Month: April 2014

According to a report at Foreign Policy, a new piece of legislation due for a vote on Wednesday of this week would force Voice of America, the federally funded news media organization, to toe the U.S. line even more closely and become an explicit propaganda tool of Washington.

A powerful pair of lawmakers in the House of Representatives have agreed on major legislation to overhaul Voice of America and other government-funded broadcasting outlets that could have implications for the broadcaster’s editorial independence, Foreign Policy has learned.

The new legislation tweaks the language of VOA’s mission to explicitly outline the organization’s role in supporting U.S. “public diplomacy” and the “policies” of the United States government, a move that would settle a long-running dispute within the federal government about whether VOA should function as a neutral news organization rather than a messaging tool of Washington.

“It is time for broad reforms; now more than ever, U.S. international broadcasts must be effective,” said Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a statement.

VOA has always been a propaganda outlet, broadly speaking, but it reportedly has taken an adversarial stance in some cases. Foreign Policy:

Founded in 1942 as a part of the Office of War Information, the VOA was originally tasked with countering Japanese and Nazi propaganda. In the 1950s, it moved to the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency where it focused its efforts on countering Communist propaganda. In later years, VOA concentrated on providing news to individuals living in repressive regimes. In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed its principles into law, emphasizing VOA’s mission as an “accurate, objective, and comprehensive” source of news, as opposed to a propaganda outlet.

For many years since then, employees at the TV and radio broadcaster have insisted on viewing themselves as objective journalists as opposed to instruments of American foreign policy. On some rare occasions, that sense of independence has resulted in news stories that depict the United States in a less than favorable light.

“The persian News Network of Voice of America has been documented to show anti-American bias,” the conservative Heritage Foundation alleged in a policy brief this month.

Every government has some form of propaganda outlet. But the U.S.A. and the people within it have always thought of themselves as different. Propaganda is a dirty word and a filthy activity that only governments less divine than ours engage in. We are benevolent and good, which makes the need for self-serving and inaccurate propaganda obsolete.

But if we have bipartisan legislation moving through Congress that explicitly calls for VOA and other U.S. funded news outlets to toe the fallacious government line, then perhaps we’ve lost even that level of pretense.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the case that a group of activists, journalists, and academics including Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, and Daniel Ellsberg brought against the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA.

This is a huge gift to the Obama administration, which will no longer have to answer for the terrible language in the provision which implies that U.S. citizens can be denied their rights to due process if the government accuses them of helping al-Qaeda or its affiliated forces. So, the court must have a damn good reason, right?

Here it is:

The appeals court said the challengers had no standing because they could not show the provision has any bearing on the government’s authority to detain U.S. citizens.

The court said the plaintiffs who were not U.S. citizens lacked standing to sue because they did not show “a sufficient threat that the government will detain them” under the provision.

This is malarkey. Given the laws on the books and previous court precedent, it is quite clear that journalists, academics, dissidents, and activists of the type involved in this suit are at risk of detainment. There is a clause of the USA PATRIOT Act which prohibits giving material support to groups designated by the United States as terrorists. Clarifying that clause, in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the court found that “training,” “expert advice or assistance,” “service,” and “personnel,” all qualified as material assistance.

Humanitarian Law Project was a group that was giving legal advice to Kurdish separatists in the PKK, a group that happens to be on the U.S. terrorist list. The U.S. terrorist list is shamefully arbitrary. The government puts individuals or groups on and takes them off according to its interests at the time: Nelson Mandela was on it before he became admired by the world as a man of peace, Saddam Hussein was on it until the U.S. decided it wanted to support him militarily against Iran in the 1980s, the Iranian group MEK was on it until 2012 when the U.S. decided having an Iranian dissident group off the terrorist list could be in its benefit, etc.

But as to the standing of these individuals in the case, they undoubtedly have it. As Noam Chomsky said in a talk at Google this month, the material assistance clause “could maybe apply to somebody who has an interview with [Hassan] Nasrallah, you know, the head of Hezbollah, as I’ve had. Or maybe advises a group to turn to non-violence. That could be regarded as material assistance under Obama. That’s a tremendous attack on freedom of speech and just elementary justice.”

Journalists also often talk with terrorist groups or individuals. Chris Hedges has certainly done so. If the government some day didn’t like the reports this or that journalist was churning out, might he be targeted for indefinite detention?

The courts failure to hear this case is a terrible move. And when this law is used at some point in the future to detain an American without due process, the court will be remembered for ensuring that inevitable obscenity.

Here is an excerpt from President Obama’s joint press conference today with Philippine President Benigno Acquino:

Typically, criticism of our foreign policy has been directed at the failure to use military force.  And the question I think I would have is, why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force after we’ve just gone through a decade of war at enormous costs to our troops and to our budget?  And what is it exactly that these critics think would have been accomplished?

My job as Commander-in-Chief is to deploy military force as a last resort, and to deploy it wisely.  And, frankly, most of the foreign policy commentators that have questioned our policies would go headlong into a bunch of military adventures that the American people had no interest in participating in and would not advance our core security interests.

So if you look at Syria, for example, our interest is in helping the Syrian people, but nobody suggests that us being involved in a land war in Syria would necessarily accomplish this goal.  And I would note that those who criticize our foreign policy with respect to Syria, they themselves say, no, no, no, we don’t mean sending in troops.  Well, what do you mean?  Well, you should be assisting the opposition — well, we’re assisting the opposition.  What else do you mean?  Well, perhaps you should have taken a strike in Syria to get chemical weapons out of Syria.  Well, it turns out we’re getting chemical weapons out of Syria without having initiated a strike.  So what else are you talking about?  And at that point it kind of trails off.

In Ukraine, what we’ve done is mobilize the international community.  Russia has never been more isolated.  A country that used to be clearly in its orbit now is looking much more towards Europe and the West, because they’ve seen that the arrangements that have existed for the last 20 years weren’t working for them.  And Russia is having to engage in activities that have been rejected uniformly around the world.  And we’ve been able to mobilize the international community to not only put diplomatic pressure on Russia, but also we’ve been able to organize European countries who many were skeptical would do anything to work with us in applying sanctions to Russia.  Well, what else should we be doing?  Well, we shouldn’t be putting troops in, the critics will say.  That’s not what we mean.  Well, okay, what are you saying?  Well, we should be arming the Ukrainians more.  Do people actually think that somehow us sending some additional arms into Ukraine could potentially deter the Russian army?  Or are we more likely to deter them by applying the sort of international pressure, diplomatic pressure and economic pressure that we’re applying?

The point is that for some reason many who were proponents of what I consider to be a disastrous decision to go into Iraq haven’t really learned the lesson of the last decade, and they keep on just playing the same note over and over again.  Why?  I don’t know.  But my job as Commander-in-Chief is to look at what is it that is going to advance our security interests over the long term, to keep our military in reserve for where we absolutely need it.  There are going to be times where there are disasters and difficulties and challenges all around the world, and not all of those are going to be immediately solvable by us.

But we can continue to speak out clearly about what we believe.  Where we can make a difference using all the tools we’ve got in the toolkit, well, we should do so.  And if there are occasions where targeted, clear actions can be taken that would make a difference, then we should take them.  We don’t do them because somebody sitting in an office in Washington or New York think it would look strong.  That’s not how we make foreign policy.  And if you look at the results of what we’ve done over the last five years, it is fair to say that our alliances are stronger, our partnerships are stronger, and in the Asia Pacific region, just to take one example, we are much better positioned to work with the peoples here on a whole range of issues of mutual interest.

And that may not always be sexy.  That may not always attract a lot of attention, and it doesn’t make for good argument on Sunday morning shows.  But it avoids errors.  You hit singles, you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run.  But we steadily advance the interests of the American people and our partnership with folks around the world.

Uncharacteristically, I’m at a loss for words.

Washington has an advanced relationship with Kuwait, the small Persian Gulf country out of which the U.S. pushed invading Iraqi forces in the 1991 Gulf War. U.S. troops are stationed in Kuwait on a more or less permanent basis, Kuwait receives considerable military assistance and training from the U.S., and in return, Kuwait is “the leading source of funding for al-Qaeda-linked terrorists fighting in Syria’s civil war,” according to the Washington Post. 

Like most of Washington’s military and economic relationships with the Arab Gulf states, overriding geopolitical goals like maintaining U.S. hegemony and containing Iran outweigh concerns about Kuwait’s support for the kind of Islamic jihadists that have allegedly propelled the bulk of post-9/11 foreign policy. Al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups are the enemies of the U.S., Washington officials remind us constantly, and they are persistently plotting to kill Americans. Oh, and please ignore the fact that our Middle East allies send them money and weapons.

The U.S. relationship with Kuwait consists of “mutual discussions in the event of a crisis; joint military exercises; U.S. evaluation of, advice to, and training of Kuwaiti forces; U.S. arms sales; prepositioning of U.S. military equipment; and U.S. access to a range of Kuwaiti facilities,” according to a recent Congressional Research Service report (CRS). In 2004, “the Bush Administration designated Kuwait as a ‘major non-NATO ally (MNNA),'” a designation that “opens Kuwait to buy the same U.S. equipment that is sold to U.S. allies in NATO.”

“During 2003-2011,” according to CRS, “there were an average of 25,000 U.S. troops based in Kuwaiti facilities, not including those rotating into Iraq at a given time.” In 2012, then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta noted, “that there were about 13,500 U.S. troops in Kuwait.”

One would think it would be implicit in the U.S.-Kuwaiti relationship that Kuwait, as the recipient of all kinds of U.S. aid, privileges, and benefits, would refrain from supporting terrorist groups characterized as America’s greatest enemies by the highest Washington officials. And one would be wrong.

Continue reading “How the US Supports Regimes That Support Terrorism”

In the aftermath of reports claiming John Kerry said Israel will become an apartheid state without a two-state solution, the Secretary of State is being portrayed as far outside the mainstream and his language is being condemned as erroneous in the extreme.

To Republicans and Democrats, the word “apartheid” in reference to Israel’s rule over Palestinians is an appalling misnomer. But the reality on the ground says different.

It’s important to note, as the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin does, that the label apartheid is not so extreme in Israel.

Yet Israel’s leaders have employed the term, as well. In 2010, for example, former Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak used language very similar to Kerry’s. “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic,” Barak said. “If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

As Israeli activist and military veteran Mikhael Manekin said in January 2012, the apartheid criticism is an accepted part of the debate lexicon in Israel. The Times of Israel reported last year that Alon Liel, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general and ex-ambassador to South Africa, believes Israel currently qualifies as an apartheid state.

“In the situation that exists today, until a Palestinian state is created, we are actually one state,” Liel said. “This joint state — in the hope that the status quo is temporary — is an apartheid state.”

Back in December, the Israeli paper Haaretz hosted a discussion of the apartheid question, led by correspondent Amira Hass who wrote that “our reality is governed by the same philosophy [as the apartheid system in South Africa], backed by laws and force of arms.”

What, for instance [denotes an apartheid system]?

There are two legal systems in place on the West Bank, a civilian one for Jews and a military one for Palestinians. There are two separate infrastructures there as well, including roads, electricity and water. The superior and expanding one is for Jews while the inferior and shrinking one is for the Palestinians. There are local pockets, similar to the Bantustans in South Africa, in which the Palestinians have limited self-rule. There is a system of travel restrictions and permits in place since 1991, just when such a system was abolished in South Africa.

Does that mean that apartheid exists only on the West Bank?

Not at all, it exists across the entire country, from the sea to the Jordan River. It prevails in this one territory in which two peoples live, ruled by one government which is elected by one people, but which determines the future and fate of both. Palestinian towns and villages suffocate because of deliberately restrictive planning in Israel, just as they do in the West Bank.

Then there was the shocking recent survey conducted by the Israeli data firm Dialog, which found that most Israeli Jews would support an explicitly apartheid system if Israel annexes the West Bank.

Continue reading “Is John Kerry Wrong About Israeli Apartheid?”