war on terror – Page 2

“I don’t know what she has been up to”

By timmukyPosted on May 17, 2012Posted in civil liberties, obama, war on terrorNo Comments

For a day or two at least, people who are alarmed at Orwellian legal trends can jump up and down and get excited. Katherine Forrest, an Obama-appointed judge (yes, you read that right), has enjoined any enforcement of Section 1021 of the NDAA because she was concerned that the Government was implying speech may equal terrorism (and be subject to indefinite detention)!

Glenn Greenwald:

This afternoon’s ruling came as part of a lawsuit brought by seven dissident plaintiffs — including Chris Hedges, Dan Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, and Birgitta Jonsdottir — alleging that the NDAA violates ”both their free speech and associational rights guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

A couple of quotes to give flavor of the caliber (and arrogance) of the government’s lawyers:

The Court then asked: Give me an example. Tell me what it means to substantially support associated forces.

Government: I’m not in a position to give specific examples.

Court: Give me one.

Government: I’m not in a position to give one specific example.

Adam Serwer, filling in for Kevin Drum, and a good thing too:

When Forrest asked the government lawyer charged with defending the statute whether the journalists, who said their work has brought them into contact with groups like Hamas or the Taliban, could be indefinitely detained, the government’s lawyer wouldn’t say….

When asked again whether one of the journalists’ activities would qualify as “substantial” support for a terrorist group, the government attorney said, “I don’t know what she has been up to.”

Good analysis as usual by Serwer here, and it almost goes without saying by Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald.

Behind all of this looms the case of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who continues to be locked up at Obama’s personal insistence, basically for the crime of being an intrepid and independent journalist.

But of course that couldn’t happen here….

And apparently, this could conceivably get (partially) sorted out today, in Congress with passage of the Smith-Amash Amendment.

That would be something. Yesterday, we had a rare instance of the Judicial Branch (an Obama-appointed judge, no less) doing its job and acting as a check on a grotesque power grab by the Executive Branch. Today, Congress has a chance to do something similar.

The Obama administration acts disgracefully; GOP does them one better

By timmukyPosted on May 1, 2012Posted in obama, politics, war, war on terrorNo Comments

One hoped there would be some negative consequences for overplaying the offing of Osama so shamelessly, but one is not holding one’s breath.

In a first for network television, NBC News has been granted unprecedented access to the most secret and secure part of the White House, the Situation Room. In a “Rock Center with Brian Williams” exclusive airing on Wednesday, May 2 at 9p/8c, President Obama and his national security and military teams, relive the pivotal moments of the raid targeting Osama bin Laden.

Well that generated at least this little bit of snark, directed at NBC: “I guess bowing to the president and hiring the secretary of state’s unqualified daughter as a special correspondent should be worth something, shouldn’t it?”

But, ah, well. McCain. Romney. Rove. Oy.

I don’t accept the premise that the killing, by twenty-some rippled, ever-so-manly assassins, of an unarmed, old man in front of his family, is “a nonpartisan, nationally unifying anniversary.” No matter what crimes he is accused of. But that puts me in the kook corner, and I’m OK with that.

As is so often the case, the behavior of both parties is cringe-worthy. Happily, as is rarely the case, this controversy CAN be summed up in a tweet, and Radley Balko said it best:

(A) Yes, Bush would have been selling a “He Killed Osama” campaign shirt by now. (B) “Not Quite as Crass as Bush” shouldn’t be your aim.

“Due process just means a process that you do.” Colbert’s reductio ad absurdum FTW

By timmukyPosted on March 7, 2012Posted in civil liberties, obama, politics, rule of law, war, war on terrorNo Comments

There is not much to add to this priceless Colbert bit.

Except to point out that nobody really cares. It’s not exactly heartening to see what little impact Holder’s mind-bogglingly brazen (and incoherent) Northwestern speech had. I know. I know. Rush Limbaugh!

I’ll also concede that this is just making it official: the U.S. Government refuses to be bound by any authority beyond its own political calculations. It’s normalizing and codifying the fact that the War on Terror’s largest single consequence may now be that the Government no longer feels it needs to offer its citizens centuries-old rights and protections.

Today, it’s the Obama Administration; a few years earlier, it was Bush, doing it on the sly. The two are presidents from Central Casting. Bush was the blustery Cowboy, Obama the calm bipartisan bureaucrat–but the effect is the same. Regardless of what party is in office, the government realizes that the electorate no longer has any significant leverage. Democrats will support the leader of their party, no matter how conservative or, in this case, downright reactionary his policies are. So a living wage? Why? What are the people gonna do? Constitutional protections? Why? Who’s gonna squawk? The ACLU? Ha.Ha.

So this is where we are. Due process was once the hallmark of American government, (within obvious limitations–for blacks, for women, for Japanese and Germans in wartime, it didn’t apply. Naturally.) But it was there, at least for the people the government claimed to represent. But, like habeas corpus, it belongs to another time. Today, for the unfortunate soul accused of being a terrorist (which used to mean being al qaeda, but now has expanded to include [former allies] the Taliban and associated groups–and adolescent family members), your due process boils down to this:

The President and his underlings are your accuser, your judge, your jury and your executioner all wrapped up in one, acting in total secrecy and without your even knowing that he’s accused you and sentenced you to death, and you have no opportunity even to know about, let alone confront and address, his accusations; is that not enough due process for you?

You gotta hand it to Obama, though. This is great politics. Blowing people up in some dusty land halfway around the world is such a perfect piece of political theater and control. Poll numbers down? Time to get another scalp. The government need only trumpet the successes. Beautiful. (And grudgingly, passive-aggressively sorta kinda own up to the misses. Not that there’s a whole lot of follow-up on these things).

Obama’s defenders, ~~remarkably,~~ see nothing odd or contradictory or WRONG in the president’s more than enthusiastic adaptation of Bush policies he campaigned against. In fact, they cannot contain their glee.

President Obama’s foreign policy has been remarkably successful. Just ask 22 of the top 30 al Qaeda leaders. Oh, wait, you can’t. They’re dead—on Obama’s orders. He has approved 239 Predator drone attacks in just three years. George W. Bush approved 44 in eight years, the wuss.

So that’s the calculus of consummate insider Paul Begala. The more drone strikes, the better the foreign policy. And Republicans are wusses. Nyah! Nyah!

Will the Republicans, those brave representatives of the Constitution-obsessed Tea Party throngs, make Obama face any consequences for, in effect, vaporizing vaguely threatening foreigners (even those who are U.S. citizens) with a mere wave of his finger?

Hell nah! They can’t wait til it’s their turn….

If we make it through December

By timmukyPosted on December 1, 2011Posted in civil liberties, country music, music, politics, war, war on terrorTagged if we make it through december, merle haggardNo Comments

Reading the news, and it’s all bad

“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world.”
–Mayor Mike. See also this
“No one is arguing for rule of law as we once knew it. Rather, it’s a fight between those espousing martial rule of law and those espousing unilateral intelligence ops.”
–Marcy Wheeler, The Rule of Martial Law Vs. the Unitary Spookery
According to the study’s authors, the United States’ poor performance and relatively slow improvement compared with other nations may be attributable to “the lack of universal coverage and high costs of care.”
—U.S. Ranks Last Among High-Income Nations on Preventable Deaths
“Still, the world is watching a geopolitical game of chicken: Western powers are raising the stakes, threatening economic warfare and even kinetic military action unless Iran backs down; Iran believes it can withstand whatever the West and Israel is plausibly going to throw at it, and is firing symbolic warning shots of its own. To avoid an escalation that could lead to war, both sides would have to be offered acceptable off-ramps. But that takes diplomacy, which isn’t exactly in vogue in Western relations with Iran, right now.”
–Tony Karon, After the Embassy Attack: Are Iran and the West Lurching Toward War?

If you can’t try ’em, fry ’em (and the crowd goes crazy!)

By timmukyPosted on October 1, 2011Posted in capital punishment, civil liberties, war, war on terrorNo Comments

Marcy Wheeler writes:

That’s right, not just one, but two, Americans were summarily and extrajudicially executed by their own government today, at the direct order of the President of the United States. No trial, no verdict, just off with their heads. Heck, there were not even charges filed against either Awlaki or Khan. And it is not that the government did not try either, there was a grand jury convened on Khan, but no charges. Awlaki too was investigated for charges at least twice by the DOJ, but non were found.

I confess to not knowing about the halfhearted attempts at legally dealing with Awlaki and Khan, but it’s not surprising to see them overlooked in media coverage of Friday’s assassination. It fits the big picture. We couldn’t convict them in any court of anything, so let’s just blow their asses away!

So that is where we stand. Bringing to its logical conclusion a process started under Clinton, the current president has declared himself to be Emperor of the Planet. If he says you’re an Extra Special Evil Enemy, you’re dead, even if you’re an American citizen. This is not the first time Obama’s exercised the imperial prerogative to put names on a death list, but it’s the most high-profile instance. And to read the responses from media and politicians–mostly bowing to the somber need to rid our country of these fucking cockroaches–is to cry.

I don’t think much has changed since I wrote “First they came, the invisible whites, and dealt death from afar” nearly a year ago. Except that now the USA is in major “Fuck Yeah!” mode in zapping terror leaders! And the efficiency of drone attacks has improved, uh, miraculously. Top counterterror honcho John Brennan now claims zero accidental deaths from drone strikes.

He actually said this:

There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.

Yes, ZERO. Earlier a key figure said, in the pages of the Times, that the success rate was more along the order of one in fifty. Now it’s one HUNDRED PERCENT.

Did the science of targeting big-ass rockets at blurry shapes on monitors improve that dramatically, or did the government just decide to lie brazenly about it?

Take your pick, but you should really ponder this report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism before you do….

There have been a good few critical responses to the Awlaki killing, mostly focusing on the fact that we are now murdering Americans without due process.

Truly, that is appalling, but isn’t it a tiny nuance, compared to the fact that a nation, protected by massive oceans on either side and friendly neighbors north and south, is vaporizing any human beings on the other side of the planet –the targeted person(s) and whoever else happens to be nearby when the Hellfire missile explodes–and then claiming self-defense? Mighty America is defending itself from a preacher in YEMEN?!!!! Just let the crazy of that sink in for a moment.

The libertarians have been getting to me, I guess. Not their goofy belief in the magic benevolence of markets, but in their justified questions of what exactly empowers the state to kill anyone, whether it be a hapless poor person of color who can’t afford decent counsel, or renegade Muslim clerics, or indeed anyone in a country that is not massing its troops at our border.

I can’t counter the thought that all of these decisions to murder arise not from an earnest desire to protect Americans (though I grant that might be mixed into the motivation), but mainly from considerations of domestic political expediency. The local DA has to appear “tough on crime” to win re-election, just as the president has to avoid the “soft on defense” tag to undercut the kneejerk criticisms on this account that are certain to come from the opposing party.

The low, dishonest decade hasn’t bottomed out yet.

Anyway, here is that earlier piece I mentioned above. Sadly, it’s even more relevant than it was last year.

“We’re the dark matter”

By timmukyPosted on September 5, 2011Posted in afghanistan, iraq, militarism, rule of law, terrorism, torture, war, war on terror, wikileaksNo Comments

Reading the news this week, there are at least three (not unrelated) subjects that call to mind that great line from Adventureland: “Hey, do you have an ice-pick I can jam into my ears? I can’t listen to this song again.”

Liberals crowing (um, prematurely?) about the mighty triumph in Libya. Not surprisingly, you can find the quintessential dumb, media hack version on the Times’ OpEd page. There is an even dumber wonk version in the works — which quite possibly will lead to a new! improved! foreign policy going forward based on “R2P” which involves, you guessed it, more “kinetic military actions”.

The lack of response, from government and serious media alike, to the Wikileaks revelations about the 2006 atrocity in Ishaqi, in which U.S. soldiers executed 11 civilians, including women and toddlers, by tying their hands behind their backs, and shooting them in the head. And then called in an air strike to destroy the evidence.

And, to arbitrarily limit the list to three things, the USA’s Qaddafi problem, as laid out in this typically very good piece from Amy Davidson of the New Yorker, who seems to be one of the few voices in the mainstream press paying attention:

Its dealings in Libya are not the C.I.A.’s only problem; nor is the C.I.A. the only problem. The Washington Post has two new pieces in its “Top Secret America” series that one should read. The first, by Julie Tate and Greg Miller, is on the C.I.A.’s shift away from learning things and toward killing people considered dangerous (and who makes that call?), with analysts becoming “targeters.” The other, by Dana Priest and William Arkin, is about the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, which has held some thousand prisoners “in jails that it alone controls in Iraq and Afghanistan.” (“We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,” a SEAL told the Post.) The “C.I.A.” binder in Tripoli included “a list of 89 questions for the Libyans to ask a suspect,” the Times said. We should have at least that many—many more—for our own government.

Maybe minor, maybe not, but Davidson cites the “dark matter” quote, not what followed. The attribution itself is kind of revealing, no? It was not “a SEAL told the Post.” No, that creepy, grandiose claim came from “a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on the condition of anonymity.” Yes, strapping. Really?

To be sure, Priest and Arkin are not the only reporters in the land to have become aroused by contact with these hunky dudes.

The humble brag about being “dark matter,” the ever-expanding practice of extrajudicial assassination–something even Reagan condemned– on an unimaginable (and apparently unknowable) scale. The CIA quietly and without discussion transforming its mission from intelligence to becoming “one hell of a killing machine.” Working in close coordination with the very dictators we’re demonizing for the rubes at home…. That’s bad, I guess, but…. Hey, did you check out the six-packs on these dudes!

WikiLeaks: Extreme disclosure when the “last best hope” fails

By timmukyPosted on December 10, 2010Posted in iraq, militarism, rule of law, war on terror, wikileaksTagged jay rosen, judith miller, julian assange, michael massing, michael r gordon, new york times, parroting the government line, quaint notions, watchdog pressNo Comments

Jay Rosen’s From Judith Miller to Julian Assange pinpoints when the Paper of Record switched its mission statement–from reporting the news to parroting the government line, without skepticism, without verification.

For the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be identified with some precision: it was on Sunday, September 8, 2002.

On that morning the New York Times published a now notorious story, reported by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, in which nameless Bush Administration officials claimed that Iraq was trying to buy the kind of aluminum tubes necessary to build a nuclear centrifuge.

Rosen weaves in material from “Now they tell us,” Michael Massing’s 2004 analysis of “the nadir” (Rosen’s phrase) in the New York Review of Books, to demonstrate just how momentous that Sunday morning was:

We know from retrospective accounts that the Bush White House had already decided to go to war. We know from the Downing Street Memo that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” We know that the Bush forces had decided to rev up their sales campaign that week because ”from a marketing point of view you don’t introduce new products in August,” as chief of staff Andrew Card brazenly put it. We know that the appearance of the tubes story in the Times is what allowed Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice to run with it on the Sunday shows, because without that they would have been divulging classified information and flouting their own rules. We also know that the tubes story was wrong: they weren’t for centrifuges. And yet it was coming from the very top of the professional pyramid, the New York Times.

.. The government had closed circle on the press, laundering its own manipulated intelligence through the by-lines of two experienced reporters, smuggling the deed past layers of editors, and then marching it like a trained dog onto the Sunday talk shows to perform in a lurid doomsday act.
.

In retrospect, it looks awfully bad, but it’s significant that the Times has put a lot of effort into examining its own behavior, and is only a little bit sorry.

Below, a 14-minute video in which Rosen expands on the print piece (nice title, btw):

As for the events of the past two weeks, it appears the Times fancies it’s doing something qualitatively different from what the government is going after Assange for. Not everyone agrees. The ubiquitous and odious Joe Lieberman has already floated the idea of prosecuting the Times:

“I’m not here to make a final judgment on that, but to me the New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship,” he said. “Whether they’ve committed a crime, I think that bears a very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department.”

In contrast to the Times’ obliviousness, the Guardian’s Friday editorial recognizes the stakes. Although the focus here is on a free Internet, the bottom line for a nominally democratic society is the same.

In times when big business and governments attempt to monitor and control everything, there is a need as never before for an internet that remains a free and universal form of communication. WikiLeaks’ chief crime has been to speak truth to power. What is at stake is nothing less than the freedom of the internet. All the rest is a sideshow distracting attention from the real battle that is being fought. We should all keep focus on the true target.

Rosen makes the connection in his conclusion, quoting Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins, a Brit who evokes high (and apparently bygone) American standards of governance and transparency:

“Accountability can only default to disclosure. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails.” But at the nadir the last best hope failed, too. When that happens accountability defaults to extreme disclosure, which is where we are today. The institutional press isn’t driving it; the wilds of the Internet are. To understand Julian Assange and the weird reactions to him in the American press we need to tell a story that starts with Judy Miller and ends with Wikileaks

More on Iran’s parallel universe nuclear threat

By timmukyPosted on December 3, 2010Posted in iran, war, war on terror, wikileaksTagged 2007 nie, george bush, george bush having a hissy, iran nie, ray mcgovernNo Comments

I like to think that I’m up to speed on the subject of Iran’s purported nuclear program, but this RealNews Network interview with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern serves up some surprising news.

It was surprising to me, anyway, because I wouldn’t be caught dead reading the new Dubya bio, but McGovern did. Apparently even purchased the damn thing.

This entire interview is excellent. The avuncular McGovern stomps all over the Times’ ham-handed and just flat out wrong attempt to claim (over four pages in the print edition) the Iran/Saudi princes wikileak as support for their hysteria over the “sharp distress over a nuclear Iran.”

This in spite of the fact that the last word continues to be the 2007 NIE in which, as McGovern says, “sixteen intelligence agencies declared with great confidence that in 2003 Iran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

The part that surprised me was what McGovern pulled from the pages of Decision Points, Dubya’s bio (at 6:25 or so): that the young Bush threw an absolute hissy about the NIE when it came out, and promptly flew to Israel and Saudi Arabia to apologize!

Why apologize? (one might well ask). Isn’t this good news? Not for the Decider.

Ah, that explains all too well.

Oh, and as for an updated NIE, McGovern says Don’t hold your breath:

Also, an updated NIE on Iran’s nuclear program, completed earlier this year, is dead in its tracks, apparently because anti-Iran hawks inside the Obama administration are afraid it will leak. It is said to repeat pretty much the conclusions of the NIE from 2007.

Securitainment: the last remaining American growth industry

By timmukyPosted on November 28, 2010Posted in civil liberties, rule of law, terrorism, war on terrorNo Comments

Job security: The FBI shows how it’s done!

Not only did the Feds build this guy up in order to knock him down, they prevented him from taking a job that might have distracted him from their creepy entrapment campaign.

Anyway, I do sleep more soundly knowing this guy will never see the light of day again. And that the other threat to our nation’s well-being, Willie Nelson, will have to fight hard for his freedom in the coming months.

Greenwald:

But it may also just as easily be the case that the FBI — as they’ve done many times in the past — found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a “Terrorist plot” which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI’s own concoction. Having stopped a plot which it itself manufactured, the FBI then publicly touts — and an uncritical media amplifies — its “success” to the world, thus proving both that domestic Terrorism from Muslims is a serious threat and the Government’s vast surveillance powers — current and future new one — are necessary.

He also dares to talk about the elephant in the room, the Why Do They Hate Us thing:

We hear the same exact thing over and over and over from accused Terrorists — that they are attempting to carry about plots in retaliation for past American violence against Muslim civilians and to deter such future acts. Here we find one of the great mysteries in American political culture: that the U.S. Government dispatches its military all over the world — invading, occupying, and bombing multiple Muslim countries — torturing them, imprisoning them without charges, shooting them up at checkpoints, sending remote-controlled drones to explode their homes, imposing sanctions that starve hundreds of thousands of children to death — and Americans are then baffled when some Muslims — an amazingly small percentage — harbor anger and vengeance at them and want to return the violence. And here we also find the greatest myth in American political discourse: that engaging in all of that military aggression somehow constitutes Staying Safe and combating Terrorism — rather than doing more than any single other cause to provoke, sustain and fuel Terrorism.

It’s SHOW TRIAL time again!

By timmukyPosted on November 18, 2010Posted in civil liberties, guantanomo, law, obama, politics, rule of law, terrorism, torture, war on terrorTagged ghailani, ghailani trialNo Comments

Judge Lewis Kaplan opened the envelope with the charge sheet in it, read the verdict to himself, and then read it again. “There will be no outbursts,” he said, a statement that seemed odd given that there were no Ghailani family members present. The young foreman spoke from the raised jury box as Ghailani watched intently. Count one: not guilty. Count two, not guilty. By the time the foreman got to count four, the courtroom felt as if it had been transported to another galaxy. Count five: guilty. Counts six to 286: Not guilty. The words rang out over and over again, to no apparent reaction; far from outburst, it seemed as if no one had anything to say. By the end, the defendant stood convicted of one charge—conspiring to damage US property

Really, why does anyone even bother? The Right will throw a hissy about anything short of torturing terrorists to death on Pay Per View (even some on NPR are wringing their hands about this shameful acquittal of a terrrist!). And Obama defenders will point to this travesty as a demonstration of the return of the “rule of law” when of course, we are talking about some sort of stylized theatrical display where the disposition of the accused is never in question.

BECAUSE, as Glenn Greenwald notes, even had Ghailani been acquitted on all counts, “the Obama administration had made clear that it would simply continue to imprison him anyway under what it claims is the President’s ‘post-acquittal detention power.'”

It’s supposed to be extremely difficult for the Government to win the right to put someone in a cage for their entire lives, or to kill them. Having lived under a tyranny in which there were very few barriers impeding the leader’s desire to imprison or otherwise punish someone — and having waged a war to escape that oppression — the Founders designed it this way on purpose. And they did so with the full knowledge that clearly guilty and even extremely evil people would sometimes receive something other than the punishment they deserve. Here’s how Thomas Jefferson weighed those considerations, as expressed in a 1791 letter: “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.”

“The inconveniencies attending too much liberty”–now there’s a notion from another time. So really, why bother? This is still about tiny distinctions between two parties who are in agreement about the Government’s absolute right to “put someone in a cage for their entire lives” regardless of what happens in their rigged courts.