Lamar W. Hankins : How George W. Bush Aided the Terrorists

Mission accomplished! Have Bush's (and Obama's) policies boosted terrorist recruitment? Photo from Reuters.

How George W. Bush aided the terrorists
(According to the government)

Bush’s bogus war in Iraq; the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and “black site” prisons; waterboarding and other uses of torture; and the civilian death toll from drone strikes have all served as recruiting tools for Al Qaeda and the terrorists.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2013

Peter Hart, from Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, recently discussed the provocative idea that George W. Bush, as well as others in his administration, aided terrorism. This idea arises as a result of evidence introduced at the trial of whistleblower Private Bradley Manning.

To show that Manning’s unauthorized release of information about American actions during the war in Iraq had harmed the U.S. by encouraging attacks against the West, the prosecution did the following, as reported by The New York Times:

A prosecution witness in the sentencing phase of the court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning told a military judge on Thursday that Al Qaeda could have used WikiLeaks disclosures, including classified United States government materials provided by Private Manning, to encourage attacks in the West, in testimony meant to show the harm done by his actions... The witness, Cmdr. Youssef Aboul-Enein, an adviser to the Pentagon's Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism, said that WikiLeaks materials showing that the United States had killed civilians, for instance, could help Al Qaeda.

Aboul-Enein said, "Perception is important because it provides a good environment for recruitment, for fund-raising and for support for Al Qaeda’s wider audience and objectives.”

Hart suggests that “the potentially most damaging part of Manning's disclosures was that the war kills civilians -- and that U.S. enemies could use that fact to recruit others.”

The standard, then, appears to be, as Hart wrote: “the killing of civilians might rally people behind the cause of Al Qaeda.” Hart identifies the invasion of Iraq itself as the cause of all of the killing, but that just scratches the surface of the disclosures of horrendous acts that inflame hatred of the U.S. and lead to enhanced recruitment of people by Al Qaeda to commit acts of terrorism against both the U.S. and its allies.

When the horror of Abu-Ghraib was revealed, Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could not stop talking publicly about how horrible such practices were, always blaming anyone but the administration for the “stuff” that happens in war.

In his 2011 memoir, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld seems to admit that Abu Ghraib atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers harmed the U.S. once they were revealed. Of course, Iraqis who were abused eventually would have been released and passed stories around of their horrendous treatment by U.S. troops, or their families would have revealed their abusive treatment.

It was the Bush administration that opened the prison in Guantanamo that has been one of the greatest aids to terrorist recruitment in the modern world, largely because the U.S. tortured the prisoners at that facility and held many who had done nothing wrong or adverse to U.S. interests. Earlier this year, UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said that the Guantanamo prison “has become an ideal recruitment tool for terrorists.”

In an April article in The Atlantic magazine, Thérèse Postel, a policy associate in international affairs at The Century Foundation, wrote: “Guantanamo Bay has often been the focus of jihadist media and propaganda... Guantanamo Bay has become a salient issue used in jihadist propaganda.”

Of course, the jihadist use of Guantanamo as a recruiting tool can now be attributed to the Obama administration, which is responsible for the prosecution of Manning. Irony and hypocrisy know no bounds when it comes to government tyranny and abuse of power.

And we should never forget the “black site” prisons located in strategic places around the globe where U.S. prisoners were tortured at will (and still are). In 2005, the Washington Post reported:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement... The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

Other black sites have been identified as located in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco. CIA interrogators in such overseas sites used "enhanced interrogation techniques," some of which are prohibited by the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and by U.S. military law.

Among the techniques used is "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he is drowning. For a time, waterboarding became a household word in the U.S. and around the world as the morality of the practice was debated. Although the U.S. is a party to the U. N. Convention, it has blatantly violated it, giving more reasons for Al Qaeda to attract new jihadist recruits.

Especially destructive to U.S. interests is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, known widely as drones, which can be armed with weapons to kill enemies. They have been used by the U.S. since 2001 when they were launched from Uzbekistan and Pakistan. One of the unfortunate effects of drone use has been the killing of civilians in large numbers. Attacks have been launched from drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

In 2009, a report from the Brookings Institute said that 10 civilians are killed for every militant killed in Pakistan drone attacks. Pakistani authorities have claimed that in 2009 alone, over 700 innocent civilians were killed by drone attacks and many more injured.

Armed drone use has grown dramatically since drones were first employed by the Bush administration. The killing of civilians by drones is widely acknowledged as a significant recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups.

If “the killing of civilians might rally people behind the cause of Al Qaeda,” then the worst perpetrator of actions that might harm U.S. interests is the government of the U.S. Of course, the government will not prosecute itself for aiding the enemy, but it will torture and punish low-level personnel like Bradley Manning for actions that it claims do what it has done.

But we know that governments can be far worse than what I. F. Stone said about them -- that all governments lie. We know, if we pay attention, that the U.S. government is duplicitous, sanctimonious, and deceitful, as well as given to lying on a regular basis.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Tom Hayden : Is President Taking New Tack on Counterterrorism?

President Obama speaks about his administration's counter-terrorism policy at the National Defense University in Washington, May 23, 2013. Photo by Larry Downing / Reuters.

Obama responding to critics:  
Tide turning on counterterrorism secrecy

While defending his military policies as constitutional, the president was promising to wind down the 'forever war,' sharply reduce drone attacks, repatriate detainees to Yemen, and move again to close Guantanamo.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / May 29, 2013

President Barack Obama’s speech at the National Defense University on counterterrorism revealed a commander-in-chief increasingly worried about political criticism of his Guantanamo detentions, his penchant for secrecy, and his drone warfare policies. Where Obama has shielded his policies on the basis of external terrorist threats, he now is responding to critics who threaten to upset domestic support for those policies abroad.

In past years, Obama has defended himself against attacks from neoconservative hawks and senators like John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsay Graham, who charged him with being “soft” on terrorism. But on May 23, while defending his military policies as constitutional, the president was promising to wind down the “forever war,” sharply reduce drone attacks, repatriate detainees to Yemen, and move again to close Guantanamo.

When disrupted by CodePink’s Medea Benjamin, Obama spontaneously said that Benjamin was “worth paying attention to,” and that he was “willing to cut the young lady who interrupted [him] some slack because it’s worth being passionate about.”

Such a gesture will hardly pacify CodePink or the president’s antiwar critics. But their criticisms have become a factor in the national debate. To criticize the president’s speech as “nothing new” is to miss the primary reason for which the speech was given: to explain a careful withdrawal from the Global War on Terrorism paradigm, the heinous impasse at Guantanamo, and the massive secrecy around drones.

The President was cautious in explaining his pivot toward deescalation, mindful that incidents like Benghazi or the Boston Marathon bombings can block his deescalation path, or at least complicate it severely.

The speech, along with Attorney General Eric Holder's letter and background briefings, for the first time revealed the following:

• Obama let it be known that the CIA will cede its control of the drone war to the Pentagon in six months, opening the way to greater public transparency and overdue congressional debate -- Pentagon budgets can be amended while CIA items are unmentionable secrets in Washington;
• Obama called the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force “near obsolete” and proposed its eventual repeal;
• Clarified that drones will not be used after American ground forces leave Afghanistan, a signal the Taliban and Pakistan will hear;
• Vowed to “limit the use of lethal force” to only those targets considered to be ”continuing, imminent threat(s) to Americans,” which could “signal an end” (according to The New York Times) of so-called "signature strikes" or where the threats are to partner-states but not American personnel;
• Acknowledged for the first time that U.S. drone attacks have killed civilians;
• Declassified the official information that the U.S. killed Anwar al-Awlaki and three other Americans;
• Dropped its judicial effort to block a California lawsuit seeking materials related to al-Awlaki’s killing;
• Announced consultations with the media and a report on new whistleblower guidelines by July 12;
• Appointed a new State Department official “to achieve the transfer” of Yemeni detainees from Guantanamo.

The ramifications of the Obama speech and Holder letter will be felt in the weeks ahead. Asked if there will be effects on existing human rights cases, Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) said, “It does, because they never admitted to killing Abdul Rahman, the teenager, in the court papers, nor did they acknowledge that they killed people that they were not targeting. I have a sense that their legal justifications are going to shift, but not sure to what. [It] may be clearer in the coming weeks.”

In a related development, federal judge Rosemary Collyer required the Justice Department to report in two weeks on how the admissions affected the legal issues in the case. While defining al-Awlaki as a justifiable security threat, the administration now says the other three deaths, including aw-Awlaki’s 16-year old son, were not specifically targeted, raising the question of whether the administration will be held accountable in the federal court.

This article was also published at TomHayden.com.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Medea Benjamin : Why I spoke Out at Obama's Foreign Policy Speech

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the political activist group CodePink, is removed by security after speaking out against President Barack Obama during his foreign policy speech Thursday. Photo by Kevin Dietsch  / UPI. Image from Common Dreams.

Why I spoke out at 
Obama's foreign policy speech

Or, Why Obama's policies themselves, not those who speak out against them, are rude.

By Medea Benjamin / Common Dreams / May 27, 2013

Having worked for years on the issues of drones and Guantanamo, I was delighted to get a pass (the source will remain anonymous) to attend President Obama’s speech at the National Defense University.

I had read many press reports anticipating what the President might say. There was much talk about major policy shifts that would include transparency with the public, new guidelines for the use of drones, taking lethal drones out of the purview of the CIA, and in the case of Guantanamo, invoking the “waiver system” to begin the transfer of prisoners already cleared for release.

Sitting at the back of the auditorium, I hung on every word the President said. I kept waiting to hear an announcement about changes that would represent a significant shift in policy. Unfortunately, I heard nice words, not the resetting of failed policies.

Instead of announcing the transfer of drone strikes from the CIA to the exclusive domain of the military, Obama never even mentioned the CIA -- much less acknowledge the killing spree that the CIA has been carrying out in Pakistan during his administration. While there were predictions that he would declare an end to signature strikes, strikes based merely on suspicious behavior that have been responsible for so many civilian casualties, no such announcement was made.

The bulk of the president’s speech was devoted to justifying drone strikes. I was shocked when the President claimed that his administration did everything it could to capture suspects instead of killing them. That is just not true. Obama’s reliance on drones is precisely because he did not want to be bothered with capturing suspects and bringing them to trial.

Take the case of 16-year-old Pakistani Tariz Aziz, who could have been picked up while attending a conference at a major hotel in the capital, Islamabad, but was instead killed by a drone strike, with his 12-year-old cousin, two days later. Or the drone strike that 23-year-old Yemini Farea al-Muslimi talked about when he testified in Congress. He said the man targeted in his village of Wessab was a man who everyone knew, who met regularly with government officials, and who could have easily been brought in for questioning.

When the President was coming to the end of this speech, he started talking about Guantanamo. As he has done in the past, he stated his desire to close the prison, but blamed Congress. That’s when I felt compelled to speak out. With the men in Guantanamo on hunger strike, being brutally forced fed and bereft of all hope, I couldn’t let the President continue to act as if he were some helpless official at the mercy of Congress.


“Excuse me, Mr. President,” I said, “but you’re the Commander-in-Chief. You could close Guantanamo tomorrow and release the 86 prisoners who have been cleared for release.” We went on to have quite an exchange.

While I have received a deluge of support, there are others, including journalists, who have called me “rude.” But terrorizing villages with Hellfire missiles that vaporize innocent people is rude. Violating the sovereignty of nations like Pakistan is rude. Keeping 86 prisoners in Guantanamo long after they have been cleared for release is rude. Shoving feeding tubes down prisoners' throats instead of giving them justice is certainly rude.

At one point during his speech, President Obama said that the deaths of innocent people from the drone attacks will haunt him as long as he lives. But he is still unwilling to acknowledge those deaths, apologize to the families, or compensate them.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. military has a policy of compensating the families of victims who they killed or wounded by mistake. It is not always done, and many families refuse to take the money, but at least it represents some accounting for taking the lives of innocent people. Why can’t the President set up a similar policy when drone strikes are used in countries with which we are not at war?

There are many things the President could and should have said, but he didn’t. So it is up to us to speak out.

This article was first published at and was distributed by Common Dreams. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

[Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org), cofounder of Global Exchange and CODE PINK: Women for Peace, is the author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. Her previous books include Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart, and (with Jodie Evans) Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism.]

Medea Benjamin interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!
The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Lamar W. Hankins : Guantánamo Turns Us All Into Monsters

Photo by AP. Image from Salon.

The nation's shame:
Guantánamo turns us all into monsters

The President says the right things, but he doesn’t seem to have the political will to release those wrongly imprisoned in Guantánamo.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / May 13, 2013

There should be no question that George W. Bush is the first to charge for the shame of Guantánamo. But now President Obama, the Congress, and the nation share that shame.

Just as the nation bought the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice-Powell lies that took us to war in Iraq, so the nation bought their claims that every person imprisoned at Guantánamo was the worst of the worst. We now know that was a lie, too.

Of the 166 men now being held at Guantánamo, 86 have been cleared of wrongdoing. There is no reason to hold them except for Congressional action to make their releases difficult and the recalcitrance of a president whose moral convictions have evaporated like steam from boiling water. No cases illustrate the shame and moral bankruptcy of U.S. actions better than the cases of Shakir Aamer and Sami al-Hajj.

Aamer was a humanitarian worker, born in Saudi Arabia, educated in the United States, and a resident of Britain, along with his British family. He was taken into custody by American agents who bought him from people who were responding to American-distributed leaflets that offered bounties for any foreigner that Pakistanis or Afghans turned over. Aamer was sold to the Americans.

He had been living in Afghanistan with his young family, building girls’ schools and digging wells as a charity worker. He was then tortured in prisons in Kandahar and Bagram before being shipped to Guantánamo, where he has been imprisoned for over 11 years, though both the Americans and the British acknowledge that he has done nothing wrong and the British government wants him repatriated. But neither the Bush nor Obama administrations have made that happen.

Aamer is one of the over 130 Guantánamo prisoners now on a hunger strike. His back has been injured by his being repeatedly thrown to the ground in a process known as “earthing,” extremely rough treatment, administered regularly to the prisoners along with other torture. He has been cruelly force-fed.

In a letter to his wife, he wrote:

I am dying here every day, mentally and physically. This is happening to all of us. We have been ignored, locked up in the middle of the ocean for years. Rather than humiliate myself, having to beg for water, I would rather hurry up the process that is going to happen anyway. I would like to die quietly, by myself. I was once 250 pounds. I dropped to 150 pounds in the first hunger strike. I want to make it easy on everyone. I want no feeding, no forced tubes, no "help," no "intensive assisted feeding."

This is my legal right. The British government refuses to help me. What is the point of my wife being British? I thought Britain stood for justice, but they abandoned us, people who have lived in Britain for years, and who have British wives and children. I hold the British government responsible for my death, as I do the Americans.

Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese citizen, was the only journalist held at Guantánamo. In 2001, while working as a cameraman for the Al Jazeera news network on his way to work for the network in Afghanistan, he was arrested by the Pakistani army and turned over to the Americans, and then shipped to Guantánamo. He was imprisoned there for more than six years without any charges of wrongdoing.

In early 2007, al-Hajj began a hunger strike that lasted 438 days until his release in May 2008. He described the procedure used to force-feed. Guantánamo medical staff intentionally use a too-large tube, which is threaded through the nose, down the esophagus and into the stomach. The size of the tube makes the process more painful than it would otherwise be, though it is unpleasant even when it is done properly as a voluntary medical treatment.

When the “feeding” is completed, al-Hajj says that the tubing is jerked out of the nose, another unnecessarily painful procedure and one that does not follow normal medical protocols for tube feeding. Often, the tubing, which is then used on the next prisoner without sanitizing or even cleaning, is contaminated with blood.

Lt. Col. Barry Wingard, an attorney for one of the hunger protesters, describes the force-feeding process this way:

The tube makes his eyes water excessively and blood begins to trickle from the nose. Once the tube passes his throat the gag reflex kicks in. Warm liquid is poured into the body for 45 minutes to two hours. He feels like his body is going to convulse and often vomits.

Now that he is free from Guantánamo, al-Hajj is working again for Al Jazeera, now as a journalist in charge of their human rights division. Based on what Guantánamo officials have told him, he believes the purpose of this mistreatment is to break the hunger strike. As law professor Marjorie Cohn has written, “the United Nations Human Rights Council concluded that force-feeding amounts to torture. The American Medical Association says that force-feeding violates medical ethics.”

Cohn reports that those “who are refusing food have been stripped of all possessions, including a sleeping mat and soap, and are made to sleep on concrete floors in freezing solitary cells.” Asa Hutchison, a former Republican congressman and member of The Constitution Project's Task Force on Detainee Treatment, has joined in a report that concluded the treatment and indefinite detention of the Guantanamo detainees is "abhorrent and intolerable." Yet President Obama has ordered it to continue.

When I read recently of the woman in Cleveland who had been held captive for over 10 years, I couldn’t help thinking of al-Hajj and the remaining innocent Guantánamo prisoners. A forensic psychologist expert in such matters described the ordeal of long-term kidnappings. “These are some of the most catastrophic kinds of experiences a human being can be subjected to.”

He described the people who engage in such kidnappings as having “longstanding fantasies of capturing, controlling, abusing and dominating” their victims. He said, “Total control over another human being is what stimulates them.”

Nothing could describe the motivation of the architects and operators of Guantánamo better than these words. Guantánamo was set up to afford total control of prisoners held there. The stories of those who are innocent (as well as those who did fight for al Queda) make clear that their experiences at Guantánamo have been catastrophic psychologically, emotionally, and physically.

Among those who want to keep Guantánamo intact are a large majority of the Congress, which passed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which the President signed. The NDAA in part is intended to hinder the release of innocents we have incarcerated for over a decade.

Laura Pitter, writing in Foreign Policy magazine, has explained congressional efforts to keep Obama from closing Guantánamo and described a way for the President to overcome those roadblocks:

In 2011 and again in 2012, Congress enacted some restrictions on the transfer of detainees from the facility, but those restrictions are not insurmountable. They require receiving countries to take certain steps to ensure that those being transferred do not engage in terrorist activity and that the secretary of defense certify such steps have taken place.

If, however, the secretary of defense cannot, for one reason or another, certify those steps have been taken, he can waive the certification requirement in lieu of "alternative actions" -- a term which has no clear legal or procedural definition. The only guidelines are that they "substantially mitigate" the risk that the detainee being transferred may engage in terrorism.

Clearly then, the administration's ability to transfer detainees out of Guantanamo exists now, even with congressional restrictions. And with Obama again reiterating that keeping Guantanamo open harms U.S. security, the certification -- and even more so the waiver -- process seems to offer a clear path forward to emptying the facility of more than half its prisoners, if not closing it down.

Recently, President Barack Obama said that he’d do more to make good on his failed first-term campaign promise to close Guantánamo.

Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us, in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.

The President says the right things, but he doesn’t seem to have the political will to release those wrongly imprisoned in Guantánamo. The American people must let him know that the incarceration of human beings under these conditions is a denial of the values stated in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, of the human rights recognized by the Magna Carta 800 years ago, and of international treaties in which we are participants.

Imprisoning these men is a repudiation of the foundations of this republic, violates our laws, and turns us all into monsters.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Lamar W. Hankins : 'Dirty Wars' and Bush-Obama Foreign Policy

Yemini writer Farea al-Muslimi testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Screen grab from Democracy Now!.

Dirty Wars:
The terror of Bush-Obama era foreign policy

While some Bush policies may have been changed, the Obama administration has found new ways to accomplish the same purposes using Bush’s and Cheney’s tactics in slightly different ways.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / April 30, 2013

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) noted critically this past week that most members of the mass media gave no coverage or gave short shrift to the Senate Judiciary Committee testimony of the young, partly American-educated Yemini writer and activist Farea al-Muslimi, who talked about the effect of American drone strikes on his village.

Al-Muslimi had a great love for America after spending a year here to further his education. He went home to convey to his people his love for America, only to have his views decimated by the drone bombs that have terrorized his villagers.

In the past, what Wessab's villagers knew of the U.S. was based on my stories about my wonderful experiences here. The friendships and values I experienced and described to the villagers helped them understand the America that I know and that I love. Now, however, when they think of America, they think of the terror they feel from the drones that hover over their heads, ready to fire missiles at any time. What the violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strike accomplished in an instant. There is now an intense anger against America in Wessab.

This is not an isolated incident. The drone strikes are the face of America to many Yemenis. I have spoken to many victims of U.S. drone strikes, like a mother in Jaar who had to identify her innocent 18-year-old son's body through a video in a stranger's cellphone, or the father in Shaqra who held his four- and six-year-old children as they died in his arms.

FAIR reported that both The New York Times and the Washington Post covered the hearing, but there was nothing on the broadcast networks or cable channels, except for an interview with Al-Muslimi on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC program. Even National Public Radio found room only on Morning Edition to mention the hearing. Only Democracy Now! gave the hearing and the issues related to drones extensive coverage.

Yet many people, including Americans, believe that our drone program violates international treaties that have been adopted by the U.S., making us international pariahs, if not terrorists in our own right.

These drone attacks are intended to kill or assassinate certain people that we deem enemies. As Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn has written: “Targeted or political assassinations -- sometimes known as extra-judicial executions -- run afoul of the Geneva Conventions, which include willful killing as a grave breach. Grave breaches of Geneva are punishable as war crimes under the U.S. War Crimes Act.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross describes the significance of the Geneva Conventions (the original four treaties of the Conventions have been ratified by the U.S.):

The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols are at the core of international humanitarian law, the body of international law that regulates the conduct of armed conflict and seeks to limit its effects. They specifically protect people who are not taking part in the hostilities (civilians, health workers and aid workers) and those who are no longer participating in the hostilities, such as wounded, sick and shipwrecked soldiers and prisoners of war.

If you doubt that official U.S. policy is to commit terrorism, take a look at the official law of the U.S. found in the United States Code, which defines an “act of terrorism” as an activity that would violate our own laws if carried out in the U.S. and is intended “to affect the conduct of a government by assassination.” The definition is expansive, but this part of it makes clear that U.S. drone assassinations are terrorism by our own definition.

A new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, by Jeremy Scahill, and a film based on the book -- document secret military and paramilitary operations in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere that are being carried out by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) under the leadership of our entire national security apparatus, from the President on down.

Scahill details the assassination of three American citizens, one of whom, a 16-year-old, had no connection with terrorism except that his father was involved with al Qaeda. However, he was killed by a drone, two weeks after his father’s death by drone in Yemen, while he was searching for his father.

Both JSOC and the CIA are carrying out assassinations based on the weekly meetings held in the White House to determine who will be targeted and killed by drone attacks. These meetings directly involve the President, who makes the final decisions on who will be killed. As described by Scahill in an interview on Democracy Now!:

...we now know that there’s these things that are called Terror Tuesdays, where they look at rosters of potential targets and present them to the president. And the president, my understanding, is very, very involved with plucking names off and deciding who stays on. And, you know, you have a working group...  that’s essentially focused around the clock on figuring out who to kill next around the world. And... what I think is really both disturbing and interesting is that there are multiple -- I know that there are at least three separate sets of kill lists.

There’s the kill list that the CIA has, and then there’s the Joint Special Operations Command, and then there’s another National Security Council list that contains certain high-value individuals that the U.S. wants taken out. And so, in a country like Yemen, you have both the CIA and JSOC conducting operations. In Pakistan, that’s been true for a very long time. In Somalia, JSOC has conducted operations on the ground, the CIA has done drone strikes, and JSOC has also come in by helicopter and launched missiles at people.

Scahill went on in that same interview to explain that it may be true (he doesn’t know) that the U.S. is no longer operating secret prisons to which people are rendered to be tortured and interrogated. But he does know that the U.S. uses secret prisons operated by the Somalis, to which we order people captured in other countries to be taken (rendered) so that U.S. officials can then go to those secret prisons, where the prisoners are tortured and interrogated.

While some Bush policies may have been changed, the Obama administration has found new ways to accomplish the same purposes using Bush’s and Cheney’s tactics in slightly different ways. The immoral and illegal practices of the Bush administration are continuing under Obama, though Obama doesn’t sound as belligerent as Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice.

Foremost among these practices, of course, is the prison known as Guantanamo, which houses 86 men approved for release (along with 80 others being held), who continue to be detained in violation of the due process of law and fairness principles identified in the Magna Carta nearly eight centuries ago.

Our political system exalts the military above all else. And the military-industrial-congressional complex exercises autocratic policies that assure we are constantly engaged in military control or action toward most of the rest of the world.

We find in our country extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy both here and abroad, and a belief in the natural rule of elites. Fascism is not a term I wish to apply to my own country, but there may be none other that adequately characterizes the nature of our government.

The direction and purpose of American foreign policy is so established in the very fabric of America that I see no way that it can be turned around. Our purpose since the end of World War II, if not before, has been to spread our military power and control so widely throughout the world that we can extract any of the world’s natural resources that we want, keep other peoples from deciding their own fates, and kill anyone who gets in our way.

Many Americans claim we have the right to do these things because we are an exceptional country, ordained by God to create the world in our own image.

Even Dwight Eisenhower, who warned us of the direction we were heading, could do nothing to stop it and, during his eight years as president, furthered the very evil he spoke about as he left office in 1960. Now, we are seeing the lawless, murderous policies begun in the late 1940s and followed by every president since develop into the most frightening, evil, deathly, and inhumane policies since Adolph Hitler.

What is a patriotic American to do in the face of such atrocities? I can’t fully answer that question for myself, and certainly not for others. But I know that a first step is to acknowledge that what our government is doing is hideous, inhumane, degrading, and illegal.

A second step is to let our politicians know that we do not approve of these practices. As soon as it is possible to do so, I plan to see Scahill’s new film and read the book. Video excerpts related to the film and book can be viewed at Democracy Now!.

Finally, I don’t know how best to respond to these things that my government is doing in my name, but I will be guided by a 1965 statement by Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The ultimate test of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge and moments of controversy.”

The drone killings around the world are just such a moment of challenge and controversy. We must accept their challenge and end the controversy they present for the good of the people of the U.S. as well as the people of the world.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Lamar W. Hankins : Obama Continues Immoral Bush Policies

Four more years. Image from NewsOne.
Obama embraces five
immoral Bush policies

“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period... was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / January 14, 2013

Looking back over the last four years, it has become clear that President Barack Obama has enthusiastically continued (and expanded in at least one case) five troubling policies of George W. Bush: foreign interventionism, the use of armed drones, extraordinary rendition, torture, and incarcerating alleged terrorists in Guantanamo.

Foreign adventurism encompasses the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the continued and expanded use of armed drones to kill people President Obama and his staff (including especially Obama’s new nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan) believe should die for their actions. Reportedly, Brennan maintains a “kill list” approved by President Obama. These drone killings occur throughout the Middle East, but particularly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

Killing in a war zone is relatively easier to justify under international legal principles to which the United States subscribes, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, than are killings elsewhere. But under Bush’s view, which relies on the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by the Congress seven days after 9/11, the “international war on terror” justifies killing anyone who the President and his agents believe is a terrorist, wherever they may be. Obama has accepted that view.

Under the International Covenant, lethal force by our military against enemy fighters in an armed conflict is permitted if done for military necessity, and if impact on civilian lives and property will not be disproportionate to the military objective. Currently, that limits such actions to Afghanistan, which we attacked because of its relationship to al Queda, the group responsible for the terrorist attack on 9/11.

Self-defense is also permitted by the International Covenant against another state that is responsible for an attack against the U.S. Drone attacks other than in Afghanistan appear to violate the International Covenant, no matter what the Congress may have authorized in 2001.

CNN reports that 4,400 people have been killed in U.S. drone attacks since 2002, most in Pakistan. Obama has ordered six times more drone attacks than Bush ordered. Of those 4,400 deaths, about 25% have been civilians, including over 200 children. Because the CIA is responsible for most of these attacks, confirming these data through the government is impossible.

John Brennan has denied that there have been any civilian deaths. According to his reasoning, any male of combat age is a terrorist, yet drone attacks have killed those attending funerals and weddings, as well as 16-year-old Tariq Aziz and his 12-year-old cousin who had been learning how to take video of drones that constantly circled their village in Pakistan, and at least two American citizens in Yemen who were not in a war zone.

In 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki, described as an al Qaeda propagandist, was killed in a drone attack in Yemen. Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son was killed in a separate drone attack.

Esquire's Tom Junod described the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki this way:

He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him.

He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

Before the drone attacks began and before 9/11, during the Clinton administration, the U.S. government began the practice, in a limited way, of extraordinary rendition, which has been described as “the apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another.” After 9/11, the practice increased dramatically as a way to engage in torture away from the eyes of Americans and the media.

The CIA, along with other U.S. government agencies, has attempted to gather intelligence from foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism by taking them to countries where U.S. and international legal safeguards do not apply, at least so far as the CIA is concerned.

These suspects are detained and interrogated by U.S. personnel at U.S.-run detention facilities outside U.S. territory or are handed over to foreign agents for interrogation. Such people are subjected to torture as that is defined by U.S. and international law.

While President Obama promised to end such practices, what his administration has done is put lipstick on the proverbial pig. Obama now assures us that the U.S. will not render a person to another country for detention and interrogation unless that country promises not to torture the suspect. While his administration has ceased using the worst practitioners of torture used by Bush (Syria, Egypt, and Libya), it has instead engaged the services of other countries to directly take such suspects into custody so that the U.S. will not be tainted by how the suspects are treated.

In spite of the evidence we now have of the wrongness of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, those Americans who spoke out from the beginning, as well as those who quickly realized the sham of the Iraq war, continue to be ridiculed. The most recent public example of the latter group is former senator Chuck Hagel, who has been named to become Obama’s next Secretary of Defense.

The interventionism recognized and opposed by Hagel and others is not evidence of an exceptional nation, but of one that has long ago forgotten the vision of its founders that we would not have a standing army, nor would we intervene in the affairs of other nations.

Finally, the interventions we have engaged in since 9/11 have led to the creation of a special prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, at the southeastern end of Cuba, which has been widely condemned around the world, by both allies and enemies.

The deathly and desolate place known simply as Guantanamo should sicken every American of good will and normal sensibilities. Many of the people incarcerated and tortured there were turned over to the U.S. in return for the payment of bounties, and many were not involved with terrorism. Right now, the Obama administration has determined that 86 men incarcerated at Guantanamo are guilty of nothing and should be repatriated to their home countries. But actions of the administration and Congress have worked together to ensure that the 86 will remain incarcerated indefinitely.

Four years ago, President Obama pledged to close the prison. Yet, he recently signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for 2013, which will prevent any of the 166 men now incarcerated at Guantanamo from leaving for at least another year, including 56 men the government has listed as having been “cleared for transfer,” a process that requires the approval of many U.S. agencies and foreign governments. No one knows when these wrongfully incarcerated men will be allowed to return to their homes.

One of the most egregious human rights violations involving Guantanamo occurred to Al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj, who was taken into custody at the Pakistani border after unknown individuals were paid a bounty by the U.S. for anyone they claimed to be a terrorist, but he was guilty of nothing related to terrorism.

The credentials of Sami al-Hajj as a journalist could not have been clearer when he was taken into custody. Amy Goodman, the primary host of Democracy Now!, recently summarized what Sami al-Hajj, now the head of Al Jazeera’s human rights and public liberties desk, endured at Guantanamo for six years:

The Al Jazeera cameraman was arrested in Pakistan in December of 2001 while traveling to Afghanistan on a work assignment. Held for six years without charge, al-Hajj was repeatedly tortured, hooded, attacked by dogs and hung from a ceiling. Interrogators questioned him over 100 times about whether Al Jazeera was a front for al-Qaeda. In January 2007, he began a hunger strike that lasted 438 days until his release in May 2008.

Recently, one innocent prisoner from Yemen -- Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif -- died in Guantanamo after nearly 11 years in captivity, leaving a wife and 14-year old son to mourn. He should never have been sent to America’s special prison, but someone was paid a $5,000 bounty to turn him in. He, too, was guilty of nothing related to terrorism. Mystery surrounds the circumstances of his death. U.S. authorities have told different stories about how he died, which should remind us all of the absolute truth of journalist I. F. Stone’s admonition that “All governments lie!”

When it comes to foreign adventurism, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, the U.S. is well-positioned to take military action from its wide-spread collection of cruisers, submarines, dock landing ships, amphibious transport docks, amphibious assault ships, and aircraft carriers, which together number around 135, with others under construction.

In addition and of equal importance, the U.S. maintains over 1,000 overseas military bases according to David Vine, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC, who has published one book on such facilities and nearly completed another on the subject.

While the Iraq war is over for the U.S. military, around 15,000 military contractors reportedly still operate there on behalf of U.S. interests, and perhaps as many as 300 troops train Iraqi security forces. Plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan include provisions to leave several thousand troops to continue training, provide support for the Afghan military, and perform counterinsurgency tasks.

Right now over 117,000 military contractors are in Afghanistan. No one outside of the government knows how many will be left in place once most U.S. troops have left, nor do we know how many CIA operatives will remain engaged there.

Mentioning the CIA inevitably brings up the question of torture. The evidence of torture by agents of the United States should be well-known by anyone who has read the newspapers since 9/11. That evidence spreads from Abu Ghraib, to extraordinary rendition sites, to Guantanamo, to our own military prisons in the U.S., where Bradley Manning was held for over a year in conditions and under treatments that violate the standards of decency which we claim to uphold.

Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn wrote recently:

Torture is illegal in all circumstances. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty the United States ratified which makes it part of U.S. law, states unequivocally: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

The prohibition of torture is absolute and unequivocal. Torture is never lawful. ... Yet despite copious evidence of widespread torture and abuse during the Bush administration, and the Constitution’s mandate that the President enforce the laws, Obama refuses to hold the Bush officials and lawyers accountable for their law breaking.

For nearly 60 years, at least since President Eisenhower authorized a coup in 1953 that brought the Shah of Iran (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) into power in place of the democratically-elected Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, the role the United States has played in the Middle East has been a tragedy.

What Martin Luther King, Jr. said about another tragedy is equally appropriate about our role not only in the Middle East, but in most of the world, where we have tried to control events and people with the armaments of war: “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period... was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

Deadly drones, foreign interventionism, extraordinary rendition, torture, and the legacy of Guantanamo require that more Americans speak out against the policies and practices of our government, hold officials accountable for their misdeeds, and find new ways to live in the only world we know. To do otherwise would allow both the bad people and the silent good people together to squander the promise of our great nation.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jim Turpin : Is the United States a 'Banana Republic'?

Image from polisci.wisc.edu.
Lookout, O. Henry!
How did the United States
become a 'banana republic'?

By Jim Turpin / The Rag Blog / February 1, 2011

ba•nan•a re•pub•lic (noun) A small country that is economically dependent on a single export commodity or on outside help, and is typically governed by a dictator or the armed forces.

“Banana republic” was first used by author William Sydney Porter (“O. Henry”) in Cabbages and Kings (1904) while residing in Honduras after hiding out for allegedly embezzling funds from the First National Bank of Austin in 1894.

“This is America, not a banana republic.” -- Vincent Bugliosi

Well... I hate to break it to the esteemed lawyer above, but the United States is a banana republic and here’s why:

• Unmitigated torture and detention of U.S. citizens & foreign nationals
• Extrajudicial assassinations of U.S. citizenry by strong man in charge
• Unlimited spying on citizenry & seizure of property
• Control of majority of economic resources by wealthy elites
• Massive indebtedness to foreign powers and funding war

Unmitigated torture and detention of US citizens & foreign nationals:

As part of the “War on Terror," the Obama administration continues the draconian national security “policies” of George W. Bush. These include indefinite detention at CIA “black sites” and at Guantanamo, “evidence” produced through torture, post acquittal “detention power," and military commissions or tribunals with severely limited “due process." This list barely touches the full complement of tools used by our government to flout the rule of law.

Key among these is the use of torture and detention for both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. The abuses at Guantanamo and other “black sites” are well known: water boarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, humiliation, and degradation. But what is not as well known is that this has happened to U.S. citizens and the “evidence” produced is admissible in military commissions.

In 2006, the Congress passed the Military Commissions Act (MCA)
which allows

procedures deviating from the traditional rules of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Among other shortcomings, the MCA rejects the right to a speedy trial, allows a trial to continue in the absence of the accused, delegates the procedure for appointing military judges to the discretion of the Secretary of Defense, allows for the introduction of coerced evidence at hearings, permits the introduction of hearsay and evidence obtained without a warrant, and denies the accused full access to exculpatory evidence.

Canadian Omar Khadr was 15 years old when picked up and accused by the U.S. government of planting roadside bombs and killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade in Afghanistan in 2002.

Defense lawyers want the military judge, Army Col. Patrick Parrish, to exclude any confessions Khadr made to U.S. interrogators following his capture, wounded and near dead, on grounds of either coercion or torture. Prosecutors seek to use statements Khadr made to his captors at age 15 and 16 at his upcoming trial...

Critics cast his trial as the first of a so-called "child soldier" in modern Western history. They argue that Khadr should have been given special treatment, including rehabilitation, and not shipped from Afghanistan to the prison camps where he was held for year as an alleged teen terrorist among adult "enemy combatants."

He still remains untried after nine years at Guantanamo and will likely never be tried or released.

U.S. citizen Jose Padilla was arrested in 2002 for providing “material support to terrorism” and for training in the use of radiologic weapons in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in 2001 and early 2002. He was then deemed an “enemy combatant” and held in a military brig in South Carolina without notice to family or attorney. Padilla was held for five years and alleges torture including sensory and sleep deprivation, stress positions, and the administration of the hallucinogenic drugs LSD and PCP. Padilla was convicted in 2007 and is serving a 17-year sentence.


Extrajudicial assassinations of U.S. citizenry by strong man in charge

Though this program existed long before the Obama administration, the ordered assassinations of U.S. citizens by the executive branch due to an “unspecified threat” seems beyond the pale for most Americans and citizens of the world.

The ACLU recently stated:

It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified "threat."

This is the most recent consequence of a troublingly overbroad interpretation of Congress's 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. This sweeping interpretation envisions a war that knows no borders or definable time limits and targets an enemy that the government has refused to define in public. This policy is particularly troubling since it targets U.S. citizens, who retain their constitutional right to due process even when abroad.

Glenn Greenwald in Salon also noted that

I actually can't believe that there is even a "debate" over whether an American President -- without a shred of due process or oversight -- has the power to compile hit lists of American citizens whom he orders the CIA to kill far away from any battlefield. The notion that the President has such an unconstrained, unchecked power is such a blatant distortion of everything our political system is supposed to be -- such a pure embodiment of the very definition of tyrannical power -- that, no matter how many times I see it, it's still hard for me to believe there are people willing to expressly defend it.

The citizen in question is Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen born in New Mexico in 1971 and a Muslim cleric accused of orchestrating terror attacks from Yemen. In December 2010 a federal judge dismissed a challenge to the Obama administration's targeted-killing program, meaning the U.S. can continue to go after a Yemeni-American cleric whom it blames for terrorist plots.

The case, brought by the father of cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, raised difficult questions about the breadth of U.S. executive power, but U.S. District Judge John Bates said he couldn't answer them as the father lacked legal standing to bring the case. The "serious issues regarding the merits of the alleged authorization of the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen overseas must await another day or another (non-judicial) forum."

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) tried in August of 2010 to pass a bill that prohibits extrajudicial assassinations, but failed to get enough votes. The Congressman stated: “The U.S. government cannot act as judge, jury, and executioner."


Unlimited spying on citizenry and seizure of property

As a response to Richard Nixon’s propensity to spy on political and activist groups which blatantly violated the Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure), the Carter administration passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. The act was created to provide judicial and Congressional oversight of the government's covert surveillance activities of foreign entities and individuals in the United States, while maintaining the secrecy needed to protect national security.

It allowed surveillance, without court order, within the United States for up to one year unless the "surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party." If a United States person is involved, judicial authorization was required within 72 hours after surveillance begins.

In the period 1979-2006 a total of 22,990 applications for warrants were made to the Court of which 22,985 were approved (sometimes with modifications; or with the splitting up, or combining together, of warrants for legal purposes), and only five were definitively rejected.

This means that only .02% of submitted governmental FISA requests were denied by the court.

Even with this governmental “rubber stamp” to spy on U.S. citizens, the Bush administration and its’ national security measures went beyond the confines of FISA authorization and allowed the National Security Administration (NSA) to track the international phone calls and e-mails of hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans without use of the court. The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 was passed (and fully supported by then Senator Obama) and as the ACLU pointed out,

...the law meant to “update” FISA instead gutted the original law by eviscerating the role of the judicial oversight in government surveillance. The law also gave sweeping immunity to the telecommunications companies that aided the Bush administration’s unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping program by handing over access to our communications without a warrant.

With the recent release of Wikileaks documents, seizure of property is now also the rule when U.S. citizens return from traveling abroad. Salon magazine recently discussed this very issue and the legal ramifications:

For those who regularly write and read about civil liberties abuses, it's sometimes easy to lose perspective of just how extreme and outrageous certain erosions are. One becomes inured to them, and even severe incursions start to seem ordinary.

Such was the case, at least for me, with Homeland Security's practice of detaining American citizens upon their re-entry into the country, and as part of that detention, literally seizing their electronic products -- laptops, cellphones, Blackberries and the like -- copying and storing the data, and keeping that property for months on end, sometimes never returning it.

Worse, all of this is done not only without a warrant, probable cause or any oversight, but even without reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in any crime. It's completely standard-less, arbitrary, and unconstrained. There's no law authorizing this power nor any judicial or Congressional body overseeing or regulating what DHS is doing.

Control of majority of economic resources by wealthy elites

Wealth inequality and plutocracy may now be at the highest point in U. S. history. Corporations are making huge profits and the recent passage of the tax bill in December heavily favors the top earning elite. With best ever fourth-quarter 2010 corporate profits from Apple ($.4.31 billion), Intel ($3.4 billion), along with many others including the financial institutions bailed out by tax payers including JP Morgan who

reported a 48 percent increase in profits over 2009 and a 47 percent increase for the fourth quarter of 2010 over the same period the previous year. JP Morgan netted a profit for the year of $17.4 billion, a figure equivalent to the gross domestic product of Bolivia

The plutocrats of this country are not just doing well, they are exceeding levels not seen since the wealth gap that was created right before the Great Depression.

In 1928, the top 0.01% of U.S. families averaged 892 times more income than families in the bottom 90%. By contrast, in 2006 the top 0.01 percent averaged 976 more income than America’s bottom 90 percent.

Inversely with wealth increasing, tax rates have plummeted for the rich. Taxpayers making more than $1 million in 1944 paid 65% of their total income in taxes. In 2005, those making $1 million faced a top marginal rate of 35% or 23% of their income in federal taxes.

Let’s not forget that the Obama administration, with a majority in both the House and Senate, caved to the Republican party in December 2010 by continuing the ruinous Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. He helped ramrod a tax cut for the uber-rich that added $900 billion to the over $14 trillion U.S. national debt. This was not well received by some Democrats, but passed anyway and was hailed as bipartisan cooperation.

Congratulations. Each man, woman and child in the U.S now owes around $45,000 to eliminate the national debt. Go ahead and add that to your mortgage, credit card, and college debt which exceeds annual disposal income by 122.5%. In other words, you are enslaved permanently to massive debt.

But who has done well in the last 15 years? Well, if you are a CEO, your pay has increased +298.2%, while production workers have had a +4.3% increase and federal workers have had their pay fall by -9.3%. But don’t worry, corporations have had a +106.7% profit increase since 1990. Go figure.


Massive indebtedness to foreign powers and funding war

You don’t have to be a math genius to figure out that huge tax cuts along with a massive increase in spending causes a huge national deficit and federal debt. The majority of U.S. debt is held by foreign countries via U.S. Treasury bonds. These bonds are held primarily by Asian countries (China, $907 billion, and Japan, $877 billion) but also by other foreign powers including the United Kingdom ($477 billion) and oil exporting countries ($214 billion).

This has caused concern that these controlling foreign entities may have not only economic but also political control of the United States policies with vast control of our national debt.

So where are your tax dollars going? 54% of federal tax dollars go to military spending (36% to current military operations to the tune of $965 billion and 18% or $484 billion for past military spending including vet benefits and interest on national debt borrowing). The government typically “cooks the books” and underestimates military spending by including trust funds (i.e. Social Security) and the expenses of past military spending as not distinguished from non-military spending.

It seems that one major export we have for the world is endless war. To date, the total cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is $1.26 trillion. This obscene amount has been approved over and over again, by both Democrats and Republicans since 2001, including the $33 billion war supplemental in August 2010. This war is bought and paid for by both parties.

Nobel economic laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz predicted that by the time the U.S. leaves these two conflicts we will have spent over $3 trillion and we may well exceed this amount when factoring in the national debt, the current economic crisis and the rising cost of oil.

So the question remains… are we now the mythical “banana republic” Anchuria that O. Henry created in Cabbages and Kings?

At that time we had a treaty with about every foreign country except Belgium and that banana republic, Anchuria...

It seems to me we don’t even rate with Anchuria... or Belgium for that matter.

[Jim Turpin is a native Austinite and member of CodePink Austin. He also volunteers for the GI coffeehouse Under the Hood Café at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Imprisonment Without Trial : The American Way?

Image from the ACLU.
When we fail our own ideals:
The unconstitutional practice
Of indefinite detention

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / March 21, 2010

When our forefathers created this great nation, one of the ills they desperately wanted to correct was to insure that government could no longer put people in prison and keep them there for extended periods of time without a trial.

This was a tactic many governments had used to stifle free speech and punish people who they didn't like. Because this is anathema in a free country, the writers of the Constitution included safeguards like habeas corpus to rein in those kind of governmental powers.

Sometimes in our history, we have not lived up to that ideal of justice. For instance, almost everyone now believes it was wrong for the U.S. government to imprison American citizens of Japanese descent during the Second World War. These people had committed no crime and posed no real danger to this country. Their incarceration was due to a racist and irrational fear.

We are now doing it again. We have been holding and torturing people (although I hope the torture has now been stopped) in Guantanamo Bay for many years without giving them a trial. This started under the administration of George Bush, when he decided he could imprison Muslims without reason or trial just by labeling them enemy combatants or terrorists, and keep them in prison for as long as he wanted.

To his shame, President Obama has continued this unconstitutional practice. He is now considering moving these prisoners out of Guantanamo Bay and into either another prison in Bagram in Afghanistan or a facility here in the United States. He is trying to do this to keep his promise to close the facility in Guantanamo Bay. Personally, I think this looks far more like a shell game than an effort to keep a promise.

What difference does it make whether these people are imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, or the United States? They are still being imprisoned with no charges and no trial, and are not allowed to present a defense or make a plea to be released. This is exactly the kind of thing our forefathers tried their best to prevent.

Now I know some will say these are prisoners of war and should be held until the war ends. The fact that not all of them were soldiers captured by our own troops belies this. Not to mention the fact that many have been released already. Others say they are terrorists and we will put ourselves in danger by releasing them. But a nation governed by the rule of law does not put people in prison because they may be scary people.

If scaring people was all it took to put people behind bars without a trial and deny them the right to defend themselves, then thousands of scary Americans should be behind bars right now. Frankly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann, the KKK, the John Birch Society, the teabaggers, and anti-choice people who believe murder is a legal political act scare me far more than any so-called terrorist.

But I'll just have to wait until these people, vile though they may be, actually break a law. Because that's the way things are done in a country governed by the rule of law. We only arrest lawbreakers and then we give them a fair trial. And that's exactly what should happen to those that have been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.

Every prisoner in Guantanamo Bay should be given a constitutionally-fair trial if there is evidence that they have broken a law. If there is no evidence (or the evidence was gained through torture), then they should be released. Justice should always outweigh politics, and no person should be kept in prison for purely political reasons.

It comes down to something as simple as doing the right and just thing.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Supremes : 'Suspected Enemy Combatant' no Longer a 'Person'

Portrait of a non-person. Image from girloftomorrow.
Dred Scott redux:
Enemy combatants denied legal standing

...once again, 144 years after the Civil War, we have established as the law of the land and the policy of the United States government that whole classes of people can be declared 'non-persons' and have their liberty stripped away...

By Chris Floyd / December 19, 2009

While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here's how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person."

They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

This extraordinary ruling occasioned none of those deep-delving "process stories" that glut the pages of the New York Times, where the minutiae of policy-making or political gaming is examined in highly-spun, microscopic detail doled out by self-interested insiders. Obviously, giving government the power to render whole classes of people "unpersons" was not an interesting subject for our media arbiters. It was news that wasn't fit to print. Likewise, the ruling provoked no thundering editorials in the Washington Post, no savvy analysis from the high commentariat -- and needless to say, no outrage whatsoever from all our fierce defenders of individual liberty on the Right.

But William Fisher noticed, and gave this report at Antiwar.com:

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use."
[....]
Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" -- did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."

The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of "national emergency." And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

And yet this is what Barack Obama -- who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer -- has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution. They can't even be sued for, in the specific case under review, subjecting uncharged, indefinitely detained captives to "beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, extreme hot and cold temperatures, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, and threatened with unmuzzled dogs."

Again, let's be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand -- in court -- that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities. Nothing to answer for, nothing meriting punishment or even civil penalties. What's more, in championing the lower court ruling, Barack Obama is now on record as believing -- insisting -- that torture is an ordinary, "foreseeable consequence" of military detention of all those who are arbitrarily declared "suspected enemy combatants."

And still further: Barack Obama has now declared, openly, of his own free will, that he does not consider these captives to be "persons." They are, literally, sub-humans. And what makes them sub-humans? The fact that someone in the U.S. government has declared them to be "suspected enemy combatants." (And note: even the mere suspicion of being an "enemy combatant" can strip you of your personhood.)

This is what President Barack Obama believes -- believes so strongly that he has put the full weight of the government behind a relentless series of court actions to preserve, protect and defend these arbitrary powers. (For a glimpse at just a sliver of such cases, go here.)

One co-counsel on the case, Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, zeroed in on the noxious quintessence of the position taken by the Court, and by our first African-American president: its chilling resemblance to the notorious Dred Scott ruling of 1857, which upheld the principle of slavery. As Fisher notes:

"Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow," he added.

The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants — whether or not they were slaves — were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

And now, once again, 144 years after the Civil War, we have established as the law of the land and the policy of the United States government that whole classes of people can be declared "non-persons" and have their liberty stripped away -- and their torturers and tormentors protected and coddled by authority -- at a moment's notice, with no charges, no defense, no redress, on nothing more than the suspicion that they might be an "enemy combatant," according to the arbitrary definition of the state.

Barack Obama has had the audacity to declare himself the heir and embodiment of the lifework of Martin Luther King. Can this declaration of a whole new principle of universal slavery really be what King was dreaming of? Is this the vision he saw on the other side of the mountain? Or is not the nightmarish inversion of the ideal of a better, more just, more humane world that so many have died for, in so many places, down through the centuries?

Source / Empire Burlesque

Thanks to S.M. Willhelm / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

The Terrorist Trials : Proving We're a Nation of Laws

Rooftop snipers, armored vehicles and lock-down zones around the courthouse are part of the security plan during the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his cohorts. Photo by Schwartz / Daily News.
Are we a nation of laws?
The trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / November 17, 2009

The Justice Department has finally decided to do the right thing, and bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (alleged 9/11 mastermind) and four of his cohorts to justice in a court of law -- just like any other vicious criminals. They will be tried and hopefully convicted in a New York criminal court, and it's about time -- it should have happened years ago.

This is not anything unique. Terrorists have been tried in our civilian criminal courts many times in the past. Take for example the original Trade Center bombers (who failed to bring the towers down), the case of Timothy McVeigh and his sidekick, and the case of the Puerto Rican terrorists many years ago. They were all tried and convicted in a civilian court of law.

But those cases were before President Bush suspended the rule of law, and decided he could decide who would get a fair trial and who wouldn't. Well, he was not only wrong, but he's no longer president. It looks like the Obama administration believes in the Constitution and the rule of law, and that's a good thing for everyone in America.

But it does point out a difference between the ultra-right wing and other Americans. Most Americans want to live in a free country governed by the Constitution and rule of law, where everyone (no matter how despised) gets a fair trial governed by the law. But the right wing doesn't want that. They would prefer to live in a dictatorship where a leader decides who should have rights and who shouldn't. That's sad.

No one should have the right to deny a fair trial with constitutional rights to anyone else -- not in a truly free country. In America, you don't get to deny rights to anyone just because you don't like them or due to the crime they're accused of committing. By protecting the rights of even the vilest of criminals, we protect those same rights for every single person in this country (and that's what the Founding Fathers wanted).

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) says it well, "We have a judicial system that's the envy of the world. I don't think we should run and hide and cower. Let's use our system."

Senator Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire) voiced opposition, saying we shouldn't give terrorists the rights guaranteed to United States citizens. His stupid statement ignores both American law and American history.

The fairness of our laws and our courts have never been reserved just for American citizens. Foreigners in the United States who violate our laws, have always been granted the same fair trial and constitutional guarantees as American citizens get. In a nation governed by the rule of law, everyone must be treated equally, citizen or not.

I want these terrorists convicted and given harsh sentences as much as anyone. But it must be done in a fair and open trial -- both to protect our system of justice and rights, and to convince the world of our fairness and justice.

A truly free country can do no less.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...