Month: August 2011
Cyber-Attacking Wikileaks
After publishing tens of thousands of additional diplomatic cables since last week, the WikiLeaks website is apparently under attack. The twitter account announced it tonight a number of times (and asked for help from supporters).
The online assault came hours after US officials voiced renewed concern over the risks to individuals after WikiLeaks made public more US diplomatic cables, many of which contained the names of sensitive sources.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland would not confirm the authenticity of the latest documents, but said “the United States strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of classified information.
The US government has proclaimed every case of cyber-warfare a terrible crime, except of course in cases where they do it. Although it can’t be known at this point where the attacks are coming from, the US government is the most likely source in my view. They certainly have the motive. That is, to prevent the one source shedding light on government behavior from staying up and running. If it is the US, it would be a serious crime of suppressing free speech and freedom of the press. But it wouldn’t be their first time.
Angela Keaton is awesome at The Daily Caller!
Cindy Sheehan Under IRS Investigation For Not Funding Gov’t Terrorism and Waste
Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan has recently been informed that she is the target of an IRS lawsuit. She posted the following on her Facebook page:
I just got a notice from the IRS that I owe them 104 grand and they are going to levy my bank accounts and property. I don’t have any property and there’s less than 150.00 in my bank accounts. Looks like Fed Prison is in my future. I would rather go to prison than fund the crimes of this government. I am going to send them a notice that they owe me infinity dollars for killing my son.
Further details of the case are not yet available, but to think of this ending up with Sheehan in prison is sickening. Let’s just consider some news to contextualize this. Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies recently conducted research on the costs of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan; their estimation was $3.7 trillion. One report from the Center for Public Integrity on Monday investigates the wasteful Pentagon practice of give-away no-bid contracts for the defense industry, which has ballooned to a $140 billion problem in 2011. Today, the findings of a bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan were released which said that “at least one in every six dollars of U.S. spending for contracts and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, or more than $30 billion, has been wasted.”
The Brown University study found that, estimating conservatively, “in human terms, 224 000 to 258 000 people have died directly from warfare, including 125 000 civilians in Iraq. Many more have died indirectly, from the loss of clean drinking water, healthcare, and nutrition. An additional 365 000 have been wounded and 7.8 million people – equal to the combined population of Connecticut and Kentucky – have been displaced.” In Iraq, 4,792 coalition soldiers have died and 2,698 in Afghanistan. Sheehan’s son was one of those thousands.
Neither of these wars were necessary, and the lengthy occupations are even less so. After all these costs, for unnecessary and criminal foreign policies, the United States government is threatening to put a peace activist in prison for $104,000 that they have been unable to steal from her, at least in part to fund their horrible murderous crimes abroad. Even the most mainstream, knucklehead, Republican or Democrat has the ability to sense something wrong here.
Night Raids and War Crimes
Just wanted to quickly draw attention to this WikiLeaks State Department diplomatic cable which details a horrible war crime committed by the US in Iraq in 2006. The cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions to the US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice:
I would like to draw the attention of your Government to information I have received regarding a raid conducted by the Multinational Forces (MNF) on 15 March 2006 in the house of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in the outskirts of Al-Iss Haqi District in Balad (Salah-El-Din Governorate).
I have received various reports indicating that at least 10 persons, namely Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay’ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra’a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz’s mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz’s sister (name unknown), Faiz’s nieces Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 5 years old), and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (aged 23) were killed during the raid.
According to the information received, American troops approached Mr. Faiz’s home in the early hours of 15 March 2006. It would appear that when the MNF approached the house, shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued for some 25 minutes. The MNF troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them. After the initial MNF intervention, a US air raid ensued that destroyed the house.
Iraqi TV stations broadcast from the scene and showed bodies of the victims (i.e. five children and four women) in the morgue of Tikrit. Autopsies carries out at the Tikrit Hospital’s morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.
Night raids like this, by the way, have become one of the primary strategies in Afghanistan. Frequent readers will note Antiwar.com’s persistent highlighting of these raids which very, very often kill civilians.
The NYT Applauds Obama Doctrine, Regurgitates Propaganda
And now for today’s extreme war propaganda from the paper of record, the New York Times.
It would be premature to call the war in Libya a complete success for United States interests. But the arrival of victorious rebels on the shores of Tripoli last week gave President Obama’s senior advisers a chance to claim a key victory for an Obama doctrine for the Middle East that had been roundly criticized in recent months as leading from behind.
Administration officials say that even though the NATO intervention in Libya, emphasizing airstrikes to protect civilians, cannot be applied uniformly in other hotspots like Syria, the conflict may, in some important ways, become a model for how the United States wields force in other countries where its interests are threatened.
A model, eh? So the model for the Obama administration’s approach for the Middle East is to go to war in open disregard for and in violation of domestic US law, almost immediately abandon the restrictions of the United Nations mandate to protect civilians in order to initiate regime change, give support and bring to power a rag-tag group of rebel militias and neighborhood gangs with at least some direct ties to al Qaeda and who have committed serious war crimes, all to culminate in massive benefits to oil corporations? Some model, although I’d dispute the novelty ascribed to it by the Times. Also, there is exactly zero mention anywhere in the article how exactly committing multiple war crimes and killing lots of civilians fits into this Doctrine.
The article goes on to praise Obama’s “Libya action” for establishing “two principles for when the United States could apply military force to advance its diplomatic interests even though its national security is not threatened directly.”
During that speech, Mr. Obama said that America had the responsibility to stop what he characterized as a looming genocide in the Libyan city of Benghazi (Principle 1). But at the same time, he said, when the safety of Americans is not directly threatened but where action can be justified — in the case of genocide, say — the United States will act only on the condition that it is not acting alone (Principle 2).
As I’ve said over and over, these are both nonsense. Even if we accept the notion that there was a looming genocide in Benghazi (which is debatable, to put it generously), there is a simple litmus test to determine whether or not the protection of civilians was the actual reason for war. Has the US consistently supported comparable atrocities in many other countries, and do we now engage in foreign policy that predictably leads to the deaths of comparable numbers of civilians? Do we also totally ignore much worse atrocities if they don’t happen to be strategically important? The answer to all of those questions is yes, which excludes the possibility that civilian casualties motivated our intervention. Furthermore, this charge of “responsibility” to protect always comes up. “Would you just let it happen!?” they ask incredulously. Whatever legitimacy the United States government has, it is derived by the consent of the American people. That is American Government 101 that we all learn in elementary school. That legitimacy simply does not carry over to the Libyan people. They certainly didn’t vote for King Obama.They didn’t get a say in whether they’d be better off or not with the rebels instead of Gadhafi.
On the second “Principle” of not going it alone. We had the support of an allied coalition and the UN. The world was with us. Well, yes this is true. But only if you use Washington’s definition of “the world” which does not include the American people or any other major nations who disagree.
The article then says Syria is different because there isn’t a regional or international consensus on Syria (nor was there on Libya) and that a US intervention could cause regional instability and an Iraq-like descent into chaos (so too with Libya). Not quite, New York Times, not quite.
Ah, so refreshing that the New York Times is ably continuing to do its job (that is, bolster the twisted rationales of the powerful war advocates).