News – Page 1087 – Antiwar.com Blog

Fighting Against NDAA?

Five Republican lawmakers from Washington state have introduced legislation that condemns the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012 for controversial measures regarding the detainment of terrorism suspects, according to the Tenth Amendment Center.

The $662 billion defense spending bill contained a controversial section that required terrorism suspects to be detained by the military without trial, regardless of where they were captured.

HB 2759, the Washington State Preservation of Liberty Act, was introduced by Reps. Jason Overstreet, Matt Shea, Vincent Buys, Cary Condotta, and David Taylor. The bill condemns the NDAA for authorizing the United States to “indefinitely detain United States citizens and lawful resident aliens captured within the United States of America without charge until the end of hostilities.”

Not sure what introducing “legislation that condemns” another piece of legislation actually means, and it seems quite clear this will go nowhere, but at least there’s somebody doing something against NDAA. Right?

John Glaser on RT Talking Syria

Senate Calls for Obama to Push Iran Internet Freedom

The Senate’s latest in an interminable number of anti-Iran resolutions, in addition to including the usual “crippling sanctions,” calls on President Obama to “develop a more robust Internet freedom strategy for Iran.”

Iran, like a number of nations, does censor the Internet. They use a content control system to do so, similar to the censorship regime of China or, a bit closer to home, the one that the US would’ve created under SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA.

The resolution, the Johnson-Shelby Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human Rights Act of 2012, is sponsored primarily by Sen. Tim Johnson (D – SD).

This is noteworthy because Sen. Johnson is also a co-sponsor for PIPA. Apparently freeing Iran’s Internet and unfreeing America’s are not mutually exclusive goals.

Our Language Cops Are
a Bunch of Barney Fifes

Andrew Sullivan:

I’ve touched slightly on the term ‘Israel-Firster’ – a shorthand that has an ugly neo-Nazi provenance, which is why I don’t use it…

As Justin Raimondo pointed out Monday, that etymology is false: the term was first used no later than 1953 by Alfred M. Lilienthal, a Jewish American. Not that that fact will change anything. I expect no correction from Sullivan, and I couldn’t care less about his source, Spencer Ackerman, whose views on intellectual honesty you can read for yourself.

But let’s assume that, for once, they weren’t bullshitting and the term was coined by an asshole. And? Does a sorry origin taint a word or phrase for all eternity, even if the term — as Sullivan effectively admits in the aforementioned post — is accurate and useful in certain cases?

Just for kicks, I searched Sullivan’s blog and Tablet magazine, where Ackerman acted out his latest “plate-glass window” fantasy, for “highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow.” It won’t surprise you to learn that the searches turned up plenty of hits. It may surprise you to learn where those words come from:

“Highbrow,” first used in the 1880s to describe intellectual or aesthetic superiority, and “lowbrow,” first used shortly after 1900 to mean someone or something neither “highly intellectual” or “aesthetically refined,” were derived from the phrenological terms “highbrowed” and “lowbrowed,” which were prominently featured in the nineteenth-century practice of determining racial types and intelligence by measuring cranial shapes and capacities. A familiar illustration of the period depicted the distinctions between the lowbrowed ape and the increasingly higher brows of the “Human Idiot,” the “Bushman,” the “Uncultivated,” the “Improved,” the “Civilized,” the “Enlightened,” and, finally, the “Caucasian,” with the highest brow of all.

– Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988)

Ugly, huh? You can find similar histories for several other commonly used terms (though “rule of thumb,” contrary to a popular myth, isn’t one of them). Will Sullivan and Tablet‘s writers ban the -brows? I doubt it, and really, why should they? If they found those adjectives useful before and had no intention of endorsing phrenology or “scientific racism,” then there’s no reason for us to presume evil motives now.

None of which is to say that some words aren’t overused or shouldn’t be used more carefully. But if “Israel-firster” is one of those terms, then “anti-Semite” is a thousand times more so. You have your work cut out for you, deputies.

Oil Corporations & US Gov’t to Wield Power in Future Oily Iraq

Iraq is projected to become an oil giant of as much geopolitical influence as Saudi Arabia. And the U.S. government and its corporations are at the center of that trend.

Ben Van Heuvelen has a piece at Foreign Policy describing Iraq’s burgeoning “extractive industry” and how they’re on track to become a “swing producer” within five years. A “swing producer” refers to “the ability to drastically increase production on short notice” (Saudi Arabia is currently the world’s only swing producer, and it affords the monarchy unmatched geopolitical power). These projections are not a certainty, but the U.S. and Western oil companies are doing their best.

In 2009, the government started awarding contracts for the country’s largest fields, and the biggest names in oil have signed up. Companies like ExxonMobil and BP have invested billions of dollars, bringing the latest in technology and engineering expertise. Production has rebounded from just over 1 million barrels per day after the invasion to nearly 3 million today. Baghdad’s 11 international oil contracts promise to deliver a total of more than 13 million barrels per day within seven years — a figure that would make Iraq the largest oil producer, ever.

Interestingly, oil corporations are relying heavily on the undemocratic centralization of political power in a quasi-dictator like Nouri al-Maliki in order to develop Iraq’s oil. Maliki’s regime has resorted to unilaterally approving contracts with oil companies like Exxon and BP, circumventing parliament’s approval in violation of Iraqi law. “Maliki’s Shiite-majority allies have backed centralized control of oil,” Van Heuvelen writes, “while parties representing the minority Kurds and Sunnis say local governments should have more authority. No bill has yet survived parliament.”

That volatility, however, hasn’t dissuaded oil multinationals — there’s simply too much oil under the country’s soil. So, many companies, from BP to ExxonMobil to Shell to Lukoil, have been willing to invest billions of dollars without the stability of a modern oil law. Companies have mitigated their risks by negotiating contracts that rely on international arbitration to settle major disputes, rather than Iraqi courts. But the overarching reason companies can operate with some confidence is that — in the laissez-faire political economy of Iraqi oil — their power rivals that of the divided Iraqi state.

It’s a pet peeve of mine when people use the term “laissez-faire” pejoratively to describe a process that is exactly not “laissez-faire.” But his point is taken: Because of a weakened parliament, sectarian divisions, and a strong-man Iraqi regime eager to use oil production to boost its geopolitical sway, those Western corporations possess inordinate command.

This is all happening alongside political developments that made news this week regarding the Obama administration’s attempts to negotiate a new defense agreement with the Maliki regime that may include an expanded number of U.S. troops based in Iraq. That’s right, after Obama dishonestly took credit for withdrawing from Iraq, he’s now vying to march right back in, using weapons deals and military training programs as lure.

So as ExxonMobil begins to wield gratuitous power in Iraq, the Obama administration plans to gain increased U.S. influence with money and weapons and troops, all while Maliki consolidates dictatorial power and suppresses democracy at every turn. Perhaps this is what Leon Panetta was referring to when he announced the war in Iraq was “worth the price.“

‘If we kill them, they were al Qaeda…’

I wrote today about Obama’s denial that a “huge number of civilian casualties” are resulting from the drone war in Pakistan. There is plenty of evidence of high numbers of civilian casualties from the drone strikes, and I write about and link to much of it in the piece, but I also left something out about how the Washington tallies the dead here.

Micah Zenko:

President Obama said that drones are used against “al-Qaeda operatives” engaged in “active plots against the United States.” We know from reporting by Pakistani journalists that the vast majority of suspected militants targeted are not members of al-Qaeda, nor are they involved in plots against the U.S. homeland. Many of the targets are actually anonymous, low-level militants who provide operational support to the Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan.

The Obama administration’s claim boils down to “if they die from our drones, they were al Qaeda.” There is no gray area, no question of whether they were insurgents, suppliers of insurgents, the son of an insurgent, at the same party as an insurgent, an actual al Qaeda operative, or an al-Qaeda sympathizer, plotting to attack the homeland, or just documenting the aftermath of drone strikes, etc. If we kill them, clearly they were bin Laden reincarnated. The catchall claim, which so far no public official has been properly scrutinized for, is analogous to Richard Nixon’s claim that “if the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”