Month: January 2013

Spencer Ackerman over at Danger Room posted an important piece with a vital emphasis on Chuck Hagel, countering the conviction that Hagel is a dove on foreign policy:

Spying on Americans’ communications without warrants? Have at it, said Hagel. A ballistic missile shield? Yes, please, and who cares if it angers the Kremlin. NATO’s 1999 war in Kosovo? Hagel was willing to flood it with U.S. soldiers.

Hagel earned his reputation as a skeptic of American military adventurism, as anyone who remembers his consistent criticism of the Iraq war will remember. But that criticism has blown Hagel’s reputation for dovishness out of proportion: After all, he voted in 2002 to authorize the war. National Journal’s Michael Hirsch insightfully argues Hagel’s reward for asking hard questions about the war is to have official Washington forget the rest of his record. So consider this a refresher.

Even as Hagel was making himself George W. Bush’s least favorite Republican, he aided Bush in crucial moments in congressional showdowns over the limits of presidential power in wartime.

When it became public that the NSA was scooping up Americans’ communications without judicial authorization, Hagel, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, defended the NSA as striking “a very delicate balance, an important balance and an effective balance.” He advocated giving the government more spy powers through “updat[ing]” the “outdated” Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which would become one of the bitterest defeats for civil libertarians and privacy advocates of the post-9/11 era.

The debate about Hagel in the pre-nomination phase – and now, most likely in the post – got caricatured by commentators across the spectrum. Those who rightly wanted to call out the Israel lobby and the crazed war-mongers in Congress for their latest witch hunt got caught up, I think, inadvertently buying into the inaccurate representation of Hagel as some kind of non-interventionist.

But the issue of Hagel demands a little nuance. Yes, Hagel learned to oppose the war in Iraq, but not when he was asked to vote for its authorization, when it counted. Hagel also opposed Obama’s surge in Afghanistan, a mindful position if there ever was one – and a lonely one to take in Washington. In recent months, Hagel has expressed firm unwillingness to commit troops to Syria or Iran.

This doesn’t make him a non-interventionist. It makes him marginally better than many of the other potential choices for Secretary of Defense. It’s relative, as is everything in politics. Those who categorically dismiss the significance of Hagel’s nomination, writing him off as a dime-a-dozen Washington war-monger at heart in an apparent attempt to counter the admittedly unwarranted reputation he has generated as a dove, are no better than the solid anti-war, anti-empire voices who papered over his hawkish transgressions.

This is what I tried to convey in my latest Op-Ed at The Dailer Caller, entitled “Chuck Hagel’s views are mainstream.” It wasn’t an endorsement. It was a statement of fact and a response to the hawks who tried to portray him as outside the mainstream in the most pejorative way. It had as much negative baggage as you’d expect from someone who considers himself decidedly not in the mainstream. But it also meant that there are marginally better (or less bad, whichever you prefer) mainstream views than others.

Hagel deserves harsh criticism for his terrible past positions, including voting for the Iraq war, supporting the intervention in Kosovo, backing the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping practices, and so on. And he also deserves the harsh criticism he will undoubtedly receive if he is in fact confirmed as Defense Secretary, for all of the terrible things he is sure to carry out. But none of this means his potential rise to that office will not have been a small victory in the sense that someone who openly criticized Israel’s unwarranted influence and explicitly disapproved of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria made it through the Washington gauntlet. In other times, I would not have considered that possible.

What was it that Murray Rothbard said of thirsting maniacally for instant victory?

The bulk of the US’s “counter-terrorism” activity is obviously in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Yemen, what with the ongoing war in Afghanistan and the secret drone war in Pakistan and Yemen. But outside these centers of US aggression, it becomes clear how the ‘war on terror’ has merely replaced previous justifications for what has been a long and consistent policy of supporting state terror.

The Associated Press:

Indonesia’s U.S.-funded police anti-terror squad has killed seven suspected militants recently, reviving allegations that the force is not trying to take suspects alive – a trend that appears to be fueling the very extremism the predominantly Muslim country is trying to counter.

…Haris Azhar, chairman of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence, an independent human rights group, said it appeared that the suspected militants were victims of “extrajudicial killings” and called for an independent investigation. He said Densus 88’s [the name for the police squad] tactics were driving militancy because they added to feelings among some Muslims that they were under siege.

The Densus 88 is described as an “anti-terror” squad in order to make it seem like US support has some connection to countering terrorist attacks against the United States. The reality is that Indonesia is using US support to crack down on its own domestic enemies and dissidents.

Since Obama came into office, Indonesia has received more than $1 billion in US aid, plus hundreds of millions in military assistance. In September, Obama proposed another $1.4 billion arms package for Indonesia.

Meanwhile, Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch has harshly criticized Indonesia for “religious discrimination, impunity, and the deterioration in rule of law,” insisting it “is a recipe for violence, abuses, and lawlessness.”

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country, and it apparently does include some who want the state to be based on sharia law. But there is no direct terrorist threat coming from Indonesia. US support for a strong, militaristic state in Indonesia is based on the same needs its always been based on: geo-politics, for the sake of Washington.

The US has given support to Indonesian crimes and abuse for decades. Indonesia had been committing crimes against the people of East Timor from 1975-1999. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave the terrible President Suharto the green light to invade East Timor, an event which led to tens of thousands of deaths and major army atrocities right off the bat. The US-backed state terror – “the United States was then supplying Indonesia’s military with 90 percent of its arms,” writes Reed Brody of the Nation – lasted through to the Clinton administration and by 1999 the dead totaled somewhere around 200,000-250,000 people.

It had its own specific justifications in the context of the Cold War. And now they aren’t much different in kind, as Obama has insisted on a “strategic pivot to Asia-Pacific” that includes beefing up military support and security guarantees to all our allies in a scheme aimed at containing China’s rising regional influence. Geo-politics is a zero-sum game for the US; if China gains influence, Washington loses some. Therefore, American taxpayers must add one more repressive state to their charitable donations list.

In the US foreign policy community, one major legacy of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq is that it gave Iraq to the Shiites and thus to Iran. There is some focus on the fact that the administration lied the country into war, and almost none on the fact that this led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and unimaginable suffering for millions of Iraqis. Among the “foreign policy community,” the geo-political legacy is that the war was a gift to Iran, which no longer faces a neighboring nemesis and is exponentially better positioned for the regional dominance it seeks.

That is true, and it was a massive strategic blunder for policymakers in Washington aiming to maintain regional hegemony over the Middle East. But a better illustration of the war’s legacy is what is going on in Syria right now: al-Qaeda jihadists, bred in the wake of the American invasion and who flooded to Iraq to fight the Crusaders, are now an actual entity that has flooded over the border into Syria to fight the next holy war. The fact that the Syrian rebels are largely made up of extremists is one of the major factors persuading Washington not to intervene militarily.

Al-Qaeda in Syria (formerly al-Qaeda in Iraq) is preventing what would probably be a par for the course humanitarian intervention against the Assad regime and making the prospect of terrorist rebels sacking Damascus and rising to political power a dangerous reality. That should be considered by the elite foreign policy community to be at least as big a geo-strategic loss as Iran’s new regional stature.

The huge spectacle and sheer enormity of the terror of 9/11 has helped reinforce an illusion about al-Qaeda at that time. Despite what the greatest terrorist attack on US soil in American history would seem to indicate, they were a small group, marginalized everywhere they went. They were a small group of extremists peculiarly obsessed with US military troops in Saudi Arabia. They used Israel-Palestine, resentment towards US-supported dictators and the sanctions-enabled genocide in Iraq to excite the Muslim masses to their cause, but nobody rose up like they’d hoped.

And then Iraq happened. The 2006 National Intelligence Estimate on Trends in Global Terrorism said that the Iraq war was “breeding deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.” The former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Robert Grenier said the war “has convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and is attacking Muslims, and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq.”

Bush’s maniacal foreign policy gave global appeal to al-Qaeda’s militant anti-US brand. And now the US is faced with several independent off-shoots that draw inspiration from the comparatively small original clan. There is al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, many of whose members fought the rebel war in Libya and were themselves veteran jihadis in Iraq. Groups in Syria like Jabhat al-Nusra, which the US State Department last month officially designated a Global Terrorist organization, identifying the group as an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq. And al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which according to Washington has coordinated at least a few attempted attacks on the US.

Now, President Obama’s so-called “counter-terrorism” policies have been equally counterproductive. His surge in Afghanistan, his relentless secret drone war in Pakistan and Yemen, his shortsighted intervention in Libya, and his limited backing of Syrian rebels have all contributed to the bolstering of al-Qaead groups.

But there is not enough emphasis on Bush’s contributions here, specifically the extent to which the Iraq war contributed. That legacy is not just the strategic blunder of an unnecessary war that failed to yield sufficient geo-political gains. It is one of creating an entirely new and larger generation of al-Qaeda terrorists.

If one were looking for a way to demonstrate how faithfully the Obama administration had carried on the legacy of the Bush administration, this past week takes the cake, and no, I’m not talking about making Bush tax cuts on the middle class permanent.

In a matter of four days, President Obama ushered in three landmark decisions that further institutionalized the Bush administration’s penchant for abridging civil liberties in the name of national security, all the while making us less safe.

1. Warrantless wiretapping of American citizens: On Sunday, Obama signed into law a renewal of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which authorizes broad, warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications, checked only by a secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that doesn’t make it’s activities and procedures available to the public.

Obama voted for the FISA Amendments Act as a senator, but with expressed reservations about “President Bush’s abuse of executive power,” and the constitutional protections that the warrantless surveillance program offended. As President, though, Obama has turned into a staunch supporter of these legally questionable abuses of executive power.

Justice Department documents released in September in litigation brought by the ACLU showed “that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.”

“Part of the problem is much of this is being done in secret and there’s very little oversight or accountability,” NSA whistleblower Nick Drake told Al Jazeera recently. “It was just stunning when I found out that the White House had entered into a secret agreement with the National Security Agency to completely bypass the FISA, and by bypassing it they turned the USA into the equivalent of a foreign nation for the purposes of dragnet, blanket electronic surveillance…in secret.”

Even though the government has acknowledged that the secretive program has exceeded its legal limits, violating Americans’ Fourth Amendment constitutional rights, the Obama administration has aggressively refused to allow any checks and balances on the program, even refusing congressional requests to disclose how many Americans have been spied on.

2. Indefinite detention without charge or trial: On Wednesday, Obama signed the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act into law. The 680-page omnibus bill contains more military and national security provisions than any one person can account for, but it notably renews the prohibition against transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay to the US for any purpose, a measure which again prevents Obama from fulfilling his pledge to close the black hole detention center.

Obama initially threatened a veto of the bill due to this provision, but the threat proved a false one. In a signing statement, Obama said he disagreed with the provision, despite his signing it into law.

But it’s difficult to take his stated reservations seriously. Back in 2010, the President signed an executive order that “establishe[d] indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and [made] clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial,” reported ProPublica at the time.

And in last year’s NDAA, there were even more controversial provisions suggesting American citizens, detained on US soil, can be locked up without charge or trial as enemy combatants. The constitutionality of those provisions, which advocates say are acceptable under the 2001 AUMF, is still being fought out in the US court of appeals.

In Afghanistan, too, the Obama era has meant mere suspects can be locked away without charge or trial in abusive detention camps, mostly in secret. The US military’s increased use of night raids led to a huge surge in detainees, very few of whom have had any evidence placed against them. The Obama administration has had them sent to Bagram to be held for indefinite detention without charge or trial, which Daphne Eviatar, an attorney for Human Rights First, has described as “worse than Guantanamo, because there are fewer rights.”

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the practice of extraordinary rendition, wherein suspects are captured and transferred to another country to be held without charge or trial, is “taking on renewed significance” under Obama.

3. Targeted killings of suspects by drone, without any pretense of due process (even if they are US citizens) remains none of the American people’s business. 

One could argue that Obama doesn’t support indefinite detention as much as Bush did, since he supports killing suspects before the issue of detention ever arises.

On Wednesday, a federal judge sided with the Obama administration in a case brought by The New York Times in which the latter was demanding that more information about the legality of the drone war be disclosed.

In terms of carrying on the legacy of the Bush administration, this one is a double-whammy. Not only did Obama expand Bush’s covert drone program exponentially, but he’s doing so by shutting out any judicial scrutiny by claiming disclosures would harm national security, a tactic called ‘state secrets privileges’ which was pioneered by the Bush administration.

US District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan appeared reluctant in her ruling, noting she “can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.”

“The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me,” McMahon said, referring to the nightmarish wonderland in which people are sentenced to death before a verdict from a jury is in.

The Obama administration has continued its dramatic increase in the use of armed drones to target and kill mostly unnamed people, primarily in Yemen and Pakistan. When a high-profile terrorist suspect is killed, the Obama administration openly discusses the success of the drone program. But when journalists and civil liberties groups ask tough, scrutinizing questions about the legality of the program, the administration gets away with ignoring their requests for information, claiming the program is secret.

Meanwhile, a report by researchers at the Stanford and NYU schools of law found in September that the drone program is “terrorizing” the people of Pakistan and that it is having “counterproductive” effects.

In Yemen, drone attacks are dramatically increasing, bombing the country over 42 times in 2012, up from an estimated 10 incidents in 2011, and killing at least 223 people. Virtually all of the victims’ indentities remain classified, thanks to the Obama administration, and al-Qaeda recruitment continues to grow in Yemen because of disgruntled locals who resent their families and tribes being relentlessly bombed and killed by the hundreds.

The Washington Post reported last week, the Yemeni government as a policy tries to conceal when US drones kill civilians, instead automatically and systematically describing the victims as al-Qaeda militants, regardless of the truth.

“Our entire village is angry at the government and the Americans,” a Yemeni villager named Mohammed told the Post. “If the Americans are responsible, I would have no choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting America.”

It’s become almost trite to argue the continuities between Bush and Obama. But this week has been so detrimental to individual liberties and so favorable to never-ending, unaccountable secret war, that it’s hard to imagine we ever extricated ourselves from those dark days of post-9/11 tyranny.