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The Pentagon's War on Accountability |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=19796"><span class="small">William Hartung, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Wednesday, 25 May 2016 14:40 |
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Hartung writes: "Now you see it, now you don't. Think of it as the Department of Defense's version of the street con game, three-card monte, or maybe simply as the Pentagon shuffle. In any case, the Pentagon's budget is as close to a work of art as you're likely to find in the U.S. government - if, that is, by work of art you mean scam."
F22 fighter jet on a runway. (photo: Getty)
The Pentagon's War on Accountability
By William D. Hartung, TomDispatch
24 May 16
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I hope those of you who want to ensure that TD’s voice stays strong in this grim world of ours will think about donating to the site. Remember that, for a contribution of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can get a signed, personalized copy of Nick Turse’s powerful, up-close-and-personal new Dispatch Book on a country that has become a war-crimes zone, Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, or Rebecca Gordon’s American Nuremberg, a riveting account of who should (but never will) be in the dock in future war-crimes trials here, or a range of other books on offer (including mine). Just check out the details at our donation page. Tom]
Colonel Mark Cheadle, a spokesman for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), recently made a startling disclosure to Voice of America (VOA). AFRICOM, he said, is currently mulling over 11 possible locations for its second base on the continent. If, however, there was a frontrunner among them Cheadle wasn’t about to disclose it. All he would say was that Nigeria isn't one of the countries in contention.
Writing for VOA, Carla Babb filled in the rest of the picture in terms of U.S. military activities in Africa. “The United States currently has one military base in the east African nation of Djibouti,” she observed. “U.S. forces are also on the ground in Somalia to assist the regional fight against al-Shabab and in Cameroon to help with the multinational effort against Nigeria-based Boko Haram.”
A day later, Babb’s story disappeared. Instead, there was a new article in which she noted that “Cheadle had initially said the U.S. was looking at 11 locations for a second base, but later told VOA he misunderstood the question.” Babb reiterated that the U.S. had only the lone military base in Djibouti and stated that “[o]ne of the possible new cooperative security locations is in Cameroon, but Cheadle did not identify other locations due to ‘host nation sensitivities.’”
U.S. troops have, indeed, been based at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti since 2002. In that time, the base has grown from 88 acres to about 600 acres and has seen more than $600 million in construction and upgrades already awarded or allocated. It’s also true that U.S. troops, as Babb notes, are operating in Somalia -- from at least two bases -- and the U.S. has indeed set up a base in Cameroon. As such, the “second” U.S. base in Africa, wherever it’s eventually located, will actually be more like the fifth U.S. base on the continent. That is, of course, if you don’t count Chabelley Airfield, a hush-hush drone base the U.S. operates elsewhere in Djibouti, or the U.S. staging areas, cooperative security locations, forward operating locations, and other outposts in Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal, the Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda, among other locales. When I counted late last year, in fact, I came up with 60 such sites in 34 countries. And just recently, Missy Ryan of the Washington Post added to that number when she disclosed that “American Special Operations troops have been stationed at two outposts in eastern and western Libya since late 2015.”
To be fair, the U.S. doesn’t call any of these bases “bases” -- except when officials forget to keep up the fiction. For example, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 included a $50 million request for the construction of an “airfield and base camp at Agadez, Niger.” But give Cheadle credit for pushing a fiction that persists despite ample evidence to the contrary.
It isn’t hard, of course, to understand why U.S. Africa Command has set up a sprawling network of off-the-books bases or why it peddles misinformation about its gigantic “small” footprint in Africa. It’s undoubtedly for the same reason that they stonewall me on even basic information about their operations. The Department of Defense, from tooth to tail, likes to operate in the dark.
Today, TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung reveals another kind of Pentagon effort to obscure and obfuscate involving another kind of highly creative accounting: think slush funds, secret programs, dodgy bookkeeping, and the type of financial malfeasance that could only be carried out by an institution that is, by its very nature, too big to fail (inside the Beltway if not on the battlefield).
Rejecting both accurate accounting and actual accountability -- from the halls of the Pentagon to austere camps in Africa -- the Defense Department has demonstrated a longstanding commitment to keeping Americans in the dark about the activities being carried out with their dollars and in their name. Luckily, Hartung is willing to shine a bright light on the Pentagon’s shady practices.
-Nick Turse, TomDispatch
The Pentagon’s War on Accountability
Slush Funds, Smoke and Mirrors, and Funny Money Equal Weapons Systems Galore
 ow you see it, now you don’t. Think of it as the Department of Defense’s version of the street con game, three-card monte, or maybe simply as the Pentagon shuffle. In any case, the Pentagon’s budget is as close to a work of art as you’re likely to find in the U.S. government -- if, that is, by work of art you mean scam.
The United States is on track to spend more than $600 billion on the military this year -- more, that is, than was spent at the height of President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War military buildup, and more than the military budgets of at least the next seven nations in the world combined. And keep in mind that that’s just a partial total. As an analysis by the Straus Military Reform Project has shown, if we count related activities like homeland security, veterans' affairs, nuclear warhead production at the Department of Energy, military aid to other countries, and interest on the military-related national debt, that figure reaches a cool $1 trillion.
The more that’s spent on “defense,” however, the less the Pentagon wants us to know about how those mountains of money are actually being used. As the only major federal agency that can’t pass an audit, the Department of Defense (DoD) is the poster child for irresponsible budgeting.
It’s not just that its books don’t add up, however. The DoD is taking active measures to disguise how it is spending the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars it receives every year -- from using the separate “war budget” as a slush fund to pay for pet projects that have nothing to do with fighting wars to keeping the cost of its new nuclear bomber a secret. Add in dozens of other secret projects hidden in the department’s budget and the Pentagon’s poorly documented military aid programs, and it’s clear that the DoD believes it has something to hide.
Don’t for a moment imagine that the Pentagon’s growing list of secret programs and evasive budgetary maneuvers is accidental or simply a matter of sloppy bookkeeping. Much of it is remarkably purposeful. By keeping us in the dark about how it spends our money, the Pentagon has made it virtually impossible for anyone to hold it accountable for just about anything. An entrenched bureaucracy is determined not to provide information that might be used to bring its sprawling budget -- and so the institution itself -- under control. That’s why budgetary deception has become such a standard operating procedure at the Department of Defense.
The audit problem is a case in point. The Pentagon along with all other major federal agencies was first required to make its books auditable in the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990. More than 25 years later, there is no evidence to suggest that the Pentagon will ever be able to pass an audit. In fact, the one limited instance in which success seemed to be within reach -- an audit of a portion of the books of a single service, the Marine Corps -- turned out, upon closer inspection, to be a case study in bureaucratic resistance.
In April 2014, when it appeared that the Corps had come back with a clean audit, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was so elated that he held a special ceremony in the “Hall of Heroes” at the Pentagon. “It might seem a bit unusual to be in the Hall of Heroes to honor a bookkeeping accomplishment,” he acknowledged, “but damn, this is an accomplishment.”
In March 2015, however, that “accomplishment” vanished into thin air. The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), which had overseen the work of Grant Thornton, the private firm that conducted the audit, denied that it had been successful (allegedly in response to “new information”). In fact, in late 2013, as Reuters reported, auditors at the OIG had argued for months against green-lighting Grant Thornton’s work, believing that it was full of obvious holes. They were, however, overruled by the deputy inspector general for auditing, who had what Reuters described as a “longstanding professional relationship” with the Grant Thornton executive supervising the audit.
The Pentagon and the firm deny that there was any conflict of interest, but the bottom line is clear enough: there was far more interest in promoting the idea that the Marine Corps could pass an audit than in seeing it actually do so, even if inconvenient facts had to be swept under the rug. This sort of behavior is hardly surprising once you consider all the benefits from an undisturbed status quo that accrue to Pentagon bureaucrats and cash-hungry contractors.
Without a reliable paper trail, there is no systematic way to track waste, fraud, and abuse in Pentagon contracting, or even to figure out how many contractors the Pentagon employs, though a conservative estimate puts the number at well over 600,000. The result is easy money with minimal accountability.
How to Arm the Planet
In recent years, keeping tabs on how the Pentagon spends its money has grown even more difficult thanks to the “war budget” -- known in Pentagonese as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account -- which has become a nearly bottomless pit for items that have nothing to do with fighting wars. The use of the OCO as a slush fund began in earnest in the early years of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and has continued ever since. It’s hard to put a precise number on how much money has been slipped into that budget or taken out of it to pay for pet projects of every sort in the last decade-plus, but the total is certainly more than $100 billion and counting.
The Pentagon’s routine use of the war budget as a way to fund whatever it wants has set an example for a Congress that’s seldom seen a military project it wasn’t eager to pay for. Only recently, for instance, the House Armed Services Committee chair, Texas Republican Congressman Mac Thornberry, proposed taking $18 billion from the war budget to cover items like an extra 11 F-35 combat aircraft and 14 F-18 fighter-bombers that the Pentagon hadn’t even asked for.
This was great news for Lockheed Martin, which needs a shot in the arm for its troubled F-35 program, already slated to be the most expensive weapons system in history, and for Boeing, which has been lobbying aggressively to keep its F-18 production line open in the face of declining orders from the Navy. But it’s bad news for the troops because, as the Project on Government Oversight has demonstrated, the money used to pay for the unneeded planes will come at the expense of training and maintenance funds.
This is, by the way, the height of hypocrisy at a time when the House Armed Services Committee is routinely sending out hysterical missives about the country’s supposed lack of military readiness. The money to adequately train military personnel and keep their equipment running is, in fact, there. Members of Congress like Thornberry would just have to stop raiding the operations budget to pay for big ticket weapons systems, while turning a blind eye to wasteful spending in other parts of the Pentagon budget.
Thornberry’s gambit may not carry the day, since both President Obama and Senate Armed Services Committee chair John McCain oppose it. But as long as a separate war budget exists, the temptation to stuff it with unnecessary programs will persist as well.
Of course, that war budget is just part of the problem. The Pentagon has so many budding programs tucked away in so many different lines of its budget that even its officials have a hard time keeping track of what’s actually going on. As for the rest of us, we’re essentially in the dark.
Consider, for instance, the proliferation of military aid programs. The Security Assistance Monitor, a nonprofit that tracks such programs, has identified more than two dozen of them worth about $10 billion annually. Combine them with similar programs tucked away in the State Department’s budget, and the U.S. is contributing to the arming and training of security forces in 180 countries. (To put that mind-boggling total in perspective, there are at most 196 countries on the planet.) Who could possibly keep track of such programs, no less what effect they may be having on the countries and militaries involved, or on the complex politics of, and conflicts in, various regions?
Best suggestion: don’t even think about it (which is exactly what the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex want you to do). And no need for Congress to do so either. After all, as Lora Lumpe and Jeremy Ravinsky of the Open Society Foundations noted earlier this year, the Pentagon is the only government agency providing foreign assistance that does not even have to submit to Congress an annual budget justification for what it does. As a result, they write, “the public does not know how much the DoD is spending in a given country and why.”
Slush Funds Galore
If smokescreens and evasive maneuvers aren’t enough to hide the Pentagon’s actual priorities from the taxpaying public, there’s always secrecy. The Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists recently put the size of the intelligence portion of the national security state’s “black budget“ -- its secret spending on everything from spying to developing high-tech weaponry -- at more than $70 billion. That figure includes a wide variety of activities carried out through the CIA, the NSA, and other members of the intelligence community, but $16.8 billion of it was requested directly by the Department of Defense. And that $70 billion is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to secret spending programs, since billions more in secret financing for the development and acquisition of new weapons systems has been squirreled away elsewhere.
The largest recent project to have its total costs shrouded in secrecy is the B-21, the Air Force’s new nuclear bomber. Air Force officials claim that they need to keep the cost secret lest potential enemies “connect the dots” and learn too much about the plane’s key characteristics. In a letter to Senator McCain, an advocate of making the cost of the plane public, Ronald Walden of the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office claimed that there was “a strong correlation between the cost of an air vehicle and its total weight.” This, he suggested, might make it “decisively easier” for potential opponents to guess its range and payload.
If such assessments sound ludicrous, it’s because they are. As the histories of other major Pentagon acquisition programs have shown, the price of a system tells you just that -- its price -- and nothing more. Otherwise, with its classic cost overruns, the F-35 would have a range beyond compare, possibly to Mars and back. Of course, the real rationale for keeping the full cost estimate for the B-21 secret is to avoid bad publicity. Budget analyst Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests that it’s an attempt to avoid “sticker shock” for a program that he estimates could cost more than $100 billion to develop and purchase.
The bomber, in turn, is just part of a planned $1 trillion splurge over the next three decades on a new generation of bombers, ballistic missile submarines, and ground-based nuclear missiles, part of an updating of the vast U.S. nuclear arsenal. And keep this in mind: that trillion dollars is simply an initial estimate before the usual Pentagon cost overruns even begin to come into play. Financially, the nuclear plan is going to hit taxpayer wallets particularly hard in the mid-2020s when a number of wildly expensive non-nuclear systems like the F-35 combat aircraft will also be hitting peak production.
Under the circumstances, it doesn’t take a genius to know that there’s only one way to avoid the budgetary equivalent of a 30-car pile up: increase the Pentagon’s already ample finances yet again. Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Brian McKeon was referring to the costs of building new nuclear delivery vehicles when he said that the administration was “wondering how the heck we’re going to pay for it, and probably thanking our lucky stars we won’t be here to answer the question.” Of course, the rest of us will be stuck holding the bag when all those programs cloaked in secrecy suddenly come out of hiding and the bills come fully due.
At this point, you may not be shocked to learn that, in response to McKeon’s uncomfortable question, the Pentagon has come up with yet another budgetary gimmick. It’s known as the “National Sea-Based Deterrence Fund,” or as Taxpayers for Common Sense more accurately labels it, “the Navy’s submarine slush fund.” The idea -- a longstanding darling of the submarine lobby (and yes, Virginia, there is a submarine lobby in Washington) -- is to set up a separate slush fund outside the Navy’s normal shipbuilding budget. That’s where the money for the new ballistic missile submarine program, currently slated to cost $139 billion for 12 subs, would go.
Establishing such a new slush fund would, in turn, finesse any direct budgetary competition between the submarine program and the new surface ships the Navy also wants, and so avoid a political battle that might end up substantially reducing the number of vessels the Navy is hoping to buy over the next 30 years. Naturally, the money for the submarine fund will have to come from somewhere, either one of the other military services or that operations and maintenance budget so regularly raided to help pay for expensive weapons programs.
Not to be outmaneuvered, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has now asked Congress to set up a “strategic deterrence fund” to pay for its two newest nuclear delivery vehicles, the planned bomber and a long-range nuclear-armed ballistic missile. In theory, this would take pressure off other major Air Force projects like the F-35, but as with the submarine fund, it only adds up if a future president and a future Congress can be persuaded to jack up the Pentagon budget to make room for these and other weapons systems.
In the end, however the specifics work out, any “fund” for such weaponry will be just another case of smoke and mirrors, a way of kicking the nuclear funding crisis down the road in hopes of fatter budgets to come. Why make choices now when the Pentagon and the military services can bet on blackmailing a future Trump or Clinton administration and a future Congress into ponying up the extra billions of dollars needed to make their latest ill-conceived plans add up?
If your head is spinning after this brief tour of the Pentagon’s budget labyrinth, it should be. That’s just what the Pentagon wants its painfully complicated budget practices to do: leave Congress, any administration, and the public too confused and exhausted to actually hold it accountable for how our tax dollars are being spent. So far, they’re getting away with it.
William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a senior adviser to the Security Assistance Monitor. He is the author of, among other books, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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Progressive Women Are Running for Office All Over the Country |
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Wednesday, 25 May 2016 14:25 |
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Vanden Heuvel writes: "With Donald Trump's misogyny under the microscope, Democrats could have a secret weapon on their side between now and November: not 'the woman's card,' as Trump has called it, but the actual progressive women who will appear on ballots nationwide."
Editor of the Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel. (photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty)
Progressive Women Are Running for Office All Over the Country
By Katrina Vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post
25 May 16
 ith Donald Trump’s misogyny under the microscope, Democrats could have a secret weapon on their side between now and November: not “the woman’s card,” as Trump has called it, but the actual progressive women who will appear on ballots nationwide.
Hillary Clinton’s bid to become the first woman president has gotten far more attention in the media, but there are hundreds of female candidates running for office in 2016. And although Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is rightly credited for calling attention to the fundamental unfairness of our rigged economic and political systems, inspiring women such as Zephyr Teachout, Pramila Jayapal and Lucy Flores are carrying the mantle of progressive populism in congressional races across the country. Notably, Sanders has endorsed and fundraised for all three women in their upcoming primaries, recognizing them as important allies in the battle to create progressive change.
Teachout, who is seeking an open House seat in New York’s Hudson Valley, shares a similar background to another progressive champion, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Like Warren, Teachout was a respected academic and progressive activist long before she entered politics. A law professor at Fordham University, Teachout is a widely recognized authority on political corruption and antitrust issues who gained visibility as a digital strategist for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004. She is also a longtime advocate of publicly financed elections, and her scholarly work was cited in former justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United.
In 2014, Teachout made her first foray into electoral politics as a candidate with an audacious primary campaign against incumbent Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Taking on the Democratic Party establishment — Cuomo received support from, among others, Hillary Clinton — Teachout joined forces with grassroots movements in the state on her way to winning more than a third of the vote. Two years later, she is building on that success. In a district that has been represented by a Republican since 2011, Teachout is running as an unapologetic progressive populist in the mold of Warren and Sanders. So far, Teachout has attracted thousands of small donors and has won support from a roster that includes the Working Families Party, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), Emily’s List and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).
Similarly, in Washington state, Pramila Jayapal has been one of Seattle’s leading progressive activists for more than a decade. Following the September 11 attacks, she founded the group Hate Free Zone (now called OneAmerica) to combat the backlash against Muslims and immigrants. A passionate advocate of comprehensive immigration reform dating to the Bush administration — and an Indian-born immigrant herself — Jayapal has also been deeply involved in the fight for environmental and economic justice throughout her career. Since being elected to the state senate in 2014, Jayapal has sponsored legislation to raise the state minimum wage, to provide for two free years of community college tuition and to pre-register teenagers who are receiving their driver licenses to vote. Running to replace retiring Rep. Jim McDermott, Jayapal’s notable backers include Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Keith Ellison and an array of labor, women’s and progressive organizations.
And in Nevada, congressional candidate Lucy Flores overcame incredible odds on her unlikely path into politics. As a poor teenager in Las Vegas, Flores was on parole, had an abortion, and dropped out of high school. Yet, remarkably, she went on to earn her GED, became a lawyer and won a seat in the state legislature by the time she was 31 years old. Inspired in part by her own experience, Flores fought for victims of domestic violence as an assemblywoman, passing a law that permits domestic abuse victims to break their leases without penalty. She then mounted an unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor in 2014. In a primary race against multiple opponents with establishment support, Flores has been endorsed by leading progressive groups, including NARAL Pro-Choice America and PCCC.
These women, in short, are the anti-Trump. In stark contrast with Trump’s contemptible blend of ignorance and intolerant bullying, they are serious thinkers and determined activists who have spent their careers defending the poor, religious and ethnic minorities, and vulnerable members of society who are too often shut out of the political process. They are also proud members of the ascendant “Warren wing” of the Democratic Party, part of a new generation of leaders who understand the need to build a progressive infrastructure at the local and national level in order to make durable change. And while they are just a few of the many women — including women of color — fighting to change the face of Congress, their candidacies should serve as a reminder that, as important as the presidency is, the White House is not the only thing at stake in 2016.
As much as any election in recent memory, this election is about who we are as a country. That is why it’s so important for Democrats and progressives to organize and mobilize over the next five months. After all, defeating Trump is not just about keeping one person out of the Oval Office. It’s also about electing leaders like Teachout, Jayapal and Flores who will fight fearlessly to defeat everything that he represents.
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Border Wars: Migration as Reparations |
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Wednesday, 25 May 2016 14:15 |
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Nevins writes: "Instead of a 'surge' in deportations, the U.S. government should be paying off its imperial debt to Central America. The right to migration is a form of reparations."
U.S. Border Patrol agents detain immigrants caught crossing the border from Mexico into the United States in August near McAllen, Texas. A federal agency is recommending that border agents not wear body cameras. (photo: John Moore/Getty)
Border Wars: Migration as Reparations
By Joseph Nevins, NACLA
25 May 16
Instead of a “surge” in deportations, the U.S. government should be paying off its imperial debt to Central America.
 n May 12, Reuters revealed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is poised to undertake a 30-day “surge” in deportations. The label for the operation suggests a military-like endeavor—the stated goal of which is to arrest and deport hundreds of single adults, mothers, and children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras who arrived after January 1, 2014, have been ordered to leave the country, yet remain in the United States without authorization. According to Reuters, it will constitute “the largest deportation sweep targeting immigrant families by the administration of President Barack Obama this year.”
Reports of the looming surge have led to protests, with many asserting that the would-be targets of the operation are in fact refugees, as defined by international law. They are individuals who have a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” and can’t rely on their national governments for protection. As such, the critics (who range from immigrant rights advocates to Bernie Sanders to mainstream Democrats) argue that the women and children from Central America’s “Northern Triangle” who are said to be in the United States ”illegally” have a right to stay—even if only temporarily.
While this argument certainly has merit, their critique of Obama administration policy accepts the narrow international definition of who is and isn’t “deserving” of asylum. The result is that the criticism can only bear fruit to the extent that U.S. authorities accept and acknowledge that the humans they prey upon are under extraordinary threat in their countries of birth. Under this framing, would-be deportees do not have a right to stay in the United States because of who they are—as human beings—but because of a determination as to what nefarious forces have done to them, or may do to them, should they be deported.
By merely asking that Washington be more inclusive in its classification of those under threat, the critique, one supported by many progressives, allows the U.S. government to remain the arbiter of who belongs and who does not, thus ensuring future waves of deportation. Moreover, it disregards an expansive notion of human rights, particularly a human right to mobility.
Even if one refuses to accept such a right, a basic concept of justice demands recognition that migration involving the movement of people from exploited and relatively impoverished parts of the world to countries of relative wealth and privilege, is, or at least should be, a right born of debt—an imperial debt. The right to migration, in other words, is a form of reparations.
Take the case of just one of the Central American countries from where the targeted individuals have fled: El Salvador. As Elise Foley and Roque Planas have pointed out, although the Obama administration contends that the country is sufficiently safe for deportees, it considers El Salvador too dangerous for the U.S. Peace Corps. Due to “the ongoing security environment” in El Salvador, the Peace Corps suspended its operations there in January.
There’s no doubt that El Salvador is very dangerous—not least for deportees from the United States, many of whom have been killed upon their forced return. The country’s murder rate is 22 times that of the United States. The first three months of 2016 saw nearly one murder per hour, making the country one of the most violent in the world. As in Guatemala and Honduras, criminal gangs plague the country, and the boundary between gang members and the police and the military is often quite fuzzy. But horrific violence in El Salvador is not new, nor is its making limited to the country’s territory. As is the case for all too many countries in Latin America, the roots of El Salvador’s violence are tied to Washington’s longstanding project of domination of the hemisphere.
During the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled the terror associated with their country’s brutal civil war and headed to the United States—typically entering clandestinely as the Reagan administration, with rare exceptions, refused to grant them refugee status. It wasn’t until 1990, with both the war in El Salvador and the Cold War winding down, that the U.S. government granted Temporary Protected Status to Salvadorans living in the United States—placing them in what sociologist Cecilia Menjívar has characterized as “legal limbo.”
Life in the neighborhoods where Salvadoran refugees settled helped to give rise to El Salvador’s contemporary gang problem. As anthropologist Elana Zilberg writes in her book, Spaces of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis Between Los Angeles and El Salvador, many of the young people were products of the very violence they were fleeing:
Many Salvadoran youth had lost family members to the Salvadoran civil war, or were left by parents on the run from political persecution or for reasons of mere economic survival. They had seen tortured corpses and severed body parts on their way to school. While in school or out on the streets, boys no more than twelve years old were forcefully conscripted into the army. Children joined the guerrillas—in the early years, sometimes by force. Some learned to make Molotov cocktails, to kill and to torture. This was the history that followed them . . . a history funded by the United States.
Once in El Norte, a lot of them, particularly those residing in and around Los Angeles, found themselves living in poor, often destitute communities in which gangs already had a strong presence. The marginalized conditions in which many Salvadoran refugee youth subsisted, along with the violent histories they embodied, led many to join and form gangs—not least for reasons of self-protection.
As Zilberg suggests, the United States funded much of the terror associated with the civil war—in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid—to prop up El Salvador’s right-wing government and the grossly unjust political-economic order it defended. The Pentagon, via the infamous School of the Americas, also trained some of El Salvador’s most notorious military officers—ones found to have committed some of the worst atrocities associated with the civil war. This included the assassination of Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero and the massacre of several hundred civilians, many of them young children, in the village of El Mozote.
In addition, Washington sent what were euphemistically referred to in official circles as “advisers” to help El Salvador’s brutal military establishment in its fight against the guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). It was later revealed that these “advisers”—members of the U.S. Special Forces, who, over the course of the war, numbered in the thousands—actively engaged in combat operations, and presumably some of the associated war crimes as well.
According to El Salvador’s official truth commission, more than 75,000 Salvadoran civilians lost their lives during the civil war (1980-1992)—this in a country of about five million people at the time. The commission’s report attributed 85 percent of the deaths to the U.S.-backed state (in the form of the country’s military, paramilitary forces, and “death squads”), and five percent to the FMLN.
Since the 1992 Peace Accords, which marked the end of the civil war and a transition to democratic elections, the U.S. government has deported gang members—real and imagined—to El Salvador in large numbers. This, combined with the country’s legacy of violence, its impoverished state, and the dislocating effects of a neoliberal “free trade” agreement, the Dominican Republic-Cental America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) imposed by the country’s conservative elites and heavily pushed by the United States more than a decade ago, is what has given rise to El Salvador’s present-day gang crisis and the marked increase in out-migration.
All this manifests U.S. culpability for much of El Salvador’s past and inextricably-tied present-day plight. It illustrates how deeply interconnected, and unjustly so, U.S. and Salvadoran societies are, a reality that strict boundary and immigration policing, which the deportation “surge” embodies, disguises and works to erase. It also should negate any justification by the United States government to deport and deny rights of residence to people of Salvadoran origin.
Donald Trump’s promise to engage in mass deportations if and when he becomes president has given rise to much concern and derision. The reaction to Trump, however, has often served to mask the fertile soil from which the reality TV star’s ugly dreams bloom. As the threatened surge demonstrates, it’s soil that the Obama administration has played a large a role in producing, having deported more individuals than any previous administration and almost as many as all those of the 20th century combined.
The roots of this deportation regime must be eradicated and replaced. But this will not occur by asking the federal government to be more “humanitarian” in carrying out its regime of immigrant and territorial exclusion. It will only come about by demanding—and fighting for—a very different world, in which the U.S. government does not undermine the very conditions that make life viable for the majority in migrant-sending countries. This would be a world in which the U.S. state does not block those fleeing the ravages Washington has helped to produce from seeking a better life in U.S. territorial confines—if not for reasons of common humanity, then, at the very least, as compensation for the conditions it created.
Until we make this happen, we can be sure that another “surge” will always be on the horizon.
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FOCUS: 2nd Amendment Anti-Black Police Violence Left Forum |
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Wednesday, 25 May 2016 12:08 |
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Abu-Jamal writes: "Every law created throughout American history was designed to disarm black people while arming whites. That tension lies at the heart of any discussion of the 2nd amendment, which ostensibly protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms."
Mumia Abu-Jamal. (photo: Prison Radio)
2nd Amendment Anti-Black Police Violence Left Forum
By Mumia Abu-Jamal, Prison Radio
25 May 16
 o the Left Forum, 2016:
Friends, Sisters, Brothers, Comrades, as you meet today on the issue of the 2nd Amendment, self defense, and the left, I am in contemplation over an editorial cartoon from that old journal Harper's Weekly of October 28th, 1876, by A. B. Frost. No, I don't have a library that extensive, nor a computer. It was reprinted in the San Francisco Bay View, and the cartoon wasn't so much clever as it was revelatory, for it could have been drawn today. It showed a tall, ranging, bearded figure holding a smoking pistol in his right hand and a bayonet in his left. Beneath him is the fallen figure of an emaciated black boy, clad in rags - clearly dead. This cartoon bears a legend in bold print. It reads: "Self Defense." The bearded white man, identified as "Southern Chivalry," states: 'If I hadn't-a killed ya, you would'a growed up to rule me.' Think about that.
That was the voice of self defense in America during the Age of Reconstruction. Actually, it was a voice of self defense in white America. Blacks had a decidedly different voice, and what it said is that self defense is a human right, practiced throughout history, and shown by groups as divergent as the Deacons for Defense, headquartered in Louisiana but active throughout the South, to the first year of the Black Panther Party, born in Oakland as the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. It was party co-founder Huey P. Newton, who in his 1967 essay "In Defense of Self Defense" called for the arming of black people to defend themselves from the repression of the state. "Men," Huey explained "were not created to obey laws. Laws were created to obey men."
Every law created throughout American history was designed to disarm black people while arming whites. That tension lies at the heart of any discussion of the 2nd amendment, which ostensibly protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. One wonders, what people? Even today we see that such a constitutional guarantee doesn't extend to black people. Today! Remember Tamir Rice, that beautiful little boy in Cleveland, killed by cops for possessing a toy gun? An armed black person is a target, an armed white person, a normality. That my friends is our reality. Yesterday, 1876, 1966, 2006 and 2015. The right to arms is as speculative as the right to self-defense. I thank you all. From in Prison Nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
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t’s impossible for fossil fuel executives to get some damn peace and quiet. At its annual shareholder meeting in Dallas, Texas, Exxon Mobil faced investors’ demands that the company get serious about climate change adaptation and regulation.
