Obama administration shuts down investigations into Bush-era torture

By Tom Carter, WSWS.ORG 

Eric Holder: As unwilling to do the right thing as his sponsor and boss at the White House.

As part of its cover-up of Bush administration war crimes, the Obama administration announced June 30 that it would shut down 99 investigations into deaths of prisoners in US custody during the so-called “war on terror,” leaving only two investigations with the potential to develop into criminal prosecutions.

The announcement underscores the fact that the anti-democratic policies developed during the presidency of George W. Bush continue unchallenged under President Barack Obama, who is doing everything in his power to keep the lid on the crimes of his predecessor.

Following the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration quickly and quietly erected a network of secret prisons and “black sites,” where opponents of US imperialism in the Middle East—as well as, in many cases, their friends, relatives and acquaintances—were jailed, tortured and murdered.

 

The Obama administration has continued and expanded the anti-democratic methods of the Bush administration, including the use of presidential assassination orders, indefinite detention without trial or charges, blocking court cases that threaten to reveal torture, domestic spying, prosecution of whistle-blowers, “rendition” of alleged terrorists to countries that practice torture, open violations of US and international law, including the War Powers Act in the case of Libya and the Geneva Conventions more generally, and the maintenance of illegal torture camps such as the infamous facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The administration’s 101 investigations into torture deaths were a token measure to begin with. The investigations were initiated in 2009 and were designed to placate popular disgust with torture and other crimes carried out under Bush.

The 101 cases by no means include every death in US custody, and rather conveniently, no case in which the torture victim survived was selected for investigation. The investigations proceeded on the explicit basis that the infamous Bush Justice Department torture memos would not be challenged. Neither would the Bush-era policy of “enhanced interrogation” (a euphemism for torture). The only question that was to be pursued in the investigations was whether the Central Intelligence Agency operatives in the 101 selected death cases had violated Bush administration guidelines. Saddled with such limitations from the outset, the investigations could barely scratch the surface of government-sanctioned war crimes.

Echoing Obama’s mantra of “looking forward, not backward,” Attorney General Holder announced June 30 that 99 of the 101 cases did not warrant further investigation.

“I welcome the news that the broader inquiries are behind us,” remarked Leon Panetta, who left his post as CIA director July 1 to become secretary of defense. “We are now finally about to close this chapter of our agency’s history,” he added. Panetta was referring not to closing the chapter in which torture took place, but closing the chapter in which the agency’s practices were subjected to any form of official scrutiny.

While the two ongoing investigations remain officially secret, some details have been leaked to the press. One case involves the murder of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; the other case involves a murder at the secret CIA “Salt Pit” prison in Afghanistan. These two cases are remarkable both for the shocking brutality of the murders themselves as well as for the cold-blooded “business as usual” attitude of the CIA operatives involved.

Only the most depraved intellect could have designed the nightmarish “Salt Pit,” located northeast of the Kabul, Afghanistan airport, in which a young Afghan man named Gul Rahman was murdered on November 20, 2002.

Ghairat Baheer, a physician and son-in-law of an Afghan political figure associated with opposition to the US occupation, survived the Salt Pit and gave a chilling account to the press of the conditions surrounding Rahman’s death. Baheer and Rahman were old friends, and they were abducted by CIA operatives at around the same time in October, 2002. They were taken together to the Salt Pit for “enhanced interrogation.”

The CIA chose an abandoned brick factory for the installation. According to Baheer, an unimaginable stench permeated the Salt Pit, where prisoners were kept in windowless cells with metal buckets for latrines. Prisoners called it the “dark prison” because there were no windows and no electric lights.

Prisoners spent much of their time in total darkness. The CIA operatives running the prison wore full face masks and used medieval-type torches to make their way through the blackness. In many cells, prisoners were shackled naked to the rough walls with metal chains. No expense was spared to ensure maximum ghoulish terror.

Baheer said he was forced to sleep naked on a rough concrete floor next to his latrine bucket, when he was not chained to the wall of his cell. The cell was perpetually dark.

CIA operatives took turns repeatedly torturing the two men. Among the countless horrors, the two men would be tied to chairs, their torturers would sit on their stomachs, threaten to kill them, stage mock executions, beat them, or douse them with water and leave them to freeze naked in the unheated cells.

According to Baheer, Rahman was stubborn and defiant during the interrogations. The details of the events of the morning of November 20, 2002 are still unclear, but it is known that at some point Rahman’s captors stripped him naked below the waist, shackled his hands over his head, brutally beat him, and then doused him with water. Within hours, Rahman had died of hypothermia.

The Salt Pit prison was closed last year after it became the subject of international scrutiny and survivors began to describe to the press the hideous terrors that took place inside. In closing the prison, the CIA no doubt also had in mind the destruction of any physical evidence of the crimes that had been committed there.

The CIA appears overall to have regarded the Salt Pit as a successful operation. According to information leaked to the Associated Press, the CIA Kabul station chief has been promoted at least three times since Rahman’s death.

The second of the two ongoing investigations involves the murder of Manadel al-Jamadi at the hands of CIA operatives in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq on November 4, 2003.

Jamadi, an alleged insurgent, was abducted violently from his house outside Baghdad in 2003 by Navy SEALs—the same feared and secretive military force that has been lauded in the bourgeois media for the murder of Osama Bin Laden. Apparently, Navy SEALs pursued Jamadi into his kitchen, where he made a ferocious last stand, toppling his stove onto one of the SEALs. In retaliation, the SEALs beat him savagely before turning him over to the CIA for interrogation at Abu Ghraib. Naturally, no trial or legal process of any kind was involved in this operation.

Forty-five minutes after he walked into Abu Ghraib, Jamadi was dead. It appears that once he arrived, Jamadi was subjected to further beatings and was chained to the wall, after which he lost consciousness and asphyxiated. Jamadi’s bruised and bloodstained corpse is featured in a number of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos, with grinning US military personnel standing over him and giving the “thumbs up.”

For as yet unexplained reasons, Jamadi’s corpse was packed in ice and stored in a shower in an attempt to prevent decomposition (military officials jokingly referred to him as “the Iceman”), and CIA officials mysteriously attached an intravenous tube to one of his arms before whisking the corpse out of the facility the following day. It appears that not long after Jamadi’s death a heated dispute broke out between the CIA and the Navy SEALs over which organization would take the blame. CIA operatives at Abu Ghraib rapidly moved to destroy all of the evidence of Jamadi’s death, including a bloodstained hood, and they scrubbed clean the death chamber.

While the Rahman and Jamadi murders constitute only the tip of the iceberg, they expose the day-to-day reality of CIA operations in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. The CIA, tasked with discovering and silently “taking out” opponents of the occupations, operates outside the bounds of US and international law. When a federal court ordered the CIA to release 92 video tapes of “enhanced interrogations” in 2005, the CIA responded by destroying the tapes, a brazenly criminal maneuver for which no official to this day has been prosecuted.

The decision by the Obama administration to shut down virtually all of its investigations is a clear signal that the war crimes will continue. Indeed, in the bourgeois press, Holder’s announcement last Thursday was generally interpreted as a green light from the Obama administration to resume and escalate the practice of torture and murder of political opponents in the Middle East. The headline of an article in the Washington Post read, “Could Torture Make a Comeback?”

A deeply reactionary and chilling editorial in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Vindicating the CIA: Ending a Disgraceful Investigation,” went further. Gloating over Holder’s announcement, the editors declared, “The disgrace is that this probe was ever undertaken.”

The editors continued, “The probe has still done considerable harm by creating a culture of second-guessing and political retribution that CIA operatives must now consider as they try to protect against terror threats.” Translated from the euphemistic language of the so-called “war on terror” into plain English, this means that the intelligence agencies should be permitted to go about the grisly work of torturing and murdering their enemies in secret without any restrictions or oversight whatsoever.

The fact that this view enjoys wide support within the ruling class should be taken as a dire warning. How will this same ruling class respond to the development of a popular movement within the US that directly challenges its interests?

___________________________________________________________________________________

PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE
A TOOL IS USELESS IF IT’S NOT USED. Don’t just sit there…introduce a friend or relative to The Greanville Post and help us expand the reach of remedial ideas and information. If each of you brings merely ONE additional reader to the table, we will be able to double our circulation!
___________________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

If you liked this article, why not support The Greanville Post by buying our T-shirt, a mug, a mousepad, or any other item now in our store? That way you donate a few dollars and also get a nice gift. It’s a win-win formula!

Created By CrankyBeagle for The Greanville Post
This and many other items at our store.  Stop by today!



Our Supreme Corporate Court: 3 Strikes and We’re Out!

By Gary Corseri

The Supreme Court: The presumption of impartiality rests on the assumption that mere men are above human beliefs and passion or defects, for that matter. The Court remains the least democratic branch of government, a fact painfully demonstrated by the mounting tyrannical abuses of the Roberts court.

First, some aphoristic opals:

The Liberator.

“What is Truth? Is often asked, as though it were harder to say what truth is than what anything else is.  But what is Justice?  What is anything?  An eternal contradiction in terms meets us at the end of every enquiry.  We are not required to know what truth is, but to speak the truth, and so with justice.” – Samuel Butler

“Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, but it is forbidden because it is hurtful.” – Benjamin Franklin

Is there a common thread to these statements?  Each writer/thinker/orator is training a highly honed mind upon some of the profoundest concepts of our frail human intellect and imagination: liberty; truth and lying; morality and sin.  Each brief statement is a flourishing note—the memorable, essential solo arpeggio in the midst of the orchestral performance.  But… beyond the particular insight or theme, each author shares a certain quality of mind—the ability to probe deeper, to turn the mundane or jejune or vapid idea on its head: to look within the essence of the question and oneself… to rotate the squares of the Rubik’s Cube till one gets just the right fit.

Now consider this statement by Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court’s recent decision to nullify the state of California’s ban on selling “gory” videos to minors:

“Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed.  As her just desserts for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers ‘till she fell dead on the floor.”

What’s missing?

Well, as Wordswoth once responded to a noisome fellow who claimed he could write as well as he—if only he had a mind to: “It is clear that the only thing missing is the mind.”

It is not just that Justice Scalia is making a false analogy, comparing apples and eggs—two very different media—the interactive, sensory-flooding world of “Mortal Kombat,” for example, with the word-by-word, progressive-sequential approach of the literate world… but, also, he seems to have missed a key point.  Snow White—and not even an “avatar” of Snow White—is not the agent of the wicked queen’s demise.  The queen’s wretched end is a consequence of her violation of higher moral codes—and the ultimate “enforcer” is not some kid with a joystick, but… fate.

Perhaps it is wrong to expect a higher level of thought from our Supreme Court justices?  After all, they are not charged with upholding wisdom; merely with the far-easier task of upholding our Constitution—with all its faults.

And just what is this “Constitution,” this “living” document?  Reading it, we wander around labyrinths of legalese with various elite interests—slave state vs. commercial; agrarian vs nascent manufacturing—until we come to the fairly clear Bill of Rights.

Except… we’re still trying to figure out “Freedom of Speech”… and, God knows, the Second Amendment is as wide open as Jared Loughner’s surreal gaze.  The Constitution is not exactly William Blake’s territory: “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.”  More like Butler’s: “We are not required to know the truth, but to speak it, and so with justice.”  And in this murky world of truth, half-truths, falsehoods and confusion, the “eternal vigilance” of which Phillips reminds us is the “price of liberty.”  And, that vigilance, that review and interpretation is not, ultimately, the province of Supreme Court justices, but is, inviolably, ours—i.e., We the People’s.

Three times in the past 18 months our Supreme Corporate Court has expressed contempt for We the People and elevated the rights and privileges of a select few above the increasingly disenfranchised many.  The “prejudice” of these Supremes was clearly manifested in January, 2010 when, according to the New York Times, the Court “ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections. … The 5-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle—that the government has no business regulating political speech.”  On the other hand, “the dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.”

Now here’s where things get murky.  Nowhere in the Constitution are corporations mentioned.  Not until 1819 does the Supreme Court recognize corporations as having some of the “contractual rights” of “persons.”  But, while the “rights” of corporations have expanded exponentially in the past couple of centuries, the rights of the People have been abridged.  Money, after all, is a marvelous lubricator of “political speech.”  While the Court has been telling the wealthy “Full speed ahead,” some 45 million Americans have been getting by on food stamps, and several million more are too worried about their jobs &/or foreclosures to help bankroll local or national candidates.  The First Amendment is about Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Expression.  It has nothing to do with permitting corporate financial power to overwhelm the free speech of the people—to drown out their voices.  Here we are in Mark Twain territory: “You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise, you are nearly sure to get caught.”

The two other instances of Supreme Court-Constitutional perfidies came lickety-split in June, 2011.   First the Court decided that 1.5 million female employees of Walmart could not exercise their First Amendment right of Free Speech by uniting in a class-action suit against their alleged gender-biased employer—that global corporation that has helped to finance thousands of factories and sweatshops around the world and driven down wages in the homeland.  Again, one thinks of Samuel Butler: “Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.”  Cannibalizing the working class is fine and dandy, the fat cats caterwaul, but the tasty morsels would be gauche to complain!

Perhaps these salivating cats have not read the First Amendment carefully or they would have understood that the right to petition for governmental redress of grievances also comes within its purview.  And, one wonders: if corporations have expanded their rights as persons and have increasingly assumed quasi-governmental powers—often writing legislation through their lobbyists—haven’t We the People the right to petition corporations and our government for a redress of grievances?

The third wave of these judicial outrages came just in time for the 4th of July celebrations of our freedoms!  In another 5-4 decision, with Don Scalia writing the majority opinion, the Court effectively told California’s parents they could go screw themselves.  (But not in public!)

On John Stewart’s show the other night, I caught a sample of the kind of videos California’s parents did not want sold to their children: an attractive blond in a skin-tight wet-suit was literally being torn apart by two hulking males on either side of her, pulling on her limbs like a chicken’s wishing bone.  Guts, blood and gore spill out of the cracked carcass.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that the Court honored the First Amendment Right of Expression of the multi-billion dollar video-“game” industry over the First Amendment Right of millions of Californians to express their opprobrium.  (And these citizens, one should note, were not insisting on censorship—they wanted regulation: under the same principles that we regulate the sale of alcohol, tobacco or firearms to minors, or restrict their access to potentially dangerous motor vehicles.)  Wise justices might have recalled Ben Franklin: “Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, it is forbidden because it is hurtful.”

Probably it is too much to hope, in the majority of these “Justices,” for the quality of mind that can penetrate the great mysteries of life, truth, and morality—not to mention justice and law!.  We hope for wisdom and the understanding of great hearts… and we are met with the Wall of the Law.  About one hundred and fifty years ago, Chief Seattle of the Duwampo tribe, perceived our fatal dichotomies all too well:

“He gave you laws. … Your religion was written upon tables of stone by the iron finger of your God. … Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors—the dreams of our old men… and it is written in the hearts of our people. … Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea.  It is the order of nature, and regret is useless.  Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend with friend cannot be exempt from the common destiny.”

Gary Corseri’s articles, poems, fiction, and dramas have appeared at hundreds of online and hard-copy venues, including The Greanville Journal, ActivistPost, CounterPunch, Global Research, The New York Times, Village Voice, Dissident Voice, Redbook and CommonDreams. He has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library and Museum. He has published two novels (Holy Grail, Holy Grail and A Fine Excess), a literary anthology (Manifestations, edited), two collections of poems, and his dramas have been on Atlanta-PBS and elsewhere. He can be reached at: gary_corseri@comcast.net or garyscorseri@gmail.com.

___________________________________________________________________________________________
PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE
A TOOL IS USELESS IF IT’S NOT USED. Don’t just sit there…introduce a friend or relative to The Greanville Post and help us expand the reach of remedial ideas and information. If each of you brings merely ONE additional reader to the table, we will be able to double our circulation!
___________________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

If you liked this article, why not support The Greanville Post by buying our T-shirt, a mug, a mousepad, or any other item now in our store? That way you donate a few dollars and also get a nice gift. It’s a win-win formula!

Created By CrankyBeagle for The Greanville Post
This and many other items at our store.  Stop by today!



Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

Prosecutions Up, Transparency Down

By LINDA GREENE

Teresa Chambers is the luckiest whistleblower in the United States. She lost her job as the first woman chief of the U.S. Park Police after she told the media in 2004 that the department was below the number required to perform the job adequately. She sued, and in January 2011 won her case.

But her victory is a rarity in the 21st century as President Barack Obama, who as an Illinois senator was instrumental in passing legislation to protect government whistleblowers, has effectively criminalized public servants who risk their jobs to speak out and expose waste, corruption and unethical behavior among their colleagues.

When campaigning in 2008, Obama promised to protect whistleblowers, saying their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled,” ABC News’ Megan Chuchmach and Rhonda Schwartz reported on Aug. 4, 2009.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer agreed in a May 23, 2011. “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,'” she wrote. “But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness.”

Since he became president, Obama, acting under the Espionage Act, has indicted five whistleblowers who allegedly leaked sensitive government information, the New York Times reported on June 11. “In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions.”

In an April 27 e-mail, Paula Dinerstein, an attorney with the Washington-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit, public interest law firm, said whistleblower in federal law “includes one who discloses substantial and specific dangers to public health or safety.”

The most famous case is that of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an army intelligence analyst who allegedly revealed confidential government documents to Wikileaks. Before Manning had a trial or was convicted of a crime, Obama declared him guilty. “He broke the law,” the president said in April at a fundraising event in San Francisco. The Department of Defense has since charged Manning with “aiding the enemy,” a crime punishable by death.

A lesser-known case is that of Thomas Drake, a senior executive at the National Security Agency, who was indicted in 2007 for leaking top secret defense documents to a Baltimore Sun reporter. Mayer’s New Yorker article is titled “The Secret Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?”

The effect of these cases has been to criminalize whistleblowing and dissent.

***

As chief of the U.S. Park Police, she was responsible for the safety and security of some of America’s most significant symbols of freedom — including such sites as the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge area and the area surrounding the White House.

Chambers’s troubles began in 2004, when she spoke frankly to the media, as her superiors had instructed her to do. In response to a Washington Post reporter’s question about Park Police staffing, she said her department was below the number required to perform the job adequately.

As reported in an editorial in the Jan. 11 issue of the Post, the department “had been forced to cut back on patrols beyond the Mall, she said, because of Interior Department orders requiring more officers to guard downtown monuments in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Traffic accidents … have increased on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, which now often has two officers on patrol instead of the recommended four.”

Chambers was only stating the facts. According to the Post editorial, “She did not breach federal law by revealing classified information. Nor did her statements put lives at stake; if anything, her honest appraisal served to alert the public and lawmakers to real dangers.”

Chambers’s bosses in the Interior Department confiscated her gun and badge and placed her on administrative leave immediately thereafter, eventually firing her.

“That’s unfortunate,” Chambers said, “when we’re taught as little kids [to] speak up for what’s right, make sure [that] harm doesn’t fall on anyone else. When we try to do that, we find ourselves on the losing end.”

After a legal battle fought in administrative agencies and federal courts, Chambers won her case in January 2011 and was reinstated in her job. The resolution of the case was a long time coming — seven years, to be exact. But her victory was complete.

“The thorough and thoroughly convincing opinion by the Merit Systems Protection Board [MSPB] concluded that Ms. Chambers was improperly fired in a classic act of retaliation against a whistleblower,” the Post said in the editorial. “The Interior Department pointed to other infractions allegedly committed by Ms. Chambers that it said justified the disciplinary action, but the board concluded that the department probably would not have moved against the chief absent her protected whistleblowing comments to the media.”

As Chambers said, “It was so blatant that [firing me] was retaliatory, that it had happened right after I had spoken to the press, and then they drug up old incidents that had happened. Tried to convince the court that [I] was a bad employee and would have been fired or disciplined otherwise. And finally the MSPB saw through that and threw out everything not on a technicality but the fact that there was never any evidence to support those charges.”

When asked whether she thought gender discrimination played a part in her case, Chambers replied, “I believe in my heart that gender may have played a role in this. We would never be able to prove it. … There were men who had done things that were much more assertive as far as talking to the press about resource needs. A former Park Police chief [had] gone to the Washington Post with [a report of] staffing shortages. He was never so much as criticized, much less ostracized or disciplined in any way.”

***

What really made her case unique wasn’t what happened in the courtroom, but what happened outside the courtroom, Chambers said.

“We made this a very public battle,” she said. “I was under an illegal gag order and couldn’t engage in conversations and interviews about what was going on, but my husband was certainly free to exercise his First Amendment rights. He took this to the public.”

Chambers said she’ll ever know the entire impact that the Web site had. It was a place for people to point to and hopefully give them help. One of her favorite aspects were comments left by visitors. “It’s humbling to read this and realize that there are so many people out there who have been harmed,” she said.

Or that there are so many whistleblowers who tried to do the right thing but, because they didn’t have the financial means or retirement packages, attorneys that believed in them, or the physical and mental stamina needed to pursue a whistleblower case, they were unable to fight back.

The Web site has drawn over 215,000 visitors.

Of her seven-year ordeal Chambers said, “My case shows the kind of perseverance one has to have if you have a chance of prevailing. … Not many whistleblowers are going to be able to stick to it as long as we have all these years.”

***

After 21 years in policing, Chambers became chief of police in Durham, N.C., in January 1998. She went to work for the Park Police in 2002. Her husband, a retired police officer, and she both had retirement incomes, so they had time to pursue the case.

However, in a year they used up most of their retirement savings fighting for her job. If it hadn’t been for PEER working pro bono to represent her and the fact that some of her lawyers (including Bloomington’s Mick Harrison) worked for a “greatly reduced fee,” she might well have lost the case.

According to PEER attorney Dinerstein, the Chambers case results were significant.

“The case was groundbreaking legally,” she wrote in an e-mail. “First it established that federal employees are entitled to whistleblower protection for disclosing specific dangers to public health or safety, even if those dangers emanate from budget or policy decisions concerning the funding of certain government activities or programs. In Chambers’s case, she claimed that understaffing and underfunding of the Park Police was leading to specific dangers to public safety.

“The second is that even where the employee is found to have engaged in some misconduct, they cannot be punished for it if that punishment is really a pretext for retaliating against the employee for whistleblower disclosures. Once an employee is found to be a whistleblower, the agency has a heavy burden of proof to show that the action taken against the employee was not retaliation.”

The final MSPB decision implemented the law and the standards of proof the way that the whistleblower community has long advocated, Dinerstein wrote.

“The MSPB examined the record of the case in depth to see whether the charges brought against Chambers which were not directly premised on her protected whistleblowing (the only ones that could possibly stand) had strong evidence behind them. Even though the court above them had previously upheld those charges on a preponderance of the evidence standard, the board found the evidence was weak for purposes of meeting the government’s heavy burden in a whistleblower case.”

The MSPB also looked at the government’s motivation and concluded the charges would not have been brought at all if Chambers had not been a whistleblower, Dinerstein wrote.

“This left no legitimate charges against her, and she was reinstated. So the decision, while not actually changing existing law, is a model of how whistleblower cases should be analyzed.”

Linda Greene writes for the Bloomington Alternative. She can be reached at lgreene@bloomington.in.us.

__________________________________________________________________________________________
PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE
A TOOL IS USELESS IF IT’S NOT USED. Don’t just sit there…introduce a friend or relative to The Greanville Post and help us expand the reach of remedial ideas and information. If each of you brings merely ONE additional reader to the table, we will be able to double our circulation!
___________________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

If you liked this article, why not support The Greanville Post by buying our T-shirt, a mug, a mousepad, or any other item now in our store? That way you donate a few dollars and also get a nice gift. It’s a win-win formula!

Created By CrankyBeagle for The Greanville Post
This and many other items at our store.  Stop by today!



Obama’s “Decent Interval” on Bush’s Wars

The United States continues toward slow-motion defeats in George W.
Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Barack Obama seeking, in
essence, a “decent interval” so the losses aren’t pinned on him and
the Democrats. But Lawrence Davidson asks what it will take for
Americans to finally begin a full reassessment of failed foreign
strategies.

By Lawrence Davidson

In December 2009, President Barack Obama committed the U.S. to an
“Afghan surge,” allocating an additional 30,000 soldiers for a
projected 18 months in order to accomplish specific “narrowly defined”
goals, chief among these the “disrupting, dismantling and defeating
[of] al-Qaeda and its extremist allies.”

On June 22, the President reported that this mission has been
accomplished and “the tide of war is receding.” Thus, he announced the
withdrawal of some 33,000 troops between now and the end of 2012.

Not coincidentally, a Pew Center poll has just come out saying that 56
percent of Americans are sick and tired of the Afghan War. Of course,
even with the announced drawdown, about 68,000 U.S. troops will remain
in Afghanistan until, according to Obama’s timetable, the end of 2014.
At that point the war in Afghanistan will be brought “to a responsible
end.”

The Republican responses to Obama’s announcement varied. Some
Republicans such as presidential candidate Mitt Romney, taking the
hint from the same poll that no doubt encouraged the President’s
decision, are saying they favor a rapid withdrawal.

However, others such as Rep. Mike Rogers, House Intelligence Committee
chairman, oppose Obama’s timetable, claiming that Obama is playing
politics by manipulating troop levels. These multiple responses mean
that whatever happens the Republicans can always say “we told you so.”

The U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan are not happy about the
pullout. They claim that withdrawal of the surge troops at this time
undercuts “consolidation of the fragile gains” made in Helmand and
other provinces where the Taliban had strongholds

This point is probably true but is based on the assumption that the
“gains” could ever be something more than “fragile.”

Most Americans have learned nothing about foreign affairs. It is all a
mystery to them and they have gladly abdicated this part of their
national lives to the politicians and lobbyists who forget mistakes as
soon as they make them.

On the other hand, Afghan commanders, such as General Mohammad Zahir
Azimi of the Afghanistan Defense Ministry, declared that his country’s
army will “fill the gap” created by the withdrawing Americans. “We are
ready,” he said, though he is probably as naive as his American
counterparts.

All of this has an unreal sound for those who actually know the modern
history Afghanistan. That history, properly considered, makes the
entire American adventure in that country problematic.

In a recent interview with Amy Goodman on her show Democracy Now!,
Middle East scholar Juan Cole stated that “U.S. leaders often are just
not good on history.” He noted that the British in the 19th century
had “tens of thousands of troops” in sensitive parts of Afghanistan
and could not pacify them.

Then, of course, the Russians failed in a similar endeavor, as well.

What are the odds, Cole said, that a “relatively temporary … and small
American expeditionary force can go into some of these provinces and
shape them up for the long term? I always thought that was just very
unlikely.”

Indeed, it was and still is.

Here are some other points to consider:

–As far as the Afghanistan franchise of al-Qaeda is concerned, it has
long ceased to be a factor in the Afghan War. Even back in December
2009, when President Obama announced his “surge,” U.S. intelligence
estimates put the number of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan at no
more than 100.

Therefore, even before the death of Osama bin Laden, the war in
Afghanistan was not so much about al-Qaeda as “its extremist allies.”
–And who are these “extremist allies”? Well, they are the Taliban. But
as the “they” implies, the Taliban are not one unified group. They are
many groups.

As Cole told Amy Goodman, “what the U.S. calls the Taliban is four or
five different groups, and they’re not necessarily all Mullah Omar
people.” Mullah Omar is the fellow who was in charge in Afghanistan
when the Americans invaded in 2001.

Right from the beginning. U.S. leaders had a tendency to mix all these
elements with al-Qaeda. Certainly the Bush Jr. people lumped them
altogether.

When, after 9/11, the government of Afghanistan responded to the Bush
demand for the surrender of Bin Laden with a request for evidence of
his involvement with those horrific attacks, the Bushites did not even
bother to respond. All these folks were one and the same to them and
they just launched the invasion.

–Today it does not matter who is with Mullah Omar and who is not. All
the Taliban factions are opposed to U.S. intervention in their country
and all are opposed to the corrupt and often incompetent ally of
America, President Hamid Karzai, sitting in Kabul. And they know that
without the presence of American combat troops, they have the power to
bring down his government.

–In this regard President Obama also knows that between now and 2014
the United States cannot make the Kabul government strong enough and
popular enough to survive. He both tells us that al-Qaeda is all but
defeated and “we will not try to make Afghanistan a perfect place. We
will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely. That
is the responsibility of the Afghan government.”

These juxtaposed statements reflect an as yet feeble effort to
separate out what Americans have always thought were the same thing.
The President is suggesting that we can defeat al-Qaeda and still lose
Afghanistan to Taliban factions. He is beginning to tell us this
because that is the way it is going to be.

–However, Obama is going to make as good a show of drawing down as he
can. He certainly does not want to see another Vietnam style retreat.
He wants to minimize the chances of the Democrats being blamed for a
debacle.

So, whether it be Iraq or Afghanistan, his goal is to accomplish “a
responsible end.” After that, it will be the natives’ fault if Iraq
ends up with a government allied to Iran and/or falls back into
sectarian Sunni vs Shi’ite vs. Kurd civil war.

And, after 2014 it will be Karzai who will take the blame when Kabul
falls to some form of “Taliban” government and/or relapses back into a
sectarian civil war of Pashtuns vs. the country’s various ethnic
minorities. So the “responsible end” really means no more or less than
an orderly withdrawal.

What would a really “responsible end” entail? It would involve
meaningful reflection on the part of both the President and Congress
about U.S. foreign policy over the last 50 years.

If they thought deeply and objectively, they would come to the rather
obvious conclusion that — if Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan can teach
us anything — it is that the standing policies that have led us into
such disasters need serious examination and reworking.

Unfortunately there is absolutely no sign that any of our leaders are
on this learning curve. President Obama’s precipitous jump into the
morass that is now Libya shows that he is quite willing to continue
the opportunistic war policies of his predecessors.

And, the shameful display of Congress slobbering over Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu several weeks ago tells us that branch of
the government is stuck in a deep and dangerous rut.

A lot of this tunnel vision reflects the fact that foreign policy is
just domestic policy in altered form. It flows from home-grown
political and ideological attitudes which are systemic.

We repeatedly head full speed off a cliff because we are being pushed
from behind and not pulled from the front. And this means that while
Obama may exit relatively gracefully from Iraq and Afghanistan, there
will be no “responsible end” to disastrous foreign adventures.

The domestic lobbies that define our foreign “interests” will demand these.
What would it take to fundamentally change the nation’s way of doing things?

Political parties, government bureaucracies, entrenched lobbies and
ideological outlooks are big and weighty things. They move through
time and space in a straight line (perhaps this is tradition) and do
not change directions easily.

Indeed, it takes a powerful force coming in at an angle to deflect
such institutions onto some truly new course. Most often, such a
powerful force is a negative one, some sort of serious catastrophe
which the U.S. has yet to confront.

As a country it is so stuck in its ways, and so full of hubris and
self-righteousness, that over the past few generations it has absorbed
repeated military defeats and nearly gone bankrupt while still not
altering its response patterns to foreign happenings. It is a real
wonder to behold!

John Davies, a 17th century English poet, once remarked that people
learn little but forget much.

Most Americans have learned nothing about foreign affairs. It is all a
mystery to them and they have gladly abdicated this part of their
national lives to the politicians and lobbyists who forget mistakes as
soon as they make them.

At this rate, the United States will not go out with a bang. It will
just be a death-dealing whimper.

Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in
Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing
America’s National Interest; America’s Palestine: Popular and Offical
Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic
Fundamentalism.

___________________________________________________________________________________________
PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE
A TOOL IS USELESS IF IT’S NOT USED. Don’t just sit there…introduce a friend or relative to The Greanville Post and help us expand the reach of remedial ideas and information. If each of you brings merely ONE additional reader to the table, we will be able to double our circulation!
___________________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

If you liked this article, why not support The Greanville Post by buying our T-shirt, a mug, a mousepad, or any other item now in our store? That way you donate a few dollars and also get a nice gift. It’s a win-win formula!

Created By CrankyBeagle for The Greanville Post
This and many other items at our store.  Stop by today!



Is Obama embracing unconstitutional powers?

Thursday’s Hill newspaper story on the White House’s new Libya War is one for the history books. It is probably the most concise summation of two of the most powerful post-9/11 tropes in our politics.

First and foremost, as my Salon.com colleague Glenn Greenwald deftly shows, it exemplifies the unprincipled, hyper-partisan nature of our public policy discourse, to the point where on the gravest matters of war and peace, professional politicians and activists are thrilled to use the same jeremiads they previously criticized once it is in their momentary self-interest to do so.

But that’s not all that this article so perfectly captures. In quoting the Obama administration’s petulant criticism of Congress, it gives us a candid-camera snapshot of the executive branch’s Kingly Presumption of blatantly unconstitutional authority. Here’s what I mean (emphasis mine):

President Obama and his aides appear increasingly angered by threats from Congress over the president’s authority to intervene in Libya.

Both in remarks the president made during his address on Afghanistan Wednesday night and in comments made by senior administration officials, the White House is losing patience with Congress…

One senior administration official, on a conference call with reporters Wednesday afternoon, seemed even more angered by the defunding threats from both sides of the aisle.

“And I think, astoundingly, there is a move in the House of Representatives to take an effort as it relates to the ongoing effort to stop a tyrant in Libya and to turn it into a political football in such a way here as to give, at a critical time — potentially send a very negative signal to the leadership of that country, which, as we all know, has over the course of time carried out hateful and heinous attacks against U.S. citizens, including terrorist attacks.”

If we take the Hill’s portrayal of its sources as an accurate picture of the White House’s not-for-attribution statements and attitude, and put it next to an administration that insists it is “astounding” for Congress to even consider fulfilling its War Powers Clause/War Powers Act responsibilities (and yes, they are responsibilities and not just prerogatives) — we see a posture that goes way beyond the mere “unitary executive” theory. We see, in short, an administration asserting a monarchical supremacy that inherently assumes that there’s no need to even rhetorically argue the legality of actions, much less halt those actions.

This, to be sure, is a step further down the authoritarian path than the recent — and preposterous — insistence by the White House that the Libya War is not actually a war. Obviously, it is a war as evidenced by the bombs, civilian casualties, Pentagon price tag — and obviously the administration actually sees it as a war, as evidenced by its (correct) decision to grant soldiers combat pay.

At least with the administration’s “War Is Peace” message, the president was implicitly admitting he was required to try to offer an explanation — however ludicrous and transparent — for how his actions can possibly be seen as legal. But now the message has clearly changed from Orwellian horseshit to the Kingly Presumption, spiced up with a few salutes to ends-justify-the-means-ism.

It is this shift that threatens to create a new precedent that goes beyond even this administration’s current practice of totally ignoring Congress. If he is successful in pioneering the Kingly Presumption, Obama will have permanently delegitimized the right of Americans and their lawmakers to even question the legality of illegal war.

  • David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book “Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More: David Sirota

___________________________________________________________________________________________
PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE
A TOOL IS USELESS IF IT’S NOT USED. Don’t just sit there…introduce a friend or relative to The Greanville Post and help us expand the reach of remedial ideas and information. If each of you brings merely ONE additional reader to the table, we will be able to double our circulation!
___________________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

If you liked this article, why not support The Greanville Post by buying our T-shirt, a mug, a mousepad, or any other item now in our store? That way you donate a few dollars and also get a nice gift. It’s a win-win formula!

Created By CrankyBeagle for The Greanville Post
This and many other items at our store.  Stop by today!