|
Hillary Clinton's Unlearned Lessons |
 |
|
Monday, 24 February 2014 09:15 |
|
Parry writes: "A top Democratic war hawk, Hillary Clinton, is now considered the odds-on favorite to get the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Her defenders even cite bipartisan Republican praise for her foreign policy attitudes."
Parry: 'Hillary Clinton, is now considered the odds-on favorite to get the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.' (photo: unknown)
Hillary Clinton's Unlearned Lessons
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
24 February 14
 s President Barack Obama tries to pick his way through a minefield of complex foreign policy issues – from Iran’s nuclear program to the Syrian civil war to Israeli-Palestinian peace to unrest in Ukraine – he is beset by incessant criticism from much of Official Washington which still retains the neocon influences of the last two decades.
Indeed, the failure to impose any meaningful accountability on Republicans, Democrats, senior editors and think-tank analysts who cheered on the Iraq War disaster makes it hard to envision how President Obama can navigate this maze of difficult negotiations and trade-offs needed to resolve conflicts in the world’s hot spots.
Successful negotiations require both an objective assessment of ground truth, i.e. a cold-eyed view of the actual power relationships between the disputing parties, and flexibility, i.e. the readiness to make concessions that accommodate the realistic needs of the two sides.
Yet, Official Washington has become a place of “tough-guy/gal” bluster where the only purpose of negotiations is for the “anti-U.S.” side to come in and surrender. That is why the likes of Washington Post editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt are always calling for the U.S. to issue military ultimatums to disfavored foreign leaders, giving them the choice of doing what they’re told or facing U.S. attack.
We saw the same attitude before President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003: Bush’s escalating demands that Saddam Hussein surrender his stockpiles of WMD, American outrage when the Iraqi government insisted that the WMD no longer existed, and then the need to respond to Iraq’s arrogance and intransigence by going to war to protect U.S. “credibility.”
The fact that Iraq was telling the truth about its lack of WMD did not lead to mass firings of Official Washington’s opinion leaders, nor serious consequences for politicians who collaborated in this war crime. Bush won reelection; most of the war hawks kept their seats in Congress; and Hiatt and the other neocon media personalities remained employed.
Odds-on Favorite
Perhaps most interestingly, a top Democratic war hawk, Hillary Clinton, is now considered the odds-on favorite to get the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Her defenders even cite bipartisan Republican praise for her foreign policy attitudes from the likes of former Vice President Dick Cheney and neocon Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain.
As for buying into Bush’s bogus case for invading Iraq, Clinton’s backers insist that she learned from this “mistake.” But there is new information in Robert Gates’s memoir, Duty, that shows how little Clinton and other Democrats did learn from the Iraq War deception, even when it came to later chapters of the Iraq War.
Sen. Clinton was among the leading Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee who were completely fooled by the significance of Gates’s nomination in November 2006 to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary. They again followed blindly the conventional wisdom, which at the time held that President Bush picked Gates to wind down the war and that he was essentially ceding control of U.S. foreign policy to the wiser national security team of his father’s administration.
There were clear warnings to the contrary, including some published at Consortiumnews.com, that Sen. Clinton and other senators were again getting the narrative wrong, that Gates’s nomination foreshadowed an escalation of the war and that Rumsfeld was getting the boot because he backed the field generals who favored shrinking the U.S. footprint in Iraq.
Writing on the Wall
This reality was even spelled out by right-wing pundit Fred Barnes in the neocon Weekly Standard, writing that Gates “is not the point man for a boarding party of former national security officials from the elder President Bush’s administration taking over defense and foreign policy in his son’s administration.” Barnes wrote that “rarely has the press gotten a story so wrong.”
Barnes reported that the younger George Bush didn’t consult his father and only picked ex-CIA Director Gates after a two-hour face-to-face meeting at which the younger Bush got assurances that Gates was onboard with the neocon notion of “democracy promotion” in the Middle East and shared Bush’s goal of victory in Iraq. [The Weekly Standard, Nov. 27, 2006]
But the mainstream press was enamored with its new storyline. A Newsweek cover pictured a large George H.W. Bush towering over a small George W. Bush. Then, embracing this conventional wisdom, Clinton and other Senate Armed Services Committee members brushed aside the warnings about Gates, both his troubling history at the CIA and his likely support for a war escalation.
Facing no probing questions, Gates offered up some bromides about his “fresh eyes” and his determination not to be “a bump on a log,” while Clinton and other Democratic senators praised his “candor” before joining in a 21-0 vote to endorse his nomination, which went on to a 95-2 confirmation by the full Senate.
However, once installed at the Pentagon, Gates became a central figure in the Iraq War “surge,” which dispatched 30,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007. The “surge” saw casualty figures spike. Nearly 1,000 additional American died along with an untold number of Iraqis. And – despite another conventional wisdom about the “successful surge” – it failed to achieve its central goal of getting the Iraqis to achieve compromises on their sectarian divisions.
In the end, all the Iraq War “surge” did was buy President Bush and his neocon advisers time to get out of office before the failure of the Iraq War became obvious to the American public. Its other primary consequence was to encourage Defense Secretary Gates, who was kept on by President Obama as a sign of bipartisanship, to conjure up another “surge” for Afghanistan.
Gates’s Recollections
So, it was enlightening to read in Duty, Gates’s recollection of his 2006 nomination and his insights into how completely clueless Official Washington was. Regarding the conventional wisdom about Bush-41 taking the reins from Bush-43, Gates wrote about his recruitment by the younger Bush: “It was clear he had not consulted his father about this possible appointment and that, contrary to later speculation, Bush 41 had no role in it.”
Though Gates doesn’t single out Hillary Clinton for misreading the significance of his nomination, Gates wrote: “The Democrats were even more enthusiastic, believing my appointment would somehow hasten the end of the war. If I had any doubt before the calls [with Democrats] that nearly everyone in Washington believed I would have a one-item agenda as secretary, it was dispelled in those calls. …
“They professed to be enormously pleased with my nomination and offered their support, I think mainly because they thought that I, as a member of the Iraq Study Group [which had called for winding down the war], would embrace their desire to begin withdrawing from Iraq.”
In Duty, Gates also acknowledges that he was always a supporter of the Iraq invasion, writing that in 2003, “I supported Bush 43’s decision to invade and bring Saddam down.” The failure of Clinton and other Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee to fully vet Gates’s attitudes on the Iraq War was a stunning failure of their own duty.
Regarding the mainstream news media’s wrongheaded take on his nomination, Gates wrote: “There was a lot of hilarious commentary about a return to ‘41’s’ team, the president’s father coming to the rescue, former secretary of state Jim Baker pulling all the strings behind the scenes, and how I was going to purge the Pentagon of Rumsfeld’s appointees — ‘clean out the E-Ring’ (the outer corridor of the Pentagon where most senior Defense civilians have their offices). It was all complete nonsense.”
Cheering on the ‘Surge’
Yet, the mainstream press didn’t get any closer to the mark in 2008 when it began cheering the “surge” as a great success, getting spun by the neocons who noted a gradual drop in the casualty levels. The media honchos, many of whom supported the invasion in 2003, ignored that Bush had laid out specific policy goals for the “surge,” none of which were achieved.
In Duty, Gates reminds us of those original targets, writing: “Prior to the deployment, clear benchmarks should be established for the Iraqi government to meet during the time of the augmentation, from national reconciliation to revenue sharing, etc. It should be made quite clear to the Iraqi government that the augmentation period is of specific length and that success in meeting the benchmarks will determine the timetable for withdrawal of the base force subsequent to the temporary augmentation.”
Those benchmarks were set for the Iraqi government to meet, but “national reconciliation to revenue sharing, etc.” were never achieved, either during the “surge” or since then. To this day, Iraq remains a society bitterly divided along sectarian lines with the out-of-power Sunnis again sidling up to al-Qaeda-connected extremists.
Playing Politics
In possibly the most shocking disclosure in Duty, Gates recounts a 2009 White House meeting regarding the Afghan War “surge.” He wrote: “The exchange that followed was remarkable. In strongly supporting the surge in Afghanistan, Hillary told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary [in 2008]. She went on to say, ‘The Iraq surge worked.’
“The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.” Obama’s aides have since disputed Gates’s suggestion that the President indicated that his opposition to the Iraq “surge” was political, noting that he had always opposed the Iraq War. The Clinton team has not challenged Gates’s account.
Of course, Official Washington’s misreading of Gates’s nomination in 2006 and its mistaken belief in the “successful surge” may pale in comparison to the fundamental crime of invading Iraq under false pretenses in 2003. But this benighted behavior continues to show how the lack of individual accountability for one failure ensures another and another.
It also adds to the complications facing President Obama as he tries to find solutions on Iran, Syria, Israel-Palestine and Ukraine. Though he opposed the Iraq War and has sidestepped demands for U.S. military attacks on Iran and Syria, his maneuvering room is tightly constrained by the many hawks in his own administration and the neocons who still dominate the major U.S. op-ed pages and think tanks.
Beyond the fact that many of these old Iraq War cheerleaders still hold down seats at influential media outlets, inside Congress and even in the Executive Branch, Democratic leaders are moving toward nominating one of the party’s staunchest war supporters to be the next President of the United States.
One has to wonder whether rank-and-file Democrats will insist on grilling Hillary Clinton about what she has and hasn’t learned from the Iraq War disaster and other aggressive use of U.S. military force before she wraps up the party’s nomination. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Is Hillary Clinton a Neocon-lite?”]
 |
|
What the Hell Is Barack Obama's Presidency For? |
|
|
Monday, 24 February 2014 09:14 |
|
Younge writes: "Barack Obama has now been in power for longer than Johnson was, and the question remains: 'What the hell's his presidency for?' His second term has been characterised by a profound sense of drift in principle and policy."
President Barack Obama speaks in the briefing room of the White House in Washington, 10/21/11. (photo: Philip Scott Andrews/NYT)
What the Hell Is Barack Obama's Presidency For?
By Gary Younge, Guardian UK
24 February 14
His ascent to power had meaning, but now his interventions are too rare and too piecemeal to constitute a narrative.
few days after John F Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson sat in his kitchen with his key advisers working his first speech to Congress. It was the evening of Kennedy's funeral – Johnson was now president. The nation was still in grief and Johnson, writes Robert Caro in The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, was not yet able to move into the White House because Kennedy's effects were still there.
He had been a hapless vice-president; now he had to both personify and project the transition from bereavement to business as usual. In the midst of the cold war, with Vietnam brewing, the Kennedy administration had been trying to get civil rights legislation and tax cuts through Congress. There was plenty of business to attend to. Johnson's advisers were keen that he introduced himself to the nation as a president who could get things done.
For that reason, writes Caro, they implored him not to push for civil rights in this first speech, since it had no chance of passing. "The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn't to expend it on this," said "one of the wise, practical people around the table". Johnson, who sat in silence at the table as his aides debated, interjected: "Well, what the hell's the presidency for."
"First," he told Congress a few days later, "no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honour President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long." Over the next five years he would go on to sign the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, launch the war on poverty and introduce Medicaid (medical assistance for low-income families) and Medicare (for seniors). That's what his presidency was for.
Barack Obama has now been in power for longer than Johnson was, and the question remains: "What the hell's his presidency for?" His second term has been characterised by a profound sense of drift in principle and policy. While posing as the ally of the immigrant he is deporting people at a faster clip than any of his predecessors; while claiming to be a supporter of labour he's championing trade deals that will undercut American jobs and wages. In December, even as he pursued one whistleblower, Edward Snowden and kept another, Chelsea Manning, incarcerated, he told the crowd at Nelson Mandela's funeral: "There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba's struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people."
If there was a plot, he's lost it. If there was a point, few can remember it. If he had a big idea, he shrank it. If there's a moral compass powerful enough to guide such contradictions to more consistent waters, it is in urgent need of being reset.
Given the barriers to democratic engagement and progressive change in America – gerrymandering, big money and Senate vetoes – we should always be wary of expecting too much from a system designed to deliver precious little to the poor. We should also challenge the illusion that any individual can single-handedly produce progressive change in the absence of a mass movement that can both drive and sustain it.
Nonetheless, it was Obama who set himself the task of becoming a transformational political figure in the mould of Ronald Reagan or JFK. "I think we are in one of those fundamentally different times right now where people think that things, the way they are going, just aren't working," he said. It was he who donned the mantles of "hope" and "change".
It was obvious what his election was for. First, preventing the alternative: presidential candidates in the grip of a deeply dysfunctional and reactionary party. His arrival marked a respite from eight years of international isolation, military excess and economic collapse. He stood against fear, exclusion and greed – and won. Second, it helped cohere and mobilise a new progressive coalition that is transforming the electoral landscape. Finally, it proved that despite the country's recent history Americans could elect a black man to its highest office.
So his ascent to power had meaning. It's his presence in power that lacks purpose. The gap between rich and poor and black and white has grown while he's been in the White House, the prospects for immigration reform remain remote, bankers made away with the loot, and Guantánamo's still open. It's true there's a limit to what a president can do about much of this and that Republican intransigence has not helped. But that makes the original question more salient not less: if he can't reunite a divided political culture, which was one of his key pledges, and his powers are that limited, then what is the point of his presidency?
This should not deny his achievements. He scaled down one major war, is winding down another, and helped save the US car industry. If he's on the hook for growing inequality, then he can take credit for the deficit shrinking and unemployment falling. But together, this amounts to an extended period of triage before sending the patient back out into the world without any plan for long-term recovery. The underlying impulses, policies, priorities and structures that made the wars and economic collapse possible are still in place.
Finally, there's healthcare reform. The brouhaha over its botched rollout will scarcely be remembered a few years hence. But with roughly 31 million people set to remain uninsured and little changing for many, its undeniable benefits are not likely to be remembered as transformational. All in all, there's precious little that Obama has done that any of his primary opponents would not have done.
Occasionally, he either gives a lead – like after the shootings at Newtown when he advocated for gun control – or follows one, as in his support for gay marriage or preventing the deportation of young undocumented immigrants, which helps to set a tone or establish a moral marker. But these interventions are too rare, and their remedies too piecemeal, to constitute a narrative.
"If you're going to be president, then I guess you obviously want to be in the history books," said Susan Aylward, a frustrated Obama supporter in Akron, Ohio, shortly before the last election. "So what does he want to be in the history books for? I don't quite know the answer to that yet." Sadly, it seems, neither does he.
|
|
|
FOCUS | Kareem Khan Is Free. And You Should Care. |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 23 February 2014 10:37 |
|
Boardman writes: "Presumably Kareem Khan would like to see Obama haunted much more vigorously by the living. For more than four years Kahn has been doing what he could to bring at least some Americans to justice for killing his son and brother."
President Barack Obama in Tucson, Arizona, 01/12/11. (photo: Jewel Samad/Getty Images)
Kareem Khan Is Free. And You Should Care.
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
23 February 14
“In 2009, my home was attacked by a drone. My brother and son were martyred. My son’s name was Hafiz Zahinullah. My brother’s name was Asif Iqbal. There was a third person who was a stone mason. He was a Pakistani. His name was Khaliq Dad…. Their bodies were covered with wounds. Later, I found some of their fingers in the rubble.”
– Kareem Khan, a Pakistani journalist, speaking of his personal experience with civilians killed by Americans, in the documentary “Wounds of Waziristan,” 2013
“… it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in every war. And for the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me and those in my chain of command, those deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred throughout conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
– President Obama, May 23, 2013, at the National Defense University
 resident Obama should be justly haunted by the slaughter of innocents, especially the ones he has personally condemned to death on untested evidence. But it’s hard to imagine him actually being haunted by any of his lethal failures, perhaps least of all by innocents condemned by the mere turning down of his imperial thumb in these or any other circumstances. The Nobel Peace Prize winner hardly sounds haunted when he’s quoted saying, "Turns out I'm really good at killing people. Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine."
Such sadistic preening, regardless of possibly ironic intent, helps explain why his haunting, real or imagined, has mostly led his administration to deny the killings and to refuse any succor to the innocent victims’ innocent families. It is as if Obama plays Macbeth and says to the Banquo’s ghost of drone murder, “Thou canst not say I did it: never shake thy gory locks at me” – a deluded and specious lawyer’s argument even then, and still false to its deepest moral roots.
Presumably Kareem Khan would like to see Obama haunted much more vigorously by the living. For more than four years Kahn has been doing what he could to bring at least some Americans to justice for killing his son and brother. As of February 19, he was in Europe as part of a campaign against the CIA drone assassination program, scheduled to visit with political leaders in Germany, the Netherlands, and UK. Khan is a freelance journalist and now an anti-drone activist. He once lived near Mir Ali in North Waziristan until the Americans destroyed his house and its occupants. Khan, who is in his fifties, now lives in Rawalpindi with his wife and his other, younger children, who were present when he was kidnapped by apparent secret police in the early hours of February 5.
"When a person is blindfolded […] they feel very bad, and when you are being treated this way, you feel like you are going crazy."
– Kareem Khan describing his captivity to Al Jazeera
For the next five days, local police refused to file a report on the event, much less acknowledge that that Khan had been disappeared in classic totalitarian style. On February 10, a local court ordered police to make a report, which then dryly noted that a kidnapping case was filed against “unidentified persons,” adding that those persons were not local police. According to witnesses, the unidentified persons numbered as many as 20, eight of whom wore some sort of police uniforms, perhaps Punjab Police. Some police state agency had taken Khan.
Khan’s lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, also filed a habeus corpus request with the Rawalpindi bench of Lahore High Court. The court responded by ordering the Ministry of the Interior, which oversees Pakistani intelligence agencies (ISI), either to produce Khan by February 20, or to explain to the court, in writing, why Khan was seized and held. Presently, there are more than 900 open cases of missing Pakistanis allegedly disappeared by their government. The ISI did not respond to the court about Khan. But in the early hours of February 14, unidentified persons threw Khan from a van, still blindfolded, onto a public street in a neighborhood of Rawalpindi.
Before releasing him, Khan’s captors had warned him not to talk to the media. Later the same day, Khan issued a statement and talked to the media about his experience of being kept blindfolded and handcuffed for eight days in a basement where he and perhaps a dozen other prisoners were held in cells and periodically tortured.
"There were different types of torture. There was mental torture – they would abuse me using very harsh and dirty curse words. Physically, they would punch me and slap me, on the face and shoulder. I was hit with a stick, on my arms and legs. They hit me on my open palms…. they would hang me upside down, and then one of them would hit the soles of my feet with a leather strap so that it did not leave a mark. But it was very painful."
– Kareem Khan, in Al Jazeera, February 14, 2014
Within hours of his release, Khan travelled to Europe in a delegation sponsored by Reprieve, the British human rights charity that has supported Khan’s efforts since 2010 as part of its program against abuses in counter-terrorism (“Reprieve investigates extra-judicial killing and detention around the world and reunites ‘disappeared’ prisoners with their legal rights”). The Reprieve delegation to Europe included, in addition to Kareem Khan:
Noor Behram, 42, a photo-journalist from North Waziristan who started documenting drone atrocities in 2008. In his experience, he said: "For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant. I don't go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed…. The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack. The Americans think it is working, but the damage they're doing is far greater." He is president of the Tribal Union of Journalists, the representative body of journalists in the region.
Shazad Akbar, 50ish, an attorney who represents Kareem Khan, and a human rights lawyer in Islamabad, where he founded and runs the human rights organization Foundation for Fundamental Rights (FFR). He currently holds a Legal Fellowship from Reprieve. Shahzad qualified as a Barrister from Lincolns Inn and also holds a LLM from University of Newcastle. In November 2010, Shahzad Akbar filed a lawsuit against the CIA on behalf of Kareem Khan for the wrongful deaths of his son and brother. The lawyer later said publicly: “If the US believes in the rule of law, it should not be hindering my advocacy of claims against the CIA for wrongful death and injury.” The U.S. government barred him from the country in May 2011 when he was invited to speak at Columbia University. Shahzad Akbar filed another lawsuit on behalf of drone victims in May 2012, this time demanding that the Pakistani government take action against the U.S. for war crimes, but also bring the issue of drone assassinations before the United Nations Security Council, the United Nations Human Rights Council and the International Court of Justice to stop them. The U.S. again barred the lawyer from entering the country, then relented in the face of public outcry, and he spoke at the first international Drone Summit in April 2013 in Washington. The U.S. barred him yet again in the fall, keeping him away when his clients testified before Congress in another case.
Jennifer Gibson, 32ish, a U.S. lawyer based in the UK, a staff attorney who leads Reprieve’s work on drones in Pakistan. She has a doctorate in international studies from the University of Cambridge and a law degree from Stanford. While at Stanford, she was part of a research team that visited Pakistan, and she is a co-author of “Living Under Drones” – a 2012 project that reaches devastating conclusions about American aerial murder: (1) “In addition to killing and maiming, the presence of drones exacts a high toll on civilian life in northwest Pakistan;” (2) “Evidence gathered in the report casts doubt on the legality of drone strikes in northwest Pakistan;” (3) “Drone strikes foster anti-American sentiment and undermine the rule of law.” Soon after the report’s release, Gibson wrote: “Unfortunately, many commentators missed the report’s key message: drones are terrorising an entire civilian population…. because no one knows who the informants are, people are reluctant to invite neighbours into their homes. The entire community withdraws from the public square, afraid to venture out, but equally afraid to bring the outside in. This is what it means to live under drones. It has turned North Waziristan into the world’s largest prison.” When the U.S. barred Shahzad Akbar from accompanying his clients before Congress, Jennifer Gibson appeared in his place and told the lawmakers that “every child who loses life or limb persuades dozens more tribes in Pakistan that the United States does not distinguish friend from foe.”
“The CIA killer drones programme is the death penalty without trial, and the new face of state lawlessness in the name of counter-terrorism. Reprieve is assisting victims' families to seek legal accountability for drone attacks, with the goal of exposing the programme to scrutiny and restoring the rule of law.”
– Reprieve statement on American drones in Pakistan
“America does not take strikes to punish individuals; we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat. And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set….”
– President Obama, May 23, 2013, at the National Defense University
Obama’s use of “near certainty” is about as deceitful as it gets. In the first place, the government has no honest idea of the actual identities of the men, women, and children they’ve killed beyond 10 per cent or, generously, maybe 30. In the second place, the government refuses to tell the truth about what it does or doesn’t know. In the third place, the government defines a “militant” as any male of military age, a flexible category that the president may expand to include women and children as exigency demands (as when the U.S. killed American citizen Abdulrahman Awlaki who was 16). The critical evidence of a person’s guilt is that the U.S. killed that person.
In other words, every published report of drone strikes killing “militants” is unverifiable and probably false, yet media everywhere report the government version uncritically, with few exceptions. The argument over the number of civilian casualties is ridiculous at its unknowable heart. The number of identified executed civilians can be only a minimum measure of American-inflicted carnage.
The New America Foundation is a somewhat paranoid, threat-obsessed Washington think tank devoted to “appropriate methods to secure the homeland.” Without providing meaningful context, the foundation reports that the number of “jihadist extremists” in the U.S. “has continued to decline from its peak in 2009,” which is similar to the trend for icebergs in the South Atlantic. The foundation has gone to great pains to try to rationalize the irrational, creating databases for drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries, citing “the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Stanford International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, and the Columbia University Law School for their valuable work on this subject.”
For all its manifest bias in favor of a security state with a siege mentality that allows the U.S. to kill anyone for any imagined reason, the foundation does offer a more rational way of assessing the usefulness of America’s drone crimes war. Tucked in the middle of its “Key Findings,” the foundation states: “Only 58 known militant leaders have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, representing just 2% of the total deaths.” [emphasis added] That represents an American moral calculus in which one “known militant leader” (whatever that means) is worth another 49 dead Pakistanis who are not “known” to have been anything but previously alive, whether they were grunts or civilians.
Judgment of Peshawar High Court [excerpt] on petition #1551-P/2012 and two other cases, issued May 9, 2013:
“Under the Constitution of Pakistan, 1973 particularly Article 199 thereof put this Court under tremendous obligation to safeguard & protect the life & property of the citizen of Pakistan and any person for the time being in Pakistan, being fundamental rights, hence, this Court is constrained to hold as follows:
i. “That the drone strikes, carried out in the tribal areas (FATA) particularly North & South Waziristan by the CIA & US Authorities, are blatant violation of Basic Human Rights and are against the UN Charter, the UN General Assembly Resolution, adopted unanimously, the provision of Geneva Conventions thus, it is held to be a War Crime, cognizable by the International Court of Justice or Special Tribunal for War Crimes, constituted or to be constituted by the UNO for this purpose.
ii. That the drone strikes carried out against a handful of alleged militants, who are not engaged in combat with the US Authorities or Forces, amounts to breach of International Law and Conventions on the subject matter, therefore, it is held that these are absolutely illegal & blatant violation of the Sovereignty of the State of Pakistan because frequent intrusion is made on its territory/airspace without its consent rather against its wishes as despite of the protests lodged by the Government of Pakistan with USA on the subject matter, these are being carried out with impunity.
iii. That the civilians casualties, as discussed above, including considerable damage to properties, livestock, wildlife & killing of infants/suckling babies, women and preteen children, is an uncondonable crime on the part of US Authorities including CIA and it is held so.”
The two most familiar U.S. serial-killing drones are appropriately named Reaper and Predator, with a wingspan of about 65 feet, almost twice as long as the body. A drone’s payload of almost two tons can include a mix-to-taste array of air-to-ground missiles, air-to-air missiles, and laser-guided bombs with explosive power in the 500-2000 pound range. Drones have flown hundreds of missions over Pakistan since 2004, bombing a country with which the U.S. is not at war, a country which has officially demanded that the U.S. stop violating Pakistani sovereignty while simultaneously doing nothing about it.
The Pakistani government has done nothing to enforce the Peshawar High Court’s order of May 2013. Even suggesting that the government act to protect its people creates controversy. An uncertain number of other cases are still pending in Pakistani courts. One of those is Kareem Khan’s 2010 wrongful death suit against the CIA for killing innocent people in his house in 2009.
On New Year’s Eve in 2009, Kareem Khan was a respected working reporter in Islamabad, Pakistan, perhaps wishing he could be home that night. At 9 p.m. on December 31, 2009, an American drone controlled by the CIA attacked Kareem Khan’s house in North Waziristan, killing all three civilians inside: Khaliq Dad, a visiting stone mason; Asif Iqbal, a secondary school teacher and Kareem Khan’s brother; and Zahin Ullah Khan, a government security employee and the reporter’s 18-year-old son.
None of these three had any connection to militants in the region, nor did Kareem Khan, other than sometimes reporting on them.
Attorney Shahzad Akbar, working with Reprieve, filed Kareem Khan’s wrongful death suit in late 2010, seeking $500 million from the CIA. The case is still pending. In the interim, another 35 Pakistanis have joined the suit, seeking justice for the wrongful deaths of members of their families.
Will the International Criminal Court act on war crimes?
On February 19, Kareem Khan and Attorney Akbar were at The Hague, where they filed a complaint against NATO countries for committing war crimes by aiding and abetting U.S. drone assassinations. A press release from Reprieve announcing the filing said: “It has been revealed in recent months that the UK, Germany, Australia, and other NATO partners support US drone strikes through intelligence-sharing. Because all these countries are signatories to the Rome Statute, they fall under The ICC’s jurisdiction and can therefore be investigated for war crimes. Kareem Khan … is at The Hague with his lawyers from the human rights charity Reprieve and the Foundation for Fundamental Rights who have filed the complaint on his behalf.”
[Last fall, a group of Egyptian lawyers filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court, charging President Obama with crimes against humanity in connection with U.S. support for the Muslim Brotherhood. In June 2013, in South Africa, the Muslim Lawyers Association petitioned the court to arrest and try President Obama for war crimes and crimes against humanity resulting from the American drone killing program.]
Accused of murder, the United States has offered no explanation, no defense, no information whatsoever to justify this extrajudicial execution campaign in which President Obama functions as judge, jury, and executioner, although he sometimes delegates some of these activities to underlings. The United States has become a rogue state and a state sponsor of terrorism and apparently the best justification the president has to offer for a decade-long killing spree in Pakistan and wanton lawless executions elsewhere is that – they do it too!
Never mind that the countries the U.S. is “protecting” are tired of the American protection racket. What’s important, according to the president in his May 23, 2013 speech is to keep in mind that crimes against humanity justify other crimes against humanity, although he put it somewhat more obliquely:
“Remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes. So doing nothing is not an option.”
How is that any different from the Hellfire missile victim who says: “If God gives me the chance of getting to Obama, I will. He is not only the killer of my son and brother, but he is the killer of many Muslims. The punishment or killing is to be killed. I would kill [Obama].”
Or are we facing another, grimmer parallel from Macbeth as he approaches the endgame and observes:
All causes shall give way. I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
|
|
Arizona Governor Fears Government Regulation Could Ruin Bigotry and Hatred |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 23 February 2014 09:00 |
|
Borowitz writes: "Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said today that she was reluctant to sign an anti-gay 'religious freedom' bill passed by the Arizona state legislature this week, telling reporters, 'I believe that bigotry and hatred should be free of government regulation.'"
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. (photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)
Arizona Governor Fears Government Regulation Could Ruin Bigotry and Hatred
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
23 February 14
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
rizona Governor Jan Brewer said today that she was reluctant to sign an anti-gay “religious freedom” bill passed by the Arizona state legislature this week, telling reporters, “I believe that bigotry and hatred should be free of government regulation.”
She said that while many Arizona business owners currently enjoy employing hateful practices, “I worry that if big government gets involved, that’ll ruin everything.”
“Don’t get me wrong—I think the anti-gay bill that the legislature passed was well-meaning,” she said. “All I’m saying is, let’s leave it to the private sector.”
Offering an example, she added, “Look at how Obamacare has messed up health care. I’d hate to pass a new law that results in government wrecking bigotry.”
But Governor Brewer got some pushback today from Republican legislator Harland Dorrinson, who told reporters, "I’m as opposed to big government as anyone. But promoting hate-based bias is one area where I believe government has an important role to play.”
For her part, Governor Brewer remains unconvinced by that argument. Noting that the current system of hatred and bigotry in place in Arizona has worked well for decades, she said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
|
|
’m going to have a story published later today about a new document, but until then, 
