Hillary Clinton, Boko Haram, and the Meaningless Politics of the US Terrorist List

A political sideshow to the escalating focus on the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram is what it means for Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects. Boko Haram was not officially designated a terrorist group until Clinton stepped down and John Kerry became Secretary of State. This, Republicans tell us, reveals she is weak on terrorism and doesn’t have the leadership or foresight to keep the country safe as president.

To try and make a substantive political point on the basis of the farcical and arbitrary State Department terrorist list is laughable. The “official list” is so fickle and ludricous as to be useless in any serious political discussion except to demonstrate how illegitimate it is.

As I wrote last month:

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.

And of course, any militant groups that the U.S. wants to aid with money and weapons can’t be on the terrorist list, even if they conduct terrorist operations.

More than that, there was some internal logic to holding off on designating Boko Haram. New York Times:

Such a step would have made it illegal for any individual in the United States to provide “material or resources” to the group and, proponents say, would also have focused international attention on the danger the group posed.

But Johnnie Carson, who was the assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 2009 to 2013, said in an interview on Thursday that he had opposed making the designation “for six or seven different reasons.”

Mr. Carson said he was concerned that the move would generate publicity for the group and help it attract support from other extremists. He said he was also worried that the designation might legitimize a heavy-handed crackdown by Nigeria’s security forces at a time when American officials were urging them to avoid human rights abuses.

“It would have aligned us with a flawed Nigerian security strategy,” Mr. Carson said.

There was concern that the designation might prompt the group to attack American interests in the region. The Nigerian government also strongly opposed the move, fearing it would raise Boko Haram’s standing.

There are two important points to make on the basis of this reporting. First, this U.S. official implicitly reveals what I’ve already said about Boko Haram: that it is a localized militant group that could be antagonized to more ambitious goals in response to U.S. meddling.

Secondly, it has been confirmed in congressional testimony that the U.S. government has a secret list of groups and individuals it considers officially designated terrorists. That list is classified, meaning that the American people can’t even know who their own government considers enemies. But further, it means that the State Department’s designation is largely moot, because the U.S. government already was taking action against Boko Haram in a covert way going back several years and so probably already had the group on its secret list.

Pull Out of South Korea

US Air Force conducting military exercises in South Korea. Credit: DoD
US Air Force conducting military exercises in South Korea. Credit: DoD

The Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow argues for the U.S. to pull out of South Korea:

Washington needs to reflect first on why the North is such a problem for America.  A small, impoverished, and distant state, even with a handful of nuclear weapons (but no delivery capacity), obviously is no match for the globe’s superpower.  Ordinarily the former wouldn’t be interested in the latter.

But the U.S. maintains a defense treaty with and garrison in the ROK, routinely deploys naval and air units around the DPRK, regularly conducts military exercises in the South, and constantly threatens war against the North.  Pyongyang can’t very well ignore America.

Thus, going home should be the foundation of U.S. policy toward the Koreas.

…Washington should loosen military ties with South Korea and extricate itself from a potential Korean conflict.  The U.S. should terminate the “mutual” defense treaty, withdraw the permanent garrison, and end the periodic threats.

Chances are slim to nil that the U.S. will actually pull out of South Korea and stop subsidizing its security from the North. Primarily, this is because, as I wrote at Al Jazeera America earlier this year, “the U.S. military presence in South Korea is not about deterring North Korea. More accurately, it is about maintaining U.S. military dominance in the Asia-Pacific region.”

In other words, containing China:

Ironically, the U.S.’s continued military presence and defense treaty with South Korea does nothing to weaken Pyongyang. Instead, it engenders geopolitical calculations on the part of regional great powers like China to prop up the North Korean regime.

…To Beijing, Pyongyang is something of a nuisance — a perpetually erratic regime with a hellish human rights record that is a constant source of aggravation to China, which is trying to avoid such negative attention from the international community.

China nevertheless endures this embarrassment and continues to safeguard the survival of the North Korean regime because it “is important to Beijing as a bulwark against U.S. military dominance of the region,” according [a 2013 Council on Foreign Relations report].

China’s reluctant support of the DPRK has allowed the latter to maintain its survival and slowly increase its nuclear capabilities. But China, like other nuclear weapons states, despises proliferation, even among its allies, because it diminishes the power and freedom of movement enjoyed by the exclusive club of nuclear powers. In all likelihood, China would halt its lenient backing of the DPRK if the risk of U.S. troops right on China’s border wasn’t in the cards.

As Bandow puts it, “Withdrawal also would reduce Beijing’s perception that the U.S. is seeking to contain China in cooperation with the ROK.”

As per usual, U.S. interventionism makes things less stable, in addition to serving as a dangerously wasteful sink-hole for U.S. resources.

Ignorance Can Be Dangerous

Originally posted at TomDispatch.

Ignorance can be dangerous, as shown in a recent poll asking Americans what to do about the Ukraine crisis.  It turned out that the less those polled were capable of identifying where in the world Ukraine is, the more likely they were to want the U.S. to intervene militarily in that country.

If ever there were a demonstration of what ignorance can lead to, that poll would be right at the top of the list of sobering examples.  Sometimes, of course, we don’t know where ignorance is going to lead, but that hasn’t stopped the U.S. government from making it a central policy principle of this era.  Just the other day, for instance, National Intelligence Director James Clapper imposed a remarkable, if little discussed, gag on the whole national intelligence “community” (and, by implication, on the media as well).  From now on, officials at the 17 agencies that make up that labyrinthine bureaucracy are barred from “speaking to journalists about unclassified intelligence-related topics without permission.”  Yes, you read that right: they are barred not just from discussing classified information with the media, but unclassified information as well.

Almost nothing from that world is unclassified any more.  In the Bush and Obama years, a vast blanket of secrecy has been thrown over just about anything American intelligence outfits do or any of the documents they produce, no matter how anodyne.  Still, you never know what small things might have slipped through unclassified due to some oversight.  Thanks to the intervention of Clapper, who only months ago promised a new era of “transparency” in intelligence, problem solved.  His is a simple way to deal with leaks of even the most innocent information.  Now, if you meet with a reporter to discuss anything at all without “permission,” you are open to being disciplined, fired, or even conceivably prosecuted.

Think of this as the Obama administration’s version of an ignorance rule.  In order to keep Americans safe, it turns out, you must keep them blissfully, utterly, totally uninformed about what in the world their government knows or thinks or does in their name, unless that information is carefully vetted and approved by some official or bureaucrat.  In other words, we now live in a country in which we have a government of the knowing, by the classifiers, for the uninformed, and if you don’t like it, well, there’s a door marked “exit” that you can step through right now.

Apply to this situation what might be called the Ukraine rule and you come up with a potential formula (or so the government evidently hopes) that would go something like this: the less the American people know, the more likely they are to believe that our “safety” and “security” lie in whatever Washington wants to do. 

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Everything Is A Threat: The Fear-Mongering and Hysteria Over Boko Haram

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The hysteria that has erupted over the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram over the last few days has been remarkable. The terrorist group abducted hundreds of girls and, thanks to a viral awareness campaign and threats from Washington to intervene, Boko Haram suddenly became America’s new Great Menace that presents an existential threat to the United States.

CNN’s Erin Burnett was particularly unhinged in the show that aired last night. “Boko Haram’s brutal violence includes burning people alive in mosques and churches and slitting the throats of students,” she warned her audience of people who surely have never heard of the group before. “Even among extremist groups, their tactics are vile.”

“You could describe them as the Taliban that have taken it to the next level,” retired U.S. Gen. James Marks said, “maybe a Taliban on steroids.” Boko Haram “is an absolutely horrible, beyond definition horrible organization that clearly needs to go away completely and we have to facilitate their departure.”

Burnett and her U.S. military guests were sure to bring the threat of Boko Haram back to America, cognizant of the risk of giving the impression that this is a Nigerian problem that’s none of our business. Gen. Carter Ham, former Second in Command at the Pentagon’s Africa Command warned, “They certainly present a very, very significant risk in Nigeria, more broadly across the region, and the leaders of Boko Haram have been very clear for the past couple of years that they aspire to attacking Westerners and specifically the United States, its people, and its interests.”

Burnett followed up with the terrifying reminder that nowadays “there are all these direct flights between Nigeria and the United States.”

And then, the alley-oop, Burnett asks Ham, “Do you think they need to be stopped now, that the United States needs to somehow become involved more actively to stop them from striking?”

They’ve set it up for the frightened, ignorant audience. This group is violent, evil, comparable to our undisputed enemies the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and they aspire to attack America. The next logical step is U.S. military intervention, right!? Ham obviously responded in the affirmative. Forget that nobody said Boko Haram was on the verge of striking the United States, or any Western country for that matter.

Continue reading “Everything Is A Threat: The Fear-Mongering and Hysteria Over Boko Haram”