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No help from Washington

By Nicola Nasser | Palestine Chronicle | July 17, 2010

Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) officials in the government of Mohamed Abbas often complain they spend more time negotiating with American rather than Israeli governments. This has been particularly true of late. Since Israel’s all-out assault on Gaza nearly a year and half ago, Palestinian officials have discontinued all direct talks with the Israelis and have been talking to the Americans. US presidential envoy George Mitchell has been closely engaged in the region since May 2010, but his efforts have not proved fruitful.

The Palestinians have had no more luck with the Americans than with the Israelis. They have been consistently asked to accept US-Israeli peace terms that spell disaster and capitulation. Apart from exhausting the Palestinians, and making them edge closer to further concessions, nothing of substance has emerged from talks with either the Americans or the Israelis.

The Americans have sold the Palestinians false hopes, giving Israel the time it needed to grab land and change the demographics of their state-to-be. Now, even the fig leaf of good intentions has fallen.

In a meeting between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last Tuesday, the mercy bullet was finally fired, dealing a deadly blow to fantasies of American help.

Palestinian negotiators keep telling us that they have no other option but to negotiate with the Americans. This is not true. The Palestinian people don’t want them to do so, and their fighting spirit is alive and well. When all other options run out, the people will come up with options of their own. It is what people living under foreign occupation have always done, and the Palestinians are no exception.

President Abbas used to tell us that the ball is in Israel’s court. Now Obama has kicked it back into the Palestinian court. Once again, the White House has made it clear that the ball, the court, the referee, and the players should all perform according to American dictates.

The peace process has been at best a US- Israeli PR exercise, at worst a political ruse designed to help the Zionists and undermine the Arabs. The whole aim of the peace process has been to create a fifth column in our midst. At heart, the peace process had no bearing on peace. Fairness was never part of the equation.

It is time the Arabs, especially Palestinian Arabs, called it a day. It is time the admission was made that the peace process has done nothing at all for the peace, security, and development of this region.

Obama was pleased to see Netanyahu, just as George Bush was once thrilled to confer with Ariel Sharon. The words the two presidents used in describing the Israeli dignitaries were almost identical. Sharon was called a “man of peace”. Now Netanyahu seems to be inheriting the title, no matter that a few days earlier he ordered the massacre of peace activists on the Gaza-bound flotilla, no matter that on the same day Obama welcomed him, the Israeli group B’Tselem issued a damning report on the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

Obama had nothing but praise for the Israeli prime minister. There are no differences between Israel and the US, Obama declared, describing his talks with Netanyahu as “excellent” and his country’s ties with Israel as “extraordinary”. Washington is as committed to Israel’s security as it always was, and the “special ties” as binding as ever, he told US reporters.

For his part, Netanyahu said reports about a schism in US-Israeli relations were just rumours.

To reward Netanyahu for what he described as “progress” toward peace, Obama accepted an invitation to visit Israel.

Does any of this surprise President Mahmoud Abbas?

The only harsh words the American president used were in reference to the Palestinians, whom he advised to stop provoking and embarrassing the Israelis. The Palestinians should stop thinking of “excuses” to tarry on peace and start talking to the Israelis. Any conditions Obama once made on direct talks seem to have been forgotten. The current US position is that the Palestinians should start talks without preconditions.

This is not what President Abbas was hoping to hear. Instead of encouragement, the Palestinians have been admonished and told to behave.

A close associate of President Abbas told Al-Quds Al-Arabi that “all signs suggest that the US administration would press the Palestinian Authority to hold direct talks” without guarantees or preconditions. This is basically what Mitchell has been trying to do throughout his earlier visits to the region.

Now Abbas has to choose. Either he gives way to the Americans, which is what he’s done since Annapolis in 2007, or he gives up on the Americans. In the first case, he would lose any remaining credibility. In the second, he will have to step down. He has gambled everything on negotiations, and now any hope of fruitful talks has evaporated.

The only option left to the Palestinians is resistance and more resistance. It is a course that is not only long and hard, but calls for national unity. The PLO made it into government as a result of resistance and national unity. Now the lack of unity and resistance threaten to banish the PLO into the wilderness, or turn it into a lackey of the occupation authorities.

– Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli – occupied Palestinian territories.

July 18, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Israeli-US love affair

By PAUL BALLES – 17. July 2010

Occasionally someone asks why I often carry on about Israel and America. My response: Israel continues to break all the rules of respectable national behaviour with unabashed US support.

The only way to stop that?  Have truth reach enough people about American support for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and using American warmongers to advance Israel’s destructive goals.

The relationship between Israel and the US becomes more disgusting every day. That’s an opinion shared by scholars and commentators who are often ignored by the mainstream media.

According to Professor Norman Finklestein, “Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussing their countries’ foreign relations resembles two lovers discussing their future together.”

Founder and CEO of Main Street Advisors, Paul Wachter, reports that “A New York Times investigation revealed that the U.S. Treasury is helping to promote illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank by granting tax exemptions to U.S. groups that funnel money into them. These specific settlements aren’t only illegal under international law, but also under Israeli law.”

Who pays? The American taxpayer.  Who suffers? America and the rest of the world.

Revealing the capacity of Zioncon propaganda to brainwash the American public, UPI reports, “One-third, 33 percent, say the seven-year war in Iraq has been a success, 36 percent say it is a failure and 31 percent are unsure.”

It’s now perfectly clear that Israel promoted the bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq based on fraudulent intelligence. Despite that fact, one-third of Americans believe it has been a success.

Has the cost of more than a trillion dollars to American taxpayers been a successful part of the Iraq fiasco?

On another issue, the Obama administration makes it clear that they believe “Israel has the right to nuclear capability for deterrence purposes.”

Haaretz correspondent Barak Ravid writes, “”The president [Obama] told the prime minister [Netanyahu] he recognizes that Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats, and that only Israel can determine its security needs.”

When will the US learn that Israel’s “nuclear capacity” does not deter?  It incites.

There’s no doubt that America has cooperated with Israel’s nuclear development, technically and financially.  Israel has thumbed its nose at all requests that they sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Equally bad is the news that ‘Citizens Action to Dismantle Nuclear Weapons Completely’ has prepared a 33-page report showing the presence of tens of tons of depleted uranium in the Gaza Strip, where its insidious radiation has long-term effects.

TBR News has reported that Comverse Infosys, a subsidiary of an Israeli-run private telecommunications firm, has offices throughout the U.S. It provides wiretapping equipment for law enforcement.

TBR News says, “Investigative reports also indicate that these offices have been and are being used as bases for intelligence operations directed against the United States via the Mossad agents working in this country.”

Operatives from Israel’s spy agency Mossad operate freely in America as spies for Israel. When caught, they are quietly released and deported. Israelis have even operated freely in the Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Defence Department.

According to Karen Kwiatkowski, former Political-Military Affairs Officer at the Pentagon, “high clearances were granted to Israelis and Likudniks who would march through the halls of the Pentagon.”

What about the leaders?  Professor Adel Safty pinpoints “the changing nature of the relationship between Netanyahu and Obama from public confrontation to cordiality, public praise, and various demonstrations of American support for Israel…”

Will the public ever tire of the sick US-Israel love affair?

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

July 17, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

We will continue to shield Israel, militarily and diplomatically, U.S. official says

Speaking during a reception for outgoing Israeli UN envoy Shalev, U.S. envoy Susan Rice says that Washington remains fully and firmly committed to Israel’s security.

By Shlomo Shamir | Haaretz | July 15, 2010

The United States will continue to maintain Israel’s military advantage as well as protect it in the diplomatic arena, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said Wednesday, adding that the American commitment to Israel’s security was “not negotiable.”

Speaking during a reception for Israeli Ambassadors Gabriela Shalev and Daniel Carmon, held by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in New York, Rice said the “United States of America remains fully and firmly committed to the peace and security of the State of Israel.”

“That commitment spans generations and political parties. It is not negotiable, and it never will be,” Rice added, saying the United States would “continue to strengthen Israel’s qualitative military advantage so that Israel can always defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats.”

The U.S. UN envoy also reiterated the U.S. conviction to defend Israel in the diplomatic arena, saying that, “as U.S. President Barack Obama] pledged, we will continue U.S. efforts to combat all international attempts to challenge the legitimacy of Israel—including and especially at the United Nations.”

“Our two countries have a long and extraordinary friendship, going back to the moment that President Truman made the United States the very first country to recognize the State of Israel—11 minutes after it declared its independence,” Rice said.

Referring to recent attempts to jumpstart the stalling peace process The U.S. envoy to the UN also said that in the wake of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ” recent meeting with President Obama, we will continue to work together to seek a lasting and comprehensive peace, that meets Israel’s security needs and creates a viable, sovereign Palestinian state.”

On the subject of the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the UN, Rice praised Shalev’s work, saying that while “being the American Ambassador to the United Nations isn’t always easy…being Israeli’s Ambassador to the United Nations is never easy.”

“But Gabi and I had the opportunity to work closely together on a series of important issues, from dealing with the deeply flawed Goldstone Report to seeing through the passage by the Security Council of the toughest sanctions resolution to date against Iran,” Rice said, adding that Shalev had been “a lioness in defense of Israel’s security and its legitimacy.”

Shalev, Rice said, worked tirelessly to ensure that Israel has the same rights and enjoys the same responsibilities as any other UN member state.”

Rice also went to compliment the Israeli envoy, comparing her to other Israeli greats who had served as Israel’s UN envoys, such as “Abba Eban, Chaim Herzog, and a scrappy up-and-comer named Bibi Netanyahu.”

“But I believe when the history books are written, in all honesty, historians will rank Gabriella Shalev as among the best representatives that Israel has ever had at the United Nations for her dedication, her skill, and her extraordinary heart,” Rice said at the Conference of Presidents reception.

The American ambassador to the UN also pointed out a reception Shalev hosted in honor of Israel’s independence, one that was attended by “many, many ambassadors, from all over the world were there”

“And they were there not only out of respect for Israel but deep and abiding friendship for Gabriella,” Rice said, adding that Shalev was her “kind of diplomat,” saying she was “smart, she’s creative, and above all, she always plays it straight.”

July 15, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

“They want us to be loyal to the occupation”

Muhammad Totah interviewed

Max Blumenthal, The Electronic Intifada, 15 July 2010

On 9 July, as Israeli Border Police officers brutalized demonstrators at the weekly protest in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, forcing them away from a street where several homes had been seized by radical right-wing Jewish settlers, I visited the Jerusalem International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) headquarters just a few hundred meters away.

Though the din of protest chants and police megaphones could not be heard from the ICRC center, the three Palestinian legislators who had staged a sit-in there for more than a week to protest their forced expulsion from Jerusalem insisted that their plight was the same as the families forced from their homes down the street.

“All the Israeli steps in East Jerusalem are designed to evacuate Jerusalem of its Palestinian heritage,” remarked Muhammad Totah, an elected Palestinian Legislative Council member who has been ordered to permanently leave Jerusalem by the Israeli government. “Whether it’s through home demolition, taking homes or deporting us, the goal is the same.”

According to Israel’s Ministry of the Interior, the three legislators are guilty of a vaguely defined “breach of trust,” ostensibly for their membership in a foreign government. The charge leveled against them recalls nothing more than the campaign platform of the far-right Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, which demanded the mass expulsion of “disloyal” Palestinian citizens of Israel.

For this reason, the Israel-based legal advocacy group Adalah described the Israeli government’s actions as “characteristic of dark and totalitarian regimes” (“Motion for Injunction filed to Israeli Supreme Court to Stop Imminent Deportation Process of Palestinian Legislative Council Members from Jerusalem,” 15 June 2010).

The lawmakers’ problems began in 2006 when they ran for the Palestinian Legislative Council in the West Bank as members of the Change and Reform list, an offshoot of Hamas. Though the Israeli government allowed the men to campaign for office and vote for the Chairman of the Palestinian Legislative Council, as soon as they were elected, Israel warned them to resign from office or face the cancellation of their status as residents of Jerusalem.

When they failed to heed the Israeli government’s demand, in June 2006, the men were arrested and sentenced to two to four years in prison. Two days after they were released, the Israeli police confiscated their identification cards and ordered them to leave Jerusalem for another part of the West Bank.

As a result of the expulsion orders, the first of their kind since 1967, the three lawmakers are virtual hostages in the city their families have lived in for generations — if they leave the Red Cross center they will be immediately arrested. Their colleague, Muhammad Abu Tir, is already in an Israeli jail cell. Despite having been separated from their families for years, they remain steadfast in their rejection of the government’s orders, fearing that their expulsion will open the door for mass deportations of Palestinians from East Jerusalem.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, along with the rest of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Sinai peninsula, which was returned to Egypt in a peace deal a decade later. No country recognizes Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, and the UN Security Council has declared repeatedly that Israel’s occupation of all the territories it seized in 1967 is governed by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, a treaty Israel was compelled to sign which specifically forbids an occupying power from expelling civilians from the territory it occupies. Thus the legislators’ expulsion has been issued in explicit violation of binding international law.

Totah told me that the Israeli interior ministry has a list of 315 members of Palestinian civil society in East Jerusalem — academics, lawmakers, activists — whom it plans to expel in the near future on charges of disloyalty to the Jewish state. “They are trying to legalize the Nakba,” Totah remarked, using the Arabic word Palestinians use to describe their mass expulsion from their homeland in 1948.

I talked with the 42-year-old Totah for a half hour in the leafy courtyard of the ICRC headquarters. He was visibly tired, having spent the past two days in meetings with British parliamentarians, the head of Jerusalem’s Greek Orthodox Church and left-wing Israeli groups ranging from Anarchists Against The Wall to Gush Shalom. While a wiry young boy rushed around the yard, serving us a seemingly endless stream of Turkish coffee shots, Totah described to me his experience as a prisoner in his hometown.

Max Blumenthal: The Israeli government says you are guilty of a “breach of trust.” Does this mean they are accusing you of disloyalty to the state?

Muhammad Totah: The main reason they are expelling us is that we are accused of disloyalty. And every one on the list [of 315 Palestinian civil society members Israel seeks to expel] is accused of disloyalty. They want us to be loyal to the occupation. This is insane! So they are seeking any excuse to get rid of us. They want us to leave at any price. Basically, they want to finish the project that they began in 1948 because it has taken too long.

MB: Why did you decide to conduct a sit-in inside the Red Cross headquarters?

MT: We are determined to prevent the occupation from coming and taking us away. Beyond that, we are using our time here to make sure the international community hears our case. The occupation is against all international laws and we believe if the door of deportation is open in Jerusalem, it means that hundreds or even thousands will be deported. Right now, we are in danger of being arrested at any time. In fact, our colleague Abu Tir was arrested last month. So they could come at any time for us.

MB: Do you believe the Israelis would go as far as raiding a Red Cross center in Jerusalem to carry out your expulsion?

MT: The occupation will do anything. They are killing people constantly, demolishing buildings and doing what they have done for years. Ten thousand Palestinians are currently in prison. So yes, we would not be surprised by such an action.

MB: Has the international community responded to your protest?

MT: We sent a letter to [US] President [Barack] Obama and asked him to interfere and to put pressure on the Israeli side to cancel this illegal decision. So far, we have not heard a response. We have sat with [Palestinian Authority] President [Mahmoud] Abbas two times and he said that he had sent my letters to all the human rights organization and USAID [the US Agency for International Development] and sent letters to the occupation authorities and he said they’re making communications all the time time. But until now nothing on the ground. We have put out a call for international human rights organizations as well. And we have sent letters to all the leaders of Islamic and Arab states.

Our letters stress that our protest is not about our case in particular, but that it is about all the Palestinians living in Jerusalem. We believe that this decision is designed to begin a process that will empty Jerusalem of Palestinian people. The UN and international community admits that East Jerusalem is occupied by Israel, so clearly this is an illegal decision under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

MB: How much of Israel’s decision is motivated by your affiliation with Hamas and how does the tension between Hamas and Fatah effect the Palestinian Authority’s involvement in the case?

MT: This is an international case. It has nothing to do with Fatah and Hamas. There is a list of over 300 people who will be deported after us — the heart of Palestinian civil society in East Jerusalem — and for this reason all the parties in Jerusalem are united against this decision. They feel that we are the first and they will be the second. We know that the occupation doesn’t discriminate between political parties.

MB: How has your predicament affected your family?

MT: My son who is six years old does not want to leave the house anymore. He said, “I will not leave the house until my father comes back!” As soon as I was released from prison I was sent to so many meetings right away and couldn’t see my family, who I had hardly seen for four years. Now he’s having his own protest at home. “I will not leave home!” he says. This is a very big problem for me because I don’t want to break his heart. One of my children who is even younger wakes up every night screaming and crying with terrible nightmares. “Why are you crying?” my wife says. He says, “The soldiers are coming to throw me in jail!” My wife is suffering because of course we have been split for a very long time. The occupation wants to scare my family and if any information gets to my wife or children about what is happening to me they become extremely upset. This is not just my problem, though. All my colleagues are suffering this same way.

MB: How much of a burden has been placed on you by the Palestinian community in Jerusalem to resist your expulsion?

MT: The fact is that if we accept the deportation it means we accept deportation for thousand of Palestinians in Jerusalem. Even as hard as it is to be here without our families for so long we think that is the only means we have to declare that [our expulsion] is illegal and is against all international laws. We have nowhere else to go. This is our original country and our original city. My father was born here; my grandfather was born here so we have been here hundreds of years. All we are demanding is to stay in our homes and we are sure that we will get it because it’s our right and the deportation is against all international laws.

MB: If deporting you is the first step in a plan for mass deportations, what do you think Israel’s end game is?

MT: We think that there is a plan from the Israeli side to make East Jerusalem Jewish and they have many practices to do so. One of them that is the most dangerous is our deportation. If they demolish your house, you can always build another building. But deporting people — how can you talk about a city without people? What they want is to legalize the Nakba.

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author working in Israel-Palestine. His articles and video documentaries have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, Al-Jazeera English and many other publications. He is a writing fellow for the Nation Institute. His book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party, is a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller.

July 15, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Obama’s and Netanyahu’s Converging Interests

By HASAN ABU NIMAH | The Jordan Times | July 14, 2010

For many years, people in our region believed that only the United States had the power and the means to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict. Year after year, actually decade after decade, of total American adoption of the Israeli illegal position were not able to shake that belief.

The Palestinian Authority, the Arab states, the European Union and many more continue to presume that if this conflict has to end one day, only the US can end it. For that reason, we have all got accustomed to accepting that Washington alone holds the keys. All have been patiently, and quite helplessly, waiting for Washington to use them. All, including the United Nations, have absolved themselves of any responsibility vis-à-vis this century-old struggle, convinced that the resolution of this conflict is Washington’s responsibility. This was accompanied by the complacent assumption that Washington has always been waiting for the right circumstances and for the mediation efforts to yield results.

Time has shown that the “right circumstances” for the US purposes would never come. The striking reality is that the chances for any meaningful US action are diminishing.

It is true that the United States is the superpower upon which Israel depends entirely and therefore could not challenge its positions without fearing adverse consequences. But the American-Israeli relations are more complex than just that. It is still the case that no American can run for high office, particularly the presidency, without first securing the support of the Israel lobby. The lobby remains very powerful and highly influential despite significant cracks.

Without any doubt, the United States has the means to discipline Israel by making it comply with the rules of international law, and therefore compel Israel to accept a settlement of its conflict with its neighbours.　 But without any doubt, also, no American president so far has been willing to risk his political future by confronting Israel.

The obstacles in the way are usually many. The Congress is one of them. The question, therefore, is who needs who? Is it the US that needs Israeli support or vice versa? Obviously it is the US. The huge financial and political aid that Washington offers Israel on regular basis could not be used as an instrument of pressure because it is originally offered as a price; it could not therefore be used to exact an opposite price.

Americans who compete for the top job at the White House need Israel lobby support. When they plan for a second term, they often watch every move in their first term, lest it would anger Israel or the lobby and thus jeopardise the president’s chance for a second term in office. This clearly applies to Obama now, and explains his acquiescence to Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s repeated defiance of America’s policies towards the region.

A look at the long history of the conflict reveals that one American president after another openly took the Israeli side while pretending to honestly broker an Arab-Israeli peace settlement. Yet the belief that only America can achieve an historic breakthrough was never shaken in the Arab world.

When Obama was elected president, peculiar euphoria swept the Arab, and to a certain extent the Muslim, world that this finally is the president who would stand by the side of justice and would, therefore, end America’s trailing behind Israeli aggression and lawlessness. No amount of clear signals otherwise were enough to check the rising tide of optimism that the Obama promise of “hope and change” meant Arabs and Muslims as well.

Although Obama’s Cairo speech in January 2009 was hollow, it was hailed as the long-awaited beginning of that change. But there was no change from the way the Bush administration had handled this historic conflict. Bush was totally on Israel’s side and so is Obama. “Pro-Israel” Democrats can proclaim Obama to be “the most pro-Israel president ever”, says MJ Rosenberg (Political Correction, July 7), reminding that Bush was the last president to hold that title.

But why does Obama deserve this title? Simply because he lost every battle he tried with Netanyahu. Right from the beginning, Netanyahu rejected every American demand put to him, and his rejectionism had been rewarded.

Netanyahu got away with everything he wanted, building more settlements, expanding Jerusalem colonisation, evicting Palestinians from their homes to build recreation parks, maintaining a punitive siege on one million and a half Palestinians in Gaza and blocking every effort to resume meaningful talks while persistently calling for resuming direct negotiations.

The proximity talks, which made a second start two months ago, following massive American pressure on the Palestinians – the first attempt collapsed before it even started – were not meant to achieve results.

No one in his right mind could have expected results. Even the PA president and other advisers of his admitted no sign of progress in response to a White House signal that they were achieving something. To move from sterile proximity talks to direct talks, as Obama is demanding, is another mockery. But again, it could not be possible that anyone would expect any results, neither does it seem that results are the goal of such negotiations.

The goal is to enable a failed US policy for the region to claim any success. This could not be accomplished without additional appeasement of Netanyahu. This is what Netanyahu returned home with from his last visit to the White House, without agreeing to one single demand.

“Each leader [Obama and Netanyahu] accomplished what he needed,” says MJ Rosenberg, adding: “Netanyahu goes home looking far stronger than when he departed and without making any compromises that would offend his right flank. Obama can inform the chairs of the House and Senate campaign committees that they can tell disgruntled donors that his relations with Netanyahu are good as gold.”

That is what really matters. Not the future of the region, not stability, not even peace, not Gaza, not the rule of law, not the fate of the Palestinians, not the occupation, not the colonisation of Palestinian lands, not Lebanon, not another war against Iran. All that does not matter. What matters is Obama’s future and whether he will return to the White House for a second term with the help of the lobby.

July 15, 2010 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

The motive behind whistle-blower prosecutions

By Glenn Greenwald | July 15, 2010

One of the more flamboyant aspects of the Bradley Manning arrest was the claim that he had leaked to WikiLeaks 250,000 pages of “diplomatic cables.”  Those were the documents which anonymous government officials pointed to when telling The Daily Beast‘s Philip Shenon that the leaks “could do serious damage to national security.”  Most commentary on the Manning case has tacitly assumed that the leaking of “diplomatic cables” would jeopardize national security secrets.  But a new BBC article today contains this quote from former UK intelligence analyst Crispin Black:

Diplomatic cables don’t usually contain huge secrets but they do contain the unvarnished truth so in a sense they can be even more embarrassing than secrets.

As usual, government concern over leaks is about avoiding embarrassment and other accountability; national security harm is but the fear-mongering excuse.  Similarly, a new Washington Post article today details the Obama DOJ’s prosecution of NSA whistle blower Thomas Drake, whose disclosures resulted in no claimed national security harm, but rather, was evidence of “waste, mismanagement and a willingness to compromise Americans’ privacy without enhancing security” (leaked only after his use of the official channels resulted in nothing, as usual).  As is true for virtually every whistle blower prosecution or threatened prosecution, there is no actual national security harm identified from that leak.  Other than when a covert agent’s identity is blown (as happened to Valerie Plame), has anyone ever heard of any actual, concrete national security harm from any of the high-profile leak cases, whether it be the illegal NSA eavesdropping program, the network of CIA black sites, the release of the Apache helicopter attack video, or the corruption and privacy infringements revealed by Drake?

The Post today quotes Obama DOJ spokesman Matthew Miller’s justification for the administration’s escalated war on whistle blowers as follows:  “We have consistently said that leaks and mishandling of classified information are matters that we take extremely seriously.”  There’s no doubt that they take such acts “extremely seriously,” but what’s the reason for it?  There’s been no identified harm to national security from any of these leaks.

What these leaks have actually accomplished is to “embarrass” the Government by revealing what the intelligence analyst quoted by the BBC calls “the unvarnished truth” about the illegal, corrupt, and embarrassing acts it undertakes.   In all of these cases where the Obama DOJ is persecuting whistle blowers, they’re punishing the greatest sin there is — exposure of high-level government wrongdoing — not harm to national security.  Amazingly, that was even the explicit rationale used by Obama when he and the Democratic Congress re-wrote FOIA to shield photographs of detainee abuse from court-ordered disclosure:  these photos would reflect poorly on the U.S. government and therefore harm national security.  And, of course, the administration’s repeated, Bush-replicating invocation of the “state secrets” privilege has been justified with vague appeals to National Security but actually motivated by a desire to shield government crimes of detention, surveillance and interrogation from disclosure and accountability.

Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance — literally — occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry.  While a small portion of that is legitimately classified, these whistle blower prosecutions and other disclosure controversies demonstrate that the vast majority of this secrecy is devoted to avoiding embarrassment and accountability.  It has nothing to do with “national security” — one of the all-justifying terms (along with Terrorism) for what the Government does.  Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption.  That’s why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics.  They’re one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.

The great irony is that there is a perfect inverse relationship between the secrecy powers of the Government (which rapidly increase) and the privacy rights of citizens (which erode just as rapidly).  The citizenry meekly acquiesces to the notion that it must sacrifice more and more privacy to the Government in order to deter and expose criminality, corruption and other dangerous acts of private citizens, yet refuses to apply that same rationale to demand greater transparency from the Government itself.  The Government (and its private corporate partners) know more and more about citizens, while citizens know less and less about the actions of the government-corporate axis which governs them.

The reason Iceland is poised to enact an unprecedentedly potent shield for whistle blowers and other leakers is that they realized that the oozing elite corruption that led to their financial collapse was caused by rampant secrecy.  They realized that unauthorized leaks are the most effective check against the crimes of the powerful, which is precisely why such leaks in the U.S. are targeted with such a fury.  What possible valid reason is there to keep classified that Apache attack video, or evidence of our civilian casualties in Afghanistan, or massive private contractor corruption at the NSA, or Bush crimes on torture and eavesdropping, or the lending programs of the Fed?  The real criminals are not those who are leaking embarrassing information about corruption and wrongdoing — those whom the Obama DOJ is prosecuting with an unprecedented vengeance — but rather the political officials who are misusing powers of secrecy to hide information for which there is no legitimate secrecy basis.

July 15, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Top Clinton Official: Only A Terror Attack Can Save Obama

By Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet | July 14, 2010

A former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton says that the only thing which can rescue Barack Obama’s increasingly tenuous grip on power as his approval figures continue to plunge is a terror attack on the scale of Oklahoma City or 9/11, another startling reminder that such events only ever serve to benefit those in authority.

Buried in a Financial Times article about Obama’s “growing credibility crisis” and fears on behalf of Democrats that they could lose not only the White House but also the Senate to Republicans, Robert Shapiro makes it clear that Obama is relying on an October surprise in the form of a terror attack to rescue his presidency.

“The bottom line here is that Americans don’t believe in President Obama’s leadership,” said Shapiro, adding, “He has to find some way between now and November of demonstrating that he is a leader who can command confidence and, short of a 9/11 event or an Oklahoma City bombing, I can’t think of how he could do that.”

Shapiro’s veiled warning should not be dismissed lightly. He was undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs during Clinton’s tenure in the Oval Office and also acted as principal economic adviser to Clinton in his 1991-1992 campaign. Shapiro is now Director of the Globalization Initiative of NDN and also Chair of the Climate Task Force. He is a prominent globalist who has attended numerous Bilderberg Group meetings over the past decade.

Shapiro is clearly communicating the necessity for a terror attack to be launched in order to give Obama the opportunity to unite the country around his agenda in the name of fighting terrorists, just as President Bush did in the aftermath of 9/11 when his approval ratings shot up from around 50% to well above 80%.

Similarly, Bill Clinton was able to extinguish an anti-incumbent rebellion which was brewing in the mid 1990’s by exploiting the OKC bombing to demonize his political enemies as right-wing extremists. As Jack Cashill points out, Clinton “descended on Oklahoma City with an approval rating in the low 40s and left town with a rating well above 50 and the Republican revolution buried in the rubble.”

… Shapiro is by no means the first to point out that terror attacks on U.S. soil and indeed anywhere in the world serve only to benefit those in positions of power.

CNN host Rick Sanchez admitted on his show this week that the deadly bombings in Uganda which killed 74 people were “helpful” to the military-industrial complex agenda to expand the war on terror into Africa.

During the latter years of the Bush presidency, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld mused with Pentagon top brass that shrinking Capitol Hill support for expanding the war on terror could be corrected with the aid of another terror attack.

Lt.-Col. Doug Delaney, chair of the war studies program at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, told the Toronto Star in July 2007 that “The key to bolstering Western resolve is another terrorist attack like 9/11 or the London transit bombings of two years ago.”

The same sentiment was also explicitly expressed in a 2005 GOP memo, which yearned for new attacks that would “validate” the President’s war on terror and “restore his image as a leader of the American people.”

In June 2007, the chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party Dennis Milligan said that there needed to be more attacks on American soil for President Bush to regain popular approval.

Given the fact that a terror attack on U.S. soil will only serve to rescue Barack Obama’s failing presidency, and will do absolutely nothing to further the aims of any so-called “right wing extremists” the attack is blamed on, who should we suspect as the masterminds behind any such acts of terror? Surely not Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief string puller, the son of an Israeli terrorist who helped bomb hotels and marketplaces, and the man who once said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste….an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” … Full article

July 14, 2010 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Obama’s Gitmo

Torturing the rule of law

By Chase Madar | The American Conservative | August 1, 2010 Issue

President Obama may lack the nerve to stare down Liz Cheney or Bibi Netanyahu, but no one can deny that our commander in chief has the guts to take on a child soldier. Come August, a military commission in Guantánamo will try Omar Khadr, a Canadian national captured outside Kabul in 2002, when he was just 15 years old. This will be only the third Gitmo trial and the Obama administration’s first, and there won’t be anything kinder and gentler about it.

But give our government credit for breaking new ground: no nation has tried a child soldier for war crimes since World War II, and the decision to prosecute Khadr has drawn protests from UNICEF, headed by a former U.S. national security adviser, as well as every major human-rights group. The audacity doesn’t stop there: charges against Khadr include “murder in violation of the rules of war,” a newly minted war crime novel to the history of armed conflict. Battlefield deaths do not usually result in murder trials for prisoners of war. But according to the Department of Defense, Omar Khadr is no POW. He’s a non-uniformed, “unprivileged belligerent.” In the euphemistic lingo of Gitmo, Khadr is not even a prisoner, just a “detainee” who has been awaiting trial for the past eight years.

This kind of court action would have made great copy under Cheney and Bush, noisome proof of their barbarity. Now everyone except the Right’s usual panic-merchants is sick of Guantánamo and wishes it had closed, as Obama promised, by the end of 2009. But that deadline has passed, and Gitmo will surely be open next year too. Several reporters told me they had to beg their editors to be sent down to cover the Khadr story.

Anyone expecting to witness eye-popping tableaux of Rumsfeldian cruelty at Gitmo will be disappointed. It’s a military base like many others, except instead of the nearby base town with obligatory pawn shop, strip club, and Korean restaurant, you find an impermeable barrier sealing base dwellers and visitors inside. Overall, it’s not a bad deployment: soldiers can at least get a beer off duty, the snorkeling’s good, and the roads are free of IEDs. Given the paucity of lurid local color, scribblers who take the military flight—a leased Delta aircraft from Andrews Air Force Base—have been reduced to soliloquizing about Guantanamo’s McDonald’s and the banality of evil amid the French fries.

Gitmo’s population continues to trickle away, to a point. Over 600 prisoners have been let go, and of the 50 habeas petitions for release filed since the Boumediene decision in 2008, 36 have been granted. Were these really “the worst of the worst”? Hardly. Still, the Obama administration has announced that it will continue to hold some 45 detainees indefinitely without charges, one of George W. Bush’s most radical policies, now zealously defended by a smoother, smarter team of Democratic lawyers. This is exactly the kind of lawlessness that Harold Koh, a human-rights icon, used to condemn from his bully pulpit as dean of Yale Law. Now, as legal adviser to the Department of State, he’s tasked with justifying indefinite detention.

Of the roughly 180 remaining prisoners, Omar Khadr is the youngest. The 23-year-old is now in the midst of pretrial suppression hearings to determine whether his confession of throwing a grenade that killed a Special Forces medic is admissible as evidence. Few would deny that Khadr was tortured—one interrogator testified that he first laid eyes on the youth hooded and chained to the walls of his cell, standing with his shackled arms extended at head level. The only questions are how much torture, exactly what kind, for how long, and whether it contaminates the confession that Khadr later retracted. The first round of hearings afforded a clear vantage into the legal black hole that Guantanamo very much remains.

The Obama administration has striven to paper over the abyss with a layer of legality. There are new, improved rules for the military commissions, signed by the secretary of defense the night before the hearings began. Alas, they continue to fall short in core areas of juridical fairness. There is no right to a speedy trial, no pretrial investigation to weed out weak cases, and the defense’s requests for witnesses must go through the prosecution. There is no credit for pretrial detention—now nearly a decade for many prisoners—and no right of equal access to witnesses and evidence. Freshly invented war crimes like “material support for terrorism,” retroactively applied, violate the fundamental juridical principle of nulla poena sine lege, no crime without a prospective law.

The greatest flaw is structural: the interference of the “Convening Authority”—the politically appointed head of the commissions—into the prosecutions has been documented again and again. Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, former legal adviser to the Convening Authority, was so blatant in his attempts to secure convictions that he was banned from any involvement in three separate trials for his “undue command influence.” One former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo has said that Hartmann pushed hard for the Khadr case because he thought it would be “sexy, the kind of case the public’s going to get energized about.” Such micromanaging did not endear Hartmann to his colleagues: former deputy prison camps commander at Guantánamo Brig. Gen. Gregory Zanetti testified in 2008 that Hartmann’s conduct was “abusive, bullying and unprofessional … pretty much across the board.”

One might expect that a legal system thus rigged would greatly appeal to its prosecutors. Until now, one would be wrong. Half a dozen prosecutors have quit the commissions in disgust, most with blistering criticisms on their way out. Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor of the commissions until October 2007, said that constant political pressure made full, fair, and open trials impossible: “What we are doing at Guantánamo is neither military nor justice.”

No less scathing is Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, formerly lead prosecutor in another commissions case against a child soldier—a case that collapsed midway through, with the government dropping all charges. “It would be foolish to expect anything to come out of Guantánamo except decades of failure. There will be no justice there, and Obama has proved to be an almost unmitigated disaster,” he told me. After resigning from the commissions as a matter of ethical principle, Vandeveld was punished with a mandatory psychiatric evaluation and gratuitous hearings into his fitness for remaining in the Army, even though he had only four months remaining in his term of service. Vandeveld, who has deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia, doubts very much that any more prosecutors will resign after his highly visible reprimand.

The new head of the prosecution team, Capt. John Murphy, told me proudly that morale has never been higher on his team. Half of the four lawyers looked young enough to have started law school long after 2001, and it is hard to imagine young attorneys quitting the commissions without established careers to fall back on.

This may spell the end to a golden chapter in JAG history: throughout the sordid drama of Guantanamo, the few glimmers of governmental integrity have come from the JAG corps’ dissent. They even earned that ultimate ethical accolade, the disapproval of John Yoo, who scolded the military lawyers for adhering to the rule of law in defiance of the “unitary executive authority” as embodied by torture buffs such as himself.

For its part, Team Obama’s main innovation has been to ban troublesome journalists from the base, a move Bush never dared. On May 6, toward the end of this round of hearings, the Joint Task Force abruptly barred four of the most knowledgeable reporters from returning to Gitmo, accusing them of violating an order that the identity of Omar Khadr’s primary interrogator be kept secret. It doesn’t matter that “Interrogator Number One,” convicted in a 2005 court martial for prisoner abuse at Bagram prison, had already been interviewed by one of these journalists two years ago and that his identity is available in the public record.

One of the banned journalists, Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy, was hounded last summer by a risible and quickly dismissed sexual harassment complaint made by Navy press officer Jeffrey Gordon. Rosenberg is the acknowledged dean of Gitmo journalists. Getting rid of her would be a singularly effective way for the Department of Defense to gain some control over Gitmo’s public image.

And that image remains pretty terrible, even if Camp X-Ray, the open-air cages that held orange jumpsuited detainees for four months in 2002, is now growing weeds. Camp Delta, the detention complex, is rather prosaic. Camp 5, for the least compliant prisoners, is a direct modular copy of a block from the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana; Camps 4 and 6, for the most compliant, of Lawanee Prison in Adrian, Michigan. Some detainees are able to take courses in Arabic, English, and art. And so what?

A prison doesn’t have to be an unremitting nightmare to threaten the rule of law. As the ACLU’s Ben Wizner puts it, “At this point, Guantánamo isn’t a place anymore, it’s a principle.” A normal-looking prison that just happens to hold people indefinitely without charge is a more insidious threat to the integrity of the legal system than Camp X-Ray ever was. For this reason, the ACLU does not see transporting the system to Thomson Correctional Facility in Illinois as any kind of progress.

Guantanamo, wherever it is located, runs the grave risk of normalization, a process already well underway. Over a few nights during the Khadr hearings, I read in my air-conditioned tent a law-review article by Prof. Adrian Vermeule, an up-and-comer at Harvard Law School. He proposes that legal black holes—the term was coined by a British law lord expressly for Guantánamo—are not only tolerable but necessary. Any attempt to fill them in with law would be “hopelessly utopian,” “quixotic” even. “Our Schmittian Administrative Law,” published last year in the Harvard Law Review, draws heavily on the work of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, lifelong opponent of the rule of law and liberal democracy. A chronic figure of fascination among lefty academics for the cold eye he cast on liberalism’s sacred myths, Schmitt’s ideas had always been held at a prophylactic distance.

No longer. Schmitt’s ready-made conceptual lexicon for political emergencies, non-state combatants, and the need for strident executive authority has proven irresistible to ambitious intellectuals in the revolving door between the federal government and the finer law schools. These tweedy immoralists urge us to relax our square-john commitment to the rule of law and embrace strong executive action. Surely the moralizing banalities of rule-of-law theorists are inadequate for the unique challenges of the post-9/11 global order, they tell us.

But after the events of the past decade, one would be on safer ground drawing the opposite conclusion about the rule of law’s value. Our government responded to 9/11 with extraordinary measures contemptuous of ordinary legality, and nearly every one of them has been catastrophic. From the conquest of Iraq to waterboarding to warrantless wiretapping to the military commissions of Guantánamo, these policies have been exorbitantly costly in blood, treasure, and national prestige. Nor is setting up a shambolic court to try a child soldier who was tortured in custody likely to solve anything. Has any part of our frenzied rejection of legal restraints improved national security?

Vermeule is correct to note that these black holes are likely to dilate rather than contract as an imperialist foreign policy strains our legal system, not only with the panic and fervor of war but with juridical conundrums of extraterritoriality, non-state belligerents, and geographically far-fetched definitions of self-defense. Already a new Guantánamo for indefinite detainees has opened up in Bagram, which will be much less accessible to media, nonprofit observers, and defense counsel.

Meanwhile, the rule of law will continue to suffer rough treatment at the hands of our best and brightest. The concept has been debunked by many postmodern academics as so much high-minded bourgeois blather and, more dangerously, derided by the neoconservative Right as a folktale for chuckleheads. But people in countries where violent lawlessness is rife see the rule of law as something more than rhetorical window dressing. From Colombia to Egypt to Italy to Guantánamo’s neighboring Cuba, citizens who risk their lives against the depredations of organized crime or authoritarian states routinely invoke the rule of law to give meaning to their acts of resistance. Yes, the rule of law may be an ideal—but it is not only an ideal.

Repairing legal black holes in America may start by shutting down Guantánamo, wherever the detention complex ultimately winds up, and radically rethinking our post-9/11 security policies. Indefinite detention in some nondescript prison with a few art classes doesn’t make for splashy headlines, but it marks the beginning of the end of the rule of law.

Chase Madar is a lawyer in New York.

July 8, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

US gives ‘secret guarantee’ to Israel

Press TV – July 8, 2010

The United States has secretly given a “written guarantee” to Israel that obliges Washington to sell Israel nuclear fission materials, Israeli sources say.

The materials will be used to “produce electricity,” Israeli Army radio, which is an official Israeli news source, reported.

Washington has also vowed to “publicly announce” that Israel is a responsible entity and can “contain its capabilities.”

Former US President Jimmy Carter has said Israel has between 200 and 300 nuclear warheads. A former Israeli scientist at Israel’s Dimona nuclear site, Mordechai Vanunu, as well as aerial footage and decades of recurrent reporting have reaffirmed the possession.

The US has always supported Israel’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity,” in line with which Tel Aviv would neither confirm nor deny having the firepower.

Israel sensed a breach in the partnership two months ago when Washington supported an Egyptian proposal to hold a regional conference in 2012 on a nuclear-free Middle East.

The White House, however, said on Wednesday that US President Barack Obama had vowed to shield Israel from being “singled out” at neither the Egyptian-proposed meeting nor a September gathering of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), where the issue of Israel’s nuclear weapons is expected to be top on the agenda, Reuters reported.

“We strongly believe that, given its size, its history, the region that it’s in, and the threats that are leveled against us — against it, that Israel has unique security requirements,” Obama as well noted.

July 8, 2010 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Obama renews call for civilian expeditionary force

By Aletho News | July 1, 2010

President Obama Thursday at a town hall meeting called for a civilian expeditionary force as large as the military, while the Department of Defense issued Defense Directive 1404.10 which  describes the workforce deployments as support for combat operations including restoration of order, drug interdiction and contingencies. This while having already raised US military spending by double digits to the highest level of any nation in history.

Having bet on being able to subdue the Afghan people by force and failed, Obama seems to be doubling down. The present military force which costs the nation nearly half of the federal budget is described as “overburdened.”

No indication was offered as to where the funds for the new force would come from as other areas of federal spending are being cut.

European counterparts in the UK and Germany meanwhile are reining in military spending as part of a balanced reduction of deficit spending.

Over recent years various Democratic party leaders have proposed a compulsory service for American youth including basic [military] training. Some proposals call for full military conscription.

Campaigning in 2008, Obama also called for a civilian “national security” force, we can expect to see action moving these plans forward so long as the American public continues to tolerate wars of choice and endless occupations.

July 1, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Obama’s Moral Bankruptcy Regarding Torture

By Andy Worthington – 29.6.10

Saturday was the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, established twelve years ago to mark the day, in 1987, when the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment came into force, but you wouldn’t have found out about it through the mainstream US media.

No editorials or news broadcasts reminded Americans that “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,” and that anyone responsible for authorizing torture must be prosecuted, and no one called for the prosecution of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld or their supportive colleagues and co-conspirators, including, for example, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, the authors of the Office of Legal Counsel’s “torture memos,” or other key figures in Cheney’s “War Council” that drove the policies: David Addington, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney general, and William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s former Chief Counsel.

Instead, two mainstream newspaper articles revealed the extent to which President Obama has, over the last 17 months, conspired with senior officials and with Congress to maintain the bitter fruits of the Bush administration’s torture program — and its closely related themes of arbitrary detention and hyperbole about the perceived threat of terrorism.

In the first of these two bleak stories, “US to repatriate Guantánamo detainee to Yemen after judge orders him to be released,” anonymous administration officials told the Washington Post that the President had generously decided to release a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo, Mohammed Hassan Odaini, whose release was ordered last month by a judge in the District Court in Washington D.C.

As I explained in an article following the judge’s May 26 ruling, it had been publicly known since November 2007 that the government had conceded in June 2005 that Odaini, a student, had been seized by mistake after staying the night with friends in a university guest house in Faisalabad, Pakistan on the night that the house was raided by Pakistani and US operatives, and that he had been officially approved for release on June 26, 2006 (ironically, on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture).

Nevertheless, the Justice Department refused to abandon the case against him, and took its feeble allegations all the way to the District Court, where they were savagely dismissed by Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. When the judge’s unclassified opinion was subsequently released, an even grimmer truth emerged: that shortly after Odaini’s arrival at Guantánamo in June 2002, an interrogator recommended his repatriation (after he had been exploited for information about his fellow prisoners), and that, in April 2004, “an employee of the Criminal Investigative Task Force (‘CITF’) of the Department of Defense reviewed five interrogations of Odaini and wrote that ‘[t]here is no information that indicates [he] has clear ties to mid or high level Taliban or that he is a member of al-Qaeda.’”

Odaini was not subjected to specific torture techniques, but there are many people — myself included — who are happy to point out to the Obama administration that subjecting an innocent man to eight years of essentially arbitrary detention in an experimental prison camp devoted to the coercive interrogations of prisoners who were deliberately excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions is itself a form of torture, especially as, unlike the worst convicted criminals on the US mainland, no Guantánamo prisoner has ever been allowed a family visit, and many have never even spoken to their families by phone.

Moreover, the fact that the administration proceeded with his habeas case, despite knowing that he was innocent, and then refused to release him as soon as the judge delivered his ruling, confirms that, when it comes to lawlessness and cruelty, the Obama administration is closer in spirit to the Bush administration than it cares to admit.

On Saturday, via its anonymous spokesmen, the administration confirmed how far it has fallen from all notions of decency. The officials explained that the moratorium on any releases to Yemen that was issued by President Obama in January, in response to cynical hysteria whipped up in the wake of the failed plane bomb plot involving a Nigerian who had reportedly trained in Yemen, “remains in place,” but, as one of the officials stated:

The general suspension is still intact, but this is a court-ordered release. People were comfortable with this … because of the guy’s background, his family and where he comes from in Yemen.

In other words, a mouthpiece of the administration told a major US newspaper that Odaini, a patently innocent man whose release was ordered by a US judge, and whose ongoing detention was cynically sought by the Obama administration, was only being released because government officials were happy about his family background (his father, it transpires, is a retired security officer).

I shouldn’t really need to explain to the government that it’s unconstitutional to detain an innocent man, even if his father happened to be Osama bin Laden rather than a security officer, nor to point out how it would appear if this vetting procedure were to be applied to the criminal justice system in general, but in Obama’s world it is apparently necessary to point out these basic facts.

The second story that arrived in time to cast a mocking light on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture — “Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority” — was published in the New York Times. Since President Obama failed to close Guantánamo by his self-imposed deadline of January 22 this year, the administration has failed to set a new deadline — and for a depressing reason, as Sen. Carl Levin explained to the Times.

“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” Sen. Levin said, adding that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration in 2013.

Sen. Levin had no doubt that this failure had come about because of a lack of political will on the part of the administration, which contrasts sharply with the rhetoric of Barack Obama in August 2007, when he was still a Senator. On that occasion, he spoke compellingly about how, “In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values. What could have been a call to a generation has become an excuse for unchecked presidential power.” However, since coming to power, as Sen. Levin explained, the administration has been “unwilling to make a serious effort to exert its influence.”

With a sharp eye for how principled rhetoric has not been followed up with any attempt whatsoever to persuade Congress of the importance of closing Guantánamo, Sen. Levin contrasted the administration’s “muted response to legislative hurdles to closing Guantánamo with ‘very vocal’ threats to veto financing for a fighter jet engine it opposes,” and added that last year the administration “stood aside as lawmakers restricted the transfer of detainees into the United States except for prosecution,” and also responded with silence just a month ago, when the House and Senate Armed Services Committees voted to block money for renovating a prison in Illinois to take the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo who have not been cleared for release.

“They are not really putting their shoulder to the wheel on this issue,” Sen. Levin concluded, adding, “It’s pretty dormant in terms of their public positions.”

“Dormant” is a good word, but something like “extinct” may be more appropriate, if, as Sen. Levin asserts, Guantánamo will still be open in January 2013. If that occurs, Guantánamo will have been open for 11 years, which doesn’t even bear thinking about. This is especially true because, as it stands now, nearly eight and half years after Guantánamo opened, the Obama administration’s refusal to take leadership on the issue, to drop its unacceptable moratorium on releasing Yemenis cleared by its own Task Force (and in some cases, like Mohammed Hassan Odaini, by the courts), and to abandon an unprincipled policy of continuing to hold men indefinitely without charge or trial demonstrates that senior officials, including the President, genuinely have no interest in bringing to an end a regime founded on torture and arbitrary detention. In most respects, their actions — or their inactivity — represent a ringing endorsement of their predecessors’ vile policies.

The “enhanced interrogation techniques” of the Bush years may have come to an end, but anyone doubting the baleful effects of long-term detention without charge or trial should recall what Christophe Girod of the International Committee of the Red Cross told the New York Times over six year and a half years ago: “The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem.”

That was in October 2003, and I dread to think what the mental state of some of those prisoners must be by now. The very thought that, two and half years from now, some of these men might still be held because the Obama administration doesn’t care enough to do anything about it cannot be excused for reasons of political expediency. Instead, it confirms that, in failing to bring to an end key elements of the Bush administration’s program of torture and arbitrary detention, the Obama administration has lost its principles.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison).

June 30, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

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