Speaking before students at Northern Virginia Community College on February 13, President Obama unveiled his 2013 budget request, in which he proposed “some difficult cuts that, frankly, I wouldn’t normally make if they weren’t absolutely necessary. But they are.” These budget cuts are unavoidable, the President argued, because “the truth is we’re going to have to make some tough choices in order to put this country back on a more sustainable fiscal path.” In a sad commentary on the misplaced priorities of the Obama Administration, however, these “tough choices” will affect the delivery of basic services to U.S. citizens while the Israeli military hits the jackpot at taxpayer expense.
As part of its budget request, the White House released a 205-page document detailing the cuts, consolidations, and savings the Obama Administration is proposing. These proposed cuts include $5 million to the USDA to analyze food-borne pathogens, potentially making the U.S. food supply even less safe than it already is after 30 people died last year after eating listeria-infected cantaloupe; a $359 million cut to the EPA to provide grants to states for water infrastructure projects when an estimated 1.7 million Americans shockingly lack access to basic water and sanitation services according to the Water Infrastructure Network; and a whopping $360 billion cut over ten years in Medicare, Medicaid, and other health programs even though the World Health Organization rates the U.S. health system as only 37th globally in health care performance.
Given these “difficult cuts” to the budget, it is easy to agree with Israeli journalist Ran Dagoni, who wrote last year in the Israeli business newspaper Globes, that “the time has come to bid goodbye to the military aid that the US extends to Israel, that generous package… that enables the Israeli taxpayer to share the cost of procuring equipment for the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] with the US taxpayer.” After all, Israel – the 28th wealthiest country in the world in 2011, with a per capita gross domestic product greater than Korea and Saudi Arabia according to the International Monetary Fund – hardly needs U.S. charity more than we need safe food, clean water, and health care.
Yet, instead of reducing or even just freezing levels of U.S. military aid to Israel, President Obama wants to provide Israel with $3.1 billion of U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons next year, an increase from $3.075 billion in 2012, making the State Department’s claim that this budget request “maintains last year’s record funding levels” for Israel both immodest and inaccurate. By comparison, of the nine other Near Eastern countries receiving U.S. military aid, the budget request for eight of them is unchanged from last year’s budget while the request for Tunisia declined.
Were Israel using these weapons for legitimate purposes and to further U.S. foreign policy objectives, then perhaps a persuasive case could be constructed for why the United States does not need to make any budgetary “tough choices” when it comes to Israel. However, Israel misuses U.S. weapons, in violation of U.S. laws, to commit grave and systematic human rights abuses against Palestinians in furtherance of its 44-year military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip and its illegal colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. From 2000 to 2009, the United States provided Israel with more than $24 billion of military aid and delivered more than 670 million weapons, rounds of ammunition, and related military equipment. During that same period, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Israel killed at least 2,969 Palestinians “who did not take part in the hostilities and were killed by Israeli security forces (not including the objects of targeted killings).”
Israel often kills Palestinians with these same U.S. weapons provided at taxpayer expense. Such was likely the case last December when an Israeli soldier fired a high-velocity tear gas canister at 28-year-old Mustafa Tamimi, a resident of the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, who was protesting against Israeli settlers seizing land on which his village’s natural spring is located. The canister, fired from an Israeli armored vehicle, struck the activist in the face. He died the next day from his wounds. Strong evidence exists that the tear gas canister that killed Mustafa was made by Combined Systems, Inc. of Jamestown, Pennsylvania and likely could have been one of more than 595,000 tear gas canisters and other “riot control” equipment, valued at more than $20.5 million, which were funded by U.S. taxpayers and given to the Israeli military between 2000 and 2009.
Not only does U.S. military aid to Israel make U.S. taxpayers complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses of Palestinians; it also acts as a disincentive for Israel to work in tandem with the Obama Administration to achieve stated U.S. foreign policy goals of freezing Israeli settlement expansion, ending Israeli military occupation, and establishing a Palestinian state and a just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The United States cannot afford the moral and economic costs of providing ever-increasing amounts of U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel. In this era of “tough choices” for the budget, here is a clear-cut example of a subsidy that should be ended.
– Josh Ruebner is the National Advocacy Director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and a former Analyst in Middle East Affairs at Congressional Research Service.
February 22, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite |
Leave a comment
Barack Obama’s administration has launched attacks unparalleled since the McCarthy years on those who blow the whistle against corruption inside the federal government.
Obama has already charged more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined (as reflected in the list below.) Peter van Buren, a career foreign affairs officer at the Department of Department of State claims his job was threathened after writing, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. Van Buren, who became disillusioned by waste and hypocrisy while serving in Iraq, says “The number of cases in play [against whistleblowers] suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.”
Van Buren points out that the pre-World War 1 Espionage Act has been used against “labor leaders and radicals like Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood, Philip Randolph, Victor Berger, John Reed, Max Eastman, and Emma Goldman. Debs, a union leader and socialist candidate for the presidency, was sentenced to 10 years in jail for a speech attacking the Espionage Act itself. The Nixon administration infamously (and unsuccessfully) invoked the Act to bar the New York Times from continuing to publish the classified Pentagon Papers.” But no other administration has used this legislation as liberally as President Obama who has authorized more drone attacks than any other American president.
Van Buren was writing on the blog Tom.Dispatch.com of Tom Engelhardt, a teaching fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California. Engelhardt in turn observes: “One thing is obvious. No one ever joins the government in order to be a whistleblower or leaker.Whistleblowers are created, not born,” speaking words that resonate with my experience as a whistleblower. Van Buren notes: “It is perhaps typical of whistleblowers and leakers that something they are privy to simply pushes them over the edge.” In my case it was the realization that government was failing to act against a U.S. multinational whose mining practices were leading to the injury and deaths of South African vanadium miners.
I continue to speak out against injustice, but it certainly has not made my life easier. Each week I get mails to my Facebook site from those who are whistleblowers or are close to whistleblowers. This week’s example is typical: “I know you don’t know me and I am taking a HUGE chance by writing you, but I have to at least try. My parents are going through some of the same things you went through at the EPA. Both top-level executives at federal agencies they have been retaliated harshly against. NO ONE seems to hear us. I’m begging for your help. Please help us… These agencies are corrupt and we are still on the bus fighting like Rosa.”
There is little I can do other than direct them to the National Whistleblower Center, give the names of lawyers and share a little human empathy. But there is no doubt that under this administration there is a concerted attack against those who dare to expose corruption in government or corporations.
Recently four employees of the Air Force Mortuary in Dover, Delaware, revealed that the Dover Air Force Base mortuary had lost and sawed off body parts and mishandled other remains of America’s war dead. Retaliation against them included firings, the placing of employees on indefinite administrative leave, and the imposition of five-day suspensions. Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner has accused the Air Force of deflecting blame — and a mortuary official of lying and obstructing the probe by firing one of the workers who blew the whistle. What remains to be seen is whether Lerner, an Obama political appointee, will distinguish herself from her disgraced predecessor by seriously investigating corruption under this administration.
At present six whistleblowers are suing the Food and Drug Administration for electronically spying on them when they tried to alert Congress about misconduct at the agency. This is the agency tasked with overseeing public health, food safety, medicines and medical devices. Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) launched an investigation in response to a lawsuit filed by six FDA whistleblowers and documents released by the National Whistleblowers Center that show the FDA targeted whistleblowers for special monitoring and intercepted personal communications to Congress, including emails to Senator Grassley’s staff.
Senator Grassley, the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg whether or not whistleblowers were singled out for special monitoring based on a letter they wrote to President-Elect Obama’s Transition Team.
We are waiting to see the Army’s reaction to whistleblower Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who documented in the Armed Forces Journal that senior leaders of the Department of Defense intentionally and consistently misled the American people and Congress about success in the Afghan War.
Those charged under the Espionage Act include:
- Former CIA officer John Kiriakou charged on January 23 for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. The CIA also found an excuse to fire his wife, also employed by the Agency, while she was on maternity leave.
- Thomas Drake an employee of the National Security Agency revealed that it spent $1.2 billion on a contract for a data collection program called Trailblazer when the work could have been done in-house for $3 million. Drake’s home was raided at gunpoint and the agency forced him out of his job. He now works at an Apple Store. His attorney told Anti-war.com: “Too often, whistleblowers end up broken, blacklisted, and bankrupted.”
- Whistleblower Pvt. Bradley Manning, accused of leaking Army and State Department documents to the website WikiLeaks, spent more than a year in a U.S. Marine prison and was denied the chance even to appear in court to defend himself until almost two years after his arrest.
- Former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Morris Davis lost his career as a researcher at the Library of Congress for writing a critical op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and a letter to the editor at the Washington Post on double standards at the infamous prison.
- Robert MacClean was charged for blowing the whistle on the Transportation Security Administration.
Van Buren notes in his piece for Tom.Dispatch.Com “My travel vouchers from as far back as the law allows have come under “routine” re-examination. My Internet activity is the subject of daily reports. My credit reports have been examined for who knows what. Department friends who email me on topical issues have been questioned by agents of Diplomatic Security, the State Department’s internal police. My Freedom of Information Act request for documents to help defend myself and force State to explain its actions has been buried.”
And then we read investigative reports in the Washington Post, as an example, of 33 members of Congress that have steered more than $300 million in earmarks and other spending provisions to dozens of public projects that are next to or within about two miles of the lawmakers’ own property. We have yet to hear of action against them.
Freedom of the press and freedom of expression are American constitutional bulwarks. These important elements of the constitution provide protection for truth-tellers as the last defense against tyranny. It is a shame that a legacy of the first African American president is heightened repression against whistleblowers.
~
See Marsha on C-Span Book/TV at: www.marshacoleman-adebayo.org.
Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo is the author of No FEAR: A Whistleblowers Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA is available through amazon.com and the National Whistleblower Center. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo worked at the EPA for 18 years and blew the whistle on a US multinational corporation that endangered vanadium mine workers. Marsha’s successful lawsuit lead to the introduction and passage of the first civil rights and whistleblower law of the 21st century: the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR.)
February 22, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | Dover Air Force Base, Food and Drug Administration, Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, National Whistleblower Center, Obama |
Leave a comment
The press wires are reporting on intensified fighting in Mali between the nation’s military and ethnic Tuareg rebels of the Azawad National Liberation Movement in the north of the nation.
As the only news agencies with global sweep and the funds and infrastructure to maintain bureaus and correspondents throughout the world are those based in leading member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, BBC News and Deutsche Presse-Agentur – the coverage of ongoing developments in Mali, like those in most every other country, reflects a Western bias and a Western agenda.
Typical headlines on the topic, then, include the following:
“Arms and men out of Libya fortify Mali rebellion” Reuters
President: Tuareg fighters from Libya stoke violence in Mali” CNN
“Colonel Gaddafi armed Tuaregs pound Mali” The Scotsman
“France denounces killings in Mali rebel offensive” Agence France-Presse
“Mali, France Condemn Alleged Tuareg Rebel Atrocities” Voice of America
To reach Mali from Libya is at least a 500-mile journey through Algeria and/or Niger. As the rebels of course don’t have an air force, don’t have military transport aircraft, the above headlines and the propaganda they synopsize imply that Tuareg fighters marched the entire distance from Libya to their homeland in convoys containing heavy weapons through at least one other nation without being detected or deterred by local authorities. And that, moreover, to launch an offensive three months following the murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi after his convoy was struck by French bombs and a U.S. Hellfire missile last October. But the implication that Algeria and Niger, especially the first, are complicit in the transit of Tuareg fighters and arms from Libya to Mali is ominous in terms of expanding Western accusations – and actions – in the region.
Armed rebellions are handled differently in Western-dominated world news reporting depending on how the rebels and the governments they oppose are viewed by leading NATO members.
In recent years the latter have provided military and logistical support to armed rebel formations – in most instances engaged in cross-border attacks and with separatist and irredentist agendas – in Kosovo, Macedonia, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Libya and now Syria, and on the intelligence and “diplomatic” fronts in Russia, China, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, Indonesia, Congo, Myanmar, Laos and Bolivia.
However, major NATO powers have adopted the opposite tack when it comes to Turkey, Morocco (with its 37-year occupation of the Western Sahara), Colombia, the Philippines, the Central African Republic, Chad and other nations that are their military clients or territory controlled by them, where the U.S. and its Western allies supply weapons, advisers, special forces and so-called peacekeeping forces.
The drumbeat of alarmist news concerning Mali is a signal that the West intends to open another military front on the African continent following last year’s seven-month air, naval and special operations campaign against Libya and ongoing operations in Somalia and Central Africa with the recent deployment of American special forces to Uganda, Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. In Ivory Coast, Mali’s neighbor to the south, last February the French military with compliant United Nations troops – “peacekeepers” – fired rockets into the presidential residence and forcibly abducted standing president Laurent Gbagbo.
U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) first became operational as the war fighting force it was intended to be from the beginning in running the first two weeks of the war against Libya last March with Operation Odyssey Dawn before turning the campaign over to NATO for seven more months of relentless bombing and missile strikes.
Mali may be the second military operation conducted by AFRICOM.
The landlocked country is the hub of the wheel of former French West Africa, bordered by every other member except Benin: Burkina Faso, Guinea (Conakry), Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal. It also shares a border with Algeria, another former French possession, to its north.
Mali is Africa’s third largest producer of gold after South Africa and Ghana. It possesses sizable uranium deposits run by French concessions in the north of the country, the scene of the current fighting. Tuareg demands include granting some control over the uranium mines and the revenue they generate. Major explorations for oil and natural gas, also in the north, have been conducted in recent years as well.
The nation is also a key pivot for the U.S.’s Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership established in 2005 (initially as the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative), which grew out of the Pan Sahel Initiative of 2003-2004.
In May of 2005 U.S. Special Operations Command Europe inaugurated the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative by dispatching 1,000 special forces troops to Northwest Africa for Operation Flintlock to train the armed forces of Mali, Algeria, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Tunisia, the seven original African members of the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative, which in its current format also includes Burkina Faso, Morocco and Nigeria. Libya will soon be brought into that format as it will the NATO Mediterranean Dialogue military partnership.
The American special forces led the first of what have now become annual Operation Flintlock counterinsurgency exercises with the above nations of the Sahel and Magreb. The following year NATO conducted the large-scale Steadfast Jaguar war games in the West African island nation of Cape Verde to launch the NATO Response Force, after which the African Standby Force has been modeled.
Flintlock 07 and 08 were held in Mali. Flintlock 10 was held in several African nations, including Mali.
On February 7 of this year the U.S. and Mali began the Atlas Accord 12 joint air delivery exercise in the African nation, but Flintlock 12, scheduled for later in the month, was postponed because of the fighting in the north. Sixteen nations were to have participated, including several of the U.S.’s major NATO allies.
Last year’s Flintlock included military units from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Nigeria and Senegal.
When AFRICOM became an independent Unified Combatant Command on October 1, 2008, the first new overseas U.S. regional military command established in the post-Cold War era, AFRICOM and Special Operations Command Africa’s Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara took control of the Flintlock exercises from U.S. European Command and U.S. Special Operations Command Europe.
In 2010 AFRICOM announced that Special Operations Command Africa “will gain control over Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara (JSOTF-TS) and Special Operations Command and Control Element–Horn of Africa (SOCCE-HOA).”
Last year the AFRICOM website wrote:
“Conducted by Special Operations Command Africa, Flintlock is a joint multinational exercise to improve information sharing at the operational and tactical levels across the Saharan region while fostering increased collaboration and coordination. It’s focused on military interoperability and capacity-building for U.S., North American and European Partner Nations, and select units in Northern and Western Africa.”
Although the stated purposed of the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership and its Flintlock multinational exercises is to train the military forces of nations in the Sahel and Magreb to combat Islamist extremist groups in the region, in fact the U.S. and its allies waged war against the government of Libya last year in support of similar elements, and the practical application of Pentagon military training and deployment in Northwest Africa has been to fight Tuareg militias rather than outfits like al-Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb or Nigeria’s Boko Haram.
The U.S. and its NATO allies have also conducted and supported other military exercises in the area for similar purposes. In 2008 the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the regional economic group from which the U.S.- and NATO-backed West African Standby Force was formed, held a military exercise named Jigui 2008 in Mali, which was “supported by the host governments as well as France, Denmark, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the European Union,” as the Ghana News Agency reported at the time.
AFRICOM also runs annual Africa Endeavor multinational communications interoperability exercises primarily in West Africa. Last year’s planning conference was held in the Malian capital of Bamako and, according to U.S. Army Africa, “brought together more than 180 participants from 41 African, European and North American nations, as well as observers from Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), the Eastern African Standby Force and NATO to plan interoperability testing of communications and information systems of participating nations.” The main exercise was also held in Mali.
The U.S. military has been ensconced in the nation since at least 2005 and Voice of America revealed in that year that the Pentagon had “established a temporary operations center on a Malian air force base near Bamako. The facility is to provide logistical support and emergency services for U.S. troops training with local forces in five countries in the region.”
The following year U.S. European Command and NATO Supreme Allied Command Europe chief Marine General James Jones, subsequently the Obama administration’s first national security advisor, “made the disclosure [that] the Pentagon was seeking to acquire access to… bases in Senegal, Ghana, Mali and Kenya and other African countries,” according to a story published on Ghana Web.
In 2007 a soldier with the 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group based in Stuttgart, Germany, where AFRICOM headquarters are based, died in Kidal, Mali, where fighting is currently occurring. His death was attributed to a “non-combat related incident.” The next year a soldier with the Canadian Forces Military Training Assistance Programme also lost his life in Mali.
Last year the Canadian Special Operations Regiment deployed troops to the northern Mali conflict zone for what was described “an ongoing mission.” Canadian Special Operations Regiment forces also participated in the Flintlock 11 exercise in Senegal.
In September of 2007 an American C-130 Hercules military transport plane was hit by rifle fire while dropping supplies to Malian troops under siege by Tuareg forces.
According to Stars and Stripes:
“The plane and its crew, which belong to the 67th Special Operations Squadron, were in Mali as part of a previously scheduled exercise called Flintlock 2007…Malian troops had become surrounded at their base in the Tin-Zaouatene region near the Algerian border by armed fighters and couldn’t get supplies…[T]he Mali government asked the U.S. forces to perform the airdrops…”
In 2009 the U.S. announced it was providing the government of Mali with over $5 million in new vehicles and other equipment.
Later in the year the website of U.S. Air Forces in Europe reported:
“The first C-130J Super Hercules mission in support of U.S. Air Forces Africa, or 17th Air Force, opened up doors to a future partnership of support between the 86th Airlift Wing and upcoming missions into Africa.
“The mission’s aircraft commander, Maj. Robert May of the 37th Airlift Squadron, and his crew were tasked to fly into Mali Dec. 19 to bring home 17 troops who were assisting with training Malian forces.”
The U.S. has been involved in the war in Mali for almost twelve years. Recent atrocity stories in the Western press will fuel demands for a “Responsibility to Protect” intervention after the fashion of those in Ivory Coast and Libya a year ago and will provide the pretext for American and NATO military involvement in the country.
AFRICOM may be planning its next war.
February 19, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Africa, Algeria, Central African Republic, Libya, Mali, NATO, Niger, West Africa |
Leave a comment
Following on the Solyndra controversy, the Department of Energy under President Barack Obama is now accused of funneling billions of dollars in funding to companies that have connections within the department.
An investigation by The Washington Post found that the Energy Department has approved nearly $4 billion in federal grants and financing to 21 companies supported by firms with connections to five Obama administration staffers and advisers.
Of this amount, $2.46 billion flowed to nine businesses that have ties to VantagePoint Venture Partners, a venture capital firm where Sanjay Wagle, an Energy Department adviser, worked before coming to Washington.
The other four officials identified by the Post include Assistant Secretary David Sandalow, who previously worked for Good Energies, a company that received $737 million from the Energy Department; and Steve Westly, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur and now a member of Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s advisory board. The Westly Group took in $600 million in federal financing.
The Obama administration says that the Energy Department employees and advisers took no part in grant-making decisions, which would mean that these business windfalls were just happy coincidences.
February 16, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Progressive Hypocrite | Obama administration, Steve Westly, Steven Chu, United States Department of Energy |
Leave a comment
The largest imperial offensive since the Iraq invasion of March, 2003, is in full swing, under the banner of “humanitarian” intervention – Barack Obama’s fiendishly clever upgrade of George Bush’s “dumb” wars. Having failed to obtain a Libyan-style United Nations Security Council fig leaf for a “humanitarian” military strike against Syria, the United States shifts effortlessly to a global campaign “outside the U.N. system” to expand its NATO/Persian Gulf royalty/Jihadi coalition. Next stop: Tunisia, where Washington’s allies will assemble on February 24 to sharpen their knives as “Friends of Syria.” The U.S. State Department has mobilized to shape the “Friends” membership and their “mandate” – which is warlord-speak for refining an ad hoc alliance for the piratical assault on Syria’s sovereignty.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are swigging the ale with their fellow buccaneers. These “human rights” warriors, headquartered in the bellies of empires past and present, their chests shiny with medals of propagandistic service to superpower aggression in Libya, contribute “left” legitimacy to the imperial project. London-based Amnesty International held a global “day of action” to rail against Syria for “crimes against humanity” and to accuse Russia and China of using their Security Council vetoes to “betray” the Syrian people – echoing the war hysteria out of Washington, Paris, London and the royal pigsties of Riyadh and Doha. New York-based Human Rights Watch denounced Moscow and Beijing’s actions as “incendiary” – as if it were not the empire and its allies who were setting the Middle East and Africa on fire, arming and financing jihadis – including hundreds of veteran Libyan Salafists now operating in Syria.
Under Obama’s “intelligent” (as opposed to “dumb”) imperial tutelage, colonial genocidaires like France now propose creation of “humanitarian corridors” inside Syria “to allow NGOs to reach the zones where there are scandalous massacres.” NATO flatly rejected such a corridor in Libya when sub-Saharan Africans and black Libyans were being massacred by militias armed and financed by the same “Friends” that now besiege Syria.
Turkey claims it has rejected, for now, the idea of setting up humanitarian “buffer zones” along its border with Syria – inside Syrian territory – while giving arms, training and sanctuary to Syrian military deserters. In reality, it is Syrian Army troop and armor concentrations on the border that have thwarted the establishment of such a “buffer” – a bald euphemism for creating a “liberated zone” that must be “protected” by NATO or some agglomeration of U.S.-backed forces.
NATO, which bombed Libya non-stop for six months, inflicting tens of thousands of casualties while refusing to count a single body, wants desperately to identify some sliver of Syrian soil on which to plant the “humanitarian” flag of intervention. They are transparently searching for a Benghazi, to justify a replay of the Libyan operation – the transparent fact that prompted the Russian and Chinese vetoes.
Faced with the certainty of superpower-backed attack under the guise of “protecting” civilians in “liberated” territory, Syria cannot afford to cede even one neighborhood of a single city – not one block! – or of any rural or border enclave, to armed rebels and foreign jihadis. That road leads directly to loss of sovereignty and possible dissection of Syria – which western pundits are already calling a “hodge-podge” nation that could be a “failed state.” Certainly, the French and British are experts at carving up other people’s territories, having drawn the national boundaries of the region after World War One. It is an understatement to say that Israel would be pleased.
With the Syrian military’s apparent successes in securing most of Homs and other centers of rebellion, the armed opposition has stepped up its terror tactics – a campaign noted with great alarm by the Arab League’s own Observer Mission to Syria, leading Saudi Arabia and Qatar to suppress the Mission’s report. Instead, the Gulf States are pressing the Arab League to openly “provide all kinds of political and material support” to the opposition, meaning arms and, undoubtedly, more Salafist fighters. Aleppo, Syria’s main commercial and industrial city, which had seen virtually no unrest, was struck by two deadly car bombs last week – signature work of the al-Qaida affiliate in neighboring Iraq.
The various “Friends of Syria,” all nestled in the U.S./NATO/Saudi/Qatar cocoon, now openly speak of all-out civil war in Syria – by which they mean stepped up armed conflict financed and directed by themselves – as the preferred alternative to the protracted struggle that the regime appears to be winning. There is one caveat: no “Western boots on the ground in any form,” as phrased by British Foreign Secretary William Hague. It is the Libya formula, and might as well have come straight from Barack Obama’s mouth.
Syria is fighting for its national existence against an umbrella of forces mobilized by the United States and NATO. Of the 6,000 or so people that have died in the past 11 months, about a third have been Syrian soldiers and police – statistical proof positive that this is an armed assault on the state. There is no question of massive foreign involvement, or that the aim of U.S. policy is regime change, as stated repeatedly by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (“Assad must go,” she told reporters in Bulgaria).
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have chosen sides in the Washington-backed belligerency – the side of Empire. As groups most often associated with (what passes for) the Left in their headquarters countries, they are invaluable allies of the current imperial offensive. They have many fellow travelers in (again, what passes for) anti-war circles in the colonizing and neo-colonizing nations. The French “Left” lifted hardly a finger while a million Algerians died in the struggle for independence, and have not proved effective allies of formerly colonized people in the 50 years, since. Among the European imperial powers, only Portugal’s so-called Carnation Revolution of 1974, a coup by young officers, resulted in substantial relief for the subjects of empire: the withdrawal of troops from Portugal’s African colonies.
The U.S. anti-war movement lost its mass character as soon as the threat of a draft was removed, in the early Seventies, while the United States continued to bomb Vietnam (and test new and exotic weapons on its people) until the fall of Saigon, in 1975. All that many U.S. lefties seemed to want was to get the Republicans off their backs, in 2008, and to Hell with the rest of the world. Democrat Barack Obama has cranked the imperial war machine back into high gear, with scarcely a peep from the “Left.”
There was great ambivalence – the most polite word I can muster – among purported leftists in the United States and Europe to NATO’s bombardment and subjugation of Libya. Here we are again, in the face of existential imperial threats to Syria and Iran, as leftists temporize about human rights while the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” blazes new warpaths.
There is no such thing as an anti-war activist who is not an anti-imperialist. And the only job of an anti-imperialist in the belly of the beast is to disarm the beast. Absent that, s/he is useless to humanity.
As we used to say: You are part of the solution – or you are part of the problem. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are part of the problem.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
February 16, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Amnesty International, Libya, NATO, Syria |
Leave a comment
An examination of the proposed U.S. budget submitted by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Congress this week shows that although billions of dollars will be cut from domestic programs and the U.S. military, annual aid to Israel remains intact, and includes an increase of $25 million from last year.
Last year, the U.S. government gave $3.075 billion in unrestricted aid to Israel, and this year’s proposed budget includes $3.1 billion. This aid is given in addition to around $3 billion in loan guarantees which, unlike other loans, do not have to be paid back.
The cuts in this Congressional budget include an 18% cut in aid to former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe, all of which have much lower GDPs than Israel. In fact, Israel is the only country receiving US aid to be above the 50th percentile economically – Israel is ranked in the richest one-third of countries in the world.
The U.S. State Department will receive a 10% decrease in funding for its programs in Iraq, despite the increased role of the State Department following the withdrawal of the U.S. military. U.S. combat operations overseas will be cut 23%, largely due to the military pullout from Iraq.
President Obama proposed the budget, which equals $3.8 trillion and includes over $1 trillion in cuts, in order to address the massive deficit left by former President George W. Bush. A bi-partisan committee, known as the ‘budget supercommittee’, tasked with recommending cuts last October failed to reach an agreement on what to cut, leaving it up to the President to propose a budget that would significantly reduce the deficit.
U.S. aid to Israel has been a part of each annual Congressional budget since 1967, and the amount has increased over time. Upon taking office, Obama recommended that U.S. aid to Israel continue at the $3 billion a year rate for the next ten years, totaling at least $30 billion (without counting loan guarantees and gifts of weaponry). The U.S. Congress overwhelmingly agreed with this assessment.
February 16, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Israel, Obama, United States Congress, United States Department of State |
Leave a comment
The first to discover that teachers make perfect scapegoats was George W. Bush. When he ran for president for the first time twelve years ago, Bush had a problem. He wanted lower taxes to be his rallying cry, but while taxes in Texas, the state where he was governor, were indeed low, the schools in Texas were notoriously bad.
The numbers are no better today: Texas ranks 47th in the county in literacy, 49th in verbal SAT scores and 46th in math scores. To blind the public to the evidence of what low taxes do, Bush produced evidence of a miracle: When it comes to education money is not what matters, he declared; what matters is holding teachers accountable. In Houston, Bush told voters, the superintendent of schools held teachers accountable, and as a result Houston saw a dramatic improvement in school quality, particularly when measured by high school graduation rates. So convincing was the miracle that as soon as he took office Congress agreed to pass the Bush tax cuts and the No Child Left Behind law.
Eight years later the “Texas miracle” was exposed. It turned out that the numbers had been cooked: Instead of the 1.5% drop-out rate that Houston had reported, the actual rate was somewhere between 25 and 50 percent. And in order to boost test results children who were considered weak in even just one subject were prevented from entering the 10th grade, the year in which the tests were administered. But by then the truth no longer mattered because the ideas that taxes are not needed to run a democratic government and that teachers, not budgets, are responsible for the failure of schools had invaded the body politic.
When Bush ran for office the rate of unemployment was low and there was a surplus in the government coffers, rather than a deficit. Today the economic situation is dire and most Americans believe that inequality is the biggest problem that the country faces. Occupy Wall Street blames the 1% — but the 1% and their elected officials have found someone else to blame: Bad teachers are back.
A new study just out from economists at Harvard and Columbia would seem to offer the proof. The study does not claim that the measurement of teachers will produce better students–this was Bush’s claim and it has already been exposed–but instead that the measurement of teachers will make students richer as adults.
President Obama echoed themes from the study when in his State of the Union Address, instead of acknowledging Occupy Wall Street, he stuck it to teachers: ”A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance,” he said. “Give them [schools] the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones…and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.”
Unlike the Texas miracle, the Harvard-Columbia revelations are not based on fraudulent numbers. But what is deeply problematic is the spin that the authors give to their findings. The study examined the incomes of adults who, as children in the 4th through the 8th grades, had teachers of different “Value Added” scores, with Value Added defined as improvement in the scores of students on standardized tests. The study claims that the individuals who had excellent teachers as children have higher incomes as adults; we will examine the validity of this claim below. But first we must ask what these higher incomes mean. When they were children, these individuals were poor. What the H-C authors fail to mention is that even when they had excellent teachers as children and therefore have higher incomes as adults, these individuals, despite their higher incomes, remain poor.
The devil is in the details: the average wage and salary of a 28 year old in the H-C study who had an excellent teacher was $20,509 in 2010 dollars, $182 higher than the average annual pay of all 28 year olds in the study. How does this compare to the average salary and wage of a 28 year old in this country? The authors excluded from their study people whose income was higher than $100,000. As we shall see, this exclusion is problematic; but to do the comparison we must do the same. The average salary and wage in 2010 of a 28 year old who earned less than $100,000 a year was $29,041, 42% higher than the income of a 28 year old in the H-C who had an excellent teacher. In other words, even if we accept the numbers that the authors of the H-C study choose to spin, having an excellent teacher cannot pull people out of poverty.
The exclusion of people with high incomes involved some 4,000 individuals, or 1.2% of the sample. The authors justify it by claiming that such people are outliers. But what if it turned out those high income earners had “bad” teachers? Including them in the study would have completely changed the results. Excluding a large number of the best performers from a study about the effect of teaching seems strange.
There’s more. While the H-C study found a statistically significant, if meaningless, relationship between the “value added” of teachers and incomes at age 28, the authors did not find a statistically significant result at age 30. Why? In the study the authors explain this by the small number of 30 year olds in their sample. In their interviews with the media and in public presentations the authors do not mention this result at all. Yet the number of 30 year olds in their sample is 61,639, and these are all students who went to school in the same city. Is this a small sample? To gain an appreciation for the size of the sample consider the fact that in order to estimate the unemployment rate that it publishes every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics relies on a national survey of 60,000 households with an average of 1.95 adults in each. Surely if 120,000 peoples are a good size sample to study a labor force of 150 million people spread all over the country, a sample of 61,639 is a good size sample to study a population of fewer than 5 million elementary school students who all come from the same school system. By any measure the sample size is not only adequate, it is fantastically huge, and the result is not statistically significant.
But the statistically insignificant results for 30 year olds may have been inconvenient for the authors for another reason. An increase of $128 a year is small by any standard, so the authors resorted to estimating a lifetime increase in earnings due to this increase. To do that they assumed that the percentage increase in income, 0.9 of one percent, which they estimated for age 28, holds for each year of a person’s working life. And perhaps this is why the authors chose to ignore the results for the 30 year olds. All that their findings permit them to claim truthfully is that an excellent teacher increases average annual income by $128 at age 28, and that this effect disappears at age 30. But then there would have been nothing to report.
Doesn’t teacher quality matter? Not when it comes to explaining the deliberate assault on the wages of workers by executives with the support of most of our elected officials. A federal law permits states to pass the doublespeak Right to Work law. Boeing, a major recipient of government largess, has just moved production from Washington State to South Carolina because, according to Governor Nikki Haley, “We are fighting the unions every step of the way. We are a strong Right to Work state and going to stay that way.” The Supreme Court has recently ruled that executives can use shareholders’ money to their heart’s desire to influence elections. Executive pay remains totally out of control and totally unregulated. Government workers have lost the right to bargain collectively in several states. These are the laws that must be changed if we are to fight poverty. Does the president really believe that teachers can change all these laws by themselves when he says that “a great teacher can offer an escape from poverty?”
The attack on “bad teachers” is a dishonest diversion, and nothing more than a reincarnation of the Texas Miracle. The problem is the power of the 1%; the solution is to pass it to the 99%.
Moshe Adler teaches economics at Columbia University and at the Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies at Empire State College. He is the author of Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal (The New Press, 2010), which is available in paperback and as an e-book.
February 14, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | George W. Bush |
Leave a comment
The most powerful Zionist lobbying group in the US, AIPAC, is increasing pressure on the administration of Barack Obama to launch a military strike against Iran, a political writer says.
“It is clear that Israel and its neoconservative camp followers here in the United States are increasing pressure on President Obama to either attack Iran or let Israel do it,” M.J. Rosenberg said.
Rosenberg, who was director of policy at the Israel Policy Forum, made the suggestion in an article about a military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The author said the main reason behind his prediction is that “this is an election year and no one will say no to [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu in an election year.”
He was referring to the 2012 presidential election in the United States that will be held in November.
Rosenberg also pointed out to an upcoming meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
“War enthusiasm will rise to a fever pitch by March, when AIPAC holds its annual policy conference,” he wrote.
AIPAC, which has an influential and undeniable role in US policies, advocates pro-Israel policies to the Congress and Executive Branch of the United States.
The group urges all members of Congress to support Israel through foreign aid.
The US and Israel have repeatedly threatened Tehran with the “option” of a military strike, based on their allegation that Iran’s nuclear program may include a covert military aspect, a claim strongly rejected by Tehran.
February 11, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | AIPAC, Iran, Israel |
Leave a comment
President Obama is like comedian Flip Wilson’s character, Geraldine: He blames everything on the Devil. The Devil made him do it.
And so, the Devil has just forced Mr. Obama to put together his own infernal Super Pac, the demon-spawn of the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision allowing corporations and wealthy individuals to spend as much money as they like on elections. Only days ago, Obama was calling Super Pacs a “threat to democracy,” but that was then, and now it’s time to make sure that the president has an equal opportunity to join in the corruption. But, don’t blame Obama. The Koch brothers made him do it, with reports that the far-right siblings plan to gather $100 million in Super Pac money. As Geraldine would say, those Koch Devils made Obama do it.
Not that there’s any danger of Obama being outspent in his re-election bid. He’s raised more money than all the Republican candidates, combined. In fact, he’s raised a lot more money from employees of Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, than Romney has. All indications are that Obama will win the race for Wall Street’s campaign contributions, hands down, no matter who the Republicans nominate, just as Wall Street preferred Obama to John McCain, four years ago.
Candidate Obama opted out of public financing in the 2008 campaign, the first president since Watergate to run without public funding. He had earlier promised to accept public financing, and the limits on spending that go with it, if McCain did. McCain kept his part of the bargain, but Obama was getting more money than he could bring himself to turn down. In fact, by that time, Obama had raised twice as much as McCain, so he couldn’t claim a disadvantage. Instead, Obama’s excuse was that the public financing system was “broken.” But, of course, it was Obama’s withdrawal that definitively broke the system, paving the way for the billion dollar election of 2012.
In the summer of 2007, Obama explained the difference between himself and all of his Democratic and Republican opponents, when it comes to taking money from the rich and greedy. “The argument is not that I’m pristine, because I’m swimming in the same muddy water,” he said. “The argument is that I know it’s muddy and I want to clean it up.” But there is no evidence that Obama wants to clean up campaign financing, only that he finds all kinds of excuses to take the money.
The Wall Street crowd loves Obama, and they show it with their checkbooks. He returns their love a thousand times over, by protecting their interests while skillfully hoodwinking the Democratic base into believing that he’s on their side. The most pitiful marks in this hustle are small contributors, who Obama claims are his real base of support. Back in 2008, he even claimed that his fundraising was a better reflection of democracy than public financing, because he had so many small contributors. But it turns out that Obama got almost exactly the same proportion of his campaign funds from the little guys as George Bush did, in 2004.
It’s a rich man’s game, in which the future of the country and the world is purchased cheaply with campaign contributions. It is common sense that the player that collects the most money, has also sold the most influence. This election year, just like last time, the top influence seller is Barack Obama.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
February 8, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Progressive Hypocrite | John McCain, Mitt Romney, Obama, Political action committee, Wall Street |
Leave a comment
Three years ago this past weekend, on his first full day in office, President Barack Obama issued his now infamous memo on transparency and open government, which was supposed to fulfill his campaign promise to lead the “most transparent administration in history.”
Instead, his administration has been just as secretive—if not more so—than his predecessors, and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become the prime example of his administration’s lack of progress.
In 2009, Obama made FOIA reform the centerpiece of his open government agenda. “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government,” he said, while laying out principles he wished to see his agencies adopt in the proceeding months.
In March of 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder issued what the Justice Department called “comprehensive new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidelines.” Holder ordered that all executive branch departments and agencies were to apply “a presumption of openness” in response to FOIA requests.
In 2010, EFF’s senior counsel David Sobel testified to Congress, calling on Obama to lead by example if they wish to change the FOIA process.
Unfortunately, secrecy won out in the Obama administration almost immediately. In the early months of his presidency, a court ruled that the administration would have to turn over photos related to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in response to a FOIA request. Knowing they’d likely lose the appeal, Obama supported a new law that could keep information secret even when FOIA would otherwise require disclosure. The bill’s only intention was to create a way to shield photographs of detainee abuse from public disclosure.
President Obama also refused at first to release White House visitor records, a practice for which his predecessor, George W. Bush, was pilloried. The Obama Administration appealed a court’s ruling that the visitor logs were subject to FOIA. In September 2009, Obama reversed course and agreed to voluntarily release White House visitor records going forward. But in 2011, the Administration was still fighting in court to keep the logs before Obama’s reversal a secret.
The Associated Press looked at the administration’s commitment to transparency in 2010 and concluded Obama was using FOIA exemptions to withhold information from requesters more than Bush did in his final year, despite receiving fewer overall requests. And one of the most frequently used exemptions was one Obama explicitly told the agencies not to use: the “deliberative process” exemption, which allows the government to withhold documents dealing with its decision making process. In Obama’s first year in office, the use of the exemption skyrocketed from 47,395 times in 2008 to 70,779 times in 2009.
Worse, more than a year after Obama and Holder’s memos, a National Security Archive study found “less than one-third of the 90 federal agencies that process such FOIA requests have made significant changes in their procedures.” Even FOIA requests on transparency were held up:
The AP is still waiting–after nearly three months–for records it requested about the White House’s “Open Government Directive,” rules it issued in December directing every agency to take immediate, specific steps to open their operations up to the public.
Yet around the same time, when President Obama was asked a question at a townhall about why his administration wasn’t more transparent, he responded by saying it was the most transparent in the modern era.
What was his first reason?
The administration’s release of White House visitor records—the same records they went to court to fight to keep secret.
The President also bragged: “We’ve revamped the classification system so it’s not used to hide things that might be embarrassing to us.”
Which, of course, is not true either. As EFF has pointed out, government secrecy and over-classification has reach absurd levels under Obama.
More damage was done to FOIA in the Dodd-Frank bill. A little-noticed provision of the recently passed financial-reform legislation stated that the SEC “no longer has to comply with virtually all requests for information releases from the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act.” Other media organizations have lodged public complaints about FOIA procedure at the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and even agencies dealing with health and scientific issues like the EPA and NASA.
EFF has experienced many of these problems first hand. When we sued the FBI after it was revealed they were systematically abusing their National Security Letter authority, the bureau redacted the vast majority of the thousands of pages requested. In another case, it was clear the FBI was arbitrarily redacting information when it wasn’t appropriate. The DHS singled out EFF, along with other activist groups and media representatives such as the ACLU, EPIC, Human Rights Watch, and AP, for an extra layer of review on its FOIA requests. EFF sued just to find out the names of the members of Obama’s Intelligence Oversight Board.
But by March 2011, only 49 of the 90 federal agencies had followed any “specific tasks mandated by the White House to improve their FOIA performance.” The National Security Archive found in July that federal backlogs of FOIA requests are growing. A Study released in December of this year by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org found the administration was withholding information using nine of the most common exemptions 33% more than George Bush’s last full year in office.
But perhaps the worst violation of Obama’s open government principles was the deplorable attempt by the Justice Department to change the DOJ’s own FOIA regulations. Under the proposed rule, instead of refusing to confirm or deny a document is in the Department’s possession, the agency could “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.” The Los Angeles Times called it an “outrageous proposal” that “provides a license for the government to lie to its own people and makes a mockery of FOIA.” After near universal outcry, including pressure from Congress, the Justice Department scaled back its rules. But as the Sunlight Foundation said, the Justice Department’s revised FOIA rules were still “worse than reported” and allow reviewers to dismiss requests for a host of trivial reasons. Obama’s Justice Department seemed intent on killing the very law it championed at the start of his administration.
The Freedom of Information Act has been hailed by open government advocates as “one of the most significant laws ever passed by the U.S. Congress,” yet its passage and survival has been fought by Presidents for more than forty years. The bill, as a significant check on executive power and secrecy, was originally opposed by Lyndon Johnson, yet was signed into law in 1966. When Congress strengthened the act after the Watergate scandal, President Ford vetoed it on the advice of his then-chief of staff Dick Cheney. Thankfully, Congress overrode his veto. Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese was so opposed to FOIA, despite its being law for more than 20 years, he wrote a memo telling the Justice Department to essentially disregard requests it disliked.
President Obama promised to change all that. Unfortunately, it’s clear many of his pledges have been broken or ignored, turning his declaration that he would lead the “most transparent administration ever” into a punch line rather than a re-election slogan.
February 4, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | FOIA, Obama |
Leave a comment
President Obama thinks killing people around the globe with drones is as cool as singing Al Green at the Apollo. In a live Web interview, Obama assured his audience that the U.S. unmanned drone force – now thought to number in the thousands and ranging from deadly Predators and Reapers to aircraft the size of small birds – was “kept on a very tight leash.” So, here we have a secret weapons program that violates other countries’ airspace and kills their citizens at will – and even kills American citizens without charge or trial – and Obama thinks that all he is obligated to do is give assurances that the weapons are on a “tight leash.”
The issue is not whether the American commander-in-chief has made sure that the drones are under his control, but that the United States is waging a terroristic war against at least four nations – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and possibly more – with not the slightest justification under international law.
The people of Iraq, who know a great deal about the effects of drones, are trying to figure out what their sovereignty and independence actually means when the U.S. State Department can fly drones above their cities as a safeguard to U.S. diplomatic installations. The question raised by Iraqis is not, Does Obama have those drones under tight controls, but Why is a foreign power, whose military was supposed to have left Iraq, flying aircraft in their skies? A New York Times article on Monday reported that the Iraqis’ were angry. But Obama dismissed their complaints as much ado about nothing; the article, he said was “a little bit overwritten.” I suppose Obama thinks he’s being cool, like breaking briefly into song at a Harlem fundraiser. But there is nothing cool about violating the territorial integrity of other countries – including nations like Iraq that Obama constantly describes as a U.S. ally.
Obama was too cool to let the U.S. Congress sweat him over the six-month aerial war waged by the United States and its NATO allies against the sovereign nation of Libya, at the conclusion of which Libya’s leader was murdered by U.S.-supported thugs. Obama apparently thought it was cool to stick a knife up Col. Gaddafi’s butt. The First Black President’s drones are busy over Somalia, whose government the U.S. and its African puppet allies overthrew in 2006, precipitating a humanitarian catastrophe that has only worsened as the U.S. war continues. All of Yemen is a killing zone for U.S. drones.
When the U.S. president arrogates to himself the right to bomb and kill at will, with no respect for national boundaries and sovereign rights, he makes himself an outlaw. So, I guess Obama is cool like Jesse James.
With his huge expansion of the drone terror wars and passage of preventive detention, Barack Obama has surpassed George Bush in lawlessness. But most Americans, especially African Americans, cannot imagine that Obama represents a danger to them. If George Bush had had thousands of drones that could fly up the hallway of an apartment building, ring the bell and assassinate whoever answered the door, Black folks would have been terrified. But, they’re not scared of Obama, because he…is oh so cool.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
February 1, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | Iraq, Libya, Obama, Pakistan |
Leave a comment
Washington plans to take bids for the management of drone operations in Iraq over the next five years
US President Barack Obama has acknowledged Washington’s unauthorized surveillance drone operations in Iraq where the un-mandated move has sparked outrage among senior Iraqi officials and the public.
“The truth is we’re not engaging in a bunch of drone attacks inside Iraq. There’s some surveillance to make sure that our embassy compound is protected,” said Obama in a chat with web users on Google+ and YouTube on Monday.
The confirmation came after The New York Times disclosed that the US State Department began operating some drones in Iraq last year on a trial basis to help protect the US Embassy and that it stepped up their use after the last US troops left the country in December.
The report has infuriated senior Iraqi officials who say Washington must respect the country’s sovereignty and consult with the Baghdad government before carrying out any operation now that “the war is over.”
“I think that there’s this perception that we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes, willy nilly,” Obama said, adding, “It is important for everybody to understand that this is kept on a very tight leash.”
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland also claimed that her department uses unmanned aerial vehicles to take pictures of US facilities and personnel abroad.
Meanwhile, The Times said that senior Iraqi officials told the newspaper that the US had not consulted with Iraqi government about the drone operations and that despite the official US withdrawal from Iraq, it maintains a strong presence in the country.
The daily said that since getting the approval for using surveillance drone aircraft over Iraq might be hard given the political tensions between the two countries, the US continues drone operations in the country without formal approval from Iraq.
It added that Washington plans to take bids for the management of drone operations in Iraq over the next five years.
January 31, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Iraq, New York Times, United States Department of State, Unmanned aerial vehicle, Victoria Nuland |
Leave a comment
Aletho News
Aletho News 