Category: News

Via, Mondoweiss, a new resolution passed by the California State Assembly attempts to limit criticism of Israeli policy on college campuses by equating it with anti-Semitic hate speech. The law urges “California colleges and universities to squelch nascent anti-Semitism” and “encourages university leaders to combat a wide array of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel actions,” according to the Associated Press.

The Assembly’s actions also drew criticism from free speech advocates. Carlos Villarreal, director of the San Francisco chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, called the resolution irresponsible and dangerous because it combines legitimate condemnations of acts of intimidation and hate with specific objections to tactics used to support the Palestinian people.

“In doing so, it can be seen as having no other purpose than to demonize all those who criticize the nation-state of Israel or support the rights of the Palestinian people,” he said.

Typically, those who want to suppress free speech criticisms of Israeli crimes are relegated to the tools of social ostracism or return criticism – you know, because of that First Amendment thing. The cry of anti-Semitism has been successful in this respect, unfortunately. This bill, by contrast, attempts to codify into law an obligation to “squelch” activism and speech objecting to Israeli government actions. Read the text of the resolution here. Fortunately, growing criticism of the bill has led the University of California to refuse to support it.

From the Washington Post, news that the Obama administration completely lied about the killing of bin Laden being in self-defense:

Bin Laden apparently was shot in the head when he looked out of his bedroom door into the top-floor hallway of his compound as SEALs rushed up a narrow stairwell in his direction, according to former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen in “No Easy Day.”

…The author writes that the man ducked back into his bedroom and the SEALs followed, only to find the man crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood with a hole visible on the right side of his head and two women wailing over his body.

Bissonnette says the point man pulled the two women out of the way and shoved them into a corner. He and the other SEALs trained their guns’ laser sights on bin Laden’s still-twitching body, shooting him several times until he lay motionless. Only when they wiped the blood off his face, were they certain it was bin Laden.

These revelations illustrate two important points from the bin Laden raid. First, the Obama administration pathologically lies about the nature of their secret operations in order to make targeted killings seem like self-defense when they are not and thus to immunize the operatives and the administration. This should be a lesson coloring our perceptions of everything from drone strikes to other elite commando raids, most of which we know comparatively little next to the Abbottabad operation.

The other point falls somewhere along the lines of what Noam Chomsky wrote immediately following the assassination operation on bin Laden. “It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law,” he wrote. “There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition…In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial.” But if President Obama suspects you’ve done wrong, no court or trial or judge are needed; he’ll just kill you by royal decree.

The calls for intervening more directly in the Syrian conflict continue to make headlines. But the reasons to stay out of it – ranging from the strategic and logistical to the legal and moral – are as numerous as the options for intervention.

A recent Op-Ed from researchers at the RAND Corp. argues that “the US needs a more activist, assertive policy toward Syria.” Since the target audience for these policy recommendations are not emotional, ill-informed voters, all pretense of “humanitarian intervention” is dropped. Nay, the United States should undertake to shape the outcome of the conflict in Syria because it has “significant geostrategic implications” that effect “the nature and stability of the future political order in the Middle East.” Plus, the authors remind us, “Assad’s overthrow would be a major strategic defeat for Iran.” Picking winners and losers in Syria, they promise, will increase Washington’s chances of “influenc[ing] the post-Assad transition” for America’s own interests.

They say our policy should basically expand on what the Obama administration is already doing. That is, aiding the opposition:

• The US should provide opposition forces with increased intelligence and communication equipment, thereby enabling them to coordinate their attacks more effectively.
• The US should supply arms, ammunition, and logistical support to the opposition, beyond what Saudi Arabia and Qatar currently are providing. Additional weapons — including anti-tank guided missiles, mortars, and sniper rifles — would enable the opposition to launch effective attacks from a distance, and challenge the pro-Assad forces’ air supremacy.
• America and its key allies should help to train the opposition forces to operate these weapons. The training provided by France, Britain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates played a critical role last year in shifting the balance in favor of Libyan opposition forces, and it could have a similar impact in Syria.

The authors choose to completely ignore the unscrupulous nature of the opposition fighters, the crimes they have committed and their growing ties to al-Qaeda. And as I discussed here, US-funded proxy wars that grow out of civil conflicts are simply not associated with “regional stability” or “peaceful democratic transition[s]” (See Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Vietnam, Angola, etc.), as the authors claim to envision. And as Prof. Eva Bellin and Prof. Peter Krause in the Middle East Brief from Brandeis University found in their study of the Syria situation, “The distillation of historical experience with civil war and insurgency, along with a sober reckoning of conditions on the ground in Syria, make clear that limited intervention of this sort will not serve the moral impulse that animates it. To the contrary, it is more likely to amplify the harm that it seeks to eliminate by prolonging a hurting stalemate.”

Beyond the fact that the interventionists seem interested in neither humanitarianism or historical experience, the impulse to interfere and help impose regime change in Syria bears a greater hubris. That is, who are these policy wonks, politicians, and pundits to presume that they know best how to solve the Syrian conflict toward any end, never mind their nefarious ones? Who are these geniuses insisting on utilizing their omniscience to shape the crisis?

The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek labeled this indefatigable arrogance in the economic realm a “Fatal Conceit,” arguing that “the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” Or, as Ralph R. Reiland summarized it, “the flawed concept…that one man or one group, one cabinet of commanding officials or one central committee, or one team of planners from Harvard and Yale, can gather and understand enough information in order to reshape the world around them according to their wishes, reshape human nature, and design” their own outcome.

The fatal conceit of the crafters of foreign policy is that, with their limited knowledge and nearly unlimited power, they can play marionette and pull the strings of the entire Middle East to shape it in their own cruel fashion, without adverse consequences. The history of misbegotten foreign policy schemes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the covert interventions preceding them that brought so much initial blowback, are enough to prove they still don’t know what they’re talking about in the case of Syria.

Via Secrecy News:

“In worldwide arms transfer agreements in 2011 — to both developed and developing nations — the United States dominated, ranking first with $66.3 billion in such agreements or 77.7% of all such agreements. This is the highest single year agreements total in the history of the U.S. arms export program,” the CRS report said.

Weapons welfare from Washington has many deleterious effects, from fueling killings and mass rape in the Congo and suppressing democracy in Bahrain (among innumerable other dictatorships), to keeping the military industrial complex fat and happy and enabling Israeli crimes against Palestinians. The Obama administration is breaking records in this respect.

This just in:

“The Republican National Convention seating chart, obtained by POLITICO Sunday, shows the delegations from Nevada, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota and Oklahoma all located on the outer fringe of the convention floor. Each are states with significant Paul followings.

“The delegation for the Northern Mariana Islands, on the other hand, is right in front behind the gang from Michigan, birth state of Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Other groups with pretty good seats include those from the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and American Samoa. None has electoral votes that can impact the outcome of the election.”

And none are really part of these United States of America. Instead, they are colonial possessions, part of our vast and ever-expanding overseas empire. How appropriate that Romney should give their representatives the best seats in the house – and put the real Americans, the staunchly anti-interventionist Paulians, up there in the peanut gallery. Romney isn’t running for President: he’s running for Emperor, and it’s only natural for Caesar to put his most subservient and dependent subjects up front, where their cheers can obscure the skeptics’ grumblings.

Yes, you read that right: I said real Americans. Because, you see, the inhabitants of the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Marianas aren’t Americans: they are Virgin Islanders, Puerto Ricans, Samoans. They are, in short, the remnants of conquered and colonized peoples, the casualties of Washington’s long war against the independence and integrity of indigenous peoples, including in the continental US. The tragedy is that these peoples are the worst victims of the Welfare-Warfare State, their cultures literally raped by a massive presence of the US military, and their economies so distorted by military socialism that the great majority are entirely dependent on government  largesse of one sort or another.

As conquered territories, they should be granted their independence forthwith, and paid whatever reparations are due them: decades of environmental degradation and outright military occupation ought to be worth something. The day there are no delegates to any American political convention representing territories outside the continental US is the day we’ll finally be cured of the bacillus of imperialism – and, yes, we can do without Alaska.

Grover Norquist continues to gently unwrap the fiscal hypocrisy of the hawks in this interview with the Cato Institute. More on cutting the military budget here.