Tag: Obama

8th Anniversary of Supreme International Crime

March 21, 2011: J. 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: J. 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.)

Civil Discourse and Targeted Concern

January 19, 2011: J. 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: J. 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.

Iraq War Logs

October 26, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

This weekend Wikileaks released the Iraq War Logs – 40,000 “Significant Incident Reports” from the period of 2004-2009 that together tell the most detailed story of the war in Iraq during that time.

As was the case with the Afghan War Logs, a number of news media outlets received advanced access to the documents and extensive competing coverage can be found in the The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Der Spiegel, and last and least, The New York Times, which decided to lead with a hit piece on the personality of the founder of Wikileaks, rather than on what the war logs themselves reveal.  CNN played the same game.  (Not suprising, of course, from an institutions that were essential to enabling the war itself.)

Like Afghan War wikileak, there is so much to read, so video summaries can be useful:  The Guardian has a short video on prevalence of “Frago 242″, which is a “fragmentary order” not to investigate torture, and some of the consequences thereof. Al Jazeera presents an hour long special here.  And here is good highlight reel from U.K. Channel 4′s current affairs program, “Dispatches“:

The U.N.’s chief torture investigator thinks there is torture to investigate, and reminds Obama of his legal obligation to do so.  Dig through the logs yourself here.

Unaccountable Rice: More of Obama’s “Looking Forward” and Stewart’s Sycophancy

October 19, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In 2003, acting as W. Bush’s “National Security Advisor”, Condoleeza Rice was one of the most vocal and mendacious fear mongers pushing for the “pre-emptive” invasion of Iraq:

We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon…. we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

Around the same time, Rice also chaired the White House meetings in which “combined interrogation techniques”, i.e. torture, were approved:

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”

Thus did Rice help to unleash a shameful decade of war and torture. At least  a hundred thousand people, perhaps as many as a million and a half, died as a result of the war that she enabled, not to mention the untold numbers of wounded and displaced; Torture is now as American as apple pie, to the enduring shame of us all.

But that doesn’t stop President “Look Forward, Not Backward” from inviting the war criminal to advise him.

And it doesn’t stop corporate shill and professional “moderate” sycophant John Stewart from playing patty-cake with her on the Daily Show, helping the should-be-disgraced Rice reinvent herself and promote her new autobiography.

See also here.

Animated IED Incident Map 2004 – 2009

July 30, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Based on info from the leaked Afghanistan war logs:

I think the end tag – “Stop all illegal wars” – is a bit fuzzy, conceptually speaking, but the animation is good, and is a great example of the kind of things that can be done with the massive amount of leaked info.

Also, it is interesting to compare the trajectory explicit in the video with what the BBC published today:

Do It Yourself

June 17, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Tuesday night’s blathering address from the Oval Office about the disaster in the Gulf has been widely panned for its timidity in the face of what could be the world’s worst ecological disaster - a disaster for which the President clearly bears some responsibility.  And meanwhile Obama has just approved 400 new leases for oil companies to operate in the gulf.

Since it seems like people are starting to realize, finally and begrudgingly, that their boy is a pro-war, anti-civil libertarian, corporatist spokesliar, I’m starting to feel like there is less of an urgent need to propagate that particular piece of increasingly obvious information.

So I thought I’d turn attention to some locals who are doing it for themselves – and, unlike the federal government, successfully fighting to address our culture’s addiction to the vile substance at the heart of many of the world’s problems.

Several months ago, these “Caution: Please Pass With Care” signs started popping up all over L.A.  They are the work of a group of guerrilla citizen-artists who call themselves the Department of D.Y.I.  Here is a video of them walking the walk:

L.A. Streets Blog covered an earlier guerrilla campain by D.I.Y. here, andThe LA.ist published the group’s manifesto here.  Their work can be seen all around the city:

Now it turns out that these guerrilla art campaigns – in conjunction with a sustained lobbying effort by the biking community — prepped the way for actual, official civic change: The LADOT has finally started to install “Sharrows,” which are an essential, although imperfect, piece of biking infrastructure.

Other things are afoot, as well: Only a few weeks after police harassment of a BP protest ride in Hollywood organized by Critical Mass, the L.A.P.D. is going to join Critical Mass as participants of a ride scheduled for June 25.

The la.ist hopes it is a game changer of cyclist/police relations in Los Angeles.

(BTW: If you are interested in following bike news, I recommend these feeds: Bike Commute News, L.A. Bike Coalition, L.A. Critical Mass, L.A. Streets Blog.)

Meanwhile, in Thailand…

May 27, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In Bangkok, a 10 week anti-government protest led by “Red Shirts” was ruthlessly crushed by the Thai military.  Here is a video illustrating consequences of a sniper’s cowardly work:

Surviving Red Shirts have returned to their villages… at least for now.

Here is a slide show of the aftermath of the Thai military’s crackdown, and a play-by-play breakdown with maps of the action.

Democracy Now hosted a debate on the meaning of the Red Shirts — are they a genuine grassroots struggle for self-determination or a proto-fascist front for a billionaire ex-Prime Minister?

And here is a short piece giving historical context context to the protests and to Obama’s foreign policy stance.

BP

May 10, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

But the latest episode in a sad history of oil operations.  This current disaster will result in several disastrous and long term effects.

Democracy Now covers the important angles of this story – how the government exempted BP from environmental review despite its dismal environmental record, noting its lobbying and greenwashing campaigns as well as its  role in the 1953 overthrow of democracy in  Iran,

Nikolas Kozloff reviews the role of Obama’s secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar. (I can’t help but succumb to a flash of schadenfreude for President Centrist since this disaster comes right on the heels of this.) And here is a bit about the Halliburton connection.

One group is mobilizing for a day of protests and calling for the seizure of BP’s assets.