Category: News

The list of former U.S. officials who believe drone strikes create more enemies than they eliminate juts got a little bit longer.

“Drone strikes take out a few bad guys to be sure, but they also kill a large number of innocent civilians,” writes Nabeel Khoury, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Yemen from 2004 to 2007. “Given Yemen’s tribal structure, the U.S. generates roughly forty to sixty new enemies for every AQAP operative killed by drones.”

This is an old trope for those of us who have been criticizing the drone war for years. But the notion that it creates blowback is gaining in popularity of late. CNN, for example, just ran this segment, entitled “In Swat Valley, U.S. drone strikes radicalizing a new generation.”

Another recent headline-grabber on this issue happened just last week when Malala Yousafzai said she told Obama, “that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people.”

And, as I said, Khoury joins a long list of U.S. officials who hold this point of view. “Drones are a weapon of terror in many ways, and the kind of hostility this is going to breed may not be worth the counter-terrorism gains,” says Barbara Bodine, who was U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 1997 to 2001.

Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA’s counter-terrorism center from 2004 to 2006 and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan, said last year that, “We have been seduced by [drones] and the unintended consequences of our actions are going to outweigh the intended consequences.”

“We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield,” Grenier added. “We are already there with regards to Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

“U.S. involvement is far more than ever in Yemen. We have no evidence that all those being killed are terrorists,” Abdul Salam Mohammed, director of Abaad Strategic Center, told CNN last year. “With every U.S. attack that is conducted in Yemen al Qaeda is only growing in power and we have to ask ourselves why that is happening.”

Add to all this the devastating reports from both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch this week detailing the human and civilian costs of the drone war and questioning its legality, and it’s clear there is an emerging opposition to the gratuitous use of drones that has prevailed in Obama’s tenure thus far.

Sen. Rand Paul has introduced a proposed constitutional amendment which specifies that our elected officials are subject to the same laws that rule us plebeians. How could a libertarian — or, really, anybody — possibly object to that?

John Glaser has managed to do it, I’m afraid.

Glaser says “The government is constantly breaking the law and taking actions that are clearly illegal for ordinary citizens to take.” Well, uh, yes — that’s precisely what the amendment aims to end.

Glaser goes through a long and tiresome litany of how the system of unequal treatment before the law benefits the politically connected — apparently without realizing that he’s undermining his own case. Which is odd.

What Glaser is really arguing, however, is that it would be impossible to put an end to this system: apparently,  according to the Glaserite view, it makes no sense to try to limit the  power and privileges of government officials. Passage of the amendment will only be “symbolic,” he avers.

Really? Why is that necessarily so? Glaser doesn’t say.

And even if the amendment isn’t enforced, the process of having it encoded in law would in itself score a victory for liberty. The reason is because it highlights the libertarian class analysis of society: that is, it dramatizes the privileged status of the political class — and  the subjection of the rest of us.

Glaser’s blithe dismissal of Sen. Paul “throwing red meat to his libertarian and  Tea Party populist followers” is, frankly, weird: isn’t it about time somebody threw us libertarians some red meat? For years politicians have been throwing red meat to warmongers, Prohibitionists, professional busybodies, free-lunchers, and you-name-it: isn’t it our turn? Isn’t this the Libertarian Moment? Or don’t we get to have a Moment?

Glaser’s holier-than-thou approach to Paul’s admirable effort is baffling: what’s wrong with putting on a “political show,” anyway? Are we trying to convince people and win them to our cause, or must we be content to sit on the sidelines writing clever little blog posts and sniffing disdainfully at any constructive effort to effect real social change?

Far from being sneered at, Sen. Paul should be commended and supported — and it’s really kind of appalling that I have to point this out.

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”