Category: Terror Wars

Decennial Notes

September 15, 2011: rosencrantz

The Decennial of 9-11 has come and gone, and the nationalist narrative of victimhood continues to be cynically employed by political elites to justify the incoherent and expanding Global War On Terror, originally a radical neocon enterprise that has been continued and defended and rendered into bipartisan consensus by a thoroughly corrupt Imperial Figurehead, who absurdly but dutifully declares that the past decade of war and war crimes and surveillance and detentions and economic crises have “made America stronger.”

Another way to describe this state of strength is as a state of exception of political leaders from established domestic and international law in pursuit of domestic and international wars of aggression — wars that have already spilled more innocent blood than could ever have been hoped for by the most misanthropic nihilist among the leadership of al-Qaeda.

Still, establishment liberals are given room in the New York Times to lament how “memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned” because of how it was used by “fake heroes” like George Bush et. al. “to cash in on the horror” and “justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.”

Such sentiments are nonetheless attacked even by mouthpieces of the left for politicizing such a somber occasion, as if “9-11 Day” wasn’t thoroughly politicized already.

The war criminals themselves, safe from all but editorial ire, call such sentiments “repugnant” while they tout the value of repugnant acts of torture on “news” networks.

The current administration defends the prior administration’s torture regime from legal accountability, according to its Orwellian “look forward, not backward” position — a position that only applies to political and economic elites, it should go without saying.

Mike Davis, author of the indispensable L.A. history City of Quartz, asks a question that answers itself:

Indeed, from the perspective of the future, which will be deemed the greater crime: to have created the Guantanamo nightmare in the first place, or to have preserved it in contempt of global popular opinion and one’s own campaign promises?

And not only is the torture regime of the prior administration defended, but torture itself, despite the Nobel Peace Laureate’s prohibition, continues to be outsourced to Afghan militias or Somali Black Sites, etc.

Famine and War in the Horn of Africa

August 15, 2011: rosencrantz

Famine in the Horn of Africa, again.

The U.N. is currently calling it the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world.”

Writing for al-Jazeera, economist Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the immediate causes of the crisis: Two years of failed rains, and colonial-era political boundaries that both divide and restrict the movements of traditionally pastoral communities.

Sachs reviews other contributing factors as well: the increasing instability of climate change, high fertility rates in the absence of contraception and family planning, widespread poverty and political instability.

The U.S. of course blames the political instability on — what else — Islamic “terrorist” groups like al-Shabaab, who are the target of and justification for black site torture prisons, drone strikes and proxy armed groups in Somalia.

Al-Shabbab, which has just lifted its ban on Western aid groups in the face of the severity of the famine,  has been the target of U.S. airstrikes and proxy attacks for years.  In a WGP post from May 2008, I tried to put a couple of these air strikes in context:

These bombings are directed at members of al-Shabaab, which is the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union who briefly controlled much of Somalia in 2006 — and who had brought relative peace and stability to the chaotic yet oil rich nation — before they were forced from power by U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops. (Christian Ethiopia is a historic enemy of Somalia, which is almost entirely Sunni Muslim.)

In that same three year old post, it was already clear how the U.S. proxy war against Somalia contributed to the threat of widespread famine:

The U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion has contributed to a humanitarian crisis the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as “catastrophic”. Over a million people have been made internal refugees, and the U.N warned that 3.5. million Somalis — nearly half the country’s population — face famine. Moreover, Amnesty International has collected many accounts of atrocities by Ethiopian troops.

Here is a recent episode of al-Jazeera’s Inside Story that focuses on the rather facile question, “Are the problems in the Horn of Africa down to nature, or are people and politics to blame?”

Khadija O. Ali, a former member of the Somali Transitional National Parliament, laments the lack of women in Somali government as “women and children are the primary victims of ongoing conflict and deepening drought and famine.”

See here for a story about how U.S. universities are participating in an “African Land Grab”.

See here for the darker side of the World Food Program’s efforts in Somalia.

The image of the starving boy was originally published in the NYT, and was commented upon here and here.

More Black Sites, More Drones

July 25, 2011: rosencrantz

As the the U.S. Congress and President negotiate about whether to pay its bills and which social programs to cut, funding for secret prisons and killer robots continue unabated.

Jeremy Scahill recently broke a story about a CIA secret prison in Mogadishu, where “terror suspects” are rendered for extra-legal storage and interrogation.

As usual following such stories exposing imperial wrongdoing, “news” media sycophants are then deployed to spin the facts by uncritically quoting anonymous government officials.

This Mogadishu CIA black site prison is just part of the larger story of the “Global War On Terror”, began by Bush 43 and continued by Obama, albeit without reference to Bush’s absurd title.

Sauron’s gaze now turns to the not-so-green pastures of Yemen and Somalia, sending forth riderless fell-beasts to spy on and kill those within proximity of those suspected of standing against the Imperial Will:

The Obama administration has escalated the existing drone program and begun a new CIA drone campaign in Yemen (one that just killed numerous people over the weekend); it also, contrary to public denials, provided the arms to Saudi Arabia to attack a rebel group in Northern Yemen.  Yemen is also the justification for Obama’s attempt to institutionalize a due-process-free assassination program aimed at U.S. citizens.  The administration just commenced a separate drone campaign in Somalia.

Presumably, these not-so-new targets of U.S. beneficence will suffer the same drone inflicted civilian slaughterings that regularly transpire (despite denials by government spokesliars) in the other terror war fronts.

Relative Terrorisms

July 5, 2011: rosencrantz

Gandhi, Assange, DeChristopher, Ruben, Mason, Alwan, Hammadi and Commander-in-Chief BushBomba

Over the weekend, the Frontline Club hosted a discusssion moderated by Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! between Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

The discussion ranged over wide territory, but in this post I want to focus on one particular theme that emerged, namely the relativity and ideological function of the term “terrorism”.

After Goodman listed and quoted various North American politicos (Gingrich, Biden, etc.) who have accused Assange of “terrorism” (some even calling for his assassination), Žižek, in his characteristically provocative way, effectively suggested that Assange embrace the designation since it puts him in a category with Gandhi. Speaking to Assange, Žižek says:

Yes, you are a terrorist! In which sense? In the sense, as I like to repeat, Gandhi was a terrorist…. In what sense was Gandhi a terrorist? He effectively tried to stop — interrupt — the normal functioning of the British State in India. And of course you are trying to interrupt the normal (which is very oppressive) functioning of the information circulation and so on.

Of course, the “terrorism” of which Žižek accuses Assange can only be understood in relation to that other type of terrorism against which it is directed.  Žižek makes this point by way of a paraphrase of “that wonderful line” from Bertolt Brecht’s Beggar’s Opera, “What is robbing a bank compared to founding a new bank?”.  Žižek:

What is your “terrorism” compared to the terrorism which we simply accept, which has to go on day by day so that just things remain the way they are? That’s were ideology holds us. When we talk about “violence”, “terrorism” — we always think about acts which interrupt the normal run of things. But what about violence which has to be here in order for things to function the way they are? So I think if (and I am very skeptical about it) we should use (in my provocative spirit I’m tempted to) the term “terrorism”, its strictly a reaction to a much stronger terrorism which is here.  So, again, instead of engaging in this moralistic game — oh no, he is a good guy (like the Stalinists said about Lenin), you like small children, you play with cats, you wouldn’t (as Norman Bates says in Psycho) wouldn’t hurt even a fly. No! You are in this formal sense a terrorist.

But if you are a terrorist — my God! — what are then they who accuse you of terrorism?

Žižek’s point can be generalized to others who have been accused of “terrorism”.

Consider, for example, environmental activism:

What is the property damage of Marie Mason or Rebecca Rubin to the ecological destruction of the institutions they targeted?

Even symbolic gestures are at risk of being legally re-framed as terrorism. But what is Tim DeChristopher’s auction sabotage compared to the coming onslaught of climate change?

Consider, moreover, the various insurgencies against the U.S. military occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

To take a specific example, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell refers to Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi as terrorists.  Their crime? Working with and supporting a domestic insurgency against a foreign army that has invaded and occupied their country.  Greenwald highlights the absurdity of labeling them terrorists:

One can have a range of views about the morality and justifiability of Iraqi nationals attacking U.S. troops in their country.  One could say that it is the right of Iraqis to attack a foreign army brutally invading and occupying their nation, just as Americans would presumably do against a foreign army invading their country (at least those who don’t share Mitch McConnell’s paralyzing fears and cowardice).  Or one could say that it is inherently wrong and evil to attack U.S. troops no matter what they’re doing or where they are in the world, even when waging war in a foreign country that is killing large numbers of innocent civilians.  Or one could say that the American war in Iraq in particular was such a noble effort to spread Freedom and Democracy that only an evil person would fight against it.  Or one could say that it’s always wrong for a non-state actor to engage in violence (a very convenient standard for the U.S., given that very few nations around the world could resist U.S. force without reliance on such unconventional means).  And one can recognize that most nations, not only the U.S., would apprehend those engaged in attacks against their troops.

But whatever one’s views are on those moral questions, in what conceivable sense can it be called “Terrorism” for a citizen of a country to fight against foreign invading troops by attacking purely military targets?

But even if it made sense to label insurgents against an occupying army “terrorists”, to return to the Brecht/Žižek question, what is arming an insurgency to a war of aggression?

Political Dickheads

June 20, 2011: rosencrantz


The absurd “Global War on Terror”, initiated by handlers of Supreme Court-appointed President George W. Bush in the wake of 9-11, was quickly turned into framework through which the U.S. could wage war abroad and assault civil liberties at home.

After aggressive war based on lies, secret prisons and torture, as well as illegal  spying programs on its own citizens and other blatant violations of the Bill of Rights, the Bush regime and its corporate collaborators received protection (and even “retroactive immunity”) from the leaders of the Democratic Party as soon as they came to power — upon winning the House in 2006, Nancy Pelosi infamously asserted that “impeachment is off the table” and, after winning the Presidency in 2008, Barack Obama directed the country to “look forward, not backward”.

Meanwhile, last week the hapless and narcissistic Congressman Weiner (himself an errand boy for Wall St. and AIPAC, btw) was pressured to resign by these very same Democratic Party leaders.

His offense? Sexting pictures of his dick, in violation of no laws whatsoever.

This comparison “summarizes everything one needs to know about our political culture“, suggests Glenn Greenwald.

Of course, by this point Obama has his own very good reasons for overlooking or condoning certain types of offenses while prudishly condemning others.  For the current Imperial Executive has not only continued the criminal trajectory of the Bush regime, but escalated and expanded it.

Under Obama, the Nobel Peace Warrior, the U.S. is now at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, with “covert” operations in Somalia and beyond.

And in terms of assaults on civil liberties, the current administration has surpassed its predecessor in radical violations of civil liberties and the rule of law — whistle blowers are targeted by the “Justice” Department, Guantanamo is still open (despite celebrated promises to close it), Bagram’s population of extra-legal prisoners grows, U.S. citizens are targeted for pretrial assassination, and new wars are started without bothering to consult Congress. And all of this is justified by means of the continued use of the dark art of Orwellian Newspeek.

UPDATE 6.22.11:

Regarding today’s expected announcement of a “troop withdrawal” from Afghanistan, ThinkProgress has posted a chart putting the numbers in context:

The “troop withdrawal” that Obama is expected to propose today will leave “far more troops in Afghanistan than it did when Obama came into office and more than at any point during former president George W. Bush’s administration.”

Borders

May 31, 2011: 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: 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.

Buried at Sea…

May 6, 2011: 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: 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.

Another Drone War

April 26, 2011: rosencrantz

The U.S. has extended its Drone War into Libya, as if to commemorate the centennial of the first aerial bombardment of history, when Italian Lieutenant Giulio Gaviotti dropped hand grenades from a Taube monoplane (pictured above, let) on targets near modern Tripoli.

It wasn’t long before the Ottomans were complaining (and the Italians were denying) that hospitals were being bombed and civilians killed.

At the time, this innovation was praised by proto-fascists and Nobel peace laureates alike — “anticipating Barak Obama’s faith in aerial bombardment as a tool of progress for humanity”.

The Kingdom of Italy’s claims to Libya could be traced back to the 1884 Conference of Berlin, when European powers divided Africa up into zones of control — with no input from Africans themselves, of course — thereby initiating, in the words of ANSWER’s Brian Becker, “the dynamic transformation of capitalism into a system of global imperialism.”

Fast forward, and the inheritors of colonial wealth are banding together once again to use their latest technology — vastly more destructive than grenades thrown from monoplanes — to bomb Libya.

Imperial functionaries tout the “precision capability” of Drones, but I suspect that their precision would be doubted by the children whose bodies they routinely blow apart — follow this link to glimpse the mindset of the trigger-happy Drone operators who sit behind computer terminals in Nevada.