Category: News

The warm waters of the Gulf look quiet from where I am sitting, but such tranquility hardly reflects the conflicts this region continues to generate. The euphoria of the so-called Arab Spring is long gone, but what remains is a region that is rich with resources and burdened with easily manipulated history that is in a state of reckless transition. No one can see what the future will look like, but the possibilities are ample, and possibly tragic.

In my many visits to the region, I have never encountered such a lack of clarity regarding the future, despite the fact that battle lines have been drawn like never before. Governments, intellectuals, sects and whole communities are lining up at both sides of many divides. This is taking place to various degrees everywhere in the Middle East, depending on the location of the conflict.

Some countries are directly engulfed in bloody and defining conflicts – revolutions gone stray, as in Egypt, or uprisings turned into most-destructive civil wars as in Syria. Conversely, those who are for now spared the agony of war, are very much involved in funding various war parties, transporting weapons, training fighters and leading media campaigns in support of one party against another. No such elusive concept as media objectivity exists anymore, not even in relative terms.

Yet in some instances, the lines are not drawn with any degree of certainty either. Within the ranks of Syria’s opposition to the Ba’ath regime in Damascus, the groups are too many to count, and their own alliances shift in ways that few in the media seem to notice or care to report. We arbitrarily write of an ‘opposition’, but in reality there are no truly unifying political or military platforms, whether it be the Supreme Military Council, the Syria National Council or the Syrian National Coalition. In an interactive map, formulated by Al Jazeera mostly on what seems like wholesale conclusions, the military council "claims it commands about 900 groups and a total of at least 300,000 fighters." The claim of actual control over these groups can be easily contended, and there are numerous other groups that operate based on their own agendas, or unified under different military platforms with no allegiance to any political structure, not those in Istanbul or elsewhere.

It is easy however to associate perpetual conflict with the supposedly inherently violent Middle East. For nearly two decades, many warned that American military intervention in Iraq would eventually ‘destabilize’ the entire region. The term ‘destabilize’ was of course a relevant one, since Israel has done more than its fair share to destabilize several countries, occupy some and destroy others. But the prospects of political destabilization were much more ominous when the world’s most powerful country invested much of its might and financial resources to do the job.

Continue reading “The Sectarian War at Hand: Redrawing the Middle East Again”

Recent reports on US drone strikes by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN have heightened international awareness about civilian casualties and have resulted in new calls for redress. The Amnesty International drone report “Will I be next?” says the US government should ensure that victims of unlawful drone strikes, including family members, have effective access to remedies, including restitution, compensation and rehabilitation. The Human Rights Watch report “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda” calls on the US government to “implement a system of prompt and meaningful compensation for civilian loss of life, injury, and property damage from unlawful attack.”

Several human rights groups have approached lawmakers asking them to sponsor legislation calling for such a fund. But congresspeople have been reluctant to introduce what they consider a losing proposition. Even maverick Congressman Alan Grayson, who is hosting a congressional briefing for drone victims from Pakistan on October 29, turned down the idea. “There’s no sympathy in this Congress for drone strike victims,” he said.

But unbeknownst to Grayson, the human rights groups and drone strike victims themselves, Congress already has such a fund.

The peace group CODEPINK recently discovered that every year for the past four years, a pot of $10 million has been allocated for Pakistani drone strike victims. That would make a total of $40 million, quite a hefty sum to divide among a few hundred families. But it appears that none of this money has actually reached them.

The Pakistani Civilian Assistance Fund was modeled after the ones that exist in Iraq and Afghanistan, where money was allocated to help alleviate the suffering of civilians harmed by US military operations as part of a strategy to “win hearts and minds.” In the case of Pakistan, where the CIA operates its drones, the money is supposed to go directly to the families of innocent drone victims, or for needs like medical expenses or rebuilding homes.

Continue reading “$40 Million Allocated for Drone Victims Never Reaches Them”

When the State Department revoked Edward Snowden’s passport four months ago, the move was a reprisal from a surveillance-and-warfare state that operates largely in the shadows. Top officials in Washington were furious. Snowden had suddenly exposed what couldn’t stand the light of day, blowing the cover of the world’s Biggest Brother.

Cancelation of the passport wasn’t just an effort to prevent the whistleblower from getting to a country that might grant political asylum. It was also a declaration that the U.S. government can nullify the right to travel just as surely as it can nullify the right to privacy.

"Although I am convicted of nothing," Snowden said in a July 1 statement after a week at a Moscow airport terminal, the U.S. government "has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum."

Since 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has affirmed with clarity: "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." The only other words of Article 14 specify an exception that clearly doesn’t apply to Snowden: "This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

The extent of the U.S. government’s scorn for this principle can be gauged by the lengths it has gone to prevent Snowden from gaining political asylum. It was a measure of desperation – and contempt for international law – that Washington got allied governments of France, Spain, Portugal and Italy to deny airspace to the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales in early July, forcing the aircraft to land for a search on the chance that it was carrying Snowden from Moscow to political asylum in Bolivia.

Although Snowden was able to stay in Russia, revocation of his U.S. passport has been a crucial weapon to prevent him from crossing an international border for any reason other than to come home to prison in the United States.

Continue reading “Why Snowden’s Passport Matters”

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced an interesting Constitutional amendment this week:

‘Section 1. Congress shall make no law applicable to a citizen of the United States that is not equally applicable to Congress.

‘Section 2. Congress shall make no law applicable to a citizen of the United States that is not equally applicable to the executive branch of Government, including the President, Vice President, ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and all other officers of the United States, including those provided for under this Constitution and by law, and inferior officers to the President established by law.

‘Section 3. Congress shall make no law applicable to a citizen of the United States that is not equally applicable to judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, including the Chief Justice, and judges of such inferior courts as Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

I view this as a superficial attempt to simultaneously throw red meat to Paul’s libertarian and populist Tea Party followers. First of all, the proposed amendment is unlikely to be successful, given the notorious difficulty of passing Constitutional amendments, which require two-thirds of both houses of Congress and then ratification by at least three-fourths of the states (or, 38 out of 50).

And secondly, while it may sound nice to say that not even the government will be above the law, that is the system we’re already supposed to have, yet it is largely a farce. Even if this actually became an amendment, it would be mostly symbolic.

The government is constantly breaking the law and taking actions that are clearly illegal for ordinary citizens to take.

To take just one example, the Supreme Court in 2010 decided that “material support” laws Congress passed to criminalize aiding terrorist groups includes “Advocacy performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization.” Yet this didn’t seem to apply to scores of current and former U.S. politicians that advocated for and got paid to speak on behalf of the Iranian dissident group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which was on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations until September 2012.

Here’s what former Governor Ed Rendell told journalist Daniel Denvir when confronted about his illegal support for MEK:

“If you indict me, I hope you know, you have to indict 67 other Americans who did the same thing, including seven generals … [who] served in Iraq. You’d have to indict James Jones, President Obama’s first NSC chief adviser, you’d have to indict former Attorney General [Michael] Mukasey, former FBI Director Louis Freeh … the whole kit and caboodle.” That caboodle is voluminous and high-powered, including Tom Ridge, UN Ambassador John Bolton, Rudolph Giuliani and Howard Dean, among others.

Or, take an example straight from the Executive Branch. In September, President Obama unilaterally waived the ban on supplying lethal aid to terrorist groups “to clear the way for the U.S. to provide military assistance to ‘vetted’ opposition groups fighting Syrian dictator Bashar Assad,” the Washington Examiner reported. If Presidents can simply waive laws they know they’ll soon be in violation of, an amendment like Paul’s is worthless.

Or what about the NSA’s lawlessness under the Executive Branch? Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee and has access to classified information about the NSA’s surveillance practices, said this month that even with the overly broad statutory powers granted to the NSA, “the rules have been broken, and the rules have been broken a lot.”

A recently declassified FISC ruling found that the NSA “frequently and systematically violated” statutory laws governing how intelligence agents can search databases of Americans’ telephone communications and that NSA analysts deliberately misled judges about their surveillance activities in order to get court approval.

Going back a little further, President Bush flagrantly violated the law when he secretly authorized the NSA to perform warrantless surveillance on phone calls, including American communications.

I could go on and on (torture, indefinite detention, war crimes, etc. etc.)

If Paul wants laws to be applied equally, why haven’t I heard him call for indictments against the Obama and Bush administrations, not to mention the leadership of the NSA?

Probably because this is for political show. The truth is, being in the Executive Branch or in Congress is basically a get out of jail free card. If Joe Schmoe steals $50 out of the cash register of his local convenient store, he’ll be in big trouble. If the U.S. government supports terrorism, wages illegal war, and systematically violates the Fourth Amendment in complete secrecy…no problem.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, two George Washington University professors note the strange inability of “the U.S. establishment” to substantiate their claims that leakers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning pose an enormous threat to national security.

The reason the establishment hasn’t been able to back that up is because there is a “deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose [that] is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it.”

The inability to get away with our own hypocrisy and double standards presents a dire threat to U.S. hegemony, write Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore:

Hypocrisy is central to Washington’s soft power — its ability to get other countries to accept the legitimacy of its actions — yet few Americans appreciate its role. Liberals tend to believe that other countries cooperate with the United States because American ideals are attractive and the U.S.-led international system is fair. Realists may be more cynical, yet if they think about Washington’s hypocrisy at all, they consider it irrelevant. For them, it is Washington’s cold, hard power, not its ideals, that encourages other countries to partner with the United States.

…This system needs the lubricating oil of hypocrisy to keep its gears turning. To ensure that the world order continues to be seen as legitimate, U.S. officials must regularly promote and claim fealty to its core liberal principles; the United States cannot impose its hegemony through force alone. But as the recent leaks have shown, Washington is also unable to consistently abide by the values that it trumpets. This disconnect creates the risk that other states might decide that the U.S.-led order is fundamentally illegitimate.

Of course, the United States has gotten away with hypocrisy for some time now. It has long preached the virtues of nuclear nonproliferation, for example, and has coerced some states into abandoning their atomic ambitions. At the same time, it tacitly accepted Israel’s nuclearization and, in 2004, signed a formal deal affirming India’s right to civilian nuclear energy despite its having flouted the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by acquiring nuclear weapons. In a similar vein, Washington talks a good game on democracy, yet it stood by as the Egyptian military overthrew an elected government in July, refusing to call a coup a coup. Then there’s the “war on terror”: Washington pushes foreign governments hard on human rights but claims sweeping exceptions for its own behavior when it feels its safety is threatened.

The reason the United States has until now suffered few consequences for such hypocrisy is that other states have a strong interest in turning a blind eye. Given how much they benefit from the global public goods Washington provides, they have little interest in calling the hegemon on its bad behavior. Public criticism risks pushing the U.S. government toward self-interested positions that would undermine the larger world order. Moreover, the United States can punish those who point out the inconsistency in its actions by downgrading trade relations or through other forms of direct retaliation. Allies thus usually air their concerns in private. Adversaries may point fingers, but few can convincingly occupy the moral high ground. Complaints by China and Russia hardly inspire admiration for their purer policies.

The ease with which the United States has been able to act inconsistently has bred complacency among its leaders. Since few countries ever point out the nakedness of U.S. hypocrisy, and since those that do can usually be ignored, American politicians have become desensitized to their country’s double standards. But thanks to Manning and Snowden, such double standards are getting harder and harder to ignore.

So, while not even the most vicious government agent has been able to substantiate any claims of an actual threat to Americans’ safety resulting from the Manning and Snowden disclosures, it is certainly true that their leaks have weakened Washington’s ability to act in ways that are contrary to self-serving propaganda about freedom, democracy, and the rule of law.

And that is the kind of threat that power hates the most.