown out lawsuits brought by detainees held as terrorism suspects.”

Should those arguing on the latter side provoke, then the current administration could soon find itself agreeing with past policies that continue to be controversial nearly a decade after the Bush White House’s use of torture started to surface.

“Many foreign political leaders and non-governmental organizations have called for members of the Bush administration, including Bush himself, to face prosecution for allowing the abuse of detainees in US custody during the course of the US campaign against Islamic militant groups spurred by the 9/11 attacks,” Mark Hanrahan wrote for the International Business Times on Sunday. “The Bush administration, which launched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had to contend with a number of allegations it allowed US officials to use torture against detainees during the course of its campaigns,” including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.

If the Pentagon and CIA attorneys prevail, then Washington could once again interpret the UN treaty in a manner that allows those same torturous practices to be performed on detainees once against, as long as any such instances occur abroad.

Last week, McClatchy news service reported that a classified $40 million probe launched by the Senate to investigate the CIA’s Bush-era detention and interrogation program concludes without holding any administration officials responsible for the scandals at Abu Ghraib and other facilities that to this day remain a major scar on the presidency.

“This report is not about the White House. It’s not about the president. It’s not about criminal liability. It’s about the CIA’s actions or inactions,” a person familiar with the report told McClatchy. “It does not look at the Bush administration’s lawyers to see if they were trying to literally do an end run around justice and the law.”

October 20, 2014 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment

Why Military Intervention Will Never “Fix” the Middle East

Who Will Show the Moral Courage to End the US’s Middle East Wars?

By Col. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR | CounterPunch | October 17, 2014

American military interventions tend to follow a familiar pattern. The path to intervention begins when Washington decides to support one side in an ongoing conflict. Regardless of its true nature, the side Washington chooses is elevated to sainthood while the side Washington decides to attack is demonized.

Soon, the usual suspects, Neocons and Liberal Interventionists who are only nominally Republicans or Democrats, trot out the old mantra, “It’s the 1930s and we can’t we can’t let another Hitler rise again.” In 1991 it was Saddam Hussein. In 1995, the villains were Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. In 1999, the principle villain was Slobodan Milošević. All were guilty of heinous crimes and deserved the worlds’ contempt, but none were radically different from most of their contemporaries governing peoples at the same time in the Balkans and the Middle East.

To the uninformed American public remote from the regions where their armed forces will operate, it did not matter. With the added boost from America’s enthusiastic media, the usual suspects stampeded the nation into military action.

Today, things are a little different.  After 13 years of ‘mission accomplished’ in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, after watching 123 Islamist Militias overrun Libya in the aftermath of the United States-led NATO bombing campaign, Americans are more circumspect. True, ISIS, the Sunni Islamists in pickup trucks ransacking towns across the wastelands of the Middle East, is barbarous and savage, but the support for all-out war to destroy ISIS involving tens of thousands of American Soldiers and Marines is tenuous. The solution: an “airpower only” answer to Washington’s need to “do something.”

Today, it’s a re-run of the Kosovo Air Campaign across Mesopotamia. It’s worth pausing to recall the events of the air campaign that lasted from 28 February 1998 until 11 June 1999.

In Kosovo American and NATO pilots found few if any good targets on the ground. Once Yugoslav (Serbian) tanks, artillery and troops dispersed across mountainous and forested terrain inside a region smaller than Wales, American Airpower had enormous trouble finding and attacking Serb forces. Old, but robust Serb air defenses skillfully integrated with commercial radars made effective air strikes launched from below 11,000 to 15,000 feet extremely dangerous, if not impossible.

Confronted with this situation, General Wes Clark expanded the air war beyond Kosovo into Serbia where the aircraft could easily identify and strike infrastructure. Initially, the resulting strikes in Serbia looked impressive on television and acted as a tonic for NATO’s beleaguered leaders. The destruction of electrical power plants and bridges over the Danube ruined Serbia’s economy, but it did little to influence events on the ground in Kosovo.

America’s European allies grew impatient. Why, Europeans asked, had NATO’s military Leaders not anticipated Serb military action to expel Kosovo’s Muslim Albanian population?  Why not refocus the air campaign on Serb forces in Kosovo? To make matters worse, small numbers of Serb and Albanian civilians died in air strikes meant for Serb troops or infrastructure. Predictably, public support for the air campaign in the United States and Europe weakened.

Undeterred, General Clark pressed for the commitment of U.S. and European ground forces. Clark believed the air campaign was the equivalent of “Rolling Thunder;” the 1965 air campaign that led to the commitment of U.S. Ground Forces to Vietnam. It was not to be.

After weeks of negotiations, Ambassador Strobe Talbot succeeded in persuading Moscow to abandon Belgrade. Moscow deserted Belgrade because Moscow needed American and European support to cope with Russia’s shattered economy and a relentless Muslim rebellion in Chechnya.

Without Russian material support in terms of food and fuel, Milošević had no choice but to capitulate. Without food and fuel, hundreds of thousands of Serbs would die in the fierce Balkan winter.  Serbian forces withdrew in good order from Kosovo. Pushing the Serbs out of Kosovo cost roughly $4.5 billion. Air strikes inflicted $9 billion of damage on little Serbia.  Damage to the economies of the States in the Danube River Valley, to Italy and Greece ran into the billions of dollars too.

President Clinton was understandably relieved. He’d escaped from the Balkan disaster just in time.

Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, the Middle East is not tiny Kosovo. There is no easy retreat from the strident declarations made at the outset of his generals’ hasty, ill-conceived policy of intervention from the air. Once again, there are few, if any, lucrative target sets for American Airpower. Worse, the Middle East is in the grip of societal collapse and radicalization.

From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, the old Cold War military alliances are crumbling and many of the Sunni Arab ruling elites that supported them fear their own populations. Millions of Sunni Muslim Arabs admire ISIS. They do so because they are struggling with dysfunctional governments mired in corruption and they fear the encroaching power and influence of Shiite Iran in Damascus, Baghdad, and the Persian Gulf Emirates.

More significantly, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan is leading Turkey’s population of 77 million on an Ottoman Revival intertwined with the re-invigoration of Turkey’s centuries’ old Islamic identity. Since taking office, Erdogan has rejected every American diplomatic and military initiative in the region. Frustrated with the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood to secure power in Egypt, Erdogan has no interest in obstructing ISIS’s attacks on his regional opponents, apostate Shiites, Christians, Jews and, most of all, Kurds.

Erdogan and his Sunni Islamist supporters in the region are furious with Washington’s support for the Kurdish independence and Iran’s client Shiite State Baghdad. American air strikes are rescuing Ankara’s enemies from destruction at the hands of ISIS. Whatever else ISIS may be, in Erdogan’s mind, they are fellow Sunni Islamists and many of its fighters are Turks from the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as Anatolia. Under these circumstances no one in Washington should be surprised that the Turkish Army, the largest in NATO, obedient to Erdogan’s orders recently attacked Kurds, but not ISIS fighters.

More time, new tactics, more money, more troops and better strategic “partners” will not change these regional realities. The logical choice for President Obama is to tell the American people the truth: America’s military interventions in the Middle East and Southwest Asia are festering sores, bottomless pits for American blood and treasure. Americans can secure their own borders, enforce the rule of law and build economic prosperity at home, but Americans in uniform cannot and will not “fix” the Middle East.

Of course, suspending military operations that are both ineffective and counterproductive takes both understanding and moral courage. In Washington DC, moral courage is always in short supply. British Prime Minister, Sir Benjamin Disraeli made the same point over a hundred years ago: “You will find as you grow older,” Disraeli said to a new member of the House of Commons, “that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.”

 

October 17, 2014 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Urgent: Right-Left Alliance Needed to Stop This War!

By David Swanson | Ron Paul Institute | October 8, 2014

Last year, public pressure played a big role in stopping US missile strikes on Syria. The biggest difference between then and now was that televisions weren’t telling people that ISIS might be coming to their neighborhood to behead them. There were other, smaller differences as well: Britain’s opposition, Russia’s opposition, and the difficulty of explaining to Americans that it now made sense to join a war on the same side as al Qaeda.

But there’s another big difference between last year and this year. Last year was not a Congressional election year. With elections coming this November, Congress declared an early vacation in September and fled town in order to avoid voting a new war up or down. It did this while fully aware that the President would proceed with the war illegally. Most Congress members, including House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Leader Harry Reid, believe that by allowing a war to happen without explicitly voting for or against it they can best win our votes for re-election without offending their funders.

Congress members have good reason to think that way. Numerous organizations and individuals are dumping endless energy and resources into trying to elect either Democrats or Republicans, regardless of their policies. Big groups on the left have told me that they will not have any time for opposing war until the elections are over, at which point they’ll be happy to “hold accountable” any of the Democrats they’ve just reelected. There are organizations who do the same thing for Republicans.

When war was made the top election issue in exit polls in 2006, Democrats took power and their leader in the House, Rahm Emanuel, openly told the Washington Post that they would keep the war in Iraq going in order to campaign against it again in 2008. And so they did. Republicans elected opposing war in 2010 have been more rhetorical than substantive in their “opposition.”

The current war, and the endless war it is part of, must be opposed by people across the political spectrum who put peace ahead of party. ISIS has a one-hour video asking for this war. Giving it to them, and boosting their recruitment, is insanity. Ending insane policies is not a left or right position. This is a war that involves bombing the opposite side in Syria from the side we were told we had to bomb a year ago, and simultaneously arming the same side that the U.S. government is bombing. This is madness. To allow this to continue while mumbling the obvious truth that “there is no military solution” is too great an evil to fit into any lesser-evil electoral calculation.

This war is killing civilians in such large numbers that the White House has announced that restrictions on killing civilians will not be followed. This war is being used to strip away our rights at home. It’s draining our economy. It’s impoverishing us — primarily by justifying the routine annual spending of roughly $1 trillion on war preparations. It’s endangering us by generating further hatred. And all of this destruction, with no up-side to be found, is driven by irrational fear that has people telling pollsters they believe this war will endanger them and they’re in favor of it.

According to the Congressional Research Service 79% of weapons shipments to Middle Eastern countries are from the United States, not counting arms given to allies of ISIS or used by the US military. Rather than arming this region to the teeth and joining in wars with US weapons on both sides, the United States could arrange for and lead an arms embargo. It could also provide restitution for what it has done in recent years, including the destruction of Iraq that allowed the creation of ISIS. Making restitution in the form of actual aid (as opposed to “military aid”) would cost a lot less than lobbing $2 million missiles at people who view them as recruitment posters and tickets to martyrdom. That shift would also begin to make the United States liked rather than hated.

We won’t get there unless people whose souls are un-owned by political parties take over town hall meetings and let Congress members know that they must work to end this war if they want to earn our votes.

October 13, 2014 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Nuland Lands in Kiev as US-backed Regime Tools Up for War

By Finian CUNNINGHAM | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 7, 2014

In an ominous sign that the war in Ukraine is set to further escalate, US state department official Victoria Nuland arrived in Kiev where she met with senior members of the Western-backed regime.

In recent days the ceasefire brokered on September 5 has come under intense pressure as Kiev military forces have stepped up their barrage of the eastern city of Donetsk, with several civilian casualties reported almost on a daily basis.

As civilian homes burn in Donetsk, the Kiev regime has also begun openly talking about resuming its war footing by “raising combat readiness” and mobilising new army units toward the eastern Donbass regions, where it is trying to suppress a pro-independence movement in the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

For the past month, the Kiev regime has been talking out of both sides of its mouth. At times it has been declaring commitment to a ceasefire brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). At other times, hardliners in the regime have been warning that there was no such truce in practice, and that it was on the verge of an all-out war with Russia.

All the while, the putative ceasefire has been in tatters largely because Kiev’s forces have refused to withdraw from the conflict lines and continued to shell civilians centres.

Now the Kiev President Petro Poroshenko has flipped to a strident war rhetoric. In a televised appearance this week, the former industry tycoon had swapped his tie and suit for military uniform, and was warning that forces under his command were ready to use “modern fighting techniques”.

Poroshenko said that “Ukraine has transferred its economy to a military footing and will provide everything possible for the Ukrainian army to be stronger”. This while his bankrupt country owes Russia $5.3 billion in unpaid gas bills.

Last week his hardline Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk declared that Kiev’s military had been replenished with new equipment and winter gear.

The timing of this renewed militarism across the board in Kiev’s political leadership – together with increasing violations of the ceasefire in the east – seems more than coincidental with the arrival of eminence grise Victoria Nuland.

Nuland, who is Assistant Secretary of State to John Kerry, hasn’t been in Kiev since March. For the past seven months, she has taken a noticeably low profile with regard to Ukraine. Her absence was no doubt aimed at deflecting from her earlier controversial involvement in overseeing the CIA-backed coup on February 22, when the elected government of then President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed by the fascist cabal headed up by Yatsenyuk.

Two weeks before that coup, Nuland had been caught in a private phone call with the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, plotting on the shape of the new regime, with Yatsenyuk nominated as the point man. Nuland was also caught disparaging the European Union with expletives, in a clear signal that Washington was taking the driving seat to install the new regime, headed up by their man “Yats”.

Yatsenyuk’s Fatherland Party and the neo-Nazi Svoboda party, with its Right Sector stormtroopers, have dominated the regime’s anti-Russia policies ever since. Following a secret visit to Kiev in April by CIA director John Brennan, the regime embarked on a massive military offensive to suppress dissident ethnic Russian populations in the east of the country who were refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the US-backed coup.

That offensive – dubbed an anti-terror operation – has been largely under-reported by Western news media, even though it has resulted in more than 3,600 deaths and up to one million refugees. Most of the casualties have been civilian, with a Russian Investigative Committee reporting last week that at least 2,500 people have been killed from indiscriminate shelling of civilian centres in Donetsk and Luhansk by Kiev forces. The latter comprise regular army units, as well as neo-Nazi paramilitaries belonging to the so-called National Guard and various private militia (death squads) run by pro-Kiev oligarch figures, such as Igor Kolomoisky.

Both Washington and Brussels have obfuscated this terror campaign by affecting to give it legality by referring to the Kiev regime as the “government of Ukraine”. Washington and Brussels have also amplified Kiev’s diversionary propaganda accusing Russia of covert aggression and destabilising the Donbass regions. Moscow has consistently denied any involvement; and Western governments, the Kiev regime and NATO have not produced a shred of verifiable proof to support their tendentious claims against Russia.

Russia’s President Putin and the OSCE chairman, Didier Burkalter, who is also the Swiss president, this week reiterated that all sides in the Ukrainian conflict must abide by the terms of the ceasefire signed in Minsk on September 5.

But it seems that Kiev is now moving to dispel any pretence of recognising that ceasefire.

Since the truce was called – and apparently signed up to by Kiev’s President Poroshenko – the pro-independence Russian-speaking militia in Donbass have claimed that Kiev’s forces were only using the lull in violence as an opportunity to regroup.

Speaking on September 8, Donetsk People’s Republic deputy premier Andrei Purgin said: “They are doing what was impossible without truce conditions. All the movements of convoys would have been impossible. During the truce, convoys of combat vehicles are reaching destinations and preparing for attacks.”

Poroshenko’s public role in all this seems to have been to give an outward impression of adhering to a cessation and paving the way for political dialogue with the dissident regions.

However, that impression has to be set against continual breaches of the ceasefire and mounting civilian casualties by his forces, relentless anti-Russian rhetoric from the hardliners like Yatsenyuk, and the supply of military aid to the Kiev regime from Washington – the last tranche worth $53 million was announced while Poroshenko was being feted in the White House three weeks ago.

This week on the day that Nuland landed in Kiev, the regime announced what many suspected all along – that it was merely using the month-old ceasefire as a tactical launchpad to redouble its military operations.

Andrey Lysenko, Kiev’s National Defence and Security Council spokesman, said on Monday: “We have managed to upgrade the equipment currently in service, to get new armaments, and to reorganise and retool the defence industries that manufacture armaments and repair hardware.” He added: “We have also managed to regroup our forces, to carry out deep reconnaissance and to gather more information about the enemy. We have completed the third wave of mobilisation. We have replaced the units that needed that, we gave them a chance to have some rest after heavy fighting and to get back to normal”.

By “normal”, Lysenko means “terrorising civilians in eastern Ukraine”.

This underscores what Poroshenko has in recent days said about “the economy moving to a war footing”.

The sinister sign is that the Kiev regime, including the “Candy King” Poroshenko, is now realigning to an all-out belligerent policy toward the people of eastern Ukraine, and by extension, toward Russia itself.

The long overdue visit to Kiev this week by Victoria Nuland – Washington’s Ukraine hawk – carries the foreboding imprimatur of US-backed war escalation.

October 8, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Longest in US history: Afghan War turns 13, US military deaths grow 4-fold under Obama

RT | October 7, 2014

Tuesday this week commemorates 13 years since the start of the Afghan War — America’s longest running campaign of its kind — yet an end to the operation is hardly on the horizon.

Under the terms of the Bilateral Security Agreement, the pact signed last week by representatives for both the United States and Afghanistan, the US will significantly reduce the number of soldiers involved in its post-9/11 Operation Enduring Freedom at the end of this year. Troop numbers will shrink to 10,000, signaling indeed a major step towards ending the war in Afghanistan — a campaign promise made by US President Barack Obama during the lead-up to his re-election in 2012. With this week’s anniversary, however, the costs incurred already appear more evident than ever, and the length of the operation may be endless.

Combined with the only recently concluded war in Iraq, the financial toll of the Afghan war on Uncle Sam’s pocketbook could range in $4 trillion to $6 trillion, according to research published last year out of Harvard University. Additionally, the iCasualties website claims the US military has suffered 2,349 deaths during Operation Enduring Freedom — including 48 this year, or as many lives lost in that war in 2003 when it was still relatively new. Of that tally, Breitbart News recently reported, 1,649 deaths or about 75 percent, have occurred since the start Pres. Obama’s first term in early 2009.

Even with last week’s agreement, however, the Afghan War will only end in name, if at all. Under the terms of the pact, the roughly 9,800 US troops that will remain in Afghanistan past the end of this year will be cut in half by the end of the next, with a full-scale withdrawal tentatively slated for the end of 2016. By keeping US troops overseas for now, the State Department said recently, Afghanistan, the US and international community at large will “maintain the partnership we’ve established to ensure Afghanistan maintains and extends the gains of the past decade.” Once the last of the US forces leave, the Afghan army will again be tasked with preserving national security, and for the first time without American troops since 2001.

When those troops actually will exit Afghan for good, however, remains up in the air. Under the terms of the BSA, US and NATO troops have already been cleared to stay “until the end of 2024 and beyond,” suggesting Operation Enduring Freedom could extend for another decade even after already being America’s longest running war.

Thirteen years ago this Tuesday, George W Bush, then the president of the United States, said the Pentagon had officially begun a mission “designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.”

“This military action is a part of our campaign against terrorism, another front in a war that has already been joined through diplomacy, intelligence, the freezing of financial assets and the arrests of known terrorists by law enforcement agents in 38 countries,” Bush said from the White House. “Given the nature and reach of our enemies, we will win this conflict by the patient accumulation of successes, by meeting a series of challenges with determination and will and purpose.”

That patience is still at play today, however, and has led Operation Enduring Freedom into the record books of being the longest-running US war ever. Now despite campaign promises made by Obama, even Bush’s successor might not see the end of a war in Afghanistan anytime soon: 13 years after Bush announced the start of a military operation against terrorists, the US and its allies are now in the midst of conducting an aerial campaign against the so-called Islamic State, a terrorist organization that even Al-Qaeda has distanced itself from over concerns involving the group’s violent practices. According to new research published last month by USA Today, Washington is investing roughly $10 million a day on fighting a campaign against that group. If the Pentagon’s numbers don’t change drastically over time, then the cost of fighting that war could come to over $3 billion annually — a fraction of the $77.7 billion spent during the last fiscal year on Operation Enduring Freedom, but costly nonetheless.

October 7, 2014 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

IS OBAMA PLANNING MASS ARRESTS?

By Sherwood Ross | October 3, 2014

Is the Obama regime preparing for mass arrests of American civilians? Some indicators suggest this is a real possibility.

It has all the laws it needs to imprison anyone should it plan to make mass arrests (thanks, Congress, for the unconstitutional Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act).

It has illegally compiled lists of some 8 million names, (thank you, FBI and NSA).

It has vast stockpiles of weapons and bullets, (salute the Pentagon!)

It has $385 million worth of new dormitories (i.e., prisons?) tucked away on military bases called “National Emergency Centers” (thanks, Halliburton construction subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root).

And it has invested 120,000 on-duty officers from 73 law enforcement agencies with authority to arrest “suspects.”

If you think “it can’t happen here,” as described in the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel of that name, think again. What’s to stop USG from doing Stateside what it has been doing around the world? After all, who has already begun killing American citizens with illegal drone strikes if not totalitarian trendsetter President Barack Obama?

As Bill Blum, a Washington investigative journalist writes in his “Anti-Empire Report,” since the end of World War 2, the U.S. has interfered in the elections of at least 30 countries and dropped bombs on people in as many others and attempted to overthrow more than 50, mostly democratic, governments, such as Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973. What’s stopping it from turning a democracy into a dictatorship?

President Obama has gone so far down the totalitarian road, American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) Executive Director Anthony Romero proclaimed, “I am disgusted with this president…it’s (his) policies on civil liberties and national security issues I’m disgusted by.”

Romero added, Obama’s actions “raises serious questions about the administration’s commitment to the rule of law.” That’s a polite way of saying the president is a law-breaker. And extrajudicial killings are official Obama policy. As Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair claimed in Congressional testimony, the U.S. can, with executive approval, kill U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism.

“It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute and unspecified ‘threat,'” points out Ben Wizner, staff lawyer for the ACLU National Security Project.

The key phrase here is “unspecified ‘threat'”, another way of saying “suspected.” As George Mickum, a lawyer who has represented Guantanamo Bay prisoners, told Inter Press Service(IPS), “We have killed thousands of innocent civilians while attempting to target alleged operatives. And let us not forget how frequently our intelligence has been wrong about alleged operatives. As the civilians were not engaged in hostile actions, their murders by the Obama regime become ‘war crimes.'”

And constitutional scholar Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, Champaign, told IPS, “This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes murder, war crimes, and because the drone strikes are widespread and systemic, crimes against humanity. Because Obama’s drone strikes almost exclusively target Muslims and People of Color, they verge upon genocide.”

Boyle said, further, “The U.S. government has now established a ‘death list’ for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called dirty wars.”

If you think the USG will not condemn more Americans to death without trials, ponder the words of attorney John Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute of Charlottesville, Va.: “Unfortunately, ‘we the people’ have become so trusting, so gullible, so easily distracted, so out-of-touch, so compliant and so indoctrinated on the idea that our government will always do the right thing by us that we have ignored the warning signs all around us, or at least failed to recognize them as potential red flags.” Whitehead is the author of “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State.”

To our knowledge, the Obama regime has not answered questions Whitehead put to it, which (my paraphrasing) include:

Q: Why did the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) buy 1.6 billion rounds of hollow-point ammunition and 7,000 fully-automatic 5.56x45mm NATO ‘personal defense weapons’?

Q: Why do the Postal Service, Department of Education, Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration buy up weapons and ammunition in bulk?

Q: Why does the Department of Agriculture need 320,000 rounds of hollow point bullets and .40 caliber submachine guns?

Q: Why is FEMA stockpiling massive quantities of emergency supplies?

Q: Why is DHS giving away millions of dollars’ worth of federal security grants to states that federal intelligence agencies ruled have “no specific foreign or domestic terrorism threat?”

Whitehead points to a New York Times article quoting a Pentagon source who says that under Obama police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.

In addition to militarizing the police, Obama’s USG is building a Main Core database, Whitehead says, that “would be used by military officials to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security… to be carried out by the Army and FEMA.

Whitehead concludes, “Taken individually, these questions are alarming enough. However, when viewed collectively, they leave one wondering what exactly the U.S. government is preparing for and whether American citizens shouldn’t be preparing, as well, for that eventuality when our so-called ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ is no longer answerable to ‘we the people.'” #

Sherwood Ross can be reached at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

October 3, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Official Washington’s Syrian ‘Fantasy’

By Robert Parry | Consortium News | October 1, 2014

What does it say when the capital of the world’s most powerful nation anchors a major decision about war in what every thinking person acknowledges is a “fantasy” – even the principal policymaker and a top advocate for foreign interventions?

It might suggest that the U.S. government has completely lost its bearings or that political opportunism now so overwhelms rationality that shortsighted expediency determines life-or-death military strategies. Either way, it is hard to see how the current U.S. policy toward Iraq, Syria and the larger Middle East can serve American national interests or translate into anything but more misery for the people of the region.

Official Washington’s most treasured “fantasy” today is the notion that a viable “moderate opposition” exists in Syria or could somehow be created. That wish-upon-a-star belief was the centerpiece of congressional action last month on a $500 million plan by President Barack Obama to train and arm these “moderate” rebels to combat Islamic State terrorists who have been plundering large swaths of Syria and Iraq — and also take on the Syrian army.

Yet, as recently as August, President Barack Obama publicly declared that trust in these “moderates” was a “fantasy” that was “never in the cards” as a workable strategy. Then, on Wednesday, David Ignatius, national security columnist for the neoconservative Washington Post and a prominent booster of U.S. interventionism, reported from a rebel staging area in Reyhanli, Turkey, the same reality in nearly the same language.

“The problem is that the ‘moderate opposition’ that the United States is backing is still largely a fantasy,” Ignatius wrote, noting that the greatest challenge would be to coordinate “the ragtag brigades of the Free Syrian Army into a coherent force that can fill the vacuum once the extremists are driven out.”

Ignatius quoted Syrian rebel commander Hamza al-Shamali, a top recipient of American support including anti-tank missiles, as saying, “At some point, the Syrian street lost trust in the Free Syrian Army,” the U.S.-backed rebel force that was the armed wing of the supposedly “moderate opposition” to President Bashar al-Assad. Ignatius added:

“Shamali explains that many rebel commanders aren’t disciplined, their fighters aren’t well-trained and the loose umbrella organization of the FSA lacks command and control. The extremists of the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra have filled the vacuum. Now, he says, ‘the question every Syrian has for the opposition is: Are you going to bring chaos or order?’”

According to Ignatius, Shamali said he rejected a proposal to merge the FSA’s disparate brigades because “we refuse to repeat failed experiments.” He argued that an entirely new “Syrian national army” would be needed to fight both the Islamist radicals and Assad’s military.

But even the sympathetic Ignatius recognized that “the FSA’s biggest problem has been internecine feuding. Over the past two years, I’ve interviewed various people who tried to become leaders, such as: Abdul-Jabbar Akaidi, Salim Idriss and Jamal Maarouf. They all talked about unifying the opposition but none succeeded.

“An Arab intelligence source explains: ‘Until now, the FSA is a kind of mafia. … People inside Syria are tired of this mafia. There is no structure. It’s nothing.’ And this from one of the people who have struggled the past three years to organize the resistance.”

In other words, the “moderate” rebels – to the degree that they do exist – are viewed by many Syrians as part of the problem, not part of any solution.

Favoring Al-Qaeda

Another flaw in Obama’s strategy is that the Syrian “moderates” are much more opposed to Assad’s harsh but secular regime than they are to the Sunni jihadists who have emerged as the most effective fighting force against him.

“If U.S. airstrikes and other support are seen to be hitting Muslim fighters only, and strengthening the despised Assad, this strategy for creating a ‘moderate opposition’ will likely fail,” Ignatius concluded.

That complaint has given new hope to Washington’s influential neoconservatives that they can ultimately redirect Obama’s intervention in Syria from bombing the Islamic State terrorists to a full-scale “regime change” war against Assad, much like the neocons helped convince President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons’ Noses Into the Syrian Tent.”]

In this regard, Obama appears to be the proverbial deer in the headlights. He’s afraid of being called “weak” if he doesn’t go after the Islamic State for its hyper-violent attacks inside Iraq and its brutal executions of American hostages in Syria. Yet, Obama also can’t escape his earlier tough talk that “Assad must go.”

Obama’s core contradiction has been that by providing “covert” assistance to Syrian rebels, he has indirectly strengthened the Sunni extremists who have seized the Free Syrian Army’s weapons depots and won converts from the “moderate” rebels, some of whom were trained, armed and financed by the CIA. Meanwhile, other U.S. allies, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, have been helping more extreme Syrian rebels, including al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front.

A year ago, many of the “moderate” rebels publicly repudiated the Syrian political front that the Obama administration had put together and instead endorsed al-Nusra. According to one source with access to Western intelligence information, some “moderate” rebels – recruited from Muslim communities in Great Britain and other Western countries – have now taken their military skills (and passports) to the Islamic State.

Yet, instead of acknowledging that this strategy of relying on an unreliable “moderate opposition” is indeed a “fantasy,” President Obama and a majority in Congress have chosen to pursue this geopolitical unicorn with another $500 million and much political chest-thumping.

An Alternative Approach

At this late stage, the only practical strategy would be to press the non-extremist Sunni opposition to work out some form of unity government with Assad who retains strong support among Syria’s Alawite, Shiite and Christian minorities. By enlisting Russia and Iran, Obama might be able to secure concessions from Assad, including the possibility of a gradual transition to a post-Assad era.

With such a political settlement in hand, the focus could then be on defeating the Islamic State and al-Qaeda’s Nusra affiliate and restoring some order to Syria. But the problem is that Official Washington’s neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies are so fixated on “regime change” in Syria and are so hostile to Russia and Iran that any pragmatic strategy is effectively ruled out.

Though Obama may be a closet “realist” who would favor such a compromise approach, he has consistently lacked the political courage or the geopolitical foresight to impose this kind of solution on the powers-that-be in Washington. Any suggestion of collaboration with Russia and Iran or acquiescence to continued rule by Assad would touch off a firestorm of outrage in Congress and the mainstream U.S. media.

So, Obama instead has charted a course into what he knows to be a fantasyland, a costly pursuit of the chimerical Syrian “moderates” who – once located – are supposed to defeat both the Sunni extremists and the army of the secularist Assad. This journey is not simply a march of folly but a meandering into illusion.

~

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

October 2, 2014 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | 2 Comments

ISIS and the USA: Expansion and Resistance by Decapitation

By James Petras :: 09.26.2014

Introduction

In order to overcome massive US and world public opposition to new wars in the Middle East, Obama relied on the horrific internet broadcasts of ISIS slaughtering two American hostages, the journalists James Foley and Steve Sotloff, by decapitation. These brutal murders were Obama’s main propaganda tool to set a new Middle East war agenda – his own casus belli bonanza!

This explains the US Administration’s threats of criminal prosecution against the families of Foley and Sotloff when they sought to ransom their captive sons from ISIS.

With the American mass media repeatedly showing the severed heads of these two helpless men, public indignation and disgust were aroused with calls for US military involvement to stop the terror. US and EU political leaders presented the decapitations of Western hostages by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) as a direct and mortal threat to the safety of civilians in the US and Europe. The imagery evoked was of black-clad faceless terrorists, armed to the teeth, invading Europe and the US and executing innocent families as they begged for rescue and mercy.

The problem with this propaganda ploy is not the villainy and brutal crimes celebrated by ISIS, but the fact that Obama’s closest ally in his seventh war in six years is Saudi Arabia, a repugnant kingdom which routinely decapitates its prisoners in public without any judicial process recognizable as fair by civilized standards – unless tortured ‘confessions’ are now a Western norm. During August 2014, when ISIS decapitated two American captives, Riyadh beheaded fourteen prisoners. Since the beginning of the year the Saudi monarchy has decapitated more than 46 prisoners and chopped off the arms and limbs of many more. During Obama and Kerry’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia, horrendous decapitations were displayed in public. These atrocities did not dim the bright smile on Barak Obama’s face as he strolled with his genial royal Saudi executioners, in stark contrast to the US President’s stern and angry countenance as he presented the ISIS killing of two Americans as his pretext for bombing Syria.

The Western mass media are silent in the face of the Saudi Kingdom’s common practice of public decapitation. Not one among the major news corporations, the BBC, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS and NPR, have questioned the moral authority of a US President who engages in selective condemnation of ISIS while ignoring the official Saudi state beheadings and the amputations.

Decapitation and Dismemberment: By Dagger and Drones

The ISIS internet videos showing gaunt, orange-suited Western prisoners and their lopped-off heads have evoked widespread dismay and fear. We are repeatedly told: ‘ISIS is coming to get us!’ But ISIS is open and public about their criminal acts against helpless hostages. We cannot say the same about the decapitations and dismemberment of the hundreds of victims of US drone attacks. When a drone fires its missiles on a home, a school, wedding party or vehicle, the bodies of living people are dismembered, macerated, decapitated and burned beyond recognition – all by remote control. The carnage is not videoed or displayed for mass consumption by Obama’s high command. Indeed, civilian deaths, if even acknowledged, are brushed off as ‘collateral damage’ while the vaporized remnants of men, women and children have been described by US troops as ‘pink foam’.

If the brutal decapitation and dismemberment of innocent civilians is a capital crime that should be punished, as I believe it is, then both ISIS and the Obama regime with his allied leaders should face a people’s war crimes tribunal in the countries where the crimes occurred.

There are good reasons to view Washington’s close relation with the Saudi royal beheaders as part of a much broader alliance with terror-evoking brutality. For decades, the US drug agencies and banks have worked closely with criminal drug cartels in Mexico while glossing over their notorious practice of decapitating, dismembering and displaying their victims, be they local civilians, courageous journalists, captured police or migrants fleeing the terror of Central America. The notorious Zetas and the Knights Templar have penetrated the highest reaches of the Mexican federal and local governments, turning state officials and institutions into submissive and obedient clients. Over 100,000 Mexicans have lost their lives because of this ‘state within a state’, an ‘ISIS’ in Mexico – just ‘South of the Border’. And just like ISIS in the Middle East, the cartels get their weapons from the US imported right across the Texas and Arizona borders. Despite this gruesome terror on the US southern flank, the nation’s principle banks, including Bank of America, CitiBank, Wells Fargo and many others have laundered billions of dollars of drug profits for the cartels. For example, the discovery of 49 decapitated bodies in one mass in May 2014 did not prompt Washington to form a world-wide coalition to bomb Mexico, nor was it moved to arrest the Wall Street bankers laundering the ‘beheaders bloody booty’.

Conclusion

Obama’s hysterical and very selective presentation of ISIS crimes forms the pretext for launching another war against a predominantly Muslim country, Syria, while shielding his close ally, the royal Saudi decapitator from US public outrage. ISIS crimes have become another excuse to launch a campaign of ‘mass decapitation by drones and bombers’. The mass propaganda campaign over one crime against humanity becomes the basis for perpetrating even worse crimes against humanity. Many hundreds of innocent civilians in Syria and Iraq will be dismembered by ‘anti-terrorist’ bombs and drones unleashed by another of Obama’s ‘coalition’.

The localized savagery of ISIS will be multiplied, amplified and spread by the US-directed ‘coalition of the willing decapitators’. The terror of hooded beheaders on the ground will be answered and expanded by their faceless counterparts in the air, while delicately hiding the heads rolling through the public squares of Riyadh or the headless bodies displayed along the highways of Mexico … and especially ignoring the hidden victims of US-Saudi aggression in the towns and villages of Syria.

September 28, 2014 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Correa Denounces US Plans to Intervene in Latin America

teleSUR | September 28, 2014

Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa criticized on Saturday a new U.S. government plan to intervene and weaken Latin American governments.

Correa said that Obama’s intention to create six innovation centers for educating new “leaders” in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, and Asia, was clearly intended to interfere with Latin American countries.

“What they want is to intervene in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, because they say we attack freedom of speech; but go and see for yourselves who are the owners of media in United States,” said Correa.

On Tuesday President Barrack Obama said that his government will support civil society in countries where freedom of speech and association are threatened by the governments.

“We’re creating new innovation centers to empower civil society groups around the world,” said Obama during his speech in a plenary session of the Clinton Open Initiative. “Oppressive governments are sharing worst practices to weaken civil society. We’re going to help you share the best practices to stay strong and vibrant.”

President Correa hit back “This is part of the conservative restoration: the insolent announcement of intervention in other countries.” He added “Let us live in peace and respect the sovereignty of our countries.”

Correa also responded that he will propose the creation of an innovation center in the United States to teach the country “something about human rights,” so they might learn about true democracy and freedom of speech, revoke the death penalty and end the blockade on Cuba.

Correa has accused opposition movements in the country of trying to destabilize his government.

September 28, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The CIA, the President, and the Senate’s Torture Report

By Rob Crawford | CounterPunch | September 26, 2014

Astounding events over the last several weeks have once again put U.S. torture in the spotlight. Evidence of spying by the CIA on Senate staffers investigating the Agency provoked an unprecedented apology from CIA director John Brennan, calls for his removal, and a response from President Obama at his August 1st press conference.

The backdrop is the long delayed but pending public release of the summary of the over 6000 page investigative report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on CIA torture. The investigation was initiated over five years ago. The report was approved by the committee 20 months ago and approved for release 5 months ago. As we move into autumn, the date of its official release is still in question.

I. The CIA

The CIA has done everything possible to undermine any investigation into its secret rendition, detention and interrogation program. There have been several facets to the CIA’s defensive strategy:

The Senate report will purportedly accuse the CIA of lying to the public and to Congress. That will be unsurprising to anyone who knows the long history of the CIA, first revealed in detail by the Church Committee in 1975.  Secrecy and lying have been an Agency hallmark. The pre-9/11 history of CIA involvement with torture in Latin America and Southeast Asia is just one example.

In 2005, the CIA destroyed videotape evidence of interrogations involving torture. In 2009, the it orchestrated a media campaign warning of the consequences for national security of a criminal investigation, capped by a letter to Obama from seven former directors of the CIA warning that the extremely limited, preliminary investigation of CIA personnel who went “beyond guidance” would severely compromise the Agency. (The investigation eventually closed with no criminal charges filed.)

When the Senate committee began its work, the CIA insisted investigators use a special CIA facility for the review of documents. It then monitored Senate staff computers, read staffers’ emails and removed a damning internal report. Brennan denied that the CIA had spied on the Senate staff, calling the allegations “beyond reason” but in late July the CIA’s Inspector General’s investigation confirmed it. In March, the CIA countered the charges of spying along with a referral to the Justice Department by asking the DOJ to open an investigation of illegal behavior of committee staff. In response, Diane Feinstein, the normally hawkish chair of the Senate committee, gave an unprecedented, angry speech on the Senate floor about CIA bullying.

Further, CIA officials have publicly accused the committee of bias and the Agency will write a dissent that will be appended to the report. Not least, the CIA can virtually dictate redactions. It is extraordinary that the very agency being investigated by the Senate has the power to redact the Senate’s report of its investigation. The CIA’s redaction review took months and has now moved to the center of a controversy between Feinstein and the White House (which coordinated, participated in and approved the redaction process). Feinstein asserted that the proposed redactions “eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions.” She further said that she will not make the report public “until these redactions are addressed to the committee’s satisfaction.”

II. The President

At a news conference on August 1st, President Obama was asked about Brennan. First, Obama expressed “full confidence” in Brennan, referring to CIA spying on the Senate staff as a matter that “CIA personnel did not properly handle …” and “some very poor judgment was shown.” Given the enormous implications for a functioning democracy of the CIA’s unlawful misconduct, Obama’s language seems mild.

Second, the president acknowledged “we did some things that were wrong.” “We tortured some folks.” These comments were qualified by “in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.” Some commentators laud the president for using the word “torture” but others point out that his language actually minimized what happened.  From 2002 to 2009, hundreds of people were tortured and hundreds more subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. There have been over 100 deaths of people in detention, many likely to be a direct result of torture. The torture and abuse went on for years.  (I leave aside here continuing accusations of U.S. personnel being involved in torture since 2009.)

Third, Obama then claimed to “understand what happened.” His explanation emphasized “how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell,” “people did not know whether more attacks were imminent,” and national security officials felt “enormous pressure.” He told us that we should “not … feel too sanctimonious in retrospect,” given that officials had a “tough job.” This framing is a version of the fall-back position accompanying the more assertive claims that “enhanced interrogation” kept America safe.  Whether or not torture was ineffective; whether or not it was, as the president said, “contrary to our values”; and whether or not it was illegal, in the end it was, Obama is suggesting, understandable—that is, excusable under the circumstances.

After all, Obama asserted, the acts in question were committed by “real patriots”—i.e., right-minded people who simply acted out of love of country. The implication is that the torture is pardonable and that it would be ungrateful to criticize patriots for anything more than misjudgment under extraordinary circumstances. The logic of this nationalist rhetoric is to place off limits the harder questions about what happened and why: Why did state institutions routinely operate outside the law, lie to Congress, destroy evidence, and adopt a “by any means necessary,” “gloves-off” approach to problems of national security? Whether CIA operatives or presidents, patriots cannot be held accountable for committing war crimes. For love of country, let’s just move on. As Andrew Sullivan put it, “We tortured. It was wrong. Never mind.”

Next, Obama—again using the word “torture” and saying that “we crossed a line”–called on the country “to take responsibility for that so that hopefully we don’t do it again in the future.” Certainly. Yet, the president might have been more explicit that the line crossed was not only moral; it was legal—and no amount of Office of Legal Counsel “guidance” (based on radically distorted interpretations of what is legally permissible) or even immunities provided by Congress can alter that fact. Moreover, the “we” who “crossed a line” remains purposefully vague. After all, specific officials crossed that line, acting through the CIA, the military, the executive branch, and with possible complicity by individual members of Congress.

Finally, what does Obama mean when he urges the “country” to take responsibility? Remember it was the same Obama who in 2009 urged the country to “look forward rather than look backward,” who refused to pursue criminal accountability or even a bipartisan commission of inquiry. It is the same Obama who appears to be supporting a redaction process that Feinstein says undermines the conclusions of the report. Obama’s statement that the country should take responsibility is contradicted by his own actions.

Obama is right that Americans should grapple with their government’s use of torture. Too many Americans have chosen simply to look the other way. However, the president has not fulfilled his own responsibility to exercise moral leadership. The task of getting to the real truth of U.S. torture is difficult. To own up to the moral and criminal failure of our national leaders is even more challenging. Meaningful accountability is impossible without genuine soul-searching among leaders in government, media and in civil society. The Senate torture report is a necessary step in that direction.

III. The Report

I offer five reasons why the Senate report is important:

1)  To date, there has been no official report focusing on the CIA’s central role in carrying out the Bush-Cheney administration’s adoption of torture post-9/11.  Although the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report will be compromised by the continued suppression of the full report, by extensive redactions, and by an inevitably limited analysis, it will be the most significant government report to date on U.S. torture.  Torture will once again be given national prominence in the media.

This has not happened since 2009, a pivotal year in “the torture debate” when a series of shocking revelations unsettled the normal timidity of the media establishment.  Then, editors provided space for opinions highly critical of Bush and Cheney’s interrogation program along with views defending the policies. Anxieties swelled among perpetrators and their defenders about how far Obama might go in revealing the full scope of the torture program or who might be held accountable and how.  In a highly charged partisan atmosphere, Republican hawks, led by Cheney, attacked the new president’s change of torture policy and warned of serious consequences that would follow attempts to hold perpetrators accountable.

As it turns out, perpetrators had little to worry about.  After changing torture policy, Obama quickly signaled that accountability was off the table and he remained largely silent in face of the barrage of justifications from Cheney and conservative media commentators.  This silence allowed Cheney and his supporters to shape the narrative.   Since 2009, there have been only a few brief moments—at least within the U.S media–where the torture issue resurfaced, most prominently concerning continuing claims that “enhanced interrogation” was effective in keeping America safe from another terrorist attack.  At the very least, the Senate report will provide a refutation of this argument, although the CIA and defenders of the Bush-Cheney program will mount a vigorous counter-attack.  The debate over the efficacy of torture is crucial.

2) Torture is a high crime under international and domestic law.  Whether or not the Senate report names the crime or recommends legal solutions (not likely; leaks suggest that the report doesn’t even use the word “torture”), the truth of government lawlessness will be laid before the public and will re-energize calls for legal accountability for officials at the top of the political, military and CIA chain of command.  Human rights organizations will recall that the legal prohibition of torture as reaffirmed in the UN Convention Against Torture (ratified by the U.S.) permits no exceptions whatsoever.

They will also remind Americans that their government is under legal obligation to investigate and prosecute those who authorized and carried out torture.  They will emphasize that failure to assign responsibility for past wrongful acts creates a climate of impunity and that the rule of law means nothing if state crimes are exempted.

3) The Senate torture report will also present an opportunity for commentators to ask critical questions about threats to liberal democracy inherent to a national security state.  Already critics are making parallels between the rogue behavior of the CIA and the NSA’s Orwellian, “collect it all” surveillance.  The truth is that post-9/11 was not the first time that the security agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA, Special Forces, and other components of the secret state) have deliberately disregarded, or have been ordered by a president to disregard, legal and moral restraints.  Open government groups are now citing the CIA’s conduct in relation to the Senate committee and its report as exhibit A in their case against unaccountable government agencies and how national security and presidential authority are used to justify the twin abuses of excessive secrecy and evasions of congressional or judicial oversight.  Just as Watergate era revelations led to the Church Committee hearings and reforms, the renewal of the torture debate will raise fundamental questions about the dangers of unaccountable security agencies and the requirements for reassertion of democratic control.

4) Most commentators have focused on the substantial partisan differences over the use of torture and the struggle between those who are fighting for the release of the report with few redactions and those who want to bury it.  These differences are politically significant.  Which side prevails may shape public attitudes toward torture for years to come. However, I want to suggest another dimension.  Powerful forces on both sides of the partisan divide want the torture issue to disappear altogether.  Many military, security and political elites recognize that U.S. torture, approved at the highest levels of government, created an unsurpassed crisis of legitimacy for the country.  Their foremost objective is to restore that legitimacy.

Arguably, this is the principal reason why Obama issued his executive order rejecting torture in 2009 (I believe that McCain would have likely done the same).  It is why the new president counseled amnesia about torture and why he refused to initiate criminal investigations or even a commission of inquiry.  It is why he has fallen mostly silent about the issue of torture.  The U.S. relies on an image that it conducts its wars humanely and in accordance with international law.  Brutality and illegality belong to the enemy.  Occasionally, however, the brutal and unlawful exercise of state violence becomes public knowledge.  The inhumanity of violence “shocks the conscience.”  Legitimacy crises follow.  For the U.S., the Abu Ghraib photos were a disaster but the disaster kept growing with a cascade of revelations that included documentation of torture of prisoners in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and CIA kidnapping, renditions, and torture in secret prisons.  The reverberations are still being felt.

In 2014, national security elites in both political parties, including those who disagree about the permissibility of “enhanced interrogation,” are worried that the Senate report will further aggravate the prolonged crisis of legitimacy caused by U.S. torture—a crisis made worse by the government’s refusal to undertake criminal proceedings and support civil suits, and partisan politics resulting in continuing indefinite detention at Guantanamo prison camp and military commission trials that admit torture as evidence.  Most Americans are still unfamiliar with the grizzly details of what their government authorized and which high officials did the authorizing.  Globally, especially in the Middle East, the report will likely reactivate multiple resentments; and it may reinforce dismay among allies.

National security elites will disagree about the efficacy of torture and other aspects of the report, but they will be united in wanting to forestall public disclosure and critical examination of America’s use of coercive power, past and present.  Torture, after all, is not the only inhumane use of state violence; nor is U.S. torture solely an aberration of the Bush-Cheney years.  For the national security elite as a whole, the history of state violence is better left buried or forgotten and dissident voices about current inhumane operations ignored.  Above all, the use of violence as an instrument of policy must remain unencumbered.

For these reasons, even though the CIA will be rebuked by liberal Democrats and perhaps some legislative reforms will be attempted, calls for accountability will continue to be opposed.  For national security elites, the release of the Senate report summary will be treated as the end of the story—time to turn the page to narratives more consistent with the myth of American Exceptionalism.  This closure will be opposed by some, especially by those who understand that post-9/11 torture was not a one-off event and that torture shares characteristics with other forms of state violence.

5) If torture is not wrong, nothing is wrong.  If torture is not wrong, any degradation of human beings in the name of national security is permitted.  The logic of torture not only reflects but also promotes acceptance of a “whatever it takes” paradigm of military power.  Once torture is accepted, anything goes.

Yet, the opposite is also possible. It is not a big jump from abhorrence of torture to revulsion to what other forms of military violence do to human beings.  If the U.S. adoption of torture has shattered the myth of American humane warfare, other aspects of military policy that contravene that myth may come under greater scrutiny.  I do not underestimate the power of nationalist blindness to the suffering of “enemy” others or the misleading language of “precision targeting,” “accidental” civilian casualties and “collateral damage;” but, there are simply too many examples of both global and domestic responses to the inhumane violence of war to be ignored.  In fact, threats to legitimacy stemming from that violence, as I have contended, are a principal concern of national security elites.

If a “by any means necessary” paradigm of national power is the problem rather than officials working under “enormous pressure” in a terrorist emergency, the Senate report–in criticizing claims of efficacy and CIA malfeasance—will fall short.  Nonetheless, the report will lay bare a core contradiction for any state that relies on violence as an instrument of foreign policy: the clash between an inhumane logic of war that resists moral and legal restraint and humane responses to the terrible consequences of that logic.  The best hope for modifying unrestrained violence emerges directly from such a response.

Thus, with the release of the Senate report, human rights and other civic organizations, dissenting journalists, religious organizations, the newly radicalized legal profession, and humane people everywhere have an opportunity to work against the semi-coerced silencing of critical debate not only about torture but also about the link between torture, militarism and all inhumane acts of war.

Rob Crawford is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences University of Washington, Tacoma.

September 27, 2014 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

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