Detention and Torture
Obama’s Plan for Indefinite Detentions
By JENNIFER VAN BERGEN and DOUGLAS VALENTINE | December 30, 2010
Author’s Note: With the news of President Obama’s plan to make indefinite detentions a permanent feature of our legal landscape, we thought it apropos to re-publish an updated, edited excerpt from a law review article we wrote in 2006 THE DANGEROUS WORLD OF INDEFINITE DETENTIONS: VIETNAM TO ABU GHRAIB.
Where you find administrative detentions, you are likely to find torture. This connection exists even where it is clear that investigations and screenings leading to such detentions are, as Alberto Gonzales put it, “not haphazard, but elaborate, and careful . . . reasoned and deliberate.”
This reason is simple and can be traced to the elements of administrative detention itself: the absence of human rights safeguards and normal legal guarantees such as due process, habeas corpus, fair trial, confidential legal counsel, and judicial review; vague and confusing definitions, standards, and procedures; inadequate adversarial procedural oversight; excessive Executive Branch power stemming from prolonged emergencies; and the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency, or other secret, thus unaccountable, Executive Branch agencies.
Without such protections, justice does not work and human rights are jeopardized. As William F. Schultz, Executive Director of Amnesty International, put it:
“[W]e are witnessing not just a series of brutal but fundamentally independent human rights violations committed by disparate governments around the globe. [W]e are witnessing something far more fundamental and far more dangerous. [W]e are witnessing the orchestrated destruction by the United States of the very basis, the fragile scaffolding, upon which international human rights have been built, painstakingly, bit by bit by bit, since the end of World War II.”
This is a remarkable statement that was originally made about the Bush Administration, but it applies equally as well now to the Obama Administration. The system was intentionally broken by the Bush Administration, just as it was by the Johnson and Nixon Administrations during the Vietnam War. And now Obama plans to sanctify this wrong and make it a permanent feature of American law.
Obama’s indefinite detention follows, at least in idea, the precedent set by and codified in the PATRIOT Act, enacted six weeks after 9/11. Section 412, which is still on the books, provides for the “mandatory detention of suspected terrorists.” This section nowhere refers to the detentions as “administrative detentions,” which result from administrative (that is, Executive Branch), not judicial, determinations. Yet this is exactly what they are. And they have been used before. The U.S. government’s internment of Japanese immigrants during the Second World War is perhaps the most recognizable example.
Section 412(a) authorizes the Attorney General to take into custody any alien whom he certifies as a terrorist. The alien may be detained indefinitely, in renewable periods of six months, as long as the Attorney General determines that he is a threat to national security, or endangers some individual or the general public.
In addition to PATRIOT Act detentions, the November 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), which preceded the PATRIOT Act, has been used by the DOJ to justify administrative detentions.
Scholars have raised concerns about the PATRIOT Act detention provisions, as well as detentions under AUMF, which allow the Secretary of Defense to detain designated alien terrorist suspects without the restrictions that Section 412 contains. Additionally, military detentions of U.S. citizens Yaser Esam Hamdi, Jose Padilla, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri have raised concerns. President Bush, citing his power as Commander-in-Chief and the laws of war, unilaterally declared these individuals “unlawful enemy combatants” subject to indefinite detention without trial or access to an attorney and without providing for a status determination hearing by a competent tribunal, which is required by the Geneva Conventions. The central concern raised by qualified legal observers about these detentions generally involves the important issues of due process and other constitutional and/or human rights guarantees.
Administrative detentions — sometimes called preventive detentions — are, by definition and practice, sought only during “national emergencies.” The emergency is the rationale for depriving suspected terrorists of adequate due process or human rights safeguards. A declaration of a national emergency is generally made unilaterally by the President and, once declared, the administrative detention laws may stay on the books for decades. This is one of the primary reasons why they are so dangerous, for without any Congressional determination of the beginning or end of hostilities, these inherently anti-democratic laws may be used for purposes of political repression.
However, few legal scholars or government officials have discussed the historically established connection between administrative detentions and torture. The subject only came into public consciousness with the revelation that U.S. soldiers were torturing terrorist suspects at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and the detention facilities at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo, Cuba. Since then, American and foreign journalists and human rights activists began to raise suspicions, subsequently borne out, that U.S. soldiers and CIA officers were routinely torturing terrorist suspects at numerous detention centers around the world. Nonetheless, to date, nothing has been done to ameliorate concerns about these detentions.
The conjoining of administrative detentions and torture is sadly by no means new to U.S. Government policies and practices. Specifically, during the Vietnam War, the United States engaged in a massive program of indefinite administrative detentions in South Vietnam of persons considered “dangerous to the national security” that engendered widespread torture and deaths of terrorist suspects.
There are many similarities between the Vietnam detentions and those used in the War on Terror, and those similarities are found not only within the procedures themselves but in the rationales for and policies behind them and even in the conditions of fear that created them.The Vietnam detention procedures provide a clear and compelling flow chart of the web of connections between administrative detentions, intelligence laws, national security courts (i.e. courts intended to deal exclusively with national security concerns), violations of international law (particularly the Geneva Conventions), and torture. These components now also appear in U.S. law and policies in the War on Terror and are continued, codified, and sanctified in Obama’s intended executive order.
One would have thought that a nation which was in large part responsible for the rescue of tens of thousands of Concentration Camp survivors and was a judicial participant in one of the most significant war crimes tribunals in history, the Nuremburg trials, would know better. How American officials could justify the detention camps in Vietnam, knowing about the torture and murders of innocents in them, after having witnessed Hitler’s internment camps and learned of the horrors he perpetrated in them, is an unanswered question. But, after the revelations of Vietnam — which all came out in congressional hearings in 1971 that led to both the repeal of the EDA and ultimately by degrees to “reforms” of the CIA’s Phoenix Program, contributing to the end of that protracted War, — Section 412 of the PATRIOT Act, Bush’s Military Commissions and unlawful enemy combatant designations, and now, Obama’s executive order establishing permanent indefinite detention are inexcusable.
For the full law review article, click here.
Jennifer Van Bergen, J.D., M.S.I.E., is the founder of the 12th Generation Institute, and author of THE TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY: THE BUSH PLAN FOR AMERICA (Common Courage Press, 2004) and Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious (Michael Weise Productions, 2007). She is currently working under contract with Bucknell University Press on a biography of Leonora Sansay, an early American novelist who was involved in the Aaron Burr Conspiracy, and on a screenplay about the conspiracy. She can be reached at jennifer.vanbergen@gmail.com.
Douglas Valentine is the author of numerous articles and five books: THE HOTEL TACLOBAN (1984), THE PHOENIX PROGRAM (1990), TDY (2000), THE STRENGTH OF THE WOLF (2004), and THE STRENGTH OF THE PACK (2009) (the latter two are histories of federal drug law enforcement). See: http://www.douglasvalentine.com/.
Related article
Obama to spend $5 trillion on murder spree
Largest Military Budget Since World War II
By Rick Rozoff | OpEd News | December 23, 2010
On December 22 both houses of the U.S. Congress unanimously passed a bill authorizing $725 billion for next year’s Defense Department budget.
The bill, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011, was approved by all 100 senators as required and by a voice vote in the House.
The House had approved the bill, now sent to President Barack Obama to sign into law, five days earlier in a 341-48 roll call, but needed to vote on it again after the Senate altered it in the interim.
The proposed figure for the Pentagon’s 2011 war chest includes, in addition to the base budget, $158.7 billion for what are now euphemistically referred to as overseas contingency operations: The military occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.
The $725 billion figure, although $17 billion more than the White House had requested, is not the final word on the subject, however, as supplements could be demanded as early as the beginning of next year, especially in regard to the Afghan war that will then be in its eleventh calendar year.
Even as it currently is, the amount is the highest in constant dollars (pegged at any given year’s dollar and adjusted for inflation) since 1945, the final year of the Second World War. With recent U.S. census figures at 308 million, next year the Pentagon will spend $2,354 for every citizen of the country at the $725 billion price tag alone.
Last year’s Pentagon budget, by way of comparison, was $680 billion, a base budget of $533.8 billion and the remainder for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. In July of this year Congress approved the 2010 Supplemental Appropriations Act which contained an additional $37 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Next year’s defense authorization of $725 billion compares to, according to the Center for Defense Information, a Pentagon budget of $444.6 billion in 1946; $460.4 billion in 1968, the highest yearly amount during the Vietnam War; and $443.4 billion in 1988, the highest during the eight years of the Ronald Reagan administration’s massive military buildup. (Numbers in 2004 constant dollars.) [1]
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates American military spending for 2009 to have accounted for 43 percent of the world total. Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives, earlier this year estimated the 2010 U.S. defense budget to constitute 47 percent of total worldwide military expenditures and to amount to 19 percent of all American federal spending.
In addition, Pentagon spending has increased by 100 percent since 1998 and “the Obama budget plans to spend more on the Pentagon over eight years than any administration has since World War II.” [2]
With 2.25 million full-time civilian and military personnel, excluding part-time National Guard and Reserve members, the Defense Department is the U.S.’s largest employer, outstripping Walmart with 1.4 million employees and the U.S Post Office with 599,000. [3]
“Add in what Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and the Energy departments spend on defense and total US military spending will reach $861 billion in fiscal 2011, exceeding that of all other nations combined,” according to Todd Harrison, senior fellow for Defense Budget Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. [4]
In April Robert Higgs of The Independent Institute advocated that the budgets – in part or in whole – of the departments of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Energy, State and Treasury and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) should be calculated in the real military budget, which would in 2009 would have increased it to $901.5 billion.
“Adding [the] interest component to the previous all-agency total, the grand total comes to $1,027.8 billion, which is 61.5 percent greater than the Pentagon’s outlays alone.”
His numbers are:
National Security Outlays in Fiscal Year 2009
(billions of dollars)
Department of Defense 636.5
Department of Energy (nuclear weapons and environmental cleanup) 16.7
Department of State (plus international assistance) 36.3
Department of Veterans Affairs 95.5
Department of Homeland Security 51.7
Department of the Treasury (for the Military Retirement Fund) 54.9
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (1/2 of total) 9.6
Net interest attributable to past debt-financed defense outlays 126.3
Total 1,027.5 [5]
The above-cited Carl Conetta stated at the beginning of this year that the 2011 Pentagon budget will mark a milestone in that “the inflation-adjusted rise in spending since 1998 will probably exceed 100% in real terms by the end of the fiscal year.
“Taking the 2011 budget into account, the Defense Department has been given about $7.2 trillion since 1998, when the post-Cold War decline in defense spending ended. Approximately $2.5 trillion of this total is due to spending above the annual level set in 1998. This added amount constitutes the post-1998 spending surge.”
Based on constant 2010 dollars, Conetta further details that the Ronald Reagan administration spent $4.1 trillion on the Defense Department, the Georgia W. Bush administration spent $4.65 trillion and “Barack Obama plans to spend more than $5 trillion.”
He also compares the two previous largest post-World War Two surges in U.S. military spending to the current one:
From 1958-1968: 43 percent
From: 1975-1985 57 percent
In regards to which he said, “the 1998-2011 surge is as large as these two predecessors combined.”
His calculations also include a growth in Pentagon contract employees of 40 percent since 1989, thereby freeing up uniformed service members for more direct combat roles.
The U.S. share of global military spending grew from 28 percent during the Cold War to 41 percent by 2006 and that of NATO member states, including the U.S., from 49 percent to 70 percent in the same period.
Contrariwise, the “group of potential adversary and competitor states has gone from claiming a 42 % share to just 16 % in 2006.
“Had Ronald Reagan -” who is generally regarded a hawkish president -” wanted to achieve in the 1980s the ratio between US and adversary spending that existed in 2006, he would have had to quadruple his defense budgets.
“And, of course, since 2006, the US defense budget has not receded, but instead grown by another 20% in real terms.
“By 2011, the United States will probably account for more than half of all global military spending calculated in terms of ‘purchasing power parity’ (which corrects for differences between national economies).” [6]
The defense authorization bill passed on December 22, despite its monumental and unprecedented size, has been routinely described in the American press as stripped-down, scaled-down and pared-down because an arms manufacturer or two, their lobbyists and obedient congresspersons didn’t get every new defense contract and weapons project they desired three days before Christmas.
The December 22 vote in the House was, as Associated Press accurately described it, conducted without debate or discussion – and “without major restrictions on the conduct of operations” – particularly in regards to the $158.7 billion for the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, $75 million to train and equip the armed forces of Yemen for the counterinsurgency campaign in that country and $205 million more to fund Israel’s Iron Dome missile shield.
Regarding the first vote on December 17: “This year’s bill is mostly noteworthy for its broad bipartisan support during wartime….Unlike during the height of the Iraq War when anti-war Democrats tried to use the legislation to force troops home, the House passed the defense bill Friday with almost no debate on Afghanistan.” [7]
Aside from voting for the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as a stand-alone measure, excising an amendment to allow abortions to be performed on military bases, and refusing reparations to victims of the World War Two Japanese occupation of the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam (apparently $100 million for the purpose was considered excessive in the $725 billion authorization), there was no meaningful dissent in either house of Congress.
Increasing the U.S. war budget to the highest level it’s been since the largest and deadliest war in history while no nation or group of nations poses a serious threat to the country, and to a degree where it effectively exceeds the defense spending of the rest of the world combined, is all in the proper order of things for the world’s sole military superpower.
1) Center for Defense Information
http://www.cdi.org/news/mrp/us-military-spending.pdf
2) Christian Science Monitor, March 29, 2010
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/David-R.-Francis/2010/0329/Defense-budget-After-Afghanistan-and-Iraq-withdrawal-a-peace-dividend
3) Christian Science Monitor, June 28, 2010
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/David-R.-Francis/2010/0628/Cuts-to-US-defense-budget-look-inevitable
4) Ibid
5) Robert Higgs, Defense Spending Is Much Greater than You Think
The Independent Institute, April 17, 2010
http://www.independent.org/blog/index.php?p=5827
6) Carl Conetta, Trillions to Burn? A Quick Guide to the Surge in Pentagon
Spending
Project on Defense Alternatives, February 5 2010
http://www.comw.org/pda/1002BudgetSurge.html
7) Associated Press, December 17, 2010
Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/
Obama’s Liberty Problem
Why Indefinite Detention By Executive Order Should Scare the Hell Out of People
By BILL QUIGLEY and VINCE WARREN | CounterPunch | December 23, 2010
The right to liberty is one of the foundation rights of a free people. The idea that any US President can bypass Congress and bypass the Courts by issuing an Executive Order setting up a new legal system for indefinite detention of people should rightfully scare the hell out of the American people.
Advisors in the Obama administration have floated the idea of creating a special new legal system to indefinitely detain people by Executive Order.
Why? To do something with the people wrongfully imprisoned in Guantanamo. Why not follow the law and try them? The government knows it will not be able to win prosecutions against them because they were tortured by the US.
Guantanamo is coming up on its ninth anniversary – a horrifying stain on the character of the US commitment to justice. President Obama knows well that Guantanamo is the most powerful recruitment tool for those challenging the US. Unfortunately, this proposal for indefinite detention will prolong the corrosive effects of the illegal and immoral detentions at Guantanamo rightly condemned world-wide.
The practical, logical, constitutional and human rights problems with the proposal are uncountable.
Our system provides a simple answer developed over hundreds of years – try them or release them. Any other stop gap measure like the one proposed merely pushes the problem back down the road and back into the courts again. While it may appear to be a popular political response, the public will soon enough see this for what it is – an unconstitutional usurping of power by the Executive branch and a clear and present danger to all Americans
The US government has never publicly said who can be prosecuted and who they have decided to hold indefinitely because they think they cannot successfully charge them. Now, after holding people for years and years, they think they can create a new set of laws by Executive Order which will justify their actions?
Recall that dozens of the very same people who would now be subject to indefinite detention have already been cleared for release by the government. How can indefinite detention of people we already cleared to go home possibly be legal?
The government proposes essentially to detain people for being a potential member or friend of the enemy force – a standard that is too open ended and inconsistent with the US and international laws of war.
Our criminal process, requiring charge, conviction and other safeguards, is the primary means by which the government may deprive a person of liberty, with carefully limited exceptions.
“Freedom from bodily restraint has always been at the core of the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause from arbitrary governmental action.” The Supreme Court has “always been careful not to “minimize the importance and fundamental nature of the individual’s right to liberty.” Foucha v Louisiana, 504 US 71 (1992).
The liberty of all persons is protected by the criminal process guarantees, among other rights: the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures; probable cause for arrest; right to counsel, right to indictment by grand jury; right to trial by an impartial jury; the right to a speedy public trial; the presumption of innocence; the right that government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt every fact necessary to make out the charged offense; a privilege against self-incrimination; the right to confront and cross examine witnesses; the right to present witnesses and use compulsory process; the duty on the government to disclose exculpatory evidence; prohibition against double jeopardy; prohibition against bills of attainder and ex post facto laws; and a prohibition against selective prosecution.
For hundreds of years judges and legislatures and advocates for justice have struggled to create protections for our liberty. People who suggest bypassing all of these protections of our liberty in the name of safety or politics do our people and our history a grave disservice.
Some wrongfully suggest that preventive detention by the Executive would be allowed because the law already allows civil confinement. But there are only very narrow circumstances when limited civil confinement is allowed by law. It is clear government cannot use civil detention or anything like it to effect punishment or to escape the comprehensive constraints of the criminal justice system. Kansas v Crane, 534 US 407, 412 (2002) (noting that civil commitment must not “become a mechanism for retribution or general deterrence.
Further, preventive detention also violates international law, specifically the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), article 9.
The proposal to create a special new legal system by Executive Order is an end run around Congress and the Judiciary. It will lengthen the illegal detentions in Guantanamo and will force this entire system back into the courts for years. It will further damage US efforts to portray itself as a fair country of laws, and will threaten the liberty of every single US citizen who is not in Guantanamo because it will damage the due process guarantees which have built up over the years to protect each one of us.
Vince Warren is the Executive Director at the Center
for Constitutional Rights (CCR).
Bill Quigley is Legal Director of CCR and law
professor at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach Bill at
Quigley77@gmail.com
South Korea to hold drills amid tensions
Press TV – December 19, 2010
South Korea is resisting pressure from Russia and China to cancel live-fire exercises amid warnings from North Korea over the upcoming war games in the Korean Peninsula.
“We have no plan to cancel our exercises,” a South Korean defense ministry spokesman said on Sunday, adding that the one-day drills may take place on Monday or Tuesday.
The North has warned the South that Seoul will face disaster if it goes ahead with the live-fire exercises on Yeonpyeong Island near the disputed Yellow Sea border.
The upcoming exercise “would make it impossible to prevent the situation on the Korean Peninsula from exploding and escape its ensuing disaster,” Pyongyang said in a statement.
It said its military has already threatened “decisive and merciless punishment” for such an action and “does not make an empty talk.”
The foreign ministers of China and Russia on Saturday called for restraint on the Korean Peninsula as the UN Security Council (UNSC) prepares for an emergency meeting over the tensions between the two Koreas.
“China firmly opposes any actions to cause tension and worsen the situation, and demands both sides on the peninsula show calmness and restraint,” said Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.
The Koreas must “carry out dialogue and contact, and completely avoid any actions that would fuel the tension,” Yang said.
The UNSC called a meeting for Sunday at Russia’s request, following Seoul’s Thursday announcement to launch the live-fire artillery exercises.
Meanwhile, the US urged top North Korean leaders in Pyongyang to show “maximum restraint” over the South’s planned live-fire drills.
US President Barack Obama has already vowed to offer what he described as ‘unshakeable support’ for Seoul.
In recent months, the US and South Korea have conducted several massive joint sea and air drills in waters east of the Korean Peninsula.
The North has called the drills provocative and an effort to trigger a war, warning the South against holding more joint military exercises with Washington.
Tensions have erupted between the two Koreas after last month’s deadly clash between South and North Korean forces along their disputed sea borders.
The fighting left four South Koreans, including two civilians, dead. Each side blames the other for initiating the fighting.
The mystery of missile defence
After the latest failed missile defence tests, critics wonder why the US has spent $100bn on the system
By Chris Arsenault | Al-Jazeera | 17 Dec 2010
The cold war ended two decades ago, but dreams of an impenetrable missile shield from Ronald Reagan – who once called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” – are firmly back on the US national security agenda.
Late on Wednesday, the US tested its newest round of interceptors, spending $100m to blast a missile from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean towards California.
The anti-ballistic missile system failed, as the kill vehicle designed to blow the projectile out of the sky missed its target, adding to a long-list of unsuccessful tests for the expensive weaponisation scheme.
Since the end of the cold war the US has spent “approximately $100bn” on missile defence systems, Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defence Agency, told Al Jazeera.
Wednesday’s failed long-range test was important because it involved an attempt to intercept a dummy warhead, rather than the usual testing scheme of just maneuvering the missile to a particular point in space, said Ian Anthony, the research coordinator for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a think-tank in Sweden.
Big bucks
Despite constant technological problems with the system, the White House has requested $9.9bn for missile defence programmes for the next fiscal year (2011), Anthony told Al Jazeera.
Those vast sums of money concern Theodore Postol, a professor of science and international security at MIT and a former scientific adviser to the head of US naval operations. The weapons expert, hardly a liberal dove, just doesn’t believe missile defence can work technologically.
View Mapping the missiles in a larger map
“If you look at it as an engineering and defence enterprise, it makes no sense,” Postol told Al Jazeera.
Technological failures and massive financial costs aside, if Barack Obama, the US president, is serious about reducing the possibility of nuclear war, then it seems developing new missile systems isn’t the best way to inspire international trust.
“The US will always say that missile defence is a defensive system,” said Tom Sauer, a professor of international relations at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. “The problem is that the Russians or Chinese may perceive it as threatening or offensive. When it comes to missile defence, perspective is everything.”
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and a former KGB agent who is well versed in cold war history, called US plans for a missile shield in Eastern Europe “very similar” to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war.
“The Bush administration planned to have a radar station in the Czech Republic and interceptors in Poland,” Dr. Sauer said. Obama has not ended the missile programme in Eastern Europe, he has just amended it slightly.
“[Current] plans call for deployment of land-based SM-3 interceptors [a modified surface to air missile] in Poland and Romania to defend Europe against short to medium range ballistic missiles,” said Missile Defense Agency spokesman Lehner.
Washington hard-liners
But even though the US and its NATO partners plan on erecting shields in former Soviet bloc countries, defence hawks in Washington are not happy.
“The Obama administration is pursuing this reset policy with Russia. As far as I can tell, it has been completely one sided with Russia pocketing all of the gains,” said Baker Spring, a security expert with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank.
The US and Russia have negotiated a new nuclear arms reduction treaty refered to as START, limiting the former cold war rivals to 1,550 warheads and 700 launchers each, enough to destroy the world several times over.
Some Republicans Senators including John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) have said arms reduction could limit US missile defence plans and plan to vote against it.
But blaming weaponisation programmes on Republican hawks would not be historically accurate. The Democratic administration of former US president Bill Clinton pursued a plan to launch 1000 missile interceptors into space, under its Strategic Defence Initiative, which critics call “star-wars”.
“We think the [Obama] administration’s programme should include that,” the Heritage Foundation’s Spring told Al Jazeera.
Postol laughs when asked about the Heritage Foundation, calling them “ideologues” who don’t understand the science behind the military programmes that they support.
‘Disappointed in Obama’
But, like the Heritage Foundation, the MIT professor and former naval adviser is also critical of Obama.
“The Obama administration is making false claims about the technical capabilities of missile defence, like the Bush administration before it. As someone who supported Obama, I find this very disappointing,” Postol said.
Unsurprisingly, Lehner from the Missile Defense Agency thinks the programme is technically sound, despite Wednesday’s failed tests.
“In total, we have had 46 successful intercepts in 58 tests since the integration of the BMDS [a ballistic missile defence system contracted to Boeing] in 2001,” he said.
But Postol says the tests themselves are “basically rigged” with “minimal standards applied to the contractors of what constitutes success”.
There are different kinds of systems designed to deal with short, medium or long range attacks. A basic premise behind missile defence is the idea of hitting a bullet with a bullet, either near the earth’s surface – like the patriot missile defences used in the 1991 Gulf War – or other systems designed to hit missiles high in the atmosphere, or outer-space, where intercontinental ballistic missiles fly.
“The fact that these systems try to operate at these high altitudes makes them vulnerable to simple countermeasures,” Postol said, citing ballons or decoy projectiles which are cheap, simple and effective ways to trick missile defences. “Nobody has been able to come up with an explanation of why the concerns I have raised are not true.”
‘Military-industrial complex’
North Korea and Iran, states cited by the US as justification for missile defence, can easily deploy counter-measures rendering the advanced technology useless, said Sauer, the international relations professor.
So, if the technology doesn’t work, what is driving the programme?
Postol chalks it up to domestic politics in the US, coupled with a desire to appease America from Europe. Republicans support the technology, even though they don’t understand how it works, he says, while democrats don’t want to be called wimps on national security.
NATO, which has been dangling without a clear raison d’etre since the end of the cold war, incorporated missile defence as a new mission at its most recent summit in Lisbon, Portugul.
Sauer agrees that partisan politics in the US play a role, but says the costly scheme speaks to something more profound than bickering between Democrats and their Republican counterparts. After all, the Clinton administration resurrected the programme which could have disappeared after the cold war.
Boeing, a primary contractor for missile defence systems, maintains operations in all fifty US States. Thus, if an unsuccessful weapons programme is cancelled, local politicans will rally to protect it, for fear of losing local jobs and votes, Sauer said.
“Many representatives in Congress would like to see more money for these programmes, they are part of the military industrial complex,” Sauer said.
Federal court blocks Obama Administration attempt to spy on cell phones without a warrant
By John Byrne | Raw Story | December 16th, 2010
The Obama Administration’s effort to obtain your location from cell phone towers without a warrant was rebuffed Wednesday by a federal court.
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that the Justice Department cannot obtain information about which cell phone towers mobile phones communicate with without a warrant.
The decision was first reported by Wired’s David Kravets, and has received almost no coverage in the press. The Obama Administration is seeking to reverse an earlier ruling giving judges the authority to require a warrant for the government to obtain cell phone tracking data.
In October, Obama Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer filed a brief seeking the power to obtain cell phone location data without a warrant, arguing that it was essentially communication made in a public place.
Referencing a 1979 case, Smith vs. Maryland, the Assistant Attorney General wrote that because telephone callers cannot expect privacy in the numbers they dial, they can’t expect privacy in the locations of towers their cell phones interact with.
“In Smith, the Supreme Court held both that telephone users have no subjective expectation of privacy in dialed telephone numbers and also that any such expectation is not one that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable,” Breuer wrote, along with several other officials. “The Court’s reasoning applies equally to cell-site information. The Court stated: “we doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial. All telephone users realize that they must ‘convey’ phone numbers to the telephone company, since it is through telephone company switching equipment that their calls are completed.” Similarly, cell phone users understand they must convey a signal to a cell phone tower before their call may be completed.” (p. 12 – pdf)
The brief was co-written by US Attorney David Hickton, Assistant US Attorney Robert Eberhardt, and and Associate Director of the US Justice Department’s Office of Enforcement Operations.
Wired‘s David Kravets noted that the decision to bar law enforcement from routine collection of cell-site data comes in a broader context of rulings favoring electronic privacy.
“The decision by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is one in a string of court decisions boosting Americans’ privacy in the digital age — rulings the government fought against,” Kravets penned Wednesday. “The most significant and recent decision came Tuesday, when a different federal appeals court said for the first time the government must obtain a court warrant for an internet service provider to grant the authorities access to a suspect’s e-mail.”
“The case that concluded Wednesday concerns historical cell-site location information, which carriers usually retain for about 18 months,” Kravets added. “The data identifies the cell tower the customer was connected to at the beginning of a call and at the end of the call — and is often used in criminal prosecutions and investigations.”
In September, the appeals court ruled that judges should have the power to require warrants for the government to obtain cell-site information. The Obama Administration appealed that decision, and the ruling Wednesday rebuffed their efforts.
Earlier this month, Law.com provided a description of how law enforcement can use cell-site information in investigations.
…Cell phone records can track the movements of the person or persons in possession of a cell phone that has been activated, even when no one is making a call on the phone, that the tracking can be quite granular, within 146 feet, or 50 meters, and, in many cases, within 40 feet, and that the increase in cell phone towers and improvements in technology will continue to make tracking even more granular. Telephones equipped with Global Positioning System applications can be tracked by GPS satellites that orbit the earth and whose purpose is to track all GPS targets.
Though not all phones are equipped with GPS capabilities, all cell phones can be tracked through network-based tracking.
Cell phones are supported by a network of cell towers that relay messages from the caller through the carrier to the recipient. There are hundreds of thousands of cell phone towers in the United States. Activated cell phones are in constant contact with cell phone towers, keeping contact with the closest one as the cell phone moves across space so that if and when a call comes in or goes out it will do so instantly.
By tracking the “hops” a cell phone makes from cell phone tower to tower, law enforcement can track the movements of that phone — and, ostensibly, its owner — for as long as the records are kept by the carrier.
Kravets, at Wired, noted that the Obama Administration is also seeking permission to affix GPS devices to vehicles without a court warrant.
“The administration has also asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to reverse its August ruling requiring court warrants to affix GPS devices to vehicles to track their every move,” he wrote. “The administration said Americans should expect no privacy ‘in the totality of his or her movements in public places.'”
“The appellate court’s answer is pending,” he added.
Remembering Richard Holbrooke
By JOSHUA FRANK | CounterPunch | December 15, 2010
In the wee morning hours of January 23rd, 2009 a U.S. spy plane killed 15 individuals in Pakistan near the Afghanistan border. It was Barack Obama’s first blood and the U.S.’ first violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty under the new administration.
As the U.S. government fired upon alleged terrorists in the rugged outback of Pakistan, Obama was back in Washington appointing Richard Holbrooke as a special U.S. representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, like the remote-control bombing that claimed human life that day, Obama’s vision for the region, in the embodiment of Holbrooke, was not a drastic departure from the failed Bush doctrine.
“[Holbrooke] is one of the most talented diplomats of his generation,” Obama said during a press conference at the State Department during the same month. In his speech Obama declared that both Afghanistan and Pakistan will be the “central front” in the War on Terror. “There, as in the Middle East, we must understand that we cannot deal with our problems in isolation,” Obama stated.
Despite Obama’s insistence that Holbrooke was qualified to lead new efforts in the War on Terror, history protested.
In 1975, during Gerald Ford’s administration, Indonesia invaded East Timor and slaughtered 200,000 indigenous Timorese. The Indonesian invasion of East Timor set the stage for a long and bloody occupation that recently ended after an international peacekeeping force was introduced in 1999.
Transcripts of meetings among Indonesian dictator Mohamed Suharto, Ford, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger have shown conclusively that Kissinger and Ford authorized and encouraged Suharto’s murderous actions. “We will understand and will not press you on the issue [of East Timor],” said President Ford in a meeting with Suharto and Kissinger in early December 1975, days before Suharto’s bloodbath. “We understand the problem and the intentions you have,” he added.
Henry Kissinger also stressed at the meeting that “the use of U.S.-made arms could create problems,” but then added, “It depends on how we construe it; whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation.” Thus, Kissinger’s concern was not about whether U.S. arms would be used offensively, but whether the act could be interpreted as illegal. Kissinger went on: “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.”
After Ford’s loss and Jimmy Carter’s ascent to the White House in 1976, Indonesia requested additional arms to continue its brutal occupation, even though there was a supposed ban on arms transfers to Suharto’s government. It was Carter’s appointee to the Department of State’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Richard Holbrooke, who authorized additional arms shipments to Indonesia during this supposed blockade. Many scholars have noted that this was the period when the Indonesian suppression of the Timorese reached genocidal levels.
During his testimony before Congress in February 1978, Professor Benedict Anderson cited a report that proved there was never a U.S. arms ban, and that during the period of the alleged ban the U.S. initiated new offers of military weaponry to the Indonesians:
“If we are curious as to why the Indonesians never felt the force of the U.S. government’s ‘anguish,’ the answer is quite simple. In flat contradiction to express statements by Gen. Fish, Mr. Oakley, and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard Holbrooke, at least four separate offers of military equipment were made to the Indonesian government during the January-June 1976 ‘administrative suspension.’ This equipment consisted mainly of supplies and parts for OV-10 Broncos, Vietnam War-era planes designed for counterinsurgency operations against adversaries without effective anti-aircraft weapons, and wholly useless for defending Indonesia from a foreign enemy. The policy of supplying the Indonesian regime with Broncos, as well as other counterinsurgency-related equipment, has continued without substantial change from the Ford through the present Carter administrations.”
The disturbing symbiosis between Holbrooke and figures like überhawk Paul Wolfowitz is startling.
“In an unguarded moment just before the 2000 election, Richard Holbrooke opened a foreign policy speech with a fawning tribute to his host, Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington,” reported Tim Shorrock following the terrorist attacks in 2001.
Shorrock continued: “Holbrooke, a senior adviser to Al Gore, was acutely aware that either he or Wolfowitz would be playing important roles in the next administration. Looking perhaps to assure the world of the continuity of U.S. foreign policy, he told his audience that Wolfowitz’s ‘recent activities illustrate something that’s very important about American foreign policy in an election year, and that is the degree to which there are still common themes between the parties.’ The example he chose to illustrate his point was East Timor, which was invaded and occupied in 1975 by Indonesia with U.S. weapons – a security policy backed and partly shaped by Holbrooke and Wolfowitz. ‘Paul and I,’ he said, ‘have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep [East Timor] out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.'”
Holbrooke worked vigorously to keep his bloody campaign silent, and it appears to have paid off. In chilling words, Holbrooke described the motivations behind his support of Indonesia’s genocidal actions:
“The situation in East Timor is one of the number of very important concerns of the United States in Indonesia. Indonesia, with a population of 150 million people, is the fifth largest nation in the world, is a moderate member of the Non-Aligned Movement, is an important oil producer – which plays a moderate role within OPEC – and occupies a strategic position astride the sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. … We highly value our cooperative relationship with Indonesia.”
Richard Holbrooke may have died, but the influence he had on U.S. foreign policy continues to kill.
Obama’s approval rating falls to 39%
Press TV – December 15, 2010
US President Barack Obama’s popularity has dropped by three percentage points in the past two weeks, now standing at 39 percent, according to results of a new poll.
A Zogby Interactive poll released on Tuesday indicates that Obama’s approval rating equals a low since he took office at 39 percent, while 63 percent of respondents think the US president is a weak leader compared to only 19 percent who regard him as a strong leader.
The latest poll comes after Obama agreed earlier in December to keep all of the Bush-era tax cuts for another two years in a bid to resolve differences with Republicans in Congress.
“It was a bad week for Obama’s relationship with his party’s base, which sees him giving in too easily to the Republicans,” John Zogby said in a statement.
According to the poll, 68 percent of those surveyed also believe that America is heading in the wrong direction.
The figures come as there are widespread assumptions that a string of government failures, including the failure to rein in the economic crisis in the US, the prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the high unemployment rate in the country have largely contributed to the slippage in Obama’s popularity rate.
Against a backdrop of the worst recession since the Great Depression, which has driven many Americans out of workplace, the latest figures published recently by the US Federal Reserve show that the unemployment rate will remain at around 9.5 percent this year and 8.9 percent in 2011.
Obama’s healthcare reforms have also struck a snag as a federal court has ruled that a key part of the new bill is unconstitutional.
Obama’s average approval rating has declined in each quarter since he took office last year.
Obama’s Show Trials
Why prosecute a terrorism suspect if life imprisonment is the only possible outcome?
Jacob Sullum from the January 2011 issue of Reason
In October a federal judge threw out a key witness against Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the former Guantanamo inmate who is accused of participating in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The witness, who was identified through Ghailani’s coerced statements, was supposed to testify that he sold the defendant the TNT used to blow up the embassy in Tanzania. But U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan concluded that the testimony was too closely tied to information the CIA had obtained from Ghailani while holding him at a secret prison where he says he was tortured.
Conservatives who think terrorism suspects should never receive civilian trials said the exclusion of this testimony showed they were right. So did civil libertarians who argue that the federal courts are perfectly capable of handling terrorism cases. But whether or not the system is working, Kaplan’s ruling suggested it is ultimately irrelevant.
“It is appropriate to emphasize,” Kaplan wrote, “that Ghailani remains subject to trial on the pending indictment, that he faces the possibility of life imprisonment if convicted, and that his status as an ‘enemy combatant’ probably would permit his detention as something akin to a prisoner of war until hostilities between the United States and Al Qaeda and the Taliban end even if he were found not guilty in this case.” Barring a formal surrender by Al Qaeda, these “hostilities” will continue indefinitely, so detention for their duration amounts to a life sentence—the same punishment Ghailani is apt to receive if he is found guilty.
If Ghailani is convicted, in other words, he will be imprisoned for life, and the same thing will happen if he is acquitted. Even with the benefit of the Fifth Amendment’s ban on coerced self-incrimination and the exclusionary rule, Ghailani has zero chance of regaining his freedom. So what exactly is the point of the trial?
In a New York Times op-ed piece published after Kaplan’s ruling, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general during the Bush administration, noted that “trials are perceived to be more legitimate than detention.” But Goldsmith, who favors military detention of suspected terrorists, added that “a conviction in a trial publicly guaranteed not to result in the defendant’s release will not be seen as a beacon of legitimacy.”
Asked whether Ghailani will be returned to military custody if his trial does not turn out the way the government wants, Attorney General Eric Holder dodged the question, saying, “We intend to proceed with this trial.” Holder’s coyness was not really necessary, because the administration already has publicly stated that it reserves the right to detain terrorism suspects who are acquitted.
“If you have the authority under the laws of war to detain someone,” Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson told the Senate Armed Services Committee in July 2009, “it is true irrespective of what happens on the prosecution side.…If there’s an acquittal…we would have the ability to detain him.”
One reason for nevertheless going through the motions of a trial, Goldsmith suggested, is the possibility of capital punishment. But the Justice Department is not seeking the death penalty in Ghailani’s case, and in any event President Barack Obama claims he can kill suspected terrorists without permission from a court.
Under his policy of “targeted killings,” Obama can authorize the summary execution of anyone he unilaterally identifies as a member or accomplice of Al Qaeda, including American citizens. Since this administration, like the last one, views the entire world as a battlefield in the war on terrorism, that means enemies of the state can be killed anywhere at any time—except, presumably, if they have been taken into custody and are being prosecuted in federal court.
Which suggests a third option for Ghailani, in addition to life imprisonment upon conviction and indefinite detention upon acquittal. The government could simply let him go—and then kill him.
Senior Editor Jacob Sullum (jsullum@reason.com) is a nationally syndicated columnist.
Rescuing Zionism at Palestinian expense
By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 13 December 2010
Hillary Clinton speaks at the Saban Forum Gala Dinner in Washington, DC, 10 December. (US State Department)
Standing in front of a huge banner of an Israeli flag merging into the American Stars and Stripes last Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave yet another set-piece speech laying out how US “engagement” would help bring peace in our time.
Speaking at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center in Washington, DC with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and key Israel lobby figures looking on — including Salam Fayyad, the puppet “prime minister” of the US- and Israeli-backed Palestinian Authority — Clinton asserted that “a Palestinian state achieved through negotiations is inevitable” (“Remarks at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy Seventh Annual Forum,” 10 December 2010).
What Clinton laid out in diagnosis and prescriptions, however, ensures that a Palestinian state is anything but inevitable. It is vanishingly unlikely.
Clinton’s much-anticipated intervention followed the Obama administration’s latest capitulation to Israel on settlement construction in the West Bank. After almost two years of attempting to bribe Israel into “restraining” the expansion of its Jewish-only colonies on occupied, stolen land, and its violent Judaization of Jerusalem, the administration concluded that it could do nothing. Of course one thing the Obama administration never tried was real pressure using as leverage the billions in annual no-strings aid the fiscally-bankrupt United States provides to Israel.
Returning to a theme she first took up in her last major speech to the Israel lobby, at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (better known as AIPAC) in March, Clinton warned that the status quo is unsustainable:
“I know that improvements in security and growing prosperity have convinced some that this conflict can be waited out or largely ignored. This view is wrong and it is dangerous. The long-term population trends that result from the occupation are endangering the Zionist vision of a Jewish and democratic state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. Israelis should not have to choose between preserving both elements of their dream. But that day is approaching.”
This is a polite way of putting it. Prominent Hebrew University demographer and Palestinian-birthrate-watcher Sergio DellaPergola recently told The Jerusalem Post that Jews already constitute just under 50 percent of the population in historic Palestine — Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip combined (“Jews now a minority between the River and the Sea,” 26 November 2010).
So while demographically, historic Palestine is no longer “Jewish” it has also never been a democracy, certainly not for its indigenous Palestinians. The Jewish majority within Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries — the basis for the claim that Israel is a “Jewish democracy” — was engineered through the most undemocratic means possible: the deliberate, carefully-planned ethnic cleansing of 90 percent of the Palestinians in that area between 1947-1950 and subsequent efforts to cover up the crime.
And, for the past 43 years — or more than two thirds of Israel’s existence — millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, occupied since 1967, have lived under brutal Israeli military tyranny with no control over their own lives, land and resources. This has not changed despite the ongoing and lavishly-funded fantasy of Salam Fayyad’s “state-building” initiative of recent years — in reality a repressive US-managed police state apparatus to crush any form of resistance.
Clinton made it clear that preserving this unjust situation — rescuing Zionism — remains the priority of US policy. For there can be no “Jewish democracy” without the liquidation of Palestinian rights, particularly of refugees and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
On refugees, all Clinton had to say was, “This is a difficult and emotional issue, but there must be a just and permanent solution that meets the needs of both sides.”
She did not spell out what those “needs” are. For Israel it is clear that the “need” is to continue to deny the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to lands from which they are excluded solely on the racist grounds that they are not Jews. Israel clearly “needs” this so it can continue to subordinate the rights of indigenous Palestinians to the ethnic privileges of Israeli Jews.
The needs of Palestinian refugees are that their rights be respected, especially the right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to return home — should they choose to do so — and for restitution and compensation. These basic human rights are recognized specifically and repeatedly in international law in the case of Palestinians.
These two sets of “needs” are irreconcilable. One can only stand on one side of the question: either one is for Israel’s “right” to remain a racist state, or one is for universal rights and international law and treating all human beings as equals regardless of their religion or ethnicity.
These are exactly the same rights that the United States and the European Union actively supported in Bosnia, in the 1995 US-brokered Dayton Agreement. Under the agreement more than half a million refugees have returned home, in a country with a total population of just 3.5 million, to areas dominated politically and demographically by antagonistic ethnic authorities. In Bosnia, the preference of ethnonational groups to live in areas cleansed of those they consider undesirable was not allowed to trump the actual rights of individual refugees. Nor should it in Palestine.
Perhaps because Clinton knows that the US position on refugees is wrong, immoral and illegal, she does not dare spell out the implications of her words in such clear terms. It is up to Israel, the ethnic cleanser and bully, and a subservient and neutered Palestinian “leadership” to “agree” on what their “needs” are — amid radical power imbalance that guarantees (or so the United States calculates and hopes) that the result will come down in Israel’s favor.
Don’t be fooled either by Clinton’s sophistry on settlements: “The position of the United States on settlements has not changed and will not change. Like every American administration for decades, we do not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement activity. We believe their continued expansion is corrosive not only to peace efforts and two-state solution, but to Israel’s future itself.”
In international law, all of Israel’s settlements beyond the line of 4 June 1967 are illegal. The United Nations Security Council, for example, determined that “all measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention …” (UN Security Council Resolution 465 (1980)).
That resolution, like so many others, called “upon the Government and people of Israel to rescind those measures, to dismantle the existing settlements and in particular to cease, on an urgent basis, the establishment, construction and planning” of new ones.
The current US position, contrary to international law, questions only the “legitimacy” — not even the legality — of “continued” settlement activity. The US only asserts that there is a problem with new settlements. The Obama administration has endorsed former President George W. Bush’s 2004 written promise to Israel that the US will recognize Israeli sovereignty over virtually all settlements that have already been built since 1967.
Could there be a clearer inducement than this for Israel to continue to establish “facts on the ground”? Whatever lip service Clinton paid to opposing settlements, it is clear, based on the performance of the Obama administration to date, that for Israel there will be no negative consequences, and only rewards.
Nor did Clinton have any word of comfort for 1.4 million Palestinian (second-class) citizens of Israel who face a raft of new racist laws, policies and declarations by Israeli leaders and state-funded rabbis, dozens of whom recently issued a religious ruling calling for Jews to boycott any other Jew who sells or rents a home to a non-Jew. For the United States it is as if these Palestinians — who face increasing threats of expulsion by prominent Israeli politicians — simply don’t exist.
So what is left of Obama’s vaunted peace process “engagement”? For sure all the things that suit Israel: an “unwavering,” unconditional commitment to supply Israel with more of the weapons that have been so promiscuously used to commit war crimes in Lebanon, Gaza and across the West Bank; acquiescence to continued settlement construction; more sanctions and pressure on Iran — an Israel lobby priority; continued boycott of Hamas, siege of Gaza and support for the West Bank police state; calls on the Arab states to normalize ties with Israel; and of course putting Israel’s desire to remain a racist ethnocracy before the universal rights of human beings.
And the US prescription now is more of the same: urging Palestinians to “negotiate” with an Israel from which the US superpower itself could extract nothing, precisely because of unconditional American support!
For the discredited Palestinian Authority “leadership” which rushed to Washington as soon as Clinton beckoned, the secretary of state had these instructions: “To demonstrate their commitment to peace, Israeli and Palestinian leaders should stop trying to assign blame for the next failure, and focus instead on what they need to do to make these efforts succeed.” She warned Palestinians specifically, in reference to efforts to get more states to recognize Palestine: “Unilateral efforts at the United Nations are not helpful and undermine trust.” Recently, Brazil and Argentina joined more than a hundred countries that recognize the nonexistent “State of Palestine” declared by the Palestine Liberation Organization in November 1988.
In other words, Palestinians must continue to take it on the chin as Israel does what it pleases with American support. Only Palestinians intent on committing national suicide could go along with such a charade. Those who support genuine peace for Palestinians and Israeli Jews, based on universal rights, equality, restitution and the decolonization of the relationship between the populations, must escalate the real peace process: boycott, divestment and sanctions to force Israel to respect Palestinian rights and obey international law.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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- OPCW Forced To Pay Damages To Whistleblower Who Found Evidence Of False Flag In Syria
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- If Americans Knew
- Israeli Strikes Kill at Least 32 Across S Lebanon, Including Children – Amid “Ceasefire”
- Israel to pour $730m into propaganda arm amid reputational crisis
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- In Gaza, Israel commits 10+ ceasefire violations a day – Daily Update
- US ships 6,500 tons of munitions, equipment to Israel in 24 hours
- A New Library in Gaza Rises From the Ashes of Destruction
- Israel’s top Jewish religious body ‘refuses to condemn’ smashing of Jesus statue
- Nun assaulted in Jerusalem amid ‘pattern’ of anti-Christian attacks by Israelis
- Former Tik Tok official describes massive pressure from Israel lobby
- No Tricks Zone
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
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