Month: July 2013

Thomas Drake after his speech

The Restore the Fourth organization had a rally at McPherson Square in downtown DC on this July 4th afternoon.   They had several excellent speakers – including Libertarian Party’s Carla Howell, CEI’s Ryan Radia, Cato’s Julian Sanchez, and Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin.  (Other rallies are occurring across the nation.)

The headliner was former National Security Agency executive Thomas Drake, who risked his freedom to expose NSA crimes.  Drake would not cringe to the feds and he and his lawyers whipped the Justice Department in federal court last year.   I am sure his courage and his victory helped encourage other whistleblowers.

It was neat to see an American hero like Drake speak on the Fourth of July.   He challenged the audience: “The government has given up on the Constitution.  Have you?”   He denounced the feds for claiming a ” license to seize first and search later.”  He warned that “the acid of government secrecy is eating out the heart of who we are as a people.”  He noted that “national security has become the state religion.”

I assume his speech will be posted on YouTube.   It is definitely worth watching –  especially at a time when other NSA crimes are coming to light.

Here’s some photos I took today:

This guy started shouting about the upside down U.S. flag next to the speaker’s podium He said that to display it like that turned the flag into “a symbol of treason and anarchy.”

 

Thomas Drake and Code Pink mastermind Medea Benjamin.

The appalling hubris of the imperial mindset in Washington was on full display yesterday when the U.S. government apparently pressured the governments of France, Spain, Portugal and Italy to deny a plane carrying Bolivia’s Evo Morales permission to pass through their air space. The plane was thus redirected, in flight, and forced to land in Vienna. The reason? Morales said he would consider granting political asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and the suspicion was that Snowden was on the plane with the Bolivian president.

That suspicion was flat out wrong. But even if it was correct, the move, according to the Guardian, went “above international law and the rights of a president of a sovereign nation.” Unsurprisingly, Washington yet again has violated international law and abused the rights of weaker nations.

“Bolivia has denounced what it calls a ‘kidnap’ operation of its president by imperial powers that violates the Vienna convention and its national sovereignty,” writes the Guardian‘s Jonathan Watts. “Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador and Uruguay have joined in the condemnation. Angry headlines have been splashed on newspapers across the region.”

“Politicians and commentators in the region are already adding the action to a long list of interventions, invasions and ‘policing actions’ by Latin America’s giant northern neighbour, alongside the Monroe Doctrine, the annexation of half of Mexico, the Bay of Pigs invasion, support for Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and other dictators and the ousting of democratically elected leftist governments in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and elsewhere,” Watts adds.

In a statement yesterday, Amnesty International said the U.S. government’s pursuit of Snowden is a gross violation of his rights and international law:

The U.S. authorities’ relentless campaign to hunt down and block whistleblower Edward Snowden’s attempts to seek asylum is a gross violation of his human rights. It is his unassailable right, enshrined in international law, to claim asylum and this should not be impeded.

The U.S. attempts to pressure governments to block Snowden’s attempts to seek asylum are all the more deplorable when you consider the National Security Agency (NSA)whistleblower could be at risk of ill-treatment if extradited to the U.S.

No country can return a person to another country where there is a serious risk of ill-treatment. We know that others who have been prosecuted for similar acts have been held in conditions that not only Amnesty International, but UN officials considered cruel inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of international law.

Meanwhile, the focus on Snowden is continuing to serve as a distraction from the fact that the NSA is violating “the constitutional rights of everybody in the country,” in the words of NSA whistleblower William Binney.

The ACLU reminds us today that the NSA’s collection of intelligence on Americans is not “inadvertent,” as they claim. Under the authority of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, “the NSA claims only to intercept American communications ‘inadvertently,’ but this is a clever fiction: the surveillance program has been engineered to sweep up American communications in vast quantity, while giving the NSA cover to claim that it is not intentionally targeting Americans.”

This deliberate collection of Americans’ communications happens in at least three ways. First, the government can target foreigners on the other end of Americans’ international communications. So, if you call or email family, friends, or business associates abroad, the NSA can intercept those communications so long as it doesn’t intentionally target a specific, known American in another country. The surveillance must also relate to “foreign intelligence,” but this term has been construed so broadly as to be all but meaningless.

Second, the government has set a dismally low bar for concluding that a potential surveillance target is, in fact, a foreigner located abroad. By default, targets are assumed to be foreign. That’s right, the procedures allow the NSA to presume that prospective targets are foreigners outside the United States absent specific information to the contrary—and to presume therefore that those individuals are fair game for warrantless surveillance.

Third, the procedures allow the NSA to collect not just the communications of a foreign target, but any communications about a foreign target. This provision likely results in significant over-collection of even purely domestic communications. So, rather than striving to protect Americans, the procedures err on the side of over-collection and less respect for privacy rights.

Hopefully some good will come out of the U.S.’s overreach in grounding Morales’s plane. Maybe this will push forward the Bolivian government’s consideration of asylum for Snowden. What would be great is if Morales issued a formal complaint at the United Nations. The U.S. should be as embarrassed about this ordeal as possible.

In the midst of continuing anti-government protests, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has rejected the Egyptian Army’s 48-hour ultimatum (by now passed) to either call for early elections or step down. On Monday, I noted the acknowledgement of the Morsi regime that the military won’t pursue this effective coup without approval from their American overlords. Here’s Foreign Policy‘s John Reed with more on why that’s true:

Oddly enough, this might be good news for the Pentagon, which largely built the modern Egyptian armed forces. In fact, the Egyptian Army — as the entire military is colloquially known there — may be one of the U.S. government’s best friends in the entire Arab world. American presidents have been encouraging stability in the region for more than 30 years by making the Egyptian military the muscle behind a regional superpower — one built and trained by Washington.

In addition to buying Egypt weapons like 1,200 M1 Abrams tanks and hundreds of F-16 fighter jets, the United States spends millions of dollars annually to train Egyptian troops in war games in the Middle East. Egypt’s current defense chief, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is an alum of the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania while the head of Egypt’s air force, Reda Mahmoud Hafez Mohamed, did a tour in the United States as a liaison officer, and the recently retired head of the Egyptian navy, Mohab Mamish, did a bunch of tours in the United States . Their cases are hardly unique; more than 500 Egyptian military officers train at American military graduate schools every year. There’s even a special guesthouse on T Street in northwest Washington, D.C., where visiting Egyptian military officials stay when in the American capital.

All this gives the United States quite a bit of leverage when it comes to the Egyptian military, one of the most powerful forces in Egyptian society. (Some estimate that up to 40 percent of the Egyptian economy is controlled by the military.)

Keep in mind that, as Egyptian blogger and activist Mohamed El Dahshan wrote this week, “this is the same army that, just a few months ago, was responsible for the Maspero massacre, that unleashed angry mobs against the peaceful protesters who objected to its rule, that conducted virginity tests on Egyptian women, and that subjected 12,000 civilians to military trials.” Furthermore, if estimates that “up to 40 percent of the Egyptian economy is controlled by the military” are correct, then the military itself is responsible for much of the discontent of the Egyptians in Tahrir Square right now, which is focused almost entirely on economic despair.

Egyptians are largely viewing the military as a temporary bulwark against the loathed Morsi government, so they welcome the Army’s ultimatum, whether it worked or not. The key lesson here, though, is that Egypt is tightly within the grip of the U.S. Empire and while political leaders may change, the people are unlikely to be satisfied with their government so long as it’s Washington – and not them – who control it.

On behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institute, Max Boot and Michael Doran are openly arguing for a return to the mafia-like political warfare of the Cold War era. “With the end of the Cold War,” they lament unironically, “America’s tradition of political warfare all but died.”

How sad. The statement is anything but true, but Boot and Doran want the U.S. to recommence its long tradition of overthrowing democratically elected governments, covertly supporting foreign miscreants, distributing mass international propaganda, and dishing out torture and death through covert or third-party means. Specifically, this intensified campaign of coercion and warfare ought to be directed at – of course – the Middle East.

Clearly, the president needs options between military intervention and complete nonintervention — ways to influence developments in the Middle East without deploying Reaper drones or sending U.S. ground forces. To give Obama the tools he needs, the U.S. government should reinvigorate its capacity to wage “political warfare,” defined in 1948 by George Kennan, then the State Department’s director of policy planning, as “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.” Such measures, Kennan noted, were “both overt and covert” and ranged from “political alliances, economic measures (as ERP — the Marshall Plan), and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.”

“At their worst,” they admit, “such policies propped up strongmen with scant legitimacy — think Cuban president Fulgencio Batista and the shah of Iran — and invited anti-American ‘blowback.’ But at their best, they enabled the United States to aid freedom fighters behind the Iron Curtain and beyond.”

I dare say they are drastically understating the “worst” effects and dramatically overstating the “best.”

If we don’t reinvigorate America’s political warfare in the Middle East, they advise, then we will “cede the Middle East to malign actors such as Iran, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood,” and “risk creating a situation that will require, at some point in the future another massive military intervention by the United States.”

Notice the wording: if we don’t rule the Middle East by force and coercion, we will “cede” it to others. This of course implies the Middle East belongs to us. And of course those other bad guys that we’ll “cede” the region to are all “malign actors.” Not us though: our policies of supporting dictatorship, engaging in illegal wars that kill hundreds of thousands, economic warfare, covert action, cyber-attacks, and aid to terrorist groups — those aren’t malignant. Those are just to save everyone from other malignants.

Obama’s trip to Africa is a propaganda crusade. As the president talks about growing economies and making electricity more available to the continent, he is all hush hush on what is actually happening in Africa with regard to U.S. policy. Namely, Obama has increased U.S. military presence and interventionism in Africa to unprecedented levels and is meanwhile trying to win a geo-political game with China to exploit the economic potential of the continent under the control of Washington.

Reuters:

Striking Islamist militants with drones, supporting African forces in stabilizing Somalia and Mali and deploying dozens of training teams, the U.S. military has returned to Africa…

Nevertheless, with some 4,000-5,000 personnel on the ground at any given time, the United States now has more troops in Africa than at any point since its Somalia intervention two decades ago…

There are two main reasons behind the build up: to counter al Qaeda and other militant groups, and to win influence in a continent that could become an increasingly important destination for American trade and investment as China’s presence grows in Africa.

These strategies, according to the Reuters report, are “key to the strategy of winning influence in a continent where China has surpassed the United States as the No.1 trade partner and has huge mining, energy and infrastructure investments.”

Indeed, “China-Africa trade grew 1000% from $10 billion in 2000 to $107 billion in 2008,” according to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s recent book Strategic Vision (p. 81). Washington, as it is wont to do, views greater economic engagement and independence as a threat to its control over the world. That’s why Obama has turned a growing Chinese economy into a reason to “pivot” to Asia and essentially surround China militarily.

Greater economic interdependence between Americans and Africans is a good thing and would enrich both peoples. But not in the way Obama wants to do it. Consider the Middle East, long the dominion of the Washington elite, and how it has been rife with major U.S. rent-seeking corporations and the world’s biggest employer (that is, the Defense Department). After WWII and throughout the Cold War, the U.S. “competed for influence” in the Middle East with Soviet Russia just as it’s now doing with China in Africa. We needn’t go through that ugly history.

Also consider the dishonesty of the other stated justification for expanding the empire into Africa: to counter the al-Qaeda presence. This is like the Bush administration justifying military occupation of Iraq to fight al-Qaeda when al-Qaeda only ever came to Iraq to counter the U.S. occupation.

Al-Qaeda’s real but very exaggerated presence in Africa was generated in large part by the U.S.-NATO war in Libya two years ago. Jihadist fighters from abroad joined the rebel militias in Libya early on and then exploited the power vacuum left when the U.S. helped them overthrow the Gadhafi regime. Ansar al-Sharia now has a presence in Libya and Islamic extremists are present in Mali, which was destabilized thanks to the chaos in Libya. In Nigeria, the radical group Boko Haram has not had its sights on the U.S., but that is likely to change in due time thanks to increased U.S. support for the Nigerian military.

Patrick Meehan, chairman of the U.S. Congressional committee that drew up a big, scary report on Boko Haram a few years ago, said “While I recognize there is little evidence at this moment to suggest Boko Haram is planning attacks against the [U.S.] homeland, lack of evidence does not mean it cannot happen.”

Then there is al-Shabab, another group whose capabilities Washington is exaggerating in order to use it as a pretext for interventionism.

“The group poses no direct threat to the security of the United States,” writes Malou Innocent, Foreign Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute. “However, exaggerated claims about the specter of al Qaeda could produce policy decisions that exacerbate a localized, regional problem into a global one.”

Even the Obama administration has quietly acknowledged the fact that military involvement in Somalia may create more problems than it solves, with one administration official telling the Washington Post last year there is a “concern that a broader campaign could turn al-Shabab from a regional menace into an adversary determined to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.”

Here’s a better route: decrease the militaristic meddling and interventionism in Africa and allow economies in the continent to develop and globalize without control from the U.S. government.