Month: May 2011

Borders

May 31, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

In his recent speech on Middle East policy, Obama became the first U.S. President to explicitly assert that a Palestinian state must be based on 1967 borders.

Although Obama’s reference to 1967 borders was not an unfamiliar position and was highly qualified — see here for a summary of the positions of past U.S. presidents and here for a discussion on whether Obama’s Mideast Speech signaled a true shift on Palestine — the move drew guarded praise from the left, but ire from the Zionist right, including the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

So, true to capitulationist form, the U.S. President quickly softened his already tepid position, grovelling before AIPAC just as he did the day after he clinched the Democratic nomination for President in 2008.

Veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk highlights one aspect of Obama’s collapse:

There was an interesting linguistic collapse in the president’s language over those critical four days. On Thursday 19 May, he referred to the continuation of Israeli “settlements”. A day later, Netanyahu was lecturing him on “certain demographic changes that have taken place on the ground”. Then when Obama addressed the American Aipac lobby group (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) on the Sunday, he had cravenly adopted Netanyahu’s own preposterous expression. Now he, too, spoke of “new demographic realities on the ground.” Who would believe that he was talking about internationally illegal Jewish colonies built on land stolen from Arabs in one of the biggest property heists in the history of “Palestine”? Delay in peace-making will undermine Israeli security, Obama announced – apparently unaware that Netanyahu’s project is to go on delaying and delaying and delaying until there is no land left for the “viable” Palestinian state which the United States and the European Union supposedly wish to see.

The day after Obama’s kowtowing to AIPAC, Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress where he delivered a speech that even the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described as “an address with no destination, filled with lies on top of lies and illusions heaped on illusions” — concluding that “the Americans will buy anything, or at least their applauding legislators will.”

Indeed, the speech was greeted by wild applause by the U.S. Congress, who gave the foreign leader more standing ovations than they could muster for the U.S. President. This, as a lone protester was violently whisked away.

Political Philosopher Andrew Levine asks the interesting question,  “Are geopolitical considerations the decisive factor joining the United States and Israel or is American domestic politics to blame?”

Columbia Political Historian Joseph Massad reviews Obama’s lopsided rhetoric and asks, “Are Palestinian Children Less Worthy?”

Interviewing AIPAC attendees, Max Blumenthal just points a camera and lets the idiocy manifest:

Other Notes:

Meanwhile the Egypt’s interim ruling council is opening its border with the Gaza strip, ending the blockade and allowing its residents some relief from what has been an open air prison. Now they will be able to import concrete to rebuild the homes destroyed by the brutal Israeli assault in 2008-9.

Characteristically, the Israeli right thinks such freedom for beleaguered Palestinians is a “dangerous development”.

War on Whistleblowers

May 23, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The Espionage Act of 1917, initially employed to imprison socialist war critics and movie makers and poets during World War I, is now being used as a tool in the Obama Administration’s unprecedented assault on whistle blowers who seek to expose government crime and waste.

This crackdown on whistle blowers is in characteristic contrast to Obama’s campaign rhetoric about becoming “the most transparent administration in history”.

While  Candidate Obama promised to protect whistle blowers and even praised their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and save taxpayer dollars”, the President Obama, according to Jane Mayer’s report in the New Yorker, seeks to convict them under the Espionage Act as ‘Enemies of the State’:

When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.

In addition to these ongoing prosecutions, the Obama Administration has expressed interest in prosecuting Julian Assange under the Espionage Act as well, which if successful would set a dark precedent for press freedom generally.
Jane Mayer closes her expose with a telling quote from another whistle blower:

Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps, is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.”

Glenn Greenwald adds:

And that’s to say nothing of the full-scale immunity also given thus far to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill, and the mortgage fraudsters who have essentially stolen people’s homes.

Juan Cole points out that the nature of NSA crimes being exposed by whistle blowers such as Drake gives the perpetrators powerful leverage over those from whom they might, in a functioning democracy, face accountability:

The thing that worries me most is that the government officials who break the law by engaging in illegal surveillance are the ones best able to blackmail judges and politicians and journalists. Part of the story of the gradual destruction of the Bill of Rights, i.e. the Constitution, probably lies hidden in those corrupt shadows.

Arab Spring (and Imperial Frost) in Bahrain

May 14, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Inspired by democratic successes in Tunisia and Egypt, the people of the tiny island monarchy of Bahrain (a majority of whom are Shia) petitioned their (Sunni) King for more representation in government.  For this they have suffered a brutal repression, including violent crackdowns of peaceful protesters, mass arrests, beatings, disappearances and death sentences.

One of the challenges faced by the Bahraini protesters is that, unlike in Egypt, the state “security forces” — primarily Sunni and increasingly foreign — lack sympathy for the people in the streets.  According to the Guardian, the Bahraini Kingdom “has made a concerted effort to recruit non-native Sunni Muslims as part of an attempt to swing the demographic balance against the Shia majority – who make up around 65% of the population of 1 million.”

Worse still, the Bahraini Royals invited Saudi “security forces” into the country  to crush the uprising. (Saudi Arabia, btw, is the recent beneficiary of the largest U.S. arms deal in history.) The king, meanwhile, blamed the unrest on a foreign plot — leading to absurd headlines.

U.S and British political executives have remained silent, demonstrating their selective and cynically employed “concern” for human rights and democracy.

As Amy Goodman points out, Obama justified military intervention into Libya on the grounds that “innocent people were targeted for killing”, “hospitals were attacked” and “journalists were arrested”, but when the same things transpire in Bahrain, he has little to say.

Obama’s silence is due in part to the fact that, unlike Libya, where the head tyrant has proven unreliable to U.S. (and European) Imperial Interests, the Malik of Bahrain was an early ally in Bush’s Terror War and is a gracious host to the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

Robert Fisk, after taking the Qatar-based al-Jazzeera to task for its silence (they “know where their bread is buttered”), argues that the U.S. (and British) silence on Bahrain is primarily a consequence of the resource alliance with the Saudis.

Other Notes:

Bahraini doctors are being tried in military courts for the crime of treating wounded protesters.

Bahrain Protest Photos.

REALLY fucked up videos.

U.S. labor organizations are advocating for Bahrain workers Caught in the Crossfire.

Buried at Sea…

May 6, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

After the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraqi Aluminum Tubes, Nigerian Yellowcake, The Escape of Jessica Lynch, The Death of Pat Tillman, and many other war justifying and glorifying fictions, it is unreasonable not to look askance at U.S. Government announcements regarding Imperial Threats and Milestones — especially when elements of these announcements are demonstrated at once to be false, or at least embarrassingly incoherent.

Curiously, several false claims regarding the Assassination of bin Laden had to be publicly corrected by the Government itself, even after establishment media had dutifully parroted them: No, actually bin Laden wasn’t armed. No, he did not use his wife as a human shield. No, there was no 40 minute gun battle, only one armed man in a guest house. (But maybe not even that.)  And no, this wasn’t a “capture or kill mission” but a “kill mission”.

But enough questions about the killing!

Other claims fell to minimal scrutiny.  The claim that bin Laden was buried at sea “in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition” could be easily debunked by anyone who bothered to look up what the Qu’ran actually says.  And why, in any case, would the U.S. go out of its way to respect bin Laden’s religious sentiments, especially after putting two holes in his head?

Another absurdity: That the U.S. won’t release documentary photos of bin Laden’s body, so as not to incite violence –  “because that’s not who we are” — as if the world (outside of the U.S.) is not regularly exposed to photographic evidence of civilians slaughtered as a result of U.S. military operations.

But perhaps the most insidious lie was uttered by the President himself, who asserted that assassinating an old man in his pajamas “is a testament to the greatness of our country” — despite the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the decade of misdirected, proliferating war leading up to this glorious event.

Other notes:

Reuters did manage to acquire some photos of the bodies left behind by the kill team in the hours following the assassination:

Remember when Bush rejected a Taliban offer to surrender bin Laden way back at the beginning of the Terror War?

Do the Gitmo Files show that the U.S. knew where Osama was since 2005?

And, for good measure, some embarrassing morons:

U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Barack and Bradley

May 1, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The case of Bradley Manning  has exposed much about the hypocrisy and incoherence of the Obama White house.

After Manning had spent the better part of a year in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, much of which time stripped naked and constantly surveilled — all without trail — Obama, the former Constitutional Law professor, assured the press that he had checked with the Pentagon, which assured him that everything being done to Manning was “appropriate”.

Meanwhile, over 250 U.S. legal scholars, including Obama’s former Constitutional Law professor at Harvard, denounced Manning’s detention as torture.

It is hard not to concur with IOZ’s assessment, who characterizes Obama’s response to Manning’s pre-trial torture as “the blithe indifference of a busy manager signing off on some subordinate’s expense report”, and as Obama himself as “an asshole of the worst order” who, though he doesn’t “delight in cruelty like his predecessor”, is nevertheless “grossly indifferent to it”.

Since then, the U.S. King Commander of Chief has publicly judged Manning to be guilty without trial, in the same breath as he maintained that the U.S. is a nation of laws. This is especially disturbing because even if Manning ever gets to have a trial, he will be judged by Obama’s subordinates. Greenwald asks: “How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?”

Something about this situation reminds me of Prince Buster’s Judge Dread (as well as Megacity One’s Judge Dredd):

It is important to remember that, according to the chat logs obtained by Wired, Manning was motivated by a concern for transparency and the “public good”:

i want people to see the truth . . . regardless of who they are . . . because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

This weekend, Democratic partisans have been beaming that Obama was able to best birthers in a war of wits at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.  But after his war on whistle-blowers, and especially the pre-trial detention, torture and judgment of Manning, the funniest line might have been when the President praised the “daring men and women” who “risk their lives for the simple idea that no one should be silenced and everyone deserves to know the truth.”

Other notes:

Although Manning is now being transferred to medium security prison in Kansas, the Pentagon is planning on holding Manning in “pre-trial confinement” for the indefinite future.

The Obama White house has tried  to banish reporters from official print pools for merely reporting on a protest in support of Bradley Manning.

Here is the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg discussing Obama and Manning.