Tag: Dead Civilians

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.

Arab Spring (and Imperial Frost) in Bahrain

May 14, 2011: 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.

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.

Humanitarian Intervention

March 28, 2011: rosencrantz

The idea that the U.S./European intervention is motivated by humanitarian concerns appears plausible at first glance because Gaddafi was slaughtering protesters and openly threatening to slaughter more — so “intervention” could be sold as a humanitarian act.

But a bit of critical reflection on the wider context of this policy reveals how shallow such an explanation is.

First, there is the question of consistency.  If the U.S. (et. al.) were motivated by humanitarian concern, then what of concern for the protesters being slaughtered in the streets of other autocratic states, like Syria, Yemen or Bahrain?

The White House managed to verbally condemn the crackdown in Syria, but the Yemeni and Bahraini regimes, important assets in the imperial project, get a pass or even support –  Secretary of State Clinton asserted that Yemen had the “sovereign right” to invite Saudi Arabian forces into the country to violently crush dissent.

And what about Israel?  Siddharth Varadarajan asks the multi-billion dollar question:

Why does only Libya get attacked or referred to the International Criminal Court and not other countries? If there is one country in the Middle East which has threatened international peace and security for decades and which, even as these words are being written, has launched its air force, yet again, against a defenceless civilian population, it is Israel. Yet never have the cheerleaders for the war on Libya argued in favour of a mandatory no-fly zone to protect the Palestinian and Lebanese people from Israeli airstrikes.

This selective application of humanitarian intervention exposes it as a whitewash.

Furthermore, if concern for humanity was a motivating factor for the U.S. (et. al.), then what of concern for its own citizens? Writing in the NYT, Bob Herbert reminds us that this “humanitarian intervention” is also “pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war… while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.”

“Humanitarian Concern”, like “Spreading Democracy”, is a PR label cynically used to sell imperial military projects to a (still-too-naive) domestic market, as well to serve as cover for complicit (and equally cynical) international institutions.

So, too, is the use of the euphemistic term “no-fly zone”, which had some Arab League support until it turned out to mean the shock and awe of missile strikes to inaugurate more or less unbounded military action, with its own inevitable civilian casualties.

But if not concern for humanity, then what motivates the U.S.(et. al.) attack on Libya?

Well, there is always the geopolitics of a dwindling oil supply. Or profits for the military-industrial-complex, which over decades gets to provide weapons to both Gaddafi and the coalition forces attacking him.

Cha-ching.

8th Anniversary of Supreme International Crime

March 21, 2011: rosencrantz

Nothing symbolizes more acutely the dark matrix of corporate hegemony, war, lies, unaccountability, torture and secrecy than the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 8 years ago.

This weekend, as the U.S. Executive Branch (without Congressional approval) began bombarding yet another oil rich predominantly Muslim country, Los Angeles joined other cities in protest to mark the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a “supreme international crime” according to principles laid out by the International Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II.

As I did last year, I documented the event in video.  This year the most compelling speaker was Mike Prysner, an Iraq War Vet and co-founder of March Forward!, a anti-war veterans group.  Here is a recording I made of his speech at the rally, edited with time lapse video of the protest march:

The AP reported that “hundreds” of people marched, but the time lapse sequences seem to indicate more. Looks like at least a few thousand to me.

Meanwhile, in D.C., Daniel Ellsberg and about 100 others were arrested in protests outside the White House.

This We’ll Defend

March 7, 2011: rosencrantz

It can be rough for people living under the U.S. occupying forces in Afghanistan, many of whom have been liberated from existence by NATO gunships in at least 3 air strikes in the past couple of weeks – scores of women and children here, 9 boys here — thus continuing the dark trend that saw 2010 as the worst year yet for civilian deaths of the Afghanistan war.

General Petraeus, current commander of the the ISAF, had to apologize about the slaughter of the 9 boys, but reportedly tried to dodge responsibility for civilian deaths resulting from a separate operation by suggesting  that “residents had invented stories, or even injured their children, to pin the blame on U.S. forces.”

“Killing 60 people, and then blaming the killing on those same people, rather than apologizing for any deaths? This is inhuman,” one Afghan official said. “This is a really terrible situation.”

Johnathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution suggests that this is how one inflicts “horrible burns on a bunch of kids and yet sleep soundly at night” and points to an historical precedent to such behavior — Nixon allowed himself to wonder whether the famous picture of wailing children running from a U.S. napalm strike was “a fix”.

Meanwhile, speaking on the situation in Libya, Obama said he wants to make sure that the U.S. “has the full capacity to act” in case “defenseless civilians” find themselves “trapped and in great danger.”

But, in Afghanistan, it is often precisely the exercise of U.S. capacities that puts “defenseless civilians” — such as the 9 wood-gathering boys ripped to shreds by NATO helicopters — not only in “great danger” but in caskets.

Those boys now join the 2,500 other people killed by the 101st Airborne Division since they arrived in eastern Afghanistan last June.

(The images of the wounded Afghan children in the above collage come from the website of The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who don’t shy away from illustrating their updates with images that reflect the violence of the U.S. occupation of their country.)

Springtime of the Peoples, North Africa

January 30, 2011: rosencrantz

Mohammed Bouazizi, sparking a revolution.

In 1848, in the midst of economic hardships and political repression, alliances between middle class liberals and working class radicals rose up and challenged the “forest of bayonets” protecting absolutist regimes throughout Europe.

Triggered by events in Paris, news of revolutionary successes and violent repressions was transmitted with unprecedented speed by new communication technologies — telegraph, rail and steamship — which, in turn, fueled the wave of rebellion and gave rise to the “Springtime of the Peoples”

Today we see something analogous happening in North Africa: a wave of revolutionary activity that was sparked, literally, by the self-immolation of a frustrated Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohammad Bouazizi. Within weeks, copycats had self-immolated in Egypt, Mauritania and Algeria displaying the pervasiveness of North African discontent with their autocratic governments.  In Tunisia itself,  the 23 year reign of Ben Ali came to an end as he fled the country, giving others in the region hope that they too might liberate themselves.

Nowhere did this hope take root more than in Egypt, which is on the verge of toppling the 30 year reign of Hosni Mubarak.

Made in the U.S.A.

The regimes in Tunis and Egypt have both been U.S. allies, and Mubarak especially has enjoyed lavish amounts of military aid — aid which has continued under Obama.

As a matter of fact, the tear gas canisters being used to put down the rebellion in Egypt are “Made in the U.S.A” — Jamestown, Philadelphia, to be precise.  So “if the army ever decides to shoot into a crowd of unarmed protestors, it will be shooting with hardware provided by the United States.”

Meanwhile, leaders of the current U.S. administration wasted no time in offering support to their beleaguered friend, Mubarak.

Sec. of State Clinton exposed her sympathies when she asserted that Mubarak’s tyrannical regime was “stable” just as hope emerged among Egyptian people that it was not. Vice President Biden added that he “would not refer to [Mubarak] as a dictator” — on the contrary he “has been a good ally”. And Obama, whose military escalations and drone strikes continue to kill and wound many, made a plea to the Egyptians that “violence is not the answer”.

Meanwhile Wikileaks, in the wake of developments in Egypt, has released more U.S. diplomatic cables which corroborate what we already knew — that the U.S. turns a blind eye to the torture and lawlessness of its client regimes. See, for example, this cable in which a U.S. diplomat relates how, during murder investigations, it is the practice of Egyptian police to “round up 40 to 50 suspects from a neighborhood and hang them by their arms from the ceiling for weeks until someone confesses.”

One such excess in particular had become a rallying point among Egyptian protesters: the murder of Khaled Said, who was beaten to death by Egyptian police. Here are pictures of Khaled before and after his treatment by the Egyptian police, and a cartoon (by Carlos Latuff) of his afterlife as an avenging angel:

BagNewsNotes, always interesting for its analysis of news images, has discussed this photograph of the Egyptian government pissing on its citizens:

And we have to give a shout out to this guy:

A word of warning, however: In 1848, the “Springtime of the Peoples” was ultimately succeeded by a “Counter-Revolutionary Autumn” in which many of the democratic advances were reversed. According to historian Mike Rapport, this reversal was made possible in part by the unraveling of the tenuous alliance between “liberals” (who sought to retain some privileges from the conservative order) and “radicals” (who sought a more thorough transformation of society).   Time will tell if events in North Africa will follow a similar trajectory, but for now perhaps we can celebrate recent advances with this man.

Civil Discourse and Targeted Concern

January 19, 2011: rosencrantz

Everyone affected by the murderous rampage of the disturbed Loughner deserved a public memorial, but to my eyes the irony of Obama’s targeted concern for victims of the massacre in Arizona was impossible to ignore. Obama is in command of an enterprise which has resulted in the slaughter of many little girls, but one would be a fool to expect him to condemn his own “senseless violence” or publically grieve for the victims of his own drone strikes — that would run counter to the imperial ideology of American Exceptionalism, according to which the lives of U.S. American are regarded as more valuable than those outside the nationalist circle of concern.

Obama even reserves for his office the right to execute anyone in the world, even U.S. citizens, and claims this right to be unlimited even by  judicial oversight. He therefore stands as a model for extra-legal vigilantism.

But these questions are not explored in the MSM, generally speaking, which instead has been dominated by the question of violent rhetoric in U.S. political discourse.

These two images present competing ways to look at the current “political climate”.  Where the cover of The Economist makes an easy equivalence between “left” and “right” rhetorical bellicosity, L. Dangle at Troubletown appeals to ideological stereotypes to suggest such equivalence is an illusion.

It is difficult to escape the idea that certain people have a particular responsibility.  I mean, before she was shot, the Congresswoman saw it coming, and saw it coming from particular places:

We’re on Sarah Palin’s “Targeted” list, but the thing is that the way she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. And when people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that action.

In response to the charge that the violent rhetoric is exclusively coming from the right, rightward leaning commentators are quick to point out recent examples of violent rhetoric coming from the left, which are in fact not hard to find.

Fair enough, but that abstracts from at least two important considerations.  First, there is a double standard about how the state deals with left leaning activism, even when it is not violent. Consider this comparison by A. Cockburn:

If Palin was in the Animal Rights movement she would have  been indicted, sentenced and imprisoned long ago. To draw a specific comparison: the SHAC 7 were convicted of “animal enterprise terrorism” for running a website which posted the names and addresses of individuals tied to the animal testing lab Huntingdon Life Sciences. They were not charged with any act of property destruction, they were charged with “conspiracy” on the grounds that they should be held accountable for the actions of others in the same movement.

Second, I don’t think it is controversial to claim that those on the right are, at least these days, more thoroughly armed.  And considering this compilation of “lone nuts” who have translated rhetoric into action, many are more dangerous as well.  Anti-war protesters I’ve seen — and I’ve seen many — are generally equipped with nothing more threatening than cardboard and crayons and costumes and drums, just as the Troubletown cartoon contends. Maybe if there WAS an armed left in the U.S. it would not be so easily and thoroughly taken advantage of.

Other perspectives / sources:

Tom Engelhardt writes about how civilian casualties in Afghanistan go underreported while the nation mourns the Arizona victims.

Amy Goodman, the best news anchor in the U.S., calls for an assault weapons ban and connects the debate to the violence in Juarez.

Billy Wharton argues that we should take Loughner as a reason to have single payer health care.

Enough about Assange: What WikiLeaks has Revealed

December 29, 2010: rosencrantz

By focusing on the personalities or philosophy behind Wikileaks, in addition to the Imperial and Corporate reactions to its successes thus far, it is easy to lose focus on the actual substance of the leaks themselves. So here is an incomplete list of significant revelations emerging from Wikileaks in 2010, summarized from a list of headlines compiled by G. Greewald:

UPDATE: Here is another round-up of what Wikileaks revelations, compiled by CBS news.

Swedish Documentary about Wikileaks

December 15, 2010: rosencrantz

Here is an informative Swedish documentary on Wikileaks: