Category: News

I’ve been a guest in Colorado Springs, Colorado, following a weeklong retreat with Colorado College students who are part of a course focused on nonviolence. In last weekend’s Colorado Springs Gazette, there was an article in the Military Life section about an international skype phone call between U.S. soldiers in Kandahar, Afghanistan and sixth grade girls at a private school in Maryland. ("Carson Soldiers Chat With Friends" November 17, 2013 F4)

Soldiers from Fort Carson’s Company C Headquarters and Headquarters Battalion, 4^th Infantry Division had been receiving care packages and handwritten letters from sixth grade girls at a private school in Brooklandville, MD. The project led to a late October video chat session which allowed the soldiers and students to converse.

I read in the article that one of the US soldiers in Kandahar assured the girls in Maryland that girls in Afghanistan now have better access to education than they did before the US troops arrived. He also mentioned that women have more rights than before.

On November 21^st, I’ll participate in a somewhat similar skype call, focused not on soldiers in Afghanistan but on the voices of young Afghans. On the 21^st of every month, through Global Days of Listening, several friends in the US arrange a call between youngsters in Afghanistan and concerned people calling or simply listening in from countries around the world. I long to hear the optimism expressed by the Fort Carson soldier reflected in the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ words. But our young friends in Afghanistan express regret that their families struggle so hard, facing bleak futures in a country racked and ruined by war.

According to Ann Jones, who has reported from Afghanistan since 2002, UNICEF’s 2012 report statesthat "almost half the "schools" supposedly built or opened in Afghanistan have no actual buildings, and in those that do, students double up on seats and share antiquated texts. Teachers are scarce and fewer than a quarter of those now teaching are considered "qualified," even by Afghanistan’s minimal standards. Impressive school enrollment figures determine how much money a school gets from the government, but don’t reveal the much smaller numbers of enrollees who actually attend. No more than 10% of students, mostly boys, finish high school. In 2012, according to UNICEF, only half of school-age children went to school at all. In Afghanistan, a typical 14-year-old Afghan girl has already been forced to leave formal education and is at acute risk of mandated marriage and early motherhood. A full 76 percent of her countrywomen have never attended school. Only 12.6 percent can read."

Continue reading “Enlightenment”

I am mystified by all the whooping on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Most of the commentators seem to believe that Lincoln was an honest man touting the highest ideals.
The fact that warmongers like George W. Bush and Obama purport to idolize Lincoln should be a warning sign to attentive folks.

Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner offered the most concise refutation to President Lincoln’s claim that the Civil War was fought to preserve a “government by consent.” Spooner observed, “The only idea . . . ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this—that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”

The main lesson from the Gettysburg address is – the more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans’ rights. Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth century presidents—and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom or self-rule. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly shut down hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln’s rhetoric cannot be judged apart from the actions he authorized to enforce his “ideals”:

In a September 17, 1863, letter to the War Department, Gen. William Sherman wrote: “The United States has the right, and … the … power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle — if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” President Lincoln liked Sherman’s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.

On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to the secretary of war: “There is a class of people [in the South] — men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”

On October 9, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant: “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman lived up to his boast — and left a swath of devastation and misery that helped plunge the South into decades of poverty.

General Grant used similar tactics in Virginia, ordering his troops “make all the valleys south of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad a desert as high up as possible.” The Scorched Earth tactics the North used made life far more difficult for both white and black survivors of the Civil War.

Lincoln was blinded by his belief in the righteousness of federal supremacy. His abuses set legions of precedents that subverted the vision of government the Founding Fathers bequeathed to America.

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.