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US First Shields Its Torturers and War Criminals From Prosecution, Now Officially Honors Them |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Saturday, 05 December 2015 09:45 |
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Greenwald writes: "The Obama administration has moved from legally protecting Bush-era war criminals to honoring and gushing over them in public."
The unveiling ceremony came just one day after Human Rights Watch released a scathing report calling for the administration of President Barack Obama to file criminal charges for Bush era CIA torture. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
US First Shields Its Torturers and War Criminals From Prosecution, Now Officially Honors Them
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
05 December 15
 s vice president, Dick Cheney was a prime architect of the worldwide torture regime implemented by the U.S. government (which extended far beyond waterboarding), as well as the invasion and destruction of Iraq, which caused the deaths of at least 500,000 people and more likely over a million. As such, he is one of the planet’s most notorious war criminals.
President Obama made the decision in early 2009 to block the Justice Department from criminally investigating and prosecuting Cheney and his fellow torturers, as well as to protect them from foreign investigations and even civil liability sought by torture victims. Obama did that notwithstanding a campaign decree that even top Bush officials are subject to the rule of law and, more importantly, notwithstanding a treaty signed in 1984 by Ronald Reagan requiring that all signatory states criminally prosecute their own torturers. Obama’s immunizing Bush-era torturers converted torture from a global taboo and decades-old crime into a reasonable, debatable policy question, which is why so many GOP candidates are now openly suggesting its use.
But now, the Obama administration has moved from legally protecting Bush-era war criminals to honoring and gushing over them in public. Yesterday, the House of Representatives unveiled a marble bust of former Vice President Cheney, which — until a person of conscience vandalizes or destroys it — will reside in Emancipation Hall of the U.S. Capitol.
At the unveiling ceremony, Cheney was, in the playful words of NPR, “lightly roasted” — as though he’s some sort of grumpy though beloved avuncular stand-up comic. Along with George W. Bush, one of the speakers in attendance was Vice President Joe Biden, who spoke movingly of Cheney’s kind and generous soul:
As I look around this room and up on the platform, I want to say thank you for letting me crash your family reunion. I’m afraid I’ve blown his cover. I actually like Dick Cheney. … I can say without fear of contradiction, there’s never one single time been a harsh word, not one single time in our entire relationship.
Leading American news outlets got in on the fun, as they always do, using the joviality of the event to promote their news accounts and generate visits to their sites:
As NPR put it, “This was not an event for Cheney critics — on the war or torture or related topics.” Totally: why let some unpleasant war criminality ruin a perfectly uplifting ceremony?
It is a long-standing trope among self-flattering Westerners and their allies that a key difference between “us” and “them” (Muslim radicals) is that “they” honor and memorialize their terrorists and celebrate them as “martyrs” while we scorn and prosecute our own.
Yesterday, the U.S. government unambiguously signaled to the world that not only does it regard itself as entirely exempt from the laws of wars, the principal Nuremberg prohibition against aggressive invasions, and global prohibitions on torture (something that has been self-evident for many years), but believes that the official perpetrators should be honored and memorialized provided they engage in these crimes on behalf of the U.S. government. That’s a message that most of the U.S. media and thus large parts of the American population will not hear, but much of the world will hear it quite loudly and clearly. How could they not?
In other news, U.S. officials this week conceded that a man kept in a cage for 13 years at Guantánamo, the now 37-year-old Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri, was there due to “mistaken identity.” As Joe Biden said yesterday, “I actually like Dick Cheney.”
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Rahm Emanuel, Laquan McDonald and Black Rebellion in Chicago |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37532"><span class="small">Paul Street, CounterPunch</span></a>
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Saturday, 05 December 2015 09:38 |
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Street writes: "Beneath a carefully constructed pretense of concern for racial justice, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has long been a dedicated corporatist 'law and order' enemy of Black America."
Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy stands with mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel during a recruitment graduation ceremony in Chicago, Illinois. (photo: Jim Young/RT)
Rahm Emanuel, Laquan McDonald and Black Rebellion in Chicago
By Paul Street, CounterPunch
05 December 15
 eneath a carefully constructed pretense of concern for racial justice, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has long been a dedicated corporatist “law and order” enemy of Black America. During his time as a top political operative in the arch-neoliberal Bill Clinton White House, the notorious bully Emanuel (later to be nicknamed “Rahmbo”) was a driving force behind the 1994 federal “three strikes” Clinton crime bill.
That draconian measure helped make Bill Clinton “the incarceration president” and contributed to a significant increase in the monumental hyper-imprisonment and criminal marking of Black Americans. Among other terrible things, the law put 100,000 more officers on the streets, allocated $10 billion for new prison construction, and eliminated Pell Grant funding for inmates pursuing college degrees while in prison.
Prior to that outrage, Emanuel joined up with Bill Daley to lead Clinton’s passage of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) – a critical investor rights measure that helped capital drain millions of jobs away from industrial regions where impoverished Black populations desperately needed paid employment.
NAFTA-encouraged deindustrialization notwithstanding, Emanuel was a leading force behind Clinton’s vicious 1996 “welfare reform.” The “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act’s” elimination of poor families’ former entitlement to basic family cash assistance has wreaked havoc on Black families stuck in jobless ghettoes ever since.
As Barack Obama’s original White House chief of staff, Emanuel consistently steered policy rightward, towards the interests of the nation’s predominantly white 1% and contrary to those of America’s disproportionately nonwhite lower and working class.
As Mayor of Chicago, Emanuel moved quickly to shutter 54 public schools in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods in the largest deliberate mass school closure in history. Emanuel’s schools chief provided principals with a guide on “how to handle civil disobedience and to report the names of any teachers and students involved in protests.” The schools closure program has always been a big taxpayer money grab for wealthy Emanuel allies seeking to build private charter schools in the wreckage left by public school closings.
Emanuel has stonewalled on numerous abusive and criminal practices on the part of his city’s police force. He flatly denied the Chicago Police Department’s operation of an illegal “black site” detention facility (Homan Square) where thousands of mostly Black and Latino suspects have been “disappeared” and forced into false confessions. The Black Site hellhole was exposed by The Guardian earlier this year. Its existence was well known across Black and Latino Chicago.
Sadly enough, Emanuel has won solid majorities of the Black Chicago vote in both of his Chicago mayoral election victories to date (in April 2011 and April 2015). As the left Black commentator Bruce Dixon noted last spring, “Rahm Emanuel’s biggest asset was the overwhelming support of Chicago’s well-established black political class of preachers, business types, ‘community leaders’ and public officials….Nearly every prominent black elected official in town, Democrats all, came out for Rahm, for privatization, for gentrification, for austerity, for more of the same. This is the state of black politics in 2015, and the reason that Rahm Emanuel carried every single one of Chicago’s majority black wards.”
The facts of the Laquan McDonald case are well understood by now. Anyone who follows the national news closely knows that:
* White Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke executed a Black male teenager in cold blood on a busy street on the city’s South Side on October 20th, 2014. Van Dyke shot McDonald 16 times, riddling Laquan’s body with bullets while the victim lay in the pavement.
* The Chicago Police lied about and covered up the murder, going so far as to threaten eyewitnesses with arrest and delete more than an hour of videotape from a fast food restaurant near the murder site.
* The City of Chicago rushed to offer McDonald’s mother $5 million on the condition that she stay silent.
* The city buried a dash cam video that clearly displayed the savage killing for thirteen months because Emanuel feared its release would spark civil unrest (this during the ongoing protests over racist police murders in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere around the nation) that might endanger his re-election chances the following April.
* The video might have never surfaced if lawyers and journalists had not been tipped off to its existence and but for the order of a county judge last week.
* Emanuel, running for re-election at the time of the shooting, fought to keep the video from going public. He claimed that releasing it might taint a federal investigation even though the U.S. Justice Department did not ask the city to hold off.
* Emanuel demonstrated a complete lack of comprehension of the public’s outrage over the killing and its cover-up when he claimed this week that he decided to fire city police chief Garry McCarthy because he had become “a distraction” – not because McCarthy has for years overseen a police department notorious for racist abuse and corruption.
* Emanuel’s arrogant response to the McDonald scandal has been to “do as little as possible — until the furor caused by the release of the video forced his hand.” (New York Times editorial board).
The part of the emerging story that blows me away the most, however, is less well known. It concerns a meeting that Emanuel held with Chicago’s leading Black ministers and pastors right before he finally released the Van Dyke murder video last week. As local reporter Mike Fourcher determined, the alleged purpose of this gathering and other meetings held with Black constituents was to assuage Black fears and anger about how City Hall had dealt with the case. When speaking to the ministers, however, Rahmbo had a different and more iron-fisted message for the city’s Black religious leaders. He warned them that they’d pay if protests went too far. Da mare wanted the pastors to know that he would withhold money for jobs programs in the city’s Black ghettoes if violence ensued. By Fourcher’s account:
“The Mayor…asked the group to stress peaceful protest through the Thanksgiving weekend and to avoid violence. ‘He encouraged us to encourage the community to exercise their first amendment rights, but to do so peacefully,’ said Rev. Barrett. ‘The point of the meeting was how to encourage that peaceful protest.’ According to attendees, the Mayor then told the group that if there was violence over the weekend, he would not be able to find resources to bring jobs into their community. ‘He said, if things go bad then don’t come looking to me for jobs,’ said Rev. Brooks. ‘There was something about how if you don’t encourage peace, don’t look to me for resources,’ said Young Leaders Alliance head Jedidiah Brown, who was also present.”
It doesn’t get much more offensive than that. It takes real sociopathic chutzpah to bully normally obedient Black pastors like that after you have just been caught with your racist police-state pants down in hideous fashion. Curiously enough, Emanuel seems to have at least momentarily lost the outward loyalties of the city’s Black bourgeois elite. As Glen Ford notes on Black Agenda Report, reflecting on mass, Black youth-led protests that took place last Friday in Chicago’s tony Michigan Avenue shopping district:
“It seemed as if the protective shield of Black Misleadership Class collaboration that has for the last 30 years insulated white mayors from the wrath of Chicago’s outraged Black rank and file, had suddenly been stripped away. Black ministers joined militant youth in marching down the city’s ‘Magic Mile’ Michigan Avenue shopping district, demanding that heads roll for hiding video evidence in the death of 17 year-old Laquan McDonald, shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke. For 400 days, Cook County States Attorney Anita Alvarez refused to indict the cop, or release the police dashboard video of the shooting, or to explain why another critical video had apparently been destroyed. Alvarez finally bowed to pressure – and a court order – indicting the cop for first degree murder and releasing the death video….But the community’s rage could not be contained. The Black Caucus of Chicago’s Board of Aldermen demanded that Police Superintendent McCarthy resign. So did Rev. Jesse Jackson and even Bobby Rush, the sell-out Black Congressman who has been a dependable servant of the Emanuel administration. The strength of the movement in Chicago can be measured by the fact that so many elements of the Black collaborationist political class have been forced to take a stance in opposition to Mayor Emanuel and the white corporate forces that he represents, and ultimately to compel the mayor to fire his favorite cop.”
Soon, however, the misleaders can be expected to resume their normal role of collaboration with the city’s predominantly white and corporate masters. As Ford notes:
“The young people that are soldiers of this struggle understand that movements are defined by their demands. In a joint statement by the Black Youth Project 100, We Charge Genocide, Assata’s Daughters, the #LetUsBreathe collective, and a Black Lives Matter chapter, they declared that ‘Indicting cops does not change the policies that promote the violence and trauma inherent in the Chicago Police Department.’ They want Rahm Emanuel’s resignation, too. The Black Youth Project also demands defunding of the Chicago police, and investment of those dollars in the Black community. They call for reparations for slavery, Jim Crow and mass Black incarceration; an end to all profit in the criminal justice system; a guaranteed income for all; a federal jobs program, and freedom from discrimination for all workers; and an end to displacement of Black people through gentrification…. These are demands for social transformation – demands that will put the young activists on a collision course with the Black Misleadership Class who are the first line of defense for the white ruling class, and who will soon close ranks in Chicago and elsewhere to try to stop this movement.”
The fight for racial justice in Chicago, as across the nation, requires rank and file class struggle within the Black community itself. The white, Latino, and Asian working class could learn from that.
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The Cult of Countering Violent Extremism |
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Saturday, 05 December 2015 09:32 |
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Fernandez writes: "Here's an acronym you may start hearing more of: CVE. It stands for 'Countering Violent Extremism,' and it's all the rage these days in U.S. establishment circles."
Yemeni men walk past a mural depicting a US drone and reading 'Why did you kill my family?' in Sanaa. (photo: AFP)
The Cult of Countering Violent Extremism
By Belén Fernández, teleSUR
05 December 15
CVE appears to be just another vehicle for imperialist meddling in strategically important, resource-rich locales.
 ere’s an acronym you may start hearing more of: CVE. It stands for “Countering Violent Extremism,” and it’s all the rage these days in U.S. establishment circles.
Sarah Sewall—the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights—described the CVE phenomenon in a recent speech as “a broader approach to address the underlying forces that make people vulnerable to violent extremism.” These “civilian-led … and preventive efforts” are, she said, “an essential complement to our military and intelligence actions against terrorism”—because, while “we must continue to capture and kill terrorists of all stripes … we must remember that no number of air strikes, soldiers, or spies can eliminate the complex motives and hateful ideologies that feed terrorism.”
Were we not willfully delusional, we might also remember that it is precisely our military “actions” that produce much of the violent extremism that must then be countered. Case in point: prior to the devastating U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq experienced not a single suicide bombing. Furthermore, the fact that America’s anti-terror efforts have entailed massive civilian casualties might render some cases of individual and/or communal hatred slightly less than “complex.”
This is not, of course, to offer a blanket excuse for acts of terrorism, but rather to propose that entities interested in countering violent extremism could start by ending their own extreme violence.
However, since there’s no place for logic in imperial hypocrisy, we end up instead with the CVE enterprise, which cleanly diverts all blame for extremist production onto afflicted communities and encourages them to engage in self-policing. As Sewall noted in her speech, CVE urges a “whole of society” approach encompassing “local officials, businesses, religious leaders, researchers, women, youth, and … former members and victims of violent extremist groups,” all of whom are supposed to work together to discourage extremism by reporting “suspicious activity” and identifying individuals who may be on a “path to radicalization.”
And while CVE celebrates the particularly helpful role of women — who, Sewall explained, are “often the first to detect warning signs of radicalization and can help off-ramp children into alternative opportunities”— other observers have voiced suspicions about what might be seen as an appeal to moms to report their kids to law enforcement. In a February blog post, for example, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Julia Harumi Mass warned that “under CVE, normal teenage behavior could be an indicator of the potential to engage in terrorism.”
For a country that has been known to pathologize whatever it can in the interest of profit (think of the pharmaceutical industry and the obsessive medication of energetic children), this is not enormously surprising news. Better yet still, when the pathologization can help fuel the notion of Arab and Muslim communities worldwide as fundamentally defective and in need not only of constant self-denunciation but also civilizing interventions by the West.
On the domestic front, antecedents to the CVE fixation might be found in a handy New York Police Department manual from 2007, which describes indicators that an individual may be headed toward “Jihadization.” According to the pseudoscientific study, a person’s “involve[ment] in social activism and community issues” or abandonment of “cigarettes, drinking, gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes” can all potentially signal “progression along the radicalization continuum.”
As we’ve since learned, carrying a pressure cooker while Arab can also merit visits from the FBI. It’s safe to surmise that, even if one weren’t prone to “radicalization” in the first place, incessant profiling and police surveillance of wardrobe changes and culinary pursuits might in some cases push one over the edge.
CVE is not only for domestic consumption; it’s also being shoved down international throats.
CVE is not only for domestic consumption; it’s also being shoved down international throats. In her presentation, Sewall announced the State Department’s launch of “CVE pilot programs in Africa focused on the most at-risk communities and key drivers of radicalization.” Lest we ponder potential drivers of radicalization in, say, African communities on the receiving end of American projectiles, we’re reminded that “CVE makes it more likely that our hard security approaches can succeed”—among them “drone strikes in Libya.”
In a November article for TomDispatch on the American military presence in Africa, investigative journalist Nick Turse observes that U.S. “bases, camps, compounds, port facilities, fuel bunkers, and other sites can be found in at least 34 countries – more than 60 percent of the nations on the continent – many of them corrupt, repressive states with poor human rights records.”
And although Sewall has warned against the “tempt[ation] to invoke counterterrorism as a pretext to disregard human right [sic],” the United States’ own history of doing just that would suggest that human rights-based counter-extremism probably isn’t the primary objective in Africa. Rather, CVE appears to be just another vehicle for imperialist meddling in strategically important, resource-rich locales.
Meanwhile, despite acknowledging a link between oppressive governments and violent extremism, the U.S. helped set up Hedayah — described by Sewall as the “first international center to support civilian-led approaches” to CVE — in Abu Dhabi, an emirate predicated on injustice and abuse. Incidentally, Sewall’s speech took place at none other than the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a preeminent Zionist think tank whose ideological orientation makes it complicit in all manner of extreme Israeli violence and ethnic cleansing.
Other dubious entities like the World Bank and Facebook have been involved, to varying degrees, in the unleashing of brand CVE, and the United Nations News Center noted in September that a CVE summit hosted by Barack Obama had “brought together representatives from more than 100 nations, more than 20 multilateral institutions, some 120 civil society groups from around the world, and partners from the private sector.”
But the idea that this seemingly united front can successfully counter extremism while remaining violent is itself — to say the least — extreme.
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Latin America: The Storms That Are Coming |
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Saturday, 05 December 2015 09:31 |
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Zibechi writes: "The recent election of Mauricio Macri as president of Argentina is a turn to the right that calls to light the flame of social conflict."
Demonstrators and police officers clash during a protest in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (photo: Victor R. Caivano/AP)
Latin America: The Storms That Are Coming
By Raúl Zibechi, Upside Down World
05 December 15
 he end of the progressive cycle implies the dissolution of hegemonies and the beginning of a period of dominations, of greater repression against the organized popular sectors. Until now we have been commenting on the causes of the end of the cycle; now it’s necessary to start to comprehend the consequences, tremendous, unattractive, demolishing in many cases.
The recent election of Mauricio Macri as president of Argentina is a turn to the right that calls to light the flame of social conflict. The response of the editors of the conservative daily newspaper La Nación with an editorial that openly defends State terrorism is a sample of what’s coming, but also of the resistances that will have to confront the project of the traditional right.
We are not facing a return to the 1990s, neoliberal and privatizing, because those below are in a different situation, more organized, with greater self esteem and understanding of the model that they suffer and, above all, with greater ability for confronting the powerful. Collective experiences don’t happen in vain, they leave deep impressions, wisdoms and ways of doing things that in this new stage will play a decisive role in the necessary resistance to the new rights.
The period that is opening in the whole South American region, where President Rafael Correa already announced that he does not aspire to re-election, will be one of greater economic, social and political instability; of increasing interference of the Pentagon’s militarism; of new difficulties for regional integration, which already crosses through serious difficulties; of the deterioration of the living conditions of the popular sectors, whose incomes started to erode in the last two years.
In this new climate, I find some questions central:
The first is that there will not be political forces capable of governing with a minimal consensus, like the one that the progressive governments had obtained in their first stage. There will not be consensus in governments like those of Macri; but it’s convenient to remember that the Lula hegemony broke under the second mandate of Dilma Rousseff, as well as under the governments of Tabaré Vázquez, Correa and Maduro, although the causes are different.
When hegemony vanishes, the logics of domination are imposed, which lead us directly to the exacerbation of class, gender, generation and race-ethnicity conflicts, The domination-conflicts-repression triad will affect (is already affecting) women and youth of the popular sectors, the principal victims of the systemic turn to the right.
The second question to take into account is that the political-economic model is more important and decisive than the people who conduct and administer it. In the lefts we still have a political culture very centered on caudillos and leaders, which without a doubt are important, but are not able to go beyond the structural limits that the model imposes on them. Extractivism is the one largely responsible for the crisis that runs through the region, for the erosion that the governments suffer and, in short, is the bottom line that explains the turn to the right of societies.
Unlike the model of industrialization over over substitution of imports, which generated inclusion and promoted social growth, the current extractive model generates social and economic polarization, generates conflicts over the common wealth and destroys the environment. Therefore, it is a model that generates violence, criminalization of poverty and the militarization of societies and territories in resistance.
The inability of the progressivisms to leave the extractive model and the express will of the new rights to deepen it augur times of pain for the peoples. The recent tragedy in Mariana (Minas Gerais) because of the rupture of two of the Vale mining company’s dams, [1] which provoked a gigantic tsunami of mud that is leveling cultivated fields and entire towns, is a small sample of what awaits us if a limit is not set on the mining-soybean-speculator model.
In third place, the end of the progressive cycle supposes the return of the antisystemic movements to the center of the political scenario, from which they had been separated by the centrality of the dispute between the governments and the conservative opposition. But the movements that are activating are not the same, nor do they have the same modes of organizing and of doing, as those that championed the struggles of the 90s.
The piquetero (picketer) movement no longer exists, although it left deep footprints and lessons, and an organized sector that works in the villas in the big cities, with new kinds of initiatives like the popular high schools and women’s houses. The campesino movements, like those of Sin Tierra, have been transformed by the geometric expansion of soy, but new subjects emerge, more complex and diverse, where neighbors of those affected by mining or agro-toxics participate, as well as a wide gamut of health, education and media professionals.
The impression is that we are seeing new articulations, above all in the big cities, where the demands for more democracy and inequality inundate the trenches of the parties and unions, but also of the movements of the neoliberal decade of privatizing.
Lastly, the progressive cycle must close with a serene analysis of the errors committed by the movements. It would be demoralizing that in the next cycle of struggles they repeat the same errors that have affected autonomy in these years. It’s probable that the greatest difficulty to confront consists in knowing how to accommodate the double activity of the movements: the struggle against the model (the defense of one’s own spaces, mobilization and formation) and the creation at each possible level of the new (health, production, housing, land and education).
While street action permits us to stop offensives from above, new creations are steps in autonomy. They are the modes that we learn to continue navigating in the storms.
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