Category: News

Faisal bin Ali Gaber is a soft-spoken engineer from Yemen. After he lost his cousin and brother-in-law in a drone strike in August 2012, he published an open letter to President Obama and Yemeni President Hadi. He said his brother-in-law was an imam who had strongly and publicly opposed al-Qaeda, and that his young cousin was a policeman. “Our town was no battlefield. We had no warning. Our local police were never asked to make any arrest,” he wrote to the presidents. “Your silence in the face of these injustices only makes matters worse. If the strike was a mistake, the family – like all wrongly bereaved families of this secret air war – deserve a formal apology.”

Now Faisal Gaber will get a chance to appeal directly to the American people. This weekend for the first time ever, a Yemeni delegation of drone strike victims’ family members, human rights experts and grassroots leaders will be visiting Washington as part of the Global Drone Summit – You can watch the Summit live all weekend on the CODEPINK livestream channel.

While the CIA and US military have been using lethal drones for over a decade, this will be only the second time that drone victims have gotten visas to come to the United States to tell their stories. The first visit was just a few weeks ago when, on October 29, the Rehman family – a father with his two children – came all the way from the Pakistani tribal territory of North Waziristan to the US Capitol to tell the heart-wrenching story of the death of the children’s beloved 67-year-old grandmother. The hearing, convened by Congressman Alan Grayson, had the congressman, the translator and the public in tears. The Rehman family’s story is documented in the new film Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Foundation, which was released at the time of their visit.

Continue reading “Drone Victims Take on Washington DC”

Obama’s strategic pivot to Asia has been hamstrung by hard facts. Sequestration included cuts to the defense budget that officials say handicapped the planned military surge in East Asia. The Syrian civil war, nuclear negotiations with Iran, and efforts to get Israeli and Palestinian leaders back to the table have drawn the U.S. back into the quicksand of the Middle East. And the October government shutdown led Obama to cancel a trip to Southeast Asia, in what was widely regarded as a diplomatic victory for China.

Don’t play your violins just yet. President Obama’s Asia-Pivot is essentially a military surge throughout East Asia meant to threaten and therefore contain a rising China. Does China threaten U.S. security? No. But expansionist U.S. policies in Asia to maintain hegemony over the world do threaten to provoke conflict between China and it’s U.S.-backed neighbors.

In addition to the above-mentioned roadblocks to a successful Asia-Pivot implementation, Ely Ratner of the Center for a New American Security is worried about another hinderance to U.S. imperialism – namely, popular opposition.

U.S. policymakers need to remember that foreign governments permitting the access and presence of U.S. troops and military equipment are engaging in highly politicized acts that can evoke deeply rooted nationalist sentiments associated with sovereignty, independence and, in some cases, colonialism and occupation. This has been manifest in America’s modern experience in the region. The Philippine Senate expelled U.S. forces from Subic Bay and Clark Air Force Base shortly after the end of the Cold War. Accidents and incidents associated with U.S. bases in Japan and South Korea have also created public outcry and led to painstaking negotiations to realign U.S. forces. More recently, in 2009 leaders from the newly elected Democratic Party of Japan sought domestic political advantage by undoing plans to relocate Futenma Air Station on Okinawa. The issue to this day remains a thorn in the side of the alliance.

For Washington and it’s helpful D.C. policy wonks, the task is not to acknowledge and respect the fact that foreign populations don’t want to be occupied by a non-native military. Instead, the task is to figure out how to get around this inconvenient obstruction.

This is why the humanitarian disaster following the Philippine typhoon is so politicized. Washington intends to give $20 million in relief and the U.S. military arrived quickly to assist in emergency relief operations. In contrast, China is sending less than $2 million in relief and has been much less visible. Washington is exploiting the humanitarian crisis in order to make U.S. military presence more palatable.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the phenomenon of “blowback” received a lot of focus. The Muslim world, especially militant Islamist groups, are infuriated by U.S. military presence in their lands and the bribing of unrepresentative governments that comes along with it. As it turns out, the costs of blowback, which manifest in events like 9/11, were well worth it to grand strategists in Washington, who expanded their presence and increased their interventionism in response to the attacks.

Incidentally, it was “blowback” in the Asian countries occupied by the U.S. that was first popularized. In 2000, Asia policy expert and professor at the University of California Chalmers Johnson, who also fought in the Korean war and was a consultant for the CIA, published a book called Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire and largely focused on the popular opposition to U.S. military presence in Asia. After 9/11, he became the go-to expert on blowback.

The U.S. government will do whatever it takes to continue to expand into Asia and wage a cold war with China, so long as it is possible to gain net benefits vis-à-vis its own geopolitical power. If Asian populations don’t like it, too bad. If Americans are hated for it, no problem. As Chalmers Johnson taught us, those are seen as acceptable costs and consequences of Empire.

Those in Congress who oppose U.S.-Iran negotiations to settle the nuclear issue essentially argue that Iran is untrustworthy and is simply trying to buy time in talks to build a nuclear bomb.

Anyone paying attention can see this is irrational. First of all, the consensus opinion in the U.S. intelligence community is that Iran has no nuclear weapons program and has not made the political decision to build a bomb. And despite all the hype about increased enrichment, according to U.N. and Israeli intelligence, Iran has been diverting much of its medium-enriched uranium to fuel rods and medical isotopes, a process which can’t be reversed if Tehran decides to break-out at a later date.

But here are two more little factoids that seem to puncture the hawkish opinion that Iran is really out to trick the international community and build a nuclear bomb after negotiations.

Reuters reports that the IAEA, the UN nuclear watch-dog that inspects Iran’s enrichment facilities, has found that Iran has essentially halted its nuclear enrichment capacity since Hassan Rouhani was elected president. For example, in the three month period prior to Rouhani’s inauguration, Iran installed more than 1,800 new centrifuges. In the three months since Rouhani came into office, they’ve installed only four.

And Laura Rosen cites a former U.S. official that worked on Iran issues in Obama’s first term as saying the deal proposed by Iran and scuttled at the last minute by France would have doubled the time it would take for Iran to “break-out.”

A former senior Obama Administration official told the House Foreign Affairs Committee today that the deal proposed to Iran by the P5+1 countries in Geneva last weekend would “double Iran’s breakout time.”

“That means it would take Iran twice as long” to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Colin Kahl told the committee. “That is meaningful. The deal puts firm restrictions on Iran building fuel assemblies for the Arak fuel reactor.” It would “increase the inspections regime. [It] serves US and Israeli interests.”

So as far as confidence building goes, one wonders how much more evidence the Iran hawks need. And then one remembers that he’s an idiot for asking such a question, since Iran hawks don’t care about evidence.

In about a month and a half it will be 2014. As far as U.S. policy in Afghanistan is concerned, 2014 is a big year. When President Obama announced the military surge in 2009, he mapped out a so-called “withdrawal” plan and the date for the official end of the surge has always been 2014. But here we are, a month or so from the beginning of this long-awaited date, and the details of the withdrawal plan are still not known.

Two things have effectively staved off agreement on the details. First, the surge has failed. The Afghan insurgency is alive and well, the Kabul government is in danger of collapsing without outside support, and the U.S.-trained Afghan security forces can’t provide security in most of the country.

The second issue forestalling specific post-2014 details is the fact that the U.S. and Kabul can’t agree on them. The sticking point, as has been widely reported, is whether or not remaining U.S. forces (numbering in the thousands) will be subject to Afghan law or U.S. law. Incidentally, this is the same sticking point that stalled U.S. negotiations over a status of forces agreement with Iraq in 2011. In that case, the Obama administration gave up and withdrew completely, preferring to pull out instead of have U.S. troops subject to Iraqi law. President Obama is reportedly considering such a “zero option” in Afghanistan too.

Americans might wonder why it’s so important to Kabul that they have jurisdiction over remaining U.S. forces. Other than it being an issue of sovereignty, there are practical reasons for this. If you look at this clearly, it seems everyone expects U.S. forces to commit crimes post-2014. If they’re subject to Afghan law, they’re likely to be punished. If they remain under U.S. jurisdiction, they will in all likelihood get off scott free, as I’ve written.

The Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) meticulously documents numerous cases in which U.S. forces have been credibly accused of war crimes or abuses and do not face punishment. In this excerpt, AAN sums up the debate about jurisdiction:

From the US point of view, it is unthinkable that it would allow its forces to be put in harm’s way by exposing them to the courts of any country, let alone those in Afghanistan where the justice system is deeply flawed. In the Afghan and often the international press, this demand is frequently presented as their being ‘immune’ from prosecution and US officials are keen to argue why this is not the case, for example US ambassador, James Cunningham in a recent press conference (the text was emailed by the embassy to AAN):

Continue reading “Why the Status of Forces Agreement Is So Important for Afghanistan”

Since Edward Snowden’s leaks, much attention has been paid to the domestic surveillance capabilities of the NSA, which have turned out to be more egregious than many predicted. But it’s worth remembering that the government has all kinds of ways to invade the privacy of innocent Americans.

McClatchy has a bombshell story up about a federal investigation into two men who had purportedly been teaching people how to beat the polygraph test, or “lie detector.” It should be noted that the polygraph is seen as “so unreliable that most courts don’t allow the results to be submitted as evidence against criminal suspects.”

Still, people applying for employment in federal agencies are often subjected to the polygraph. And in the governments latest effort to rout out potential “insider threats,” or employees they think may choose to blow the whistle, the polygraph is viewed as an important screening process.

In the course of investigating these two men for the high crime of teaching people how to pass polygraphs, federal agencies – including the CIA, NSA, IRS, FDA, and others – collected and retained the names and personal information of 4,904 people suspected of hearing the polygraph-cheating advice. McClatchy:

Federal officials gathered the information from the customer records of two men who were under criminal investigation for purportedly teaching people how to pass lie detector tests. The officials then distributed a list of 4,904 people – along with many of their Social Security numbers, addresses and professions – to nearly 30 federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. Although the polygraph-beating techniques are unproven, authorities hoped to find government employees or applicants who might have tried to use them to lie during the tests required for security clearances. Officials with multiple agencies confirmed that they’d checked the names in their databases and planned to retain the list in case any of those named take polygraphs for federal jobs or criminal investigations.

Continue reading “NSA Aside, It’s Way Too Easy For Government to Snoop On You”