Category: News

In 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg stated the following, in language that was introduced by Judge Robert Jackson, the lead American prosecutor of Axis war criminals:

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

This means that those who launch a war of aggression are responsible for far more than just the initial death and destruction caused by the war. They should be held responsible for all of the “accumulated evil” that follows and that would not have otherwise occurred. This is a very succinct and intuitive ethical precept that is virtually impossible to argue against. But while this injunction can’t seriously be disputed, it can be ignored, and, in fact, often is by powerful states. Unfortunately, Jackson’s own government has never taken his words seriously, and this has never been more evident than in the case of Iraq.

The United States launched a preventive – not preemptive, contrary to what we often read – war against Iraq in March of 2003. This is now considered old news. Most people are aware that the attack resulted in death and misery on a massive scale – millions of refugees, well over 100,000 dead civilians, an exponential increase in terrorism, and so on. Nevertheless, talk about Iraq has all but disappeared in the mainstream, following the U.S.’s much-ballyhooed “withdrawal” from the country in 2011. The general feeling seems to be that Iraq was a tragic episode, one of the worst “blunders” in the annals of American foreign policy, but is now thankfully behind us. No American service member has been killed in Iraq since November of 2011.

However, the war is far from over for the people of Iraq. They are living with the consequences of the war every day, and will be for quite some time. The country is, to this day, terrorized by suicide bombings, which, crucially, did not exist in Iraq prior to the American invasion. In early 2008, Robert Fisk called the acute reality of suicide terrorism in Iraq “perhaps the most ghoulish and frightening legacy of George Bush’s invasion.” Now, more than five years later, the “perhaps” can safely be removed from that sentence. On Tuesday, 16 more Iraqis were pointlessly killed in several bombings and shootings. The previous day was even more deadly, with a “wave” of bombings killing 58 and wounding 187. The death toll from sectarian violence has just passed 500 for this month alone. Iraq is, by any measure, one of the most dangerous countries in the world, far more dangerous than it was under Saddam. The United States and its allies have direct moral culpability for this state of sheer hell in which millions of Iraqis are living.

Shockingly little attention has been paid to the “evil” that is still very much ”accumulating” in Iraq. It’s virtually impossible to imagine that any of the individuals responsible for carrying out this massive war crime will ever be brought to justice. In fact, the person more responsible than any other just had a fancy new library built in his name, and was the subject of lavish praise from his fellow American statesmen at the opening ceremony. It was a day for Bush to “bask in the sun,” according to the New York Times report on the celebration. Naturally, “Iraq” was one word that “never passed Bush’s lips, or those of the other four presidents who spoke.” That would have been such a buzz-kill.

Judge Jackson’s morally eloquent words are destined to be ignored, because powerful actors generally do as they please, and turning themselves in for war crimes is typically not high on the agenda. At the very least, though, as responsible citizens, we can express, in a variety of ways, outrage and disapproval at our political class pushing the unconscionable horrors the U.S. has inflicted on the Iraqi people under the rug. Minimal standards of compassion and solidarity demand that much.

Justin Doolittle writes a political blog called Crimethink. His writing has appeared on Alternet, Common Dreams, and Counterpunch.

As Eric mentioned on the blog last week, Charley Reese has passed away. He was one of the nation’s best newspaper columnists. I never met him in person but he and I exchanged a few letters.  He struck me as the incarnation of a thoughtful, considerate, Southern gentleman.

Charley’s antiwar bias was in part  the result of his classical understanding of freedom. I especially appreciated Charley’s courage in labeling U.S. government abuses and foreign policy debacles. He had spent too many years dealing with hard facts to be swept away by the latest political mania.  One of Charley’s best columns has been bouncing around lately on the web and is reprinted below:

Politicians, as I have often said, are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Everything on the Republican contract is a problem created by Congress. Too much bureaucracy? Blame Congress. Too many rules?

Blame Congress. Unjust tax laws? Congress wrote them.

Out-of-control bureaucracy? Congress authorizes everything bureaucracies do. Americans dying in Third World rat holes on stupid U.N. missions? Congress allows it. The annual deficits?

Congress votes for them. The $4 trillion plus debt? Congress created it.

To put it into perspective just remember that 100 percent of the power of the federal government comes from the U.S. Constitution. If it’s not in the Constitution, it’s not authorized.

Then read your Constitution. All 100 percent of the power of the federal government is invested solely in 545 individual human beings. That’s all. Of 260 million Americans, only 545 of them wield 100 percent of the power of the federal government.

That’s 435 members of the U.S. House, 100 senators, one president and nine Supreme Court justices. Anything involving government that is wrong is 100 percent their fault.

I exclude the vice president because constitutionally he has no power except to preside over the Senate and to vote only in the case of a tie. I exclude the Federal Reserve because Congress created it  and all its power is power Congress delegated to it and could withdraw anytime it chooses to do so. In fact, all the power exercised by the 3 million or so other federal employees is power delegated from the 545.

All bureaucracies are created by Congress or by executive order of the president. All are financed and staffed by Congress. All enforce laws passed by Congress.

All operate under procedures authorized by Congress. That’s why all complaints and protests should be properly directed at Congress, not at the individual agencies.

You don’t like the IRS? Go see Congress. You think the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agency is running amok? Go see Congress.

Congress is the originator of all government problems and is also the only remedy available. That’s why, of course, politicians go to  such extraordinary lengths and employ world-class sophistry to make you think they are not responsible. Anytime a congressman pretends to be outraged by something a federal bureaucrat does, he is in fact engaging in one big massive con job. No federal employee can act at all except to enforce laws passed by Congress and to employ procedures authorized by Congress either explicitly or implicitly.

Partisans on both sides like to blame presidents for deficits, but all deficits are congressional deficits. The president may, by custom, recommend a budget, but it carries no legal weight. Only Congress is authorized by the Constitution to authorize and appropriate and to levy taxes. That’s what the federal budget consists of: expenditures authorized, funds appropriated and taxes levied.

Both Democrats and Republicans mislead the public. For 40 years Democrats had majorities and could have at any time balanced the budget if they had chosen to do so. Republicans now have majorities and could, if they choose, pass a balanced budget this year. Every president, Democrat or Republican, could have vetoed appropriations bills that did not make up a balanced budget. Every president could have recommended a balanced budget. None has done either.

We have annual deficits and a huge federal debt because that’s what majorities in Congress and presidents in the White House wanted. We have troops in various Third World rat holes because Congress and  the president want them there.

Don’t be conned. Don’t let them escape responsibility. We simply have to sort through 260 million people until we find 545 who will act responsibly.

Continue reading “Freedom Champion Charley Reese, RIP”

In an interview with The Daily Caller, NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake the Obama administration’s targeting of journalists, their sources, and government whistleblowers is an attack on the First Amendment.

“[R]eporters have shared with me privately that some of their most trusted sources within government are increasingly afraid to speak with them, even off-the-record, for fear that they will be monitored and surveilled,” Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the National Security Agency and a whistleblower who was prosecuted by the Obama administration, told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview.

“That’s self-censorship,” he said.

Drake explained to TheDC that he sees a “soft tyranny” enveloping the United States through the federal government’s targeting of journalists and their sources.

Drake accurately describes himself as someone who “became a criminal and was labeled an enemy of the state because I was calling out government wrongdoing and illegality.” Someone that has gone through that experience can be expected, at this point, to be calling out the Obama administration attacks on press freedoms.

But consider what CBS’s Bob Schiefer, your run of the mill, toe-the-line, stenographic broadcast “reporter,” – hardly a brave dissident like Drake – said about Obama’s cold disdain for the press (via Kevin Gosztola):

People often ask me, of all the administrations you’ve covered which was the most secretive and manipulative? The Nixon administration retired the trophy, of course. Since then my answer is whichever administration is currently in power. Information management has become so sophisticated every administration learns from the previous one, each finds new ways to control the flow of information. It’s reached the point that if I want to interview anyone in the administration on camera, from the lowest-level worker to a White House official, I have to go through the White House press office.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out last week, this “establishes a standard where the only information the public can learn is what the U.S. government wants it to know, which is another way of saying that a classic propaganda model has been created.”

There’s a discussion over at the Lawfare blog about whether or not finally repealing the expansive war powers authorized in the 2001 AUMF will actually do anything to constrain Obama and future U.S. presidents.

Mind you, the Lawfare crowd includes former Bush administration officials who wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to the expanded executive war powers usurped in the post-9/11 world being made permanent. But the discussion is revealing nonetheless.

Robert (Bobby) Chesney argues that while the AUMF is the most immediate official justification for the programs of indefinite detention and borderless drone strikes, the president has acquired so much unprecedented power since 9/11 that the AUMF isn’t even necessary to continue to carry them out.

According to Chesney, “the current shadow war approach to counterterrorism doesn’t really require an armed-conflict predicate – or an AUMF, for that matter.” Instead, the president will retain the ability to drone bomb anybody, anywhere in the world because the Executive Branch will justify it with the same self-defense rationale as it does now. (That self-defense rationale is, I think, indefensible, resting as it does on an untenable redefinition of “imminence”).

Here is Jack Goldsmith following up Chesney’s post:

First, I agree with Bobby’s implication that we are on the road toward post-AUMF uses of military force around the globe justified entirely on the basis of self-defense and the President’s Article II powers.  Self-defensive military actions based on Article II are (I think) what Jeh Johnson was talking about when he referred to “military assets available in reserve to address continuing and imminent [extra-AUMF] terrorist threats” and what Harold Koh meant when he said “I see no proof that the U.S. lacks legal authority to defend itself against those [beyond the AUMF] . . . who pose to us a genuine and imminent threat,” and what the President probably had in mind when he said that “[o]ur systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue” even after the AUMF-war ends.

Goldsmith adds: “it would be an unprecedented expansion of Article II authority if the scope and scale of current military and paramilitary operations outside Afghanistan today were justified under Article II.”

It has become fashionable in recent weeks to openly discuss the revision or even repeal of the outdated AUMF. Carl Levin and John McCain have been advocating such a change. And Obama put it in his speech last week, saying he “look[s] forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate.” “This war, like all wars,” he said, “must end.”

But that is just grandstanding if we grant that Obama knows what the Lawfare folks know, that his war powers won’t be curtailed if and when the AUMF is repealed.

And that is the world we now live in. The warfare state no longer needs legal sanction to execute a global assassination program and selective application of habeas corpus. Those aren’t just powers the president gets in times of war, you see. They are inherent.

According to Angel Rabasa of the RAND Corp., we really need to start directly arming the Syrian rebels. How do we do that without bolstering the influence and lethality of extremist groups? Simple, he says: just “establish as soon as possible a task force to organize and supervise a train and equip program for the Syrian opposition forces.”

This sounds a lot like the supposed “vetting process” the U.S. has already been conducting while the CIA funnels weapons and aid from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to the rebel fighters.

Rabasa argues that the “train and equip task force” he was a part of for Bosnian fighters in the 1990s worked great, so it should work for Syria too. Well, that it worked great is arguable. But either way, I don’t think it’s arguable that the situation on the ground in Bosnia back then is at all comparable to the situation in Syria now.

The much vaunted “vetting process” consists of untrustworthy, third-party sources, and intelligence officials told the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as far back as a year ago that the truth is that the U.S. doesn’t know who is getting the money and weapons. That is to say, extremist groups linked to al-Qaeda have been getting the bulk of the aid.

According to Julien Barnes-Dacey and Daniel Levy, in a policy brief for the European Council on Foreign Relations, “it is unrealistic to expect that weapons can be guaranteed to end up in the hands of pro-Western actors. The U.S. and its allies were unable to achieve the micro-management of weapons control in Iraq and Afghanistan, even with a massive physical presence there, so it is unlikely that they will fare better doing this with a light footprint.”

Arming the rebels also creates “a real danger that these weapons could find their way into sectarian tensions in neighboring countries such as Lebanon and Iraq, supplying oxygen for the outbreak of an arc of sectarian conflict across the Levant.” Furthermore, it is likely cause the Assad regime to escalate violence, not the other way around.

With a bill authorizing the direct arming of Syrian rebels having already passed in Senate committee last week, it’s worrisome that advice like the kind offered by Rabasa might be followed by the Obama administration soon enough.

What kind of a Syria would we be promoting at that point?

According to reports, rebel-controlled areas in Syria – mostly dominated by Jabhat al-Nusra – have started to set up cruel sharia law systems. Armed militias rule these areas and dish out harsh punishments like extra-judicial executions and torture in the midst of frightened local residents.

So when militia leaders aren’t cutting out and eating the hearts of their enemies, they’re setting up the most extreme, doctrinal Sunni Islamic system (exported mostly from our Gulf allies, ironically) that is antithetical not just to the West but to freedom and democracy. And we want to send them arms?

Sounds like a great plan.

In the U.S., our job for today is clear. It’s Memorial Day and there are a solemn thoughts to have and wreaths to lay. “Ultimate sacrifice” must be repeated again and again. And as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes learned last year, best not to raise even the smallest question of whether  painting each and every dead soldier with a broad “hero” brush is accurate.

President Obama visited the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and gave a speech  mourning the fact that war touches so few American lives these days. Not, mind you, because that makes wars harder to stop, but because “not all Americans may always see or fully grasp the depths of sacrifice, the profound costs that are made in our name, right now, as we speak, every day.” It’s true that war is dull and endless to much of America now, and that soldiers who return from war broken and riddled with PTSD are tucked away out of sight. But discomfort with the reality of war — even its effects on “our” guys and gals — has never stopped celebration and perpetuation of its theoretical gloriousness.

There are are a lot of dead to consider on a day like today — certainly they weren’t all bad people, even when the cause was American imperialism and they were — at best — draftees too scared to drop everything and run to Canada. (What about all those dead draftees? Aren’t there a few peeved young dead men wondering why they’re being celebrated today?)

So what’s Memorial Day for? We already have Veteran’s Day. November 11 once celebrated something solemn and tangible — the end of a war. Not a well-ended war, considering how easily it lead to the worst one in history. But honoring the stoppage of that carnage — albeit too little, too late for 15 million men — is a truer celebration than a non-specific day of thanking veterans for their “service.” Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 declaration to mark the day was war mongerish, but the 1926 Joint Resolution by Congress about Armistice Day was downright dovish:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; […]

We used to actually celebrate the end of a war in America. What a strange concept. But after World War II and Korea, veterans were included in the honoring, and Armistice Day turned to Veteran’s Day.

Funny also how Decoration Day turned to Memorial Day. After the Civil War, mourning families put flowers on the graves of their fallen. But that personal sorrow, too, became a generic “celebration” instead of a response  — albeit one officially respectful to the cause — to the blood and misery of the Civil War. Now you needn’t think about World War I or the Civil War, or try to picture them. Just consider nice ideas like the bravery of veterans and the solemnity of memorializing dead soldiers in between carefully browning each side of your barbecuing bratwurst. If we’re all mourning dead soldiers today, and honoring living ones in November, what does it matter how they die, or who they’ve killed? With one sweep, it’s all honorable, and it’s all tragic, and that turns reality into a bumper sticker.

Over at Free Association, Sheldon Richman is celebrating the day as he always does, by watching the film The Americanization of Emily. This masterpiece goes beyond a Catch-22-type absurdest critique of the lunacy of war, and  more daringly critiques the dangers of memorializing soldiers the way that we do. Says the main character at one point:

I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades . . . we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows’ weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices….

Yet another thing that war robs from family members of dead soldiers is a way to mourn their loved ones without helping to prop up the very system that had them killed. It is not morally neutral to join the military, and so it’s not morally neutral to mourn war dead. At least not while this dangerous cult of adoration exists. And not while every dead American soldier is a tragedy, and a young, brave life taken, but every dead foreigner is a shame at best, but usually just a number, just one forgotten number out of hundreds, thousands, and millions.