Did he know, or didn’t he? That’s the question surrounding President Barack Obama since it was revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on the private communications of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Obama has been put in the embarrassing position of either admitting that he authorized the NSA to tap into the cell phone and email communications of the leaders of Germany and other allied countries, or that during his presidency spy agencies have been allowed to do as they wish without his knowledge even though many of their programs were already in place before Obama entered the White House.
Media reports out of Germany over the weekend indicated that Obama did know what the NSA was doing, going back several years in fact.
The German tabloid Bild alleged that Obama was personally briefed in 2010 about the operation to target Merkel’s phone by the NSA’s director, Keith Alexander, and that he authorized it to continue.
Another story, published in Der Spiegel, said the U.S. had been spying on Germans from the U.S. embassy in Berlin since 2008, and that surveillance of Merkel may have began as early as 2002.
In response to the stories, the NSA denied that Alexander met with Obama to discuss the controversial program.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) cited numerous unnamed sources who said the White House didn’t learn of the NSA spying until this past summer, when the operation against Merkel was shut down. It quoted a senior NSA official as saying, “These decisions are made at NSA. The president doesn’t sign off on this stuff.”
But that could mean Obama was in the dark for years about NSA activities.
“Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn’t have been practical to brief him on all of them,” the WSJ’s Siobhan Gorman and Adam Entous reported.
If that’s the best spin the administration can put on the scandal, it still leaves Obama open to criticism that he’s allowed a multi-billion-dollar spy agency to run amok and pry into the communications of whomever it wishes.
The drone war is obscure by design. Operated by armchair pilots from clandestine bases across the American west, the Predators and Reapers fly over Afghanistan, Yemen, and Pakistan’s Tribal Areas at invisible heights, where they are on orders from the CIA to kill “high value” targets with laser-guided “surgical” precision thousands of feet below. But because of where the Hellfire missiles land, and because the program is operated in secret, verifying their precision and their lasting effects isn’t easy.
For years, US officials have downplayed the number of civilian deaths in particular, even as a chorus of independent reports have offered their own grim estimates. The latest, according to new research by the United Nations and Amnesty International: 58 civilians killed in Yemen, and up to nine hundred in Pakistan. In a speech in May, President Obama finally broke his silence on drones, acknowledging that civilians had been killed—he didn’t say how many—and promising more transparency for the program. “Those deaths,” added the President, “will haunt us for as long as we live.”
For journalist Madiha Tahir, the numbers are important, but they’re not the whole story. Her documentary “Wounds of Waziristan,” which premieres above, features interviews with the people who live in the southern part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, bordering Afghanistan, under the eyes of the drones, and in the wake of their destruction. The film switches up the typical calculus that drives the drone debate at home. Tahir, who grew up between Pakistan and the U.S., points out that drone strikes aren’t just about the numbers of casualties, or the kinds of ethical arguments that arise around “just war” concepts like proportionality. The effects of the drone war have as much to do with the way those casualties rip apart communities and haunt the living, in distant places that exist on the fringes of law and order.
“Because drones are at a certain remove, there is a sense of uncertainty, a sense that you can’t control this,” Tahir says, describing the attitude among the people who live in Waziristan. Already haunted by the legacy of British colonialism and the laws it left behind, this part of the Tribal Areas is now ruled with a brutal fist by the Pakistani military and various insurgent groups. But the buzz of the drones, sometimes seven or eight overhead a day, signals another kind of indeterminate power. “Whether its true or not, people feel that with militants there is some degree of control. You can negotiate. There is some cause and effect. But there is no cause and effect with drones. It’s an acute kind of trauma that is not limited to the actual attack.”
For the operators of the drone program, who have launched more than 300 missile attacks in Pakistan since 2008, the political vacuum of the Tribal Areas have encouraged a special kind of war-on-terror calculus. As the New York Timesreported last year, the American government has been counting all military-age males in a strike zone as “militants,” which leads to skewed figures about who exactly has been killed. The Obama administration has executed “signature strikes,” drone attacks based on a so-called “pattern of life” analysis in which simply suspicious behavior is enough to qualify for an attack. And in a so-called “double tap” maneuver, a second attack follows an initial strike, killing those who have come to recover bodies from the scene.
“When an attack happens, the media claims to know how many militants were killed,” says Noor Behram, a journalist in the Tribal Areas who has been photographing the casualties of drone strikes for years. “Actually, you only find body parts on the scene, so people can’t tell how many have died.”
In one interview, Tahir speaks with a man from South Waziristan named Karim Khan, whose brother and son were killed in a drone strike. “What is the definition of terrorism?” he asks her, and she returns the question to him. His tired eyes light up.
“I think there is no bigger terrorist than Obama or Bush,” he says. “Those who have weaponry like drones, who drop bombs on us while we are in our own homes, there are no greater terrorists than them.” …
The German Chancellor’s mobile phone has been on an NSA target list since 2002 and was code-named “GE Chancellor Merkel”, according to Der Spiegel. The paper also reports that President Obama assured Merkel that he did not know her phone was tapped.
The monitoring operation was still in force even a few weeks before Obama’s visit to Berlin in June 2013.
In the NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS) document cited by the magazine, the agency said it had a “not legally registered spying branch” in the US embassy in Berlin. It also warned that its exposure would lead to “grave damage for the relations of the United States to another government”.
Using the spying branch, NSA and CIA staff were tapping communications in Berlin’s government district with high-tech surveillance.
The magazine says that according to a secret document from 2010, such branches existed in about 80 locations around the world, including Paris, Madrid, Rome, Prague, Geneva and Frankfurt.
However, it is unclear, Der Spiegel reports, if the SCS obtained recorded conversations or just connection data.
President Obama, however, told Merkel that he was not aware that her phone was bugged, if he had known, he would have immediately stopped it, Der Spiegel reports as it also disclosed the recent conversation between the two.
The German newspaper cites the Chancellor’s office, which said that during Wednesday’s call Obama expressed his deep regret and apologized to the Chancellor.
Earlier, Barack Obama assured Merkel that his country was not monitoring her communications, but failed to confirm or deny the tapping took place in the past.
Speaking to her German counterpart, Susan E. Rice, the President’s national security adviser, also insisted that Obama did not know about the monitoring of Merkel’s phone, and said it was not currently happening. However, she also failed to deny it happened in the past.
Angela Merkel called President Obama over the German government’s suspicions the US could have tapped her mobile phone on Wednesday.
Following the call, US ambassador to Germany Steffen Seibert stated that Merkel had made clear to Obama that if the information proved trued it would be “completely unacceptable” and represent a “grave breach of trust”.
A few days earlier, the US President had to convince his French colleague of the same issues.
The Le Monde newspaper reported earlier this week that the NSA spied on the agency records of millions of phone calls of top French politicians and business people. Later The Guardian revealed citing former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the leadership of 35 nations was spied on; the list of countries however did not follow.
In response to allegations, Obama promised that the US secret service would revise its methods of working in order to both provide the security of citizens and not to interfere with their privacy.
Germany will send heads of its foreign and domestic intelligence agencies to Washington to hold talks with the White House and the National Security Agency in order to push forward” an investigation into allegations the US spied on its leader.”
“What exactly is going to be regulated, how and in what form it will be negotiated and by whom, I cannot tell you right now,” German government spokesman Georg Streiter told reporters.
German media citing sources close to the intelligence service reported on Saturday that the delegation will include top officials from the German secret service.
Earlier, Germany and France said they want “a no-spy deal” with the US to be signed by the end of the year.
The Foreign Policy reported on Saturday that 21 one countries are now participating in talks over a draft UN General Resolution aimed at holding back US government surveillance.
EU leaders say their relations with the US have been undermined by reports of NSA spying on European leaders and ordinary citizens.
A partnership with America should be built on respect and trust, they said in a joint statement on Friday.
“[The leaders] stressed that intelligence gathering is a vital element in the fight against terrorism,” the BBC cites the statement as reading. “A lack of trust could prejudice the necessary cooperation in the field of intelligence gathering.”
The European Parliament recently voted for the suspension of US access to the global financial database held by a Belgian company because of concerns that the US is snooping on the database for financial gain rather than just to combat terrorism.
However, anti-war activist Richard Becker doubted President Obama did not know the German Chancellor’s phone was bugged.
“These kinds of assertions are comical,” he told RT. “It shows that the US’ relationship with other countries is based on its notion of its “American exceptionalism.” There is in fact an American exceptionalism – no other country in the world spies on everybody else and all of the countries and feels free to intervene in all other countries,” he said.
Becker says the spying scandal shows “the nature of the relationships” between the US and other states.
“Even among the allies they are in contention and competition among each other and not to mention the kind of relationship that is carried out against those countries that the US considers its enemies,” he said.
A new report has revealed that US President Barack Obama was personally aware of the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
NSA director Keith Alexander had briefed President Obama on the mobile phone tapping against Merkel in 2010, German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported on Sunday.
“Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue,” according to the paper citing a high-ranking NSA official.
The newspaper also said the US spying agency eavesdropped on Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schroder, after former US president George W. Bush launched the spying program in 2002, adding that Schroder’s refusal to support the Iraq war was a key reason behind the operation.
The new revelation comes one day after German magazine Der Spiegel said that the NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS) had listed Merkel’s mobile telephone since 2002.
Washington’s ally has demanded explanations from the White House after disclosures about the huge and broad American electronic spying.
On Thursday, Germany summoned US ambassador John Emerson to discuss the tapping allegations.
“For us, spying on close friends and partners is totally unacceptable. This undermines trust and this can harm our friendship,” German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said. “We need the truth now.”
In a phone call with Obama on Wednesday, Merkel said that she “unequivocally disapproves of such practices and sees them as completely unacceptable. There should be no such monitoring of the communication of a head of government. That would be a grave breach of trust.”
The White House, however, rejected the allegations, saying “the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel.”
The global outrage over US government surveillance further spiked after The Guardian — citing a confidential memo obtained from American whistleblower Edward Snowden – revealed that the NSA is illegally eavesdropping on phone conversations of 35 world leaders.
The revelations have prompted Brazil and Germany to begin drafting a UN General Assembly resolution to restrain the NSA’s surveillance programs against other nations.
At a time when a record 47-million Americans live in poverty, when cities are going bankrupt, when 10 million jobless can’t find work and millions more are too discouraged to look, when the infrastructure is crumbling, when schools are running down, when bridges,roads and water mains need urgent repair, and when the AP reports four out of five Americans are in the financial soup, President Obama’s plan to spend $60 billion to refurbish an aging nuclear weapons arsenal is an obscene waste of tax dollars.
This president, who campaigns like a progressive and governs like a reactionary, is about to modernize a costly nuclear arsenal that President Ronald Reagan, in his shining moment, called “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization”. Reagan sensibly called for “a world free of nuclear weapons” and met with Soviet Russia’s Gorbachev at four summit conferences between 1985 and 1988 to draw down missile and nuclear stockpiles.
Yet Obama appears hell-bent on updating the seven aging hydrogen bomb designs (why, oh, why, in the name of god, why?) that would require construction of costly new facilities when millions of American families can’t find decent housing and small businesses can’t find money to expand! According to a report by Ralph Vartabedian of the Los Angeles Times, the new scheme “essentially violates the Obama administration’s pledge against developing nuclear weapons.” The reporter interviewed Philip Coyle, former head of the U.S. nuclear testing program no less, quoting him as saying the Obama plan “sends the wrong message to the rest of the world.”
It also puzzles a lot of Americans. Areport by the Union of Concerned Scientists, writes Vartabedian, “raises new objections that the plan would require construction of unnecessary facilities and introduce untested combinations of parts inside the bombs—which could erode confidence in their reliability and safety.” (A polite way of saying, “Holy Hell, Look Out!”)
Speaking of safety, in an article titled “Nukes of Hazard” in the Sept. 30th issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes, “most of the danger that human beings faced from nuclear weapons after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to do with inadvertence—with bombs dropped by mistake, bombers catching on fire or crashing, missiles exploding, and computers miscalculating and people jumping to the wrong conclusion. On most days (during the Cold War), the probability of a nuclear explosion happening by accident was far greater than the probability that someone would deliberately start a war.”
Yet, instead of destroying all nuclear weapons and calling upon the other members of the lunatic nuclear fraternity to do likewise, President Obama is setting the wrong example and raising the stakes of a nuclear accident that could far exceed the havoc that an accidental nuclear release is currently inflicting on Japan—and perhaps the rest of the world as well. Reviewing Eric Schlosser’s new book, “Command and Control,”(Penguin) Menand writes, there have been “hundreds” of incidents since 1945 “when accident, miscommunication, human error, mechanical malfunction, or some combination of glitches nearly resulted in the detonation of nuclear weapons.”
What’s more, “the more extensive, elaborate, and fine-tuned the nuclear-weapons system became, the greater its exposure to the effects of an accident,” Menand writes. “For the system to work,” he adds, “for the warnings to be timely, communications to be transparent, missiles to launch, explosives inside the warheads to detonate, and nuclear cores to fission—everything has to be virtually perfect. The margin for error is tiny. And nothing is perfect.” Also consider, if you will, that the new nukes will make those dropped on Japan look like cherry bombs.
To spend $60 billion on weapons that must never be used, and whose use Reagan warned can destroy civilization, is a horrific waste of taxpayers’ dollars when, as CNN Money reports, roughly “three quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little or no emergency savings.”
Menand warns not to give too much credit to Mr. Reagan for calling for an end to nuclear bombs, as he was only responding to pressure from the American public. Well, I think the American public would really prefer not to have nuclear weapons around today, just as polls show it wants out of the Middle East. President Reagan showed the way. If Obama goes through with this wild spending plan, the survivors may well refer to it as Obama’s Folly.
Sherwood Ross can be reached at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
Despite repeated warnings from experts, the federal government under President Barack Obama has continued to allow farmers to pump livestock with antibiotics intended for humans, which has increased health risks for Americans.
A new study (pdf) from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (JHCLF) blamed the lack of meaningful change in livestock-antibiotics policies on the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, which have lobbied to block new laws and regulations from being adopted.
Members of Congress and officials with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have caved to industry pressures, even though evidence shows the overuse of antibiotics in livestock has made these drugs less effective in treating human infections.
Bob Martin, executive director of the JHCLF, told The Washington Post that FDA statistics reveal as much as 80% of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are fed to cattle, pigs, chickens and other farm animals—a practice that reduces the efficacy of the drugs when it comes to fighting deadly infections in people.
The FDA has developed new guidelines that would require farms to stop using antibiotics specifically to bulk up food animals. But the rules would allow the drugs’ continued use for disease control. This latter provision is so loosely defined, Martin said, that there would be no practical change in the use of antibiotics.
“In a couple of areas, the Obama administration started off with good intentions. But when industry pushed back, even weaker rules were issued,” he told the Post. “We saw undue influence everywhere we turned.”
The new report was authored by a commission chaired by former Kansas governor John Carlin (D) and that included former U.S. agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, ranchers, and experts in public health and veterinary medicine.
The report’s message was echoed in a dire warning issued by Mary Wilson of the Harvard School of Public Health: “We will see common infections become fatal,” just as they were before the invention of antibiotics, she told the Post.
Obama’s global terror campaign is not only dependent upon his drone assassination program, but increasingly it has come to rely upon the deployment of Special Operations forces in countries all over the world, reportedly between 70 and 120 countries at any one time. As Obama has sought to draw down the large-scale ground invasions of countries (as Bush pursued in Afghanistan and Iraq), he has escalated the world of ‘covert warfare,’ largely outside the oversight of Congress and the public. One of the most important agencies in this global “secret war” is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC for short.
JSOC was established in 1980 following the failed rescue of American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Iran as “an obscure and secretive corner of the military’s hierarchy,” noted the Atlantic. It experienced a “rapid expansion” under the Bush administration, and since Obama came to power, “appears to be playing an increasingly prominent role in national security” and “counterterrorism,” in areas which were “traditionally covered by the CIA.” 1 One of the most important differences between these covert warfare operations being conducted by JSOC instead of the CIA is that the CIA has to report to Congress, whereas JSOC only reports its most important activities to the President’s National Security Council.2
During the Bush administration, JSOC “reported directly” to Vice President Dick Cheney, according to award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh (of the New Yorker), who explained that, “It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on.” He added: “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.” 3
In 2005, Dick Cheney referred to U.S. Special Forces as “the silent professionals” representing “the kind of force we want to build for the future… a force that is lighter, more adaptable, more agile, and more lethal in action.” And without a hint of irony, Cheney stated: “None of us wants to turn over the future of mankind to tiny groups of fanatics committing indiscriminate murder and plotting large-scale terror.” 4 Not unless those “fanatics” happen to be wearing U.S. military uniforms, of course, in which case “committing indiscriminate murder and plotting large-scale terror” is not an issue.
The commander of JSOC during the Bush administration – when it served as Cheney’s “executive assassination ring” – was General Stanley McChrystal, whom Obama appointed as the top military commander in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, JSOC began to play a much larger role in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. 5 In early 2009, the new head of JSOC, Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, ordered a two-week ‘halt’ to Special Operations missions inside Afghanistan, after several JSOC raids in previous months killed several women and children, adding to the growing “outrage” within Afghanistan about civilian deaths caused by US raids and airstrikes, which contributed to a surge in civilian deaths over 2008. 6
JSOC has also been involved in running a “secret war” inside of Pakistan, beginning in 2006 but accelerating rapidly under the Obama administration. The “secret war” was waged in cooperation with the CIA and the infamous private military contractor, Blackwater, made infamous for its massacre of Iraqi civilians, after which it was banned from operating in the country. 7
Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, was recruited as a CIA asset in 2004, and in subsequent years acquired over $1.5 billion in contracts from the Pentagon and CIA, and included among its leadership several former top-level CIA officials. Blackwater, which primarily hires former Special Forces soldiers, has largely functioned “as an overseas Praetorian guard for the CIA and State Department officials,” who were also “helping to craft, fund, and execute operations,” including “assembling hit teams,” all outside of any Congressional or public oversight (since it was technically a private corporation).8
The CIA hired Blackwater to aid in a secret assassination program which was hidden from Congress for seven years. 9 These operations would be overseen by the CIA or Special Forces personnel. 10 Blackwater has also been contracted to arm drones at secret bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan for Obama’s assassination program, overseen by the CIA. 11 The lines dividing the military, the CIA and Blackwater had become “blurred,” as one former CIA official commented, “It became a very brotherly relationship… There was a feeling that Blackwater eventually become an extension of the agency.” 12
The “secret war” in Pakistan may have begun under Bush, but it had rapidly expanded in the following years of the Obama administration. Wikileaks cables confirmed the operation of JSOC forces inside of Pakistan, with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani telling the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson (who would later be appointed as ambassador to Egypt), that, “I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.”13
Within the first five months of Obama’s presidency in 2009, he authorized “a massive expansion of clandestine military and intelligence operations worldwide,” granting the Pentagon’s regional combatant commanders “significant new authority” over such covert operations. 14 The directive came from General Petraeus, commander of CENTCOM, authorizing Special Forces soldiers to be sent into “both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa.” The deployment of highly trained killers into dozens of countries was to become “systemic and long term,” designed to “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” enemies of the State, beyond the rule of law, no trial or pretenses of accountability. They also “prepare the environment” for larger attacks that the U.S. or NATO countries may have planned. Unlike with the CIA, these operations do not report to Congress, or even need “the President’s approval.” But for the big operations, they get the approval of the National Security Council (NSC), which includes the president, as well as most other major cabinet heads, of the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, etc.15
The new orders gave regional commanders – such as Petraeus who headed CENTCOM, or General Ward of the newly-created Africa Command (AFRICOM) – authority over special operations forces in the area of their command, institutionalizing the authority to send trained killers into dozens of countries around the world to conduct secret operations with no oversight whatsoever; and this new ‘authority’ is given to multiple top military officials, who have risen to the top of an institution with absolutely no ‘democratic’ pretenses. Regardless of who is president, this “authority” remains institutionalized in the “combatant commands.”16
The combatant commands include: AFRICOM over Africa (est. 2007), CENTCOM over the Middle East and Central Asia (est. 1983), EUCOM over Europe (est. 1947), NORTHCOM over North America (est. 2002), PACOM over the Pacific rim and Asia (est. 1947), SOUTHCOM over Central and South America and the Caribbean (est. 1963), SOCOM as Special Operations Command (est. 1987), STRATCOM as Strategic Command over military operations to do with outer space, intelligence, and weapons (est. 1992), and TRANSCOM handling all transportation for the Department of Defense. The State Department was given “oversight” to clear the operations from each embassy, 17 just to make sure everyone was ‘in the loop,’ unlike during the Bush years when it was run out of Cheney’s office without telling anyone else.
In 2010, it was reported by the Washington Post that the U.S. has expanded the operations of its Special Forces around the world, from being deployed in roughly 60 countries under Bush to about 75 countries in 2010 under Obama, operating in notable spots such as the Philippines and Colombia, as well as Yemen, across the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. The global deployment of Special Forces – alongside the CIA’s global drone warfare program – were two facets of Obama’s “national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values,” in the words of the Washington Post, though the article was unclear on which aspect of waging “secret wars” in 75 countries constituted Obama’s “values.” Commanders for Special Operations forces have become “a far more regular presence at the White House” under Obama than George Bush, with one such commander commenting, “We have a lot more access… They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.” Such Special Operations forces deployments “go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them.”18
So not only are U.S. forces conducting secret wars within dozens of countries around the world, but they are training the domestic military forces of many of these countries to undertake secret wars internally, and in the interests of the United States Mafia empire.
One military official even “set up a network” of private military corporations that hired former Special Forces and CIA operations to gather intelligence and conduct secret operations in foreign countries to support “lethal action”: publicly subsidized, privatized ‘accountability.’ Such a network was “generally considered illegal” and was “improperly financed.” 19 When the news of these networks emerged, the Pentagon said it shut them down and opened a “criminal investigation.” Turns out, they found nothing “criminal,” because two months later, the operations were continuing and had “become an important source of intelligence.” The networks of covert-ops corporations were being “managed” by Lockheed Martin, one of the largest military contractors in the world, while being “supervised” by the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command. 20
Admiral Eric T. Olson had been the head of Special Operations Command from 2007 to 2011, and in that year, Olson led a successful initiative – endorsed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates – to encourage the promotion of top special operations officials to higher positions in the whole military command structure. The “trend” was to continue under the following Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who previously headed the CIA from 2009 to 2011. 21 When Olson left his position as head of Special Operations Command, he was replaced with Admiral William McRaven, who served as the head of JSOC from 2008 to 2011, having followed Stanley McChrystal.
By January of 2012, Obama was continuing with seeking to move further away from large-scale ground wars such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, and refocus on “a smaller, more agile force across Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East.” Surrounded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in full uniforms adorned with medals, along with other top Pentagon officials, President Obama delivered a rare press briefing at the Pentagon where he said that, “our military will be leaner, but the world must know the United States is going to maintain our military superiority.” The priorities in this strategy would be “financing for defense and offense in cyberspace, for Special Operations forces and for the broad area of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.” 22
In February of 2012, Admiral William H. McRaven, the head of the Special Operations Command, was “pushing for a larger role for his elite units who have traditionally operated in the dark corners of American foreign policy,” advocating a plan that “would give him more autonomy to position his forces and their war-fighting equipment where intelligence and global events indicate they are most needed,” notably with expansions in mind for Asia, Africa and Latin America. McRaven stated that, “It’s not really about Socom [Special Operations Command] running the global war on terrorism… I don’t think we’re ready to do that. What it’s about is how do I better support” the major regional military command structures. 23
In the previous decade, roughly 80% of US Special Operations forces were deployed in the Middle East, but McRaven wanted them to spread to other regions, as well as to be able to “quickly move his units to potential hot spots without going through the standard Pentagon process governing overseas deployments.” The Special Operations Command numbered around 66,000 people, double the number since 2001, and its budget had reached $10.5 billion, from $4.2 billion in 2001. 24
In March of 2012, a Special Forces commander, Admiral William H. McRaven, developed plans to expand special operations units, making them “the force of choice” against “emerging threats” over the following decade. McRaven’s Special Operations Command oversees more than 60,000 military personnel and civilians, saying in a draft paper circulated at the Pentagon that: “We are in a generational struggle… For the foreseeable future, the United States will have to deal with various manifestations of inflamed violent extremism. In order to conduct sustained operations around the globe, our special operations must adapt.” McRaven stated that Special Forces were operating in over 71 countries around the world.25
The expansion of global special forces operations was largely in reaction to the increasingly difficult challenge of positioning large military forces around the world, and carrying out large scale wars and occupations, for which there is very little public support at home or abroad. In 2013, the Special Operations Command had forces operating in 92 different countries around the world, with one Congressional critic accusing McRaven of engaging in “empire building.” 26 The expanded presence of these operations is a major factor contributing to “destabilization” around the world, especially in major war zones like Pakistan.27
In 2013, McRaven’s Special Operations Command gained new authorities and an expanded budget, with McRaven testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee that, “On any day of the year you will find special operations forces [in] somewhere between 70 and 90 countries around the world.” 28 In 2012, it was reported that such forces would be operating in 120 different countries by the end of the year.29
In December of 2012, it was announced that the U.S. was sending 4,000 soldiers to 35 different African countries as “part of an intensifying Pentagon effort to train countries to battle extremists and give the U.S. a ready and trained force to dispatch to Africa if crises requiring the U.S. military emerge,” operating under the Pentagon’s newest regional command, AFRICOM, established in 2007.30
By September of 2013, the U.S. military had been involved in various activities in Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde Islands, Senegal, Seychelles, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia, among others, constructing bases, undertaking “security cooperation engagements, training exercises, advisory deployments, special operations missions, and a growing logistics network.”31
In short, Obama’s global ‘war of terror’ has expanded to roughly 100 countries around the world, winding down the large-scale military invasions and occupations such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq, and increasing the “small-scale” warfare operations of Special Forces, beyond the rule of law, outside Congressional and public oversight, conducting “snatch and grab” operations, training domestic repressive military forces in nations largely run by dictatorships to undertake their own operations on behalf of the ‘Global Godfather.’
Make no mistake: this is global warfare. Imagine for a moment the international outcry that would result from news of China or Russia conducting secret warfare operations in roughly 100 countries around the world. But when America does it, there’s barely a mention, save for the passing comments in the New York Times or the Washington Post portraying an unprecedented global campaign of terror as representative of Obama’s “values.” Well, indeed it is representative of Obama’s values, by virtue of the fact that he doesn’t have any.
Indeed, America has long been the Global Godfather applying the ‘Mafia Principles’ of international relations, lock-in-step with its Western lackey organized crime ‘Capo’ states such as Great Britain and France. Yet, under Obama, the president who had won public relations industry awards for his well-managed presidential advertising campaign promising “hope” and “change,” the empire has found itself waging war in roughly one hundred nations, conducting an unprecedented global terror campaign, increasing its abuses of human rights, war crimes and crimes against humanity, all under the aegis of the Nobel Peace Prize-winner Barack Obama.
Whether the president is Clinton, Bush, or Obama, the Empire of Terror wages on its global campaign of domination and subjugation, to the detriment of all humanity, save those interests that sit atop the constructed global hierarchy. It is in the interests of the ruling elite that America protects and projects its global imperial designs. It is in the interests of all humanity, then, that the Empire be opposed – and ultimately, deconstructed – no matter who sits in office, no matter who holds the title of the ‘high priest of hypocrisy’ (aka: President of the United States). It is the Empire that rules, and the Empire that destroys, and the Empire that must, in turn, be demolished.
The world at large – across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America – suffers the greatest hardships of the Western Mafia imperial system: entrenched poverty, exploitation, environmental degradation, war and destruction. The struggle against the Empire cannot be waged and won from the outside alone. The rest of the world has been struggling to survive against the Western Empire for decades, and, in truth, hundreds of years. For the struggle to succeed (and it can succeed), a strong anti-Empire movement must develop within the imperial powers themselves, and most especially within the United States. The future of humanity depends upon it.
Or… we could all just keep shopping and watching TV, blissfully blind to the global campaign of terror and war being waged in our names around the world. Certainly, such an option may be appealing, but ultimately, wars abroad come home to roost. As George Orwell once wrote: “The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”
There’s a dark side to the flurry of reports and testimony on drones, helpful as they are in many ways. When we read that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch oppose drone strikes that violate international law, some of us may be inclined to interpret that as a declaration that, in fact, drone strikes violate international law. On the contrary, what these human rights groups mean is that some drone strikes violate the law and some do not, and they want to oppose the ones that do.
Which are which? Even their best researchers can’t tell you. Human Rights Watch looked into six drone murders in Yemen and concluded that two were illegal and four might be illegal. The group wants President Obama to explain what the law is (since nobody else can), wants him to comply with it (whatever it is), wants civilians compensated (if anyone can agree who the civilians are and if people can really be compensated for the murder of their loved ones), and wants the U.S. government to investigate itself. Somehow the notion of prosecuting crimes doesn’t come up.
Amnesty International looks into nine drone strikes in Pakistan, and can’t tell whether any of the nine were legal or illegal. Amnesty wants the U.S. government to investigate itself, make facts public, compensate victims, explain what the law is, explain who a civilian is, and — remarkably — recommends this: “Where there is sufficient admissible evidence, bring those responsible to justice in public and fair trials without recourse to the death penalty.” However, this will be a very tough nut to crack, as those responsible for the crimes are being asked to define what is and is not legal. Amnesty proposes “judicial review of drone strikes,” but a rubber-stamp FISA court for drone murders wouldn’t reduce them, and an independent judiciary assigned to approve of certain drone strikes and not others would certainly approve of some, while inevitably leaving the world less than clear as to why.
The UN special rapporteurs’ reports are perhaps the strongest of the reports churned out this week, although all of the reports provide great information. The UN will debate drones on Friday. Congressman Grayson will bring injured child drone victims to Washington on Tuesday (although the U.S. State Department won’t let their lawyer come). Attention is being brought to the issue, and that’s mostly to the good. The U.N. reports make some useful points: U.S. drones have killed hundreds of civilians; drones make war the norm rather than an exception; signature strikes are illegal; double-tap strikes (targeting rescuers of a first strike’s victims) are illegal; killing rather than capturing is illegal; imminence (as a term to define a supposed threat) can’t legally be redefined to mean eventual or just barely imaginable; and — most powerfully — threatened by drones is the fundamental right to life. However, the U.N. reports are so subservient to western lawyer groupthink as to allow that some drone kills are legal and to make the determination of which ones so complex that nobody will ever be able to say — the determination will be political rather than empirical.
The U.N. wants transparency, and I do think that’s a stronger demand than asking for the supposed legal memos that Obama has hidden in a drawer and which supposedly make his drone kills legal. We don’t need to see that lawyerly contortionism. Remember Obama’s speech in May at which he claimed that only four of his victims had been American and for one of those four he had invented criteria for himself to meet, even though all available evidence says he didn’t meet those criteria even in that case, and he promised to apply the same criteria to foreigners going forward, sometimes, in certain countries, depending. Remember the liberal applause for that? Somehow our demands of President Bush were never that he make a speech.
(And did you see how pleased people were just recently that Obama had kidnapped a man in Libya and interrogated him in secret on a ship in the ocean, eventually bringing him to the U.S. for a trial, because that was a step up from murdering him and his neighbors? Bush policies are now seen as advances.)
We don’t need the memos. We need the videos, the times, places, names, justifications, casualties, and the video footage of each murder. That is to say, if the UN is going to give its stamp of approval to a new kind of war but ask for a little token of gratitude, this is what it should be. But let’s stop for a minute and consider. The general lawyerly consensus is that killing people with drones is fine if it’s not a case where they could have been captured, it’s not “disproportionate,” it’s not too “collateral,” it’s not too “indiscriminate,” etc., — the calculation being so vague that nobody can measure it. We’re not wrong to trumpet the good parts of these reports, but let’s be clear that the United Nations, an institution created to eliminate war, is giving its approval to a new kind of war, as long as it’s done properly, and it’s giving its approval in the same reports in which it says that drones threaten to make war the norm and peace the exception.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but that’s stunning. Drones make war the norm, rather than the exception, and drone murders are going to be deemed legal depending on a variety of immeasurable criteria. And the penalty for the ones that are illegal is going to be nothing, at least until African nations start doing it, at which point the International Criminal Court will shift into gear.
What is it that makes weaponized drones more humane than land mines, poison gas, cluster bombs, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, and other weapons worth banning? Are drone missiles more discriminate than cluster bombs (I mean in documented practice, not in theory)? Are they discriminate enough, even if more discriminate than something else? Does the ease of using them against anyone anywhere make it possible for them to be “proportionate” and “necessary”? If some drone killing is legal and other not, and if the best researchers can’t always tell which is which, won’t drone killing continue? The UN Special Rapporteur says drones threaten to make war the norm. Why risk that? Why not ban weaponized drones?
For those who refuse to accept that the Kellogg Briand Pact bans war, for those who refuse to accept that international law bans murder, don’t we have a choice here between banning weaponized drones or watching weaponized drones proliferate and kill? Over 99,000 people have signed a petition to ban weaponized drones at http://BanWeaponizedDrones.org Maybe we can push that over 100,000 … or 200,000.
It’s always struck me as odd that in civilized, Geneva conventionized, Samantha Powerized war the only crime that gets legalized is murder. Not torture, or assault, or rape, or theft, or marijuana, or cheating on your taxes, or parking in a handicapped spot — just murder. But will somebody please explain to me why homicide bombing is not as bad as suicide bombing?
It isn’t strictly true that the suffering is all on one side, anyway. Just as we learn geography through wars, we learn our drone base locations through blowback, in Afghanistan and just recently in Yemen. Drones make everyone less safe. As Malala just pointed out to the Obama family, the drone killing fuels terrorism. Drones also kill with friendly fire. Drones, with or without weapons, crash. A lot. And drones make the initiation of violence easier, more secretive, and more concentrated. When sending missiles into Syria was made a big public question, we overwhelmed Congress, which said no. But missiles are sent into other countries all the time, from drones, and we’re never asked.
We’re going to have to speak up for ourselves.
I’ll be part of a panel discussing this at NYU on Wednesday. See http://NYACT.net
US President Barack Obama’s job approval rating has suffered one the largest quarter-to-quarter declines of his presidency, according to the latest Gallup poll.
The survey indicates that Obama averaged a 44.5 percent job approval rating during his 19th quarter in office, a decline of more than three percentage points from his 18th quarter.
The 19th quarter, which ran from July 20 through October 19, is now the third in a row in which Obama’s approval rating has declined, the poll showed.
The approval rating decreased in the middle part of the 19th quarter when he was pushing for military action against Syria, something the American public did not favor.
Furthermore, the legislative battles over the federal budget and the Affordable Care Act, as well as the federal debt limit took a toll on the president’s popularity, Gallup said.
According to a survey by Pew Research, the 16-day government shutdown pushed public trust in government near record lows, with fewer than two in 10 Americans saying they trust Washington to do what is right most of the time.
The survey also found that only 14 percent of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the US, and 81 percent said they were dissatisfied.
Recent estimates by the economists show that the US government’s policy blunders in recent years have significantly slowed economic growth and kept roughly 2 million people out of work.
On Sunday, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the recent fiscal fight between Republicans and Democrats had a bruising impact on the country’s economy and eroded the confidence of both businesses and consumers.
President Barack Obama has chosen a former Pentagon attorney who defended the extrajudicial killing of American citizens to man the helm of the United States Department of Homeland Security and replace outgoing Secretary Janet Napolitano.
Jeh Johnson, a general counsel for the Pentagon during the president’s first term in office, was named by Mr. Obama as his choice for new DHS secretary during a Friday afternoon press conference.
“The president is selecting Johnson because he is one the most highly qualified and respected national security leaders,” a senior administration official told the Washington Post on Thursday while speaking condition of anonymity. “During his tenure at the Department of Defense, he was known for his sound judgment and counsel.”
Johnson, 56, served as a special counsel during John Kerry’s unsuccessful 2004 run for the presidency before assisting with Obama’s campaign four years later. During his first week in office, Obama nominated Johnson as DoD general counsel and he was confirmed by the Senate in Feb. 2009.
Up until his resignation from Defense Department attorney in December 2012, Johnson advised the largest military in the world, including during historic matters regarding the repeal of the Pentagon’s ban on openly gay troops and the reform of military commissions.
That same span in the Pentagon was also marred by Obama administration decisions that opponents of the president’s latest pick have been quick to pounce on.
While working as one of the top attorneys for the US military, Johnson authorized the execution of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen and suspected senior figure in Al-Qaeda who was killed by a drone strike in Yemen in late 2011. That slaying was carried out by an operation conducted by the Pentagon in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency and has drawn immense criticism directed at the White House and the president’s extrajudicial killing of an American citizen.
The New York Times reported shortly after that Johnson told attendees at a speech at Yale Law School that “Belligerents who also happen to be US citizens do not enjoy immunity where non-citizen belligerents are valid military objectives.”
The president postponed offering full justification for the attack until this past May when he said, “I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any US citizen — with a drone, or with a shotgun — without due process . . . But when a US citizen goes abroad to wage war against America and is actively plotting to kill US citizens, and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot, his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team.”
Johnson also served as general counsel during the height of the WikiLeaks scandal that involved the unauthorized disclosure of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents. In a letter to the whistleblower organization published in August 2010, Johnson blamed WikiLeaks for their “illegal and irresponsible actions,” and said that the leaking of classified materials aided America’s enemy in “their own terrorist aims.” Earlier this year, a military judge said that Chelsea Manning, the Army analyst who admitted to giving those files to WikiLeaks, did not aid Al-Qaeda by supplying the website with documents.
Johnson said in the same letter that the Pentagon “demands that NOTHING further be released by WikiLeaks, that ALL of the US Government classified documents that WikiLeaks has obtained be returned immediately and that WikiLeaks remove and destroy all of these records from its databases.”
Mr. Obama officially nominated Johnson at a 2 p.m. meeting, paving the way for the Senate to formally decide if they will appoint the president’s pick.
“If confirmed by the Senate, I promise all of my energy, focus and ability towards the task of safeguarding our nation’s national and homeland security,” Johnson said after being introduced by the president.
The comments come from Malala and the U.N. respectively.
President Obama invited Malala Yousafzai, a 16-year-old Pakistani advocate for girls’ education, to meet with his family. And she promptly explained that what he is doing works against her agenda and fuels terrorism.
Malala is a victim of violence in Pakistan, having been attacked by religious fanatics opposed to her work. But Obama may not have expected her to speak up against other forms of violence in her country.
Malala recounted: “I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education, it will make a big impact.”
President Obama may also have not expected most people to notice or care. The corporate media have virtually ignored this part of a widely-reported meeting.
It’s up to us to surprise everyone with the depth of our interest and concern. Almost 100,000 have thus far signed a petition to ban weaponized drones, soon to be delivered to the U.N., the I.C.C., the State Department, the White House, Congress, and embassies.
The United Nations has released a report on “armed drones and the right to life” (PDF). The report begins by noting that, as of now, weaponized drones are legal:
“Although drones are not illegal weapons, they can make it easier for States to deploy deadly and targeted force on the territories of other States. As such, they risk undermining the protection of life in the immediate and longer terms. If the right to life is to be secured, it is imperative that the limitations posed by international law on the use of force are not weakened by broad justifications of drone strikes.”
Drones, the U.N. Special Rapporteur reports, risk making war the normal state of affairs:
“Peace should be the norm, yet such scenarios risk making its derogation the rule by privileging force over long-term peaceful alternatives. . . . Given that drones greatly reduce or eliminate the number of casualties on the side using them, the domestic constraints — political and otherwise — may be less restrictive than with the deployment of other types of armed force. This effect is enhanced by the relative ease with which the details about drone targeting can be withheld from the public eye and the potentially restraining influence of public concern. Such dynamics call for a heightened level of vigilance by the international community concerning the use of drones.”
The U.N. Charter and this report seek to make war an exceptional state of affairs. This is a very difficult, and a morally depraved thing to attempt with an institution that deserves total abolition. War does not work as a tool with which to eliminate war. But, even within that framework, the U.N. finds that drones create extra-legal war:
“An outer layer of protection for the right to life is the prohibition on the resort to force by one State against another, again subject to a narrowly construed set of exceptions. The protection of State sovereignty and of territorial integrity, which onoccasion presents a barrier to the protection of human rights, here can constitute an important component of the protection of people against deadly force, especially with the advent of armed drones.”
The strongest excuse for war is the claim of defense against an actual attack. The next best thing is to pretend an attack is imminent. The Obama Administration has famously redefined “imminent” to mean eventual or theoretical — that is, they’ve stripped the word of all meaning. (See the “white paper” PDF.) The U.N. doesn’t buy it:
“The view that mere past involvement in planning attacks is sufficient to render an individual targetable even where there is no evidence of a specific and immediate attack distorts the requirements established in international human rights law.”
U.S. lawyers at Congressional hearings have tended to maintain that drone killing is legal if and only if it’s part of a war. The U.N. report also distinguishes between two supposedly different standards of law depending on whether a drone murder is separate from or part of a war. Disappointingly, the U.N. believes that some drone strikes can be legal and others not:
“Insofar as the term ‘signature strikes’ refers to targeting without sufficient information to make the necessary determination, it is clearly unlawful. . . . Where one drone attack is followed up by another in order to target those who are wounded and hors de combat or medical personnel, it constitutes a war crime in armed conflict and a violation of the right to life, whether or not in armed conflict. Strikes on others confirmed to be civilians who are directly participating in hostilities or having a continuous combat function at the time of the follow-up strike could be lawful if the other international humanitarian law rules are respected.”
The complex mumbo-jumbo of multiple legal standards for multiple scenarios, complete with calculations of necessity and distinction and proportionality and collateral damage, mars this report and any attempt to create enforceable action out of it. But the report does, tentatively, find one little category of drone murders illegal that encompasses many, if not all, U.S. drone murders — namely, those where the victim might have been captured rather than killed:
“Recent debates have asked whether international humanitarian law requires that a party to an armed conflict under certain circumstances consider the capture of an otherwise lawful target (i.e. a combatant in the traditional sense or a civilian directly participating in hostilities) rather than targeting with force. In its Interpretive Guidance, ICRC states that it would defy basic notions of humanity to kill an adversary or to refrain from giving him or her an opportunity to surrender where there manifestly is no necessity for the use of lethal force.”
Pathetically, the report finds that if a government is going to pretend that murdering someone abroad is “self-defense” the action must be reported to the U.N. — thereby making it sooooo much better.
A second UN report (PDF) goes further, citing findings that U.S. drones have killed hundreds of civilians, but failing to call for prosecutions of these crimes. That is to say, the first report, above, which does not list specific U.S. drone murders of civilians, discusses the need for prosecutions. But this second report just asks for “a detailed public explanation.”
The fact that an insane killing spree is counter-productive, as pointed out to Obama by Malala, in case he hadn’t heard all his own experts, is not enough to end the madness. Ultimately we must recognize the illegality of all killing and all war. In the meantime, prior to the U.N.’s debate on this on the 25th, we can add our names to the growing movement to ban weaponized drones at http://BanWeaponizedDrones.org.
On September 30th, as he was about to fly from Brazil to Denver, Colorado, where he had been invited to attend and address a German Studies conference, the German novelist Ilija Trojanow (pronounced “llya Troyanov”) was informed that he would not be allowed to board the flight on which he was booked.
He was told, after some 45 minutes of waiting while his passport and various computer screens were examined, that his case was “special” and that no further explanation was available. To this date, none has been offered.
But the explanation was and is obvious to anyone aware of Mr. Trojanow’s recent political history, in the context of the Obama administration’s increasingly jaundiced and vehement campaign against whistleblowers and critics of its surveillance-state apparatus. Despite the President’s absurdly facile talk of “welcoming the debate” on NSA data-gobbling and Orwellian tactics, the war on internet freedom is reaching a new high point. The US government is determined to achieve full access to all digital data, and has no intention of compromising with its critics, of which internationally known intellectuals appear to represent a particularly worrisome species.
Asked how the scholars at the conference in Denver had reacted to the government’s action in blocking his entry, Trojanow said that they were “…enormously angry. A great deal of prepared work was carried out in vain. Now they want to write an open letter. It is, obviously, ironic that this should happen in connection with – of all things — an event that was intended to bring the USA and Germany together. The theme of the seminar was ‘transnationalism’”.
Less than two weeks earlier, on September 18th, an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel accompanied by the signatures of 67,000 supporters — including a number of prominent literary and legal figures – had been delivered to the Chancellery in Berlin by Trojanow’s friend and fellow novelist Juli Zeh, its initiator. One of the first signatures was Trojanow’s. The two are co-authors of the book “Angriff auf die Freiheit” (“Freedom Under Attack”), published in 2010 by DTV Deutscher Taschenbuch, the subtitle of which translates to “Security Madness, Surveillance State and the Dismantling of Civil Rights.” Three years before the Snowden revelations, Mr. Trojanow, a native Bulgarian whose family fled political persecution there in the dark ages of Eastern Bloc state repression, had become a prominent critic of policies in the West that had an all-too-familiar smell. The Snowden documents and emerging NSA scandal now brought new urgency to this work.
The German Chancellor and leader of the Christian Democratic Union, who as opposition leader during the Social Democratic/Green Party coalition government,and later as Chancellor, had given George W. Bush uncritical support for his Iraq policies among many others, was staying true to form in the face of Snowden’s assertion that Germany’s intelligence services were deeply involved in the surveillance scandal. After weeks of evasion and “salami” tactics by which admissions regarding the Snowden charges were made piecemeal once they could no longer be denied; after a highly-publicized trip to Washington by her Interior Minister (analogous to Minister of Homeland Security in the USA), who was photographed at the table with top American intelligence officials, and returned to assure Germans that the US took the issue very seriously and had guaranteed him that no German laws were being broken; after an appearance by Merkel’s Minister of the Chancellery before a special investigative committee to which he had been summoned by an outraged opposition in the German Bundestag (an appearance generally assessed to have been characterized by flippant and insubstantial responses to penetrating questions regarding German complicity alleged by Snowden); after a press conference in which the Chancellor blithely declared that she “preferred to wait and see” what the truth about the allegations might be; and after declaring in a vaguely irritated tone in a TV debate with her Social Democratic challenger in the eminent election – on almost the same day that the letter and petition were presented in Berlin — that she “had no reason to mistrust the NSA,” Merkel was comfortably reelected on September 22nd despite the fact that more than two-thirds of Germans had been polled as being unsatisfied with the government’s response to the scandal. While the conservatives in Berlin and the Obama administration may have breathed a sigh of relief, someone in Washington was apparently not yet ready to forget about Trojanow’s work in the actions which had produced the following document (translated from the original German for Mr. Trojanow by myself):
Honored Madame Chancellor,
Since Edward Snowden made public the existence of the PRISM program, the media have turned their attention to the biggest wiretapping scandal in modern German history. We citizens have, through published reports, become aware that foreign intelligence services — even in the absence of any concrete grounds for suspicion – skim and record our telephone and electronic communications. Through the storage and evaluation of metadata, our contacts, friendships and relationships are apprehended. Our political positions, our “movement profiles” and, in fact, even our daily moods and emotional status are transparent to the security authorities. The “transparent man” has thus become reality.
We have no defenses. There is no means of redress or airing of grievances, no opportunity for access to the files. While our private lives are made transparent, the secret services assert a right to a maximum of opacity regarding their methods. In other words: we are experiencing an historic attack upon our democratic rule of law, namely, the reversal of the principle of a “presumption of innocence” into a millionfold general suspicion.
Madame Chancellor, you stated in your summer press conference that Germany is “not a surveillance state.” Since the Snowden revelations, however, we have no choice but to say: unfortunately, it is. In the same connection you summarized your approach to the investigation of the PRISM affair with the apt phrase: “I prefer to wait and see what happens.”
But we do not wish to wait. It is increasingly difficult to avoid the impression that this behavior by the American and British intelligence services is tacitly accepted by the German government. For that reason we ask you: is it politically desirable that the NSA conducts surveillance of German citizens in a manner that is forbidden to the German authorities by the constitution and the German Federal Constitutional (Supreme) Court? Do the German intelligence services profit from information received from the US authorities, and is that the reason for your hesitant reaction? How can it be justified that the BND (“Bundesnachrichtendienst”, federal intelligence authority) and the Verfassungsschutz (“Constitutional Protection”, federal domestic intelligence agency) deploy the NSA spy-program XKeyScore, for which there is no legal basis, in the surveillance of search engines? Is the German Federal Government in the process of taking a detour around the rule of law, instead of defending it?
We call upon you to tell the people of this nation the full truth about the electronic spying. And we want to know what the federal government proposes to do against it. You are charged by the constitution with protecting Germany’s citizens from harm. Madame Chancellor, what is your strategy?
/ Juli Zeh / Ilija Trojanow / Carolin Emcke / Friedrich von Borries /Moritz Rinke / Eva Menasse / Tanja Dückers / Norbert Niemann / Sherko Fatah / Angelina Maccarone / Michael Kumpfmüller / Tilman Spengler / Steffen Kopetzky / Sten Nadolny / Markus Orths / Sasa Stanisic / Micha Brumlik / Josef Haslinger / Simon Urban / Kristof Magnusson / Andres Veiel / Feridun Zaimoglu / Ingo Schulze / Falk Richter / Hilal Sezgin / Georg Oswald
(Translation from the German original: Gregory Barrett)
Trojanow was awarded the 2006 Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair for his adventure novel “Der Weltensammler” (“The Collector of Worlds”). He delivered the laudatory speech for the Nobel Prizewinner Herta Müller at the ceremony marking her acceptance of the Franz Werfel Human Rights Prize. In Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, he had been a guest writer at the invitation of the Goethe Institute. On October 5th he was to speak at the conference of the German Studies Association in Denver about his most recent novel “EisTau” (“Ice Thaw”). Ms. Zeh is best known to the German-speaking public as the author of several novels including “Adler und Engel” (“Eagles and Angels”), which has been translated into 31 languages, and “Nullzeit” (“Zero Hour” or “Out of Time”), but also holds impressive law degrees and has worked at the United Nations. The forum afforded the two highly-respected intellectuals in various media, from the powerful news magazine “Der Spiegel,” to the national public radio network Deutschlandradio, to popular national television talk shows may well be making the Merkel government nervous about the possibility that the surveillance issue — which had appeared to be fading in the public consciousness as the Chancellor and her allies had hoped — could still catch fire with the help of the continued revelations being parceled out by Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and a growing network. Such coverage has given the German writers’ campaign a visibility seldom granted to the usual suspects on the German left.
Appeals to the German government for mediation and clarity following the US refusal to allow Mr. Trojanow’s entry into the land of the free have, predictably, been without success at this writing. The novelist himself immediately applied for a new US visa and is determined to elicit a clear statement about the grounds for the ban.
Meanwhile, Trojanow and Zeh are working on a new international appeal, with which they hope to generate broad-based resistance to the massive destruction of civil- and privacy rights worldwide represented by the NSA’s new technological might. There are links already in place to the London-based group “Index on Censorship” and many other groups including Amnesty International, Liberty, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Russian PEN Center. The German writer-activists hope to bring more Americans into their network as well. The signs may be auspicious, too, for legislative activity at the European level: in late September a 36-page report prepared for the European Union stated that “…Prism seems to have allowed an unprecedented scale and depth in intelligence gathering, which goes beyond counter-terrorism and beyond espionage activities carried out by liberal regimes in the past. This may lead towards an illegal form of total information awareness where data of millions of people are subject to collection and manipulation by the NSA.” It went on to point out that “…there are no privacy rights for non-Americans under Prism and related programmes” and that the US probably places “no limitations on exploiting or intruding a non-US person’s privacy.” However, those of us who have watched for many years as the European Parliament and EU Commission have taken one principled position after another against US policies, only to buckle later under pressure, are under no illusion that things will be much different this time. The stark contrast between the Merkel government’s initial protestations of concern over PRISM and other NSA programs for public consumption, and its subsequent low-to-no profile on the issue, demonstrates that below the surface, the European interest in maintaining its often obsequious posture as regards its mighty ally will once again trump other concerns in the absence of a public outcry. Ilija Trojanow and his partners, however, hope to keep the urgency of the issue alive in the international political and literary spheres.
“It is more than ironic that an author who for years has been speaking out about the dangers of surveillance and the secret state within the state should be denied entry into the ‘land of the brave and the free,’ ” writes Trojanow. “No more than a minor, individual case, to be sure: but it’s indicative of the consequences of a disastrous development and it reveals the naivety of the attitude of many citizens who comfort themselves with the mantra, ‘But it’s got nothing to do with me’. That might still be the case – however, the net is tightening. For these citizens the secret services are still just a rumor, but in the not-so-distant future the knock on the door will be very real indeed.”
Gregory Barrett is a translator and musician living in Germany.
By Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today | July 23, 2017
Israeli Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu seems to have picked up where the late Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef left off. The Israeli army, Eliyahu said, must slaughter the Palestinians “and leave no one alive.” The Palestinians, the good rabbi continued, must be “destroyed and crushed in order to end violence.” Here is Eliyahu’s algorithm:
“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill 1,000. And if they do not stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million.”
There is more to this “logic” than meets the eye and ear. Eliyahu even postulated that the Israeli army ought not to get involved in arresting Palestinians because “If you leave him alive, there is a fear that he will be released and kill other people. We must eradicate this evil from within our midst.”
You may say that this is just an isolated case. No Israeli official believes that, right? … continue
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Did he know, or didn’t he? That’s the question surrounding President Barack Obama since it was revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on the private communications of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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