According to the president of the United States, “we’re all created equal and every single American deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law.”
Of course, Barack Obama, like other US politicians, does not actually believe we, the people of Earth, are all created equal. That’s clear enough from his exclusion of non-Americans when he describes who “deserves” equal treatment before the law. As a conservative nationalist, Obama believes some nationalities are more entitled to legal protections than others. Born in America, he might deign to give you a trial; born in Pakistan, he won’t even bother identifying the remains left in the wake of a Predator drone.
But Obama wasn’t talking about state-sanctioned murder. Instead, in a blog for the Huffington Post, he was condemning the continued, legal discrimination on the part of employers against LGBT employees.
“It’s offensive,” an Obama staffer presumably wrote. “It’s wrong. And it needs to stop because, in the United States of America, who you are and who you love should never be a fire-able offense.”
This is a great bit of rhetoric that’s ready to be slapped on a photo of a happy gay couple and shared 83,000 times on Facebook. It’s also incredibly disingenuous.
Barack Obama, right now, without needing to convince any bad mean stupid Republicans in Congress, could sign an executive order banning federal contractors from engaging in discrimination based on perceived sexual orientation. He could have done that yesterday. He doesn’t need legislation: he could have ended that discrimination instead of blogging, instantly providing greater job security to the tens of thousands of people working right now for the private contractors who effectively provide government services any more.
But he didn’t because Obama and the Democratic Party run a neat little scam, whereby they set themselves up as 0.05 percent more progressive than the GOP — for which they expect accolades and tribute — and then rely on the public’s ignorance of process to explain away why they’re not actually doing anything to make things even 0.05 percent better. In this case, John Boehner and his gang of angry white homophobes in the House get blamed for setting back Progress; discrimination against LGBT people continues; and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee then sends out a mailer with that happy gay couple meme on it asking if you will please donate to help defeat the forces of darkness.
And then they laugh and they laugh and they laugh.
An independent report has charged that medical personnel, working under the direction of the Department of Defense and CIA in military defense facilities, violated medical ethics by participating in the torture of detainees.
The services provided by American doctors and psychologists included “designing, participating in, and enabling torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of detainees, according to the report.
The 19-member task force concluded that since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA ordered medical professionals to assist in intelligence gathering, as well as forced-feeding of hunger strikers, in a way that inflicted “severe harm” on detainees in US custody.
The authors of the 269-page report, entitled “Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the ‘War on Terror’” is based on information from unclassified, publicly available information.
The task force revealed that a “theory of interrogation” emerged in US detention facilities, including Guantanamo Bay detention camp, that was based on “personality disintegration” as a means of breaking down the resistance of the detainees in an effort to extract confessions and information.
Over time, new interrogation methods were developed by interrogators and psychologists from techniques used in the pre-9/11 Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program that was designed for training US troops to withstand interrogation and mistreatment techniques in the event they were captured.
The interrogators and medical professionals transformed torture-resistant tactics into abusive methods of interrogation, which they employed on detainees. This included so-called ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, such as waterboarding, which involves covering a restrained detainee’s face with a towel and then soaking it with water. The technique is said to induce a feeling of drowning and complete helplessness.
The detainees are not permitted to receive treatment for the mental anguish caused by their torture.
The report also gave special mention to the Bush administration, which declared that the legal safeguards regarding the treatment of prisoners of war set down in the Geneva Convention did not apply to the “unlawful combatants” (i.e. terrorists) in the War on Terror.
The lack of any judicial restraints on the part of the military and medical personnel involved opened the door to “cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of prisoners at GITMO under both the Bush and Obama administrations.
Task Force member, Dr. Gerald Thomson, Professor of Medicine Emeritus at Columbia University, said physicians violated medical code of conduct by willingly becoming “agents of the military.”
“The American public has a right to know that the covenant with its physicians to follow professional ethical expectations is firm regardless of where they serve,” Dr. Thomson said in a released statement. “It’s clear that in the name of national security the military trumped that covenant, and physicians were transformed into agents of the military and performed acts that were contrary to medical ethics and practice.”
The medical community has “a responsibility to make sure this never happens again,” he added.
The authors cited a number of sources that informed their study, including recently published accounts of force-feeding hunger-striking detainees, a 2008 Senate report on the treatment of terrorists in custody, and a Red Cross probe of CIA interrogation measures that was leaked to the New York Times.
Dr. Thomson summarized the feelings of many people when he called the participation of physicians in the torture and interrogation of detainees a “big striking horror.”
“This covenant between society and medicine has been around for a long, long time — patient first, community first, society first, not national security, necessarily,” he continued. “If we just ignore this and satisfy ourselves with the (thought that), ‘Well, they were trying to protect us,’ when it does happen again we’ll all be complicit in that.”
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale, reviewed the charges contained in the report and called them “wholly absurd.”
“The health care providers at the Joint Strike Force who routinely provide not only better medical care than any of these detainees have ever known, but care on par with the very best of the global medical profession, are consummate professionals working under terrifically stressful conditions, far from home and their families, and with patients who have been extraordinarily violent,” Breasseale told NBC News.
Arthur Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, said the medical personnel working at Gitmo may believe they are doing something valuable for society.
“What I’ve seen over the years is that people (doctors) who don’t want to do that, don’t. They find ways to avoid it, get out of it, or get reassigned,” Caplan told NBC News. “But for someone who does it, that doctor’s impulse may be to say: ‘I want to fight terrorism. I want to get information that protects the American people.’ They think they’re doing the right thing.”
On October 22, 2013, the following exchange took place at the Daily Press Briefing between Deputy Spokesperson for the Department of State Marie Harf and an unidentified, tenacious reporter:
QUESTION: Earlier this month, the L.A. Times quoted Under Secretary Sherman saying in a Senate briefing that, quote, “Deception is part of the DNA of the Iranian leadership.” It’s only now picking up in Iranian media and Foreign Minister Zarif has condemned this remark. Do you have a response to that, or can you clarify what she may have meant?
MS. HARF: No, thank you for the question. I will make a couple points on that. I think first that doubtless each side has said things that have offended the other side over the last, what, thirty years now, and each side has commented publicly on its inability to trust the other side. I think focusing on those things that divide us really isn’t going to get us anywhere. We have a lot of work to do. We were in Geneva, as you know, last week, and I think the Iran delegation and the American delegation, led by Under Secretary Sherman, began to understand each other in ways—new ways during this last round of the P5+1 talks. In addition, their bilateral meeting, which was the first, I think, since 2009 between the U.S. and Iran, which we hope will continue as we go forward with the P5+1, will help, I think, set aside those years of mistrust and really start a—more of a direct dialogue.
QUESTION: So are you saying she misspoke?
MS. HARF: No, no. Not at all. The President in his UNGA speech said that there are decades and a long history of mistrust. This mistrust has deep roots, and we don’t think it can be overcome overnight, but we made some progress last week in Geneva, and we hope to continue making progress, including with additional bilateral meetings going forward.
QUESTION: Well, there is a difference between deep mistrust and saying that deception is in their DNA. If it’s in their DNA, that means they can’t ever change. Right?
MS. HARF: I don’t—I guess I don’t have any further comment on that than this. We –
QUESTION: So –
MS. HARF: — had good meetings last week.
QUESTION: I –
MS. HARF: Under Secretary Sherman had a good bilateral meeting with her Iranian counterparts and we believe we began to make process [sic] and hope to continue to do so.
QUESTION: Maybe this is something that stem cells can fix, yeah? Can you explain — Under Secretary Sherman, when she made those comments on the Hill, was talking specifically about President Rouhani in his previous capacity as an—as the Iranian nuclear negotiator when she said deception runs in the DNA.
MS. HARF: Well, I think we’ve made a lot of comments about –
. . .
QUESTION: So you don’t believe that President Rouhani is genetically incapable of being not deceptive? Do you—is that correct?
MS. HARF: We have said repeatedly over the last few weeks and months that President Rouhani—that we are encouraged by the words he said. We are encouraged with his conversation with President Obama. We’re encouraged by Foreign Minister Zarif’s conversations that he had with the Secretary and then at the P5+1. We also have said coming out of the P5+1 that there—this was a new level of seriousness, this was a new level of specificity in these talks that we have never seen before. That’s what we’re focused on and that’s what we’re focused on going forward.
QUESTION: So Under Secretary Sherman’s comment was not meant to imply that President Rouhani is genetically incapable of telling the truth or being –
MS. HARF: In no way. We’ve been very clear that we appreciate some of the—many of the things President Rouhani has said, that we appreciate the tone coming out of him and the rest of the Iranian delegation to the P5+1, and hope to continue that tone going forward.
The painful exchange between the persistent reporter and inarticulate Ms. Harf continued for a bit longer. Yet, to the very end, the reporter could not get an answer to his basic question: Does Under Secretary Sherman believe that Iranians are genetically deceptive?
To be fair, what Wendy Sherman actually stated in her Senate briefing was: “[W]e know that deception is part of the DNA.” As some news media in Iran pointed out, the statement did not explicitly refer to “Iranians.” However, as some others correctly pointed out, Sherman did not need to be explicit; given the context of her conversation, her meaning was clear. Indeed, on October 25, 2013, in an interview with the Voice of America, the propaganda wing of her own State Department, Sherman was given the chance to clarify her statement and, perhaps, rectify its racist overtone. Yet, she stuck to her guns, and even implicated President Obama, by stating: “I think those words spoke to some deep mistrust that President Obama discussed, and that we have to really work to get over that mistrust.” She was then asked about calls in Iran to boycott nuclear talks with the West if she were present. She answered: “The President, the Secretary of State, have asked me to lead the US delegation. I think colleagues will say that I am a fair [and] balanced negotiator.”
It is difficult to picture Wendy Sherman as a fair and balanced negotiator in the meetings between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the Security Council—the US, Britain, France, Russia and China—and Germany). This is not because she considers Iranians as genetically deceptive, but because of the history of her role in these negotiations. As I pointed out in my March and June essays, in the past meetings between Iran and the P5+1 Sherman appeared to represent mostly the interests of a colonial entity allied with the US, Israel. In these meetings she would put forward the Israeli manufactured demands and then go to Israel to report on the Iranian reactions. For example, as Haaretz reported on May 25, 2012, following the Iran-P5+1 meeting in Iraq, Sherman went straight to Israel to “update Israeli officials on the talks in Baghdad, and on preparations for the third round of talks in Moscow on June 18 and 19.” “We updated the Israelis in detail before we updated our own government,” Haaretz quoted an unnamed US official on the following day. According to the same report, in her trip to Israel, Sherman was accompanied by Gary Samore, President Obama’s Coordinator for Weapons of Mass Destruction Counter-Terrorism and Arms Control. Similar to Sherman, Samore represented the position of Israel in the Obama Administration before his departure in September of 2013. He was—along with Dennis Ross, the architect of Obama’s Iran policy, and Richard Holbrooke—one of the original leaders of “United Against Nuclear Iran” (UANI), an Israeli lobby group which has been actively seeking sanctions and the use of military force against Iran. After leaving the White House, Samore became the President of UANI! It was probably associates such as Gary Samore that Wendy Sherman had in mind when she stated “colleagues will say that I am a fair [and] balanced negotiator.”
In sum, neither Wendy Sherman nor many of her colleagues are what they pretend to be. They are not honest and objective negotiators who are genuinely trying to resolve peacefully a dispute between the West and Iran over Iran’s nuclear program. In the guise of representing the interests of the people of the United States of America, these individuals are in fact representing the interests of a colonial power in the Middle East. There is a saying in Persian to the effect that the pagan considers everyone else to have the same faith as himself. It appears that when Mrs. Sherman stated that “deception is part of the DNA,” she was thinking of herself and many of her own colleagues.
Another round of Iran-P5+1 meeting is scheduled for November 7 and 8. It follows the meetings on October 15-16 in Vienna, which were the first of such meetings during the Presidency of Hassan Rouhani. In these meetings Iran offered a set of proposals. Even though the details remained confidential, there were some reports as to what was proposed—all of which, of course, were denied by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. According to these reports, the set of proposals included Iran freezing its production of 20% enriched uranium and converting the stock of such uranium into fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor that produces medical isotopes. In addition, it was reported, Iran offered to relinquish spent fuel from a yet-to-be-operational Arak heavy water reactor. Moreover, the reports contended that Iran agreed to sign the so-called Additional Protocol—which would allow for the most intrusive inspection of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency—once unilateral and multilateral sanctions were lifted.
Iran’s set of proposals, if in fact true, were not that far apart from what had been offered by the P5+1 to Iran during the presidency of Ahmadinejad. Under normal circumstances, one would expect the two sides to reach some sort of agreement, given that their offers and counter offers were close. But we are not dealing with normal circumstances. As I have pointed out in my previous essays, Israel, which is not interested in any peaceful settlement of the dispute, basically sets the agenda for these meetings, not only through US officials, such as Wendy Sherman, but through British and French officials. Just before the last meetings, on October 10, 2013, Haaretz reported that “high-ranking” British and French diplomats arrived in Israel to meet with their “Israeli counterparts.” The delegations, according to the report, included individuals who represent Britain and France at the P5+1 and Iran meetings.
More importantly, Israel has nearly a veto power over any agreement that might ever be reached. Reuters reported on October 12, 2013, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President François Hollande to tell them “sanctions must not be eased.” The same message has been delivered ad nauseam by Netanyahu et al. to President Obama. But that is not all. Israel fortifies its position by pressuring the US Congress, mainly through its numerous lobby groups and its surrogate Senators and Congressmen. The Jewish Daily Forward reported on October 25, 2013, that for “members of Congress, the pressure is to not just maintain, but to increase the current far-reaching economic and trade sanctions against Iran. And it’s coming not just from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington but also from the local level, district-by-district, where Jewish groups are engaged in a push that is almost unprecedented in its intensity and breadth.” The situation is such that the White House has to beg these same groups to allow negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran to proceed, at least temporality. On October 29, 2013, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that a “small coterie of Jewish organizational leaders” will meet “with top staff at the National Security Council to discuss Iran, according to the White House and officials of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.” The following day Al-Monitor reported that the officials who were present at the meeting were National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisors Antony Blinken and Ben Rhodes, and, of course, Under Secretary Wendy Sherman.
The Obama Administration’s policy of “tough diplomacy” toward Iran, originally manufactured by Israeli lobby groups, has failed to bring about its desired results. The economic pain, induced by the most colossal sanctions ever imposed on a country, has not succeeded in bringing the disgruntled Iranians into the streets and preparing the ground for a naval blockade of Iran and military actions. The failure of the policy, as well as the departure of some of the original brains behind it, such as Dennis Ross and Gary Samore, has created an opportunity for the US to change course. But would Israel, its lobby groups and its surrogates in the US government, allow a different path to be followed? Would they allow the P5+1 and Iran to settle the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program? Or would they veto any peaceful resolution of the conflict and push for more sanctions and war? Whatever the answer, the DNA of Iranians has no bearing on the matter.
Some 47 million poor Americans – one in four children – see their already meager federal food allowances slashed this week.
The cuts amount to $4 billion a year over the next decade.
That $4 billion figure should ring a bell. It is equivalent to the official annual subvention that the US government sends to Israel – courtesy of the American taxpayer.
This week that $4 billion annual donation to the regime in Tel Aviv was on display with the following items: Israeli tanks, warplanes and troops carried out deadly raids on occupied Palestinian territories, resulting in at least nine deaths and dozens of wounded; dozens of Palestinians continued to be kidnapped (“arrested”) from their homes and streets by Israeli troops; also the dominant Likud party of Benjamin Netanyahu announced that illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Al Quds “will be intensified” with plans to build an additional 5,000 housing units.
The accelerated construction on Palestinian land is in blatant contravention of international law.
In other words, this week, as in every other week, the war crimes that the US-backed Israeli regime has been committing since at least 1967 continued apace. This in the same week that millions of Americans are on notice that they are being put on starvation rations because their government would rather send $4 billion to a genocidal regime than pay for basic human nutrition.
The fact is that the Israeli criminal regime gets away with this genocide only because the US rulers hand over $4 billion every year to a state that comprises some seven million Israeli nationals.
It is astounding that tens of millions of Americans are going hungry because the same amount of money being cut from their social welfare is bankrolling Israel.
Ironically, some 900,000 of those hungry Americans are believed to be former US soldiers, many of whom are mentally and physically broken from fighting in the so-called Wars on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Israeli regime, its American lobbyists and its bought-and-paid-for politicians created the false premises for these criminal wars – and many others besides.
But the men and women who served as cannon fodder in these criminal wars are now being abandoned in hunger, while the regime that helped cause their misery is still creaming off American taxpayers.
Hunger, poverty, suffering, death, genocide are all consonant and consistent in this grotesque system deified as capitalism.
Here are a few other figures to round out the abject picture. If just 0.6 per cent were shaved off the annual $700 billion US military budget, that would be enough to cover the cuts in the food stamp program this year.
If the $52-billion-a-year NSA spying program that is operated against our own citizens was cancelled that would pay for the immediate food needs of all Americans and, moreover, help build an economy for genuine social development, with good paying jobs, welfare and infrastructure. But, again, that won’t happen because the US economy is a war economy based on fear and paranoia.
US lawmakers, both Republican and Democrat – they are all the same puppets – want to axe a total of $40 billion from the food program over 10 years. This is the same figure – $40 billion – that these same minions throw at Wall Street and the mega-banks every two weeks under the scam known as “Quantitative Easing.” Taxpayers, many of them on food stamps, are bailing out corporations that crashed the world economy and which are up to their necks in militarism. Yet, this bloated elite turns around and snatches the crumbs out of people’s mouths.
But we return to the Zionist regime. These crimes are subsidized and enabled by money that would otherwise feed hungry Americans. People will die this year in the US simply from poverty and the lack of food. These American deaths will be for the same reason that Palestinians will die from poverty and hunger.
The choice is revealingly simple. Stop funding genocide in the Middle East or start feeding Americans.
Doug Henwood, a radical economist and founder of Left Business Observer, says it as succinctly as anyone when he sums up the goal of bipartisan corporate education reform imposed on poorer neighborhoods as “ … low cost privatized holding tanks leading to McDonalds jobs for the lucky, or to prison for the not so lucky …” along with classes delivered by computers rather than unionized teachers. But as useful as this summation is, it leaves out one element worth noting. You can’t run a global empire without a military class, any more than you can run a prison without prison guards.
So in Chicago, widely touted as a laboratory of educational innovation, mostly because its current mayor, President Obama’s former chief of staff holds dictatorial power over its public schools, one of the showpieces of education reform has been the handing over of entire high schools and even middle schools to the army, the navy and the marine corps.
Before the era of corporate reform there was at least one achievement of genuine small d democratic education reform pushed through by the administration of Chicago mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s. Since then parents in every public school have been allowed to elect parent councils, with reps from among rank and file teachers, which have veto power over title one funds and principal’s contracts, which are limited to two years. The “innovative” answer of downtown bureaucrats, corporate elites and subsequent mayors to parents taking a hand in running the schools has been to simply close Chicago public schools and replace them with charters over which parents have no say.
This year, Chicago closed more public schools than any other school district in a single year in the nation’s history. None were charter schools. This week Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced he was moving the middle school which had earlier been given to the marine corps into the facility of a fully functioning neighborhood school, Ames Middle School.
The fact that Ames parents and community members had testified, had met with officials and overwhelmingly rejected the closing of their school meant less than nothing, and may even have contributed to the replacement of their school by a military academy. What mayor, and what alderman really wants organized parents running their own neighborhood institutions? It’s bad for business if you’re a privatizer, or a politician who takes cues and campaign contributions from privatizers. And ultimately habits of local democracy are bad for empire.
What Chicago, and corporate education reformers and privatizers and their contractors nationwide want, as Henwood observes, are low-cost holding tanks to funnel the well-behaved into low-wage precarious labor for the lucky and jail for the unlucky. They want distance education and computerized instruction because these are cheaper than human, potentially unionized teachers. And to Henwood’s list we should add, they want a sprinkling of military charter schools. After all, you can’t run an empire without soldiers, or a prison without guards.
A new study from the Department of Homeland Security has proven what has been a well-known fact amongst anyone who follows the alternative media. The so-called war on terrorism has actually increased terrorism around the world. Whenever the United States government announces that they are launching a war on something we get more of what they are waging a war on.The war on poverty resulted in more poverty, the war on drugs resulted in more drug use and now we can definitively say the same thing about the war on terrorism. If the goal of the so-called war on terrorism was to reduce the amount of terrorism in the world it has failed miserably. Anyone with any sort of common sense would look at this study and realize that a policy change is in order. Unfortunately the policy makers within the Obama regime who are either useful idiots or psychotic criminals will do nothing of the sort.
According to the study there has been a 69% rise in terrorist attacks and an 89% increase in terrorist related fatalities from 2011.In addition, the number of people killed due to a terrorist attack has risen greatly since 2001.These figures clearly indicate that global terrorism has steadily risen throughout this so-called war on terrorism.
In reality, these numbers should be considered low due to the fact that this study does not include terrorist attacks launched by governments or state actors.
If they did include these numbers the amount of terrorist attacks and terrorist related fatalities would be much higher with the Obama regime topping the list as one of the world’s biggest terrorist organizations. The Obama regime has authorized countless drone strikes that have killed many civilians including women and children.These incidents should all be considered acts of terrorism.
To prove this point, the study used the following criteria to classify an incident as an act of terrorism.
It was aimed at attaining a political, economic, religious or social goal.
It was intended to coerce, intimidate or convey a message to a larger group.
It violated international humanitarian law by targeting non-combatants.
The Obama regime’s drone strikes certainly fulfill all three categories and if they were carried out by a non-state actor they would be considered terrorist attacks.These drone strikes have specifically targeted civilians who the Obama regime merely suspects are terrorists.This means that the Obama regime is acting as judge, jury and executioner.This is illegal and contrary to international law. … Full article
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights says there has been “systematic violation of human rights” at the notorious US-run Guantanamo prison in Cuba.
“The information we have indicates that there was a general and systematic violation of human rights” at Guantanamo, said Rodrigo Escobar Gil, one of the seven commissioners at the Washington-based body.
The commission also called on the US government to explain the alleged abuses, especially the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike.
Protesting harsh conditions and indefinite detention without charge or trial, Guantanamo prisoners began a hunger strike in early February, which US authorities say ended in late September.
Images from the detention center published in June showed how prisoners were force fed by military guards, being strapped to a metal restraint chair and fed through the nose with plastic tubing.
In July, a federal judge ruled that the practice of force-feeding the Guantanamo hunger strikers amounted to torture, but said she did not have the jurisdiction to stop the practice.
Escobar Gil, who described force-feeding at Guantanamo as “cruel and inhumane treatment,” said the IACHR’s requests for visits to the prison complex without pre-conditions have all been rejected by US authorities.
“We have reports of torture and degrading treatment. But all our requests for visits without conditions have been denied. We want to know when they are going to allow visits without pre-conditions,” he said.
Shutting down Guantanamo was a central theme of Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 as he acknowledged that the detention camp was a symbol of the US government’s violation of human rights.
The drone war is obscure by design. Operated by armchair pilots from clandestine bases across the American west, the Predators and Reapers fly over Afghanistan, Yemen, and Pakistan’s Tribal Areas at invisible heights, where they are on orders from the CIA to kill “high value” targets with laser-guided “surgical” precision thousands of feet below. But because of where the Hellfire missiles land, and because the program is operated in secret, verifying their precision and their lasting effects isn’t easy.
For years, US officials have downplayed the number of civilian deaths in particular, even as a chorus of independent reports have offered their own grim estimates. The latest, according to new research by the United Nations and Amnesty International: 58 civilians killed in Yemen, and up to nine hundred in Pakistan. In a speech in May, President Obama finally broke his silence on drones, acknowledging that civilians had been killed—he didn’t say how many—and promising more transparency for the program. “Those deaths,” added the President, “will haunt us for as long as we live.”
For journalist Madiha Tahir, the numbers are important, but they’re not the whole story. Her documentary “Wounds of Waziristan,” which premieres above, features interviews with the people who live in the southern part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, bordering Afghanistan, under the eyes of the drones, and in the wake of their destruction. The film switches up the typical calculus that drives the drone debate at home. Tahir, who grew up between Pakistan and the U.S., points out that drone strikes aren’t just about the numbers of casualties, or the kinds of ethical arguments that arise around “just war” concepts like proportionality. The effects of the drone war have as much to do with the way those casualties rip apart communities and haunt the living, in distant places that exist on the fringes of law and order.
“Because drones are at a certain remove, there is a sense of uncertainty, a sense that you can’t control this,” Tahir says, describing the attitude among the people who live in Waziristan. Already haunted by the legacy of British colonialism and the laws it left behind, this part of the Tribal Areas is now ruled with a brutal fist by the Pakistani military and various insurgent groups. But the buzz of the drones, sometimes seven or eight overhead a day, signals another kind of indeterminate power. “Whether its true or not, people feel that with militants there is some degree of control. You can negotiate. There is some cause and effect. But there is no cause and effect with drones. It’s an acute kind of trauma that is not limited to the actual attack.”
For the operators of the drone program, who have launched more than 300 missile attacks in Pakistan since 2008, the political vacuum of the Tribal Areas have encouraged a special kind of war-on-terror calculus. As the New York Timesreported last year, the American government has been counting all military-age males in a strike zone as “militants,” which leads to skewed figures about who exactly has been killed. The Obama administration has executed “signature strikes,” drone attacks based on a so-called “pattern of life” analysis in which simply suspicious behavior is enough to qualify for an attack. And in a so-called “double tap” maneuver, a second attack follows an initial strike, killing those who have come to recover bodies from the scene.
“When an attack happens, the media claims to know how many militants were killed,” says Noor Behram, a journalist in the Tribal Areas who has been photographing the casualties of drone strikes for years. “Actually, you only find body parts on the scene, so people can’t tell how many have died.”
In one interview, Tahir speaks with a man from South Waziristan named Karim Khan, whose brother and son were killed in a drone strike. “What is the definition of terrorism?” he asks her, and she returns the question to him. His tired eyes light up.
“I think there is no bigger terrorist than Obama or Bush,” he says. “Those who have weaponry like drones, who drop bombs on us while we are in our own homes, there are no greater terrorists than them.” …
The German Chancellor’s mobile phone has been on an NSA target list since 2002 and was code-named “GE Chancellor Merkel”, according to Der Spiegel. The paper also reports that President Obama assured Merkel that he did not know her phone was tapped.
The monitoring operation was still in force even a few weeks before Obama’s visit to Berlin in June 2013.
In the NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS) document cited by the magazine, the agency said it had a “not legally registered spying branch” in the US embassy in Berlin. It also warned that its exposure would lead to “grave damage for the relations of the United States to another government”.
Using the spying branch, NSA and CIA staff were tapping communications in Berlin’s government district with high-tech surveillance.
The magazine says that according to a secret document from 2010, such branches existed in about 80 locations around the world, including Paris, Madrid, Rome, Prague, Geneva and Frankfurt.
However, it is unclear, Der Spiegel reports, if the SCS obtained recorded conversations or just connection data.
President Obama, however, told Merkel that he was not aware that her phone was bugged, if he had known, he would have immediately stopped it, Der Spiegel reports as it also disclosed the recent conversation between the two.
The German newspaper cites the Chancellor’s office, which said that during Wednesday’s call Obama expressed his deep regret and apologized to the Chancellor.
Earlier, Barack Obama assured Merkel that his country was not monitoring her communications, but failed to confirm or deny the tapping took place in the past.
Speaking to her German counterpart, Susan E. Rice, the President’s national security adviser, also insisted that Obama did not know about the monitoring of Merkel’s phone, and said it was not currently happening. However, she also failed to deny it happened in the past.
Angela Merkel called President Obama over the German government’s suspicions the US could have tapped her mobile phone on Wednesday.
Following the call, US ambassador to Germany Steffen Seibert stated that Merkel had made clear to Obama that if the information proved trued it would be “completely unacceptable” and represent a “grave breach of trust”.
A few days earlier, the US President had to convince his French colleague of the same issues.
The Le Monde newspaper reported earlier this week that the NSA spied on the agency records of millions of phone calls of top French politicians and business people. Later The Guardian revealed citing former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the leadership of 35 nations was spied on; the list of countries however did not follow.
In response to allegations, Obama promised that the US secret service would revise its methods of working in order to both provide the security of citizens and not to interfere with their privacy.
Germany will send heads of its foreign and domestic intelligence agencies to Washington to hold talks with the White House and the National Security Agency in order to push forward” an investigation into allegations the US spied on its leader.”
“What exactly is going to be regulated, how and in what form it will be negotiated and by whom, I cannot tell you right now,” German government spokesman Georg Streiter told reporters.
German media citing sources close to the intelligence service reported on Saturday that the delegation will include top officials from the German secret service.
Earlier, Germany and France said they want “a no-spy deal” with the US to be signed by the end of the year.
The Foreign Policy reported on Saturday that 21 one countries are now participating in talks over a draft UN General Resolution aimed at holding back US government surveillance.
EU leaders say their relations with the US have been undermined by reports of NSA spying on European leaders and ordinary citizens.
A partnership with America should be built on respect and trust, they said in a joint statement on Friday.
“[The leaders] stressed that intelligence gathering is a vital element in the fight against terrorism,” the BBC cites the statement as reading. “A lack of trust could prejudice the necessary cooperation in the field of intelligence gathering.”
The European Parliament recently voted for the suspension of US access to the global financial database held by a Belgian company because of concerns that the US is snooping on the database for financial gain rather than just to combat terrorism.
However, anti-war activist Richard Becker doubted President Obama did not know the German Chancellor’s phone was bugged.
“These kinds of assertions are comical,” he told RT. “It shows that the US’ relationship with other countries is based on its notion of its “American exceptionalism.” There is in fact an American exceptionalism – no other country in the world spies on everybody else and all of the countries and feels free to intervene in all other countries,” he said.
Becker says the spying scandal shows “the nature of the relationships” between the US and other states.
“Even among the allies they are in contention and competition among each other and not to mention the kind of relationship that is carried out against those countries that the US considers its enemies,” he said.
At a time when a record 47-million Americans live in poverty, when cities are going bankrupt, when 10 million jobless can’t find work and millions more are too discouraged to look, when the infrastructure is crumbling, when schools are running down, when bridges,roads and water mains need urgent repair, and when the AP reports four out of five Americans are in the financial soup, President Obama’s plan to spend $60 billion to refurbish an aging nuclear weapons arsenal is an obscene waste of tax dollars.
This president, who campaigns like a progressive and governs like a reactionary, is about to modernize a costly nuclear arsenal that President Ronald Reagan, in his shining moment, called “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization”. Reagan sensibly called for “a world free of nuclear weapons” and met with Soviet Russia’s Gorbachev at four summit conferences between 1985 and 1988 to draw down missile and nuclear stockpiles.
Yet Obama appears hell-bent on updating the seven aging hydrogen bomb designs (why, oh, why, in the name of god, why?) that would require construction of costly new facilities when millions of American families can’t find decent housing and small businesses can’t find money to expand! According to a report by Ralph Vartabedian of the Los Angeles Times, the new scheme “essentially violates the Obama administration’s pledge against developing nuclear weapons.” The reporter interviewed Philip Coyle, former head of the U.S. nuclear testing program no less, quoting him as saying the Obama plan “sends the wrong message to the rest of the world.”
It also puzzles a lot of Americans. Areport by the Union of Concerned Scientists, writes Vartabedian, “raises new objections that the plan would require construction of unnecessary facilities and introduce untested combinations of parts inside the bombs—which could erode confidence in their reliability and safety.” (A polite way of saying, “Holy Hell, Look Out!”)
Speaking of safety, in an article titled “Nukes of Hazard” in the Sept. 30th issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes, “most of the danger that human beings faced from nuclear weapons after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to do with inadvertence—with bombs dropped by mistake, bombers catching on fire or crashing, missiles exploding, and computers miscalculating and people jumping to the wrong conclusion. On most days (during the Cold War), the probability of a nuclear explosion happening by accident was far greater than the probability that someone would deliberately start a war.”
Yet, instead of destroying all nuclear weapons and calling upon the other members of the lunatic nuclear fraternity to do likewise, President Obama is setting the wrong example and raising the stakes of a nuclear accident that could far exceed the havoc that an accidental nuclear release is currently inflicting on Japan—and perhaps the rest of the world as well. Reviewing Eric Schlosser’s new book, “Command and Control,”(Penguin) Menand writes, there have been “hundreds” of incidents since 1945 “when accident, miscommunication, human error, mechanical malfunction, or some combination of glitches nearly resulted in the detonation of nuclear weapons.”
What’s more, “the more extensive, elaborate, and fine-tuned the nuclear-weapons system became, the greater its exposure to the effects of an accident,” Menand writes. “For the system to work,” he adds, “for the warnings to be timely, communications to be transparent, missiles to launch, explosives inside the warheads to detonate, and nuclear cores to fission—everything has to be virtually perfect. The margin for error is tiny. And nothing is perfect.” Also consider, if you will, that the new nukes will make those dropped on Japan look like cherry bombs.
To spend $60 billion on weapons that must never be used, and whose use Reagan warned can destroy civilization, is a horrific waste of taxpayers’ dollars when, as CNN Money reports, roughly “three quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little or no emergency savings.”
Menand warns not to give too much credit to Mr. Reagan for calling for an end to nuclear bombs, as he was only responding to pressure from the American public. Well, I think the American public would really prefer not to have nuclear weapons around today, just as polls show it wants out of the Middle East. President Reagan showed the way. If Obama goes through with this wild spending plan, the survivors may well refer to it as Obama’s Folly.
Sherwood Ross can be reached at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
PYONGYANG — The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) said Wednesday it would not unilaterally dismantle its nuclear deterrence unless outside nuclear threats were removed, the official KCNA news agency reported.
“As action for action remains a basic principle for finding a solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula, the DPRK will not unilaterally move first,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement.
The denuclearization of the peninsula did not mean unilateral nuclear disarmament by the DPRK but a process of realizing a whole nuclear-free peninsula by removing substantial outside nuclear threats on the principle of simultaneous actions, the statement said.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said early this month Washington would be open to dialogue if Pyongyang started denuclearization first.
The National Defense Commission on Oct. 12 dismissed the U.S. request as “an intolerable mockery and insult to the army and people of the DPRK.”
The statement criticized Washington for shifting responsibility to Pyongyang and urged Washington to abandon its hostile policy toward Pyongyang.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a press briefing Wednesday that Beijing had been “in close communication with all relevant parties of the six-party talks.”
China’s chief delegate to the six-party talks, Wu Dawei, and his Russian counterpart, Igor Morgulov, met in Beijing Monday and exchanged views on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the resumption of the six-party talks, the ministry said in a brief statement.
Despite repeated warnings from experts, the federal government under President Barack Obama has continued to allow farmers to pump livestock with antibiotics intended for humans, which has increased health risks for Americans.
A new study (pdf) from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (JHCLF) blamed the lack of meaningful change in livestock-antibiotics policies on the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, which have lobbied to block new laws and regulations from being adopted.
Members of Congress and officials with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have caved to industry pressures, even though evidence shows the overuse of antibiotics in livestock has made these drugs less effective in treating human infections.
Bob Martin, executive director of the JHCLF, told The Washington Post that FDA statistics reveal as much as 80% of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are fed to cattle, pigs, chickens and other farm animals—a practice that reduces the efficacy of the drugs when it comes to fighting deadly infections in people.
The FDA has developed new guidelines that would require farms to stop using antibiotics specifically to bulk up food animals. But the rules would allow the drugs’ continued use for disease control. This latter provision is so loosely defined, Martin said, that there would be no practical change in the use of antibiotics.
“In a couple of areas, the Obama administration started off with good intentions. But when industry pushed back, even weaker rules were issued,” he told the Post. “We saw undue influence everywhere we turned.”
The new report was authored by a commission chaired by former Kansas governor John Carlin (D) and that included former U.S. agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, ranchers, and experts in public health and veterinary medicine.
The report’s message was echoed in a dire warning issued by Mary Wilson of the Harvard School of Public Health: “We will see common infections become fatal,” just as they were before the invention of antibiotics, she told the Post.
In honour of Michael Parenti (1933–2026), who passed away on 24 January 2026 at the age of 92. He spent his life naming what power prefers to leave unnamed.
In 1837, Abraham Lincoln remarked: “These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people.”
Today, he would be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.
That dismissal—reflexive, automatic, requiring no engagement with evidence—is not a mark of sophistication. It is a tell. The question worth asking is not whether conspiracies exist (they are a matter of public record and a recognised concept in law) but why acknowledging their existence provokes such reliable hostility. What work does the label “conspiracy theorist” actually do?
The late political scientist Michael Parenti spent decades answering that question. His conclusion was blunt: “’Conspiracy’ refers to something more than just illegal acts. It serves as a dismissive label applied to any acknowledgment of ruling-class power, both its legal and illegal operations.” The term functions not as a descriptor but as a weapon—a thought-terminating cliché that protects the powerful from scrutiny by pathologising those who scrutinise them.
Conspiracy denial, in Parenti’s analysis, is not skepticism. It is the opposite of skepticism. It is credulity toward power dressed up as critical thinking. As he wrote in Dirty Truths: “Just because some people have fantasies of conspiracies does not mean all conspiracies are imaginary.” … continue
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