Category: News

Advocates of U.S. military action in Syria have grown fond of responding to opponents of intervention with what they seem to think is a ‘gotcha.’ Opponents of intervention keep warning of the potential catastrophe of getting involved in another Middle Eastern conflict that could draw us in to another lengthy quagmire like Iraq and Syria. Advocates cleverly retort: “But we don’t want boots on the ground!!”

A fine example of this was reported today at The Daily Beast by Josh Rogin. Apparently, John McCain – perhaps the most prominent and vocal advocate of “limited intervention” in Syria, actually went inside Syria just recently in an unannounced visit to the rebel leader Gen. Salem Idris. A coordinated act of propaganda no doubt, the rebels told McCain that what they want is the U.S. to arm the rebels, impose a no-fly zone, and bomb the Assad regime and Hezbollah.

Julien Barnes-Dacey and Daniel Levy have written a policy brief for the European Council on Foreign Relations that reviews the so-called “limited” options of directly arming the Syrian rebels and imposing no-fly zones. It it well worth a read. Here are some sample excerpts:

No-Fly Zones

• …it is unclear how much killing would be prevented. According to General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, only 10 percent of opposition casualties result from air strikes. Moreover, safe zones could cement the collapse of the central state, and, given existing intra-rebel fighting, competing groups are likely to seek local control through violent means. As demonstrated by developments in some opposition-held areas in parts of northern Syria, this could render them anything but safe for the civilian population. As noted by António Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees: “Bitter experience has shown that it is rarely possible to provide effective protection and security in such areas.”
• Syria’s collapse accelerated by the establishment of safe zones would also pose a danger to the territorial unity of neighbouring states, fuelling, for instance, existing tendencies towards militia-run zones in Lebanon and Iraq, and thereby potentially feeding a series of regional civil wars. Additionally, the act of establishing safe zones would be an act of war against Syria, with the obvious dangers of escalation and mission creep.

Arming the Opposition

• First, it is unrealistic to expect that weapons can be guaranteed to end up in the hands of pro-Western actors. The US 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. The apparent Western conduit, the Supreme Military Council under General Salim Idris, has a limited remit over battlefield groups. This will be particularly challenging given that Jubhat al-Nusra – an organisation with declared ideological links to al-Qaeda – is now considered the strongest and most effective rebel fighting force.
• …There is a real danger that these weapons could find their way into sectarian tensions in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon and Iraq, supplying oxygen for the outbreak of an arc of sectarian conflict across the Levant. The other neighbouring countries – Jordan, Turkey, and Israel – are all also feeling the ripple effects in different ways.
• …Moreover, increased foreign support to predominantly Sunni rebels feeds Assad’s longstanding claim that Syria faces a foreign-backed Islamist plot, enabling him to further mobilize his domestic and international support base. Pro-opposition escalation is therefore likely to be met with escalation by the regime.
• Rebels currently unwilling to engage in negotiations with the regime (distinct from accepting the regime’s political surrender, which they are prepared to do) are even less likely to do so once they receive Western armed support.

Earlier this month, Secretary of State John Kerry, with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, announced an impending diplomatic convention at which negotiations between all sides in Syria could take place. This is an attempt to get going on some sort of political transition that would hopefully make discussions of military options obsolete. But Washington is making two major mistakes going into the negotiations, write Levy and Barnes-Dacey, that sets up the diplomatic push for ultimate doom.

First, the U.S. has stuck to its initial demand that ‘Assad must go.’But this essentially ensures continued fighting and bloody stalemate. “Insisting on Assad’s removal and a full transfer of power may represent a morally appealing position for the main trans-Atlantic protagonists but it amounts to dictating terms of surrender and is antithetical to pursuing a diplomatic track with the Syrian regime or its backers,” says their policy brief.

Second, the U.S. has rejected the inclusion of Iran in the negotiations. This type of approach reinforces the tendency toward proxy war that has been the hallmark of the international fight in Syria from the beginning. If, as demanded by the U.S., one side of  negotiations has Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the United States, and the rebel opposition, and the other side has simply Russia, it will signal to the Assad regime and its backers that the point of the negotiations is to impose regime change, to the automatic detriment of their interests. Clearly, both Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah will see aiding the Assad regime in a continuing proxy war as a better option – and thus the negotiations will collapse.

The Rios Montt trial set back a month and will now likely collapse, a sad day for international justice. But for neoconservatives, the decision is good news, because Reagan’s shady connections with Montt have been exposed (for the few willing to discover them). And yet some on the right are still trying to protect Montt and Reagan – here’s how you spin a genocide.

J. Michael Waller calls blaming the U.S. “easy propaganda.” He writes in the New York Times that,

The Rios Montt prosecution was less about justice and more about using the courts to wage political propaganda campaigns to settle old scores. Rios Montt’s real crime was not genocide, according to prevailing logic, but his political beliefs… shouldn’t former insurgents who committed war crimes in the 1980s also face justice?

We’ll hear more “blame the insurgents” arguments later, but for now, let’s take a look at how the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification report on the atrocities. They find that U.S. backed government forces, not the rebels, committed 93 percent of the crimes.

The Washington Office of Latin America reports,

Ríos Montt has long been identified by human rights activists in Guatemala and internationally as the man in charge during the period of the most notorious human rights abuses committed during Guatemala’s civil war; massacres and targeted attacks on indigenous Mayan communities were widespread during his regime. Ríos Montt’s trial and conviction are a vindication for the victims and their families, as well as a re-assertion of the principle that indiscriminate attacks on civilian communities during wartime can never be justified.

But it was really Montt’s political views that sunk him.

In Foreign Policy, Jose Cardenas defends Reagan in a similar way, downplaying the crimes, and saying that Reagan’s “gamble” just didn’t pan out. He writes:

If someone wants to argue that the Reagan administration’s policy gamble on Ríos Montt to quell the violence did not pan out, then that’s one thing (history books are full of such examples). But to equate it with aiding and abetting “genocide” is beyond the pale. In fact, it is more evidence of an ideological agenda than any noble search for accountability.

In this retelling, we have a United States that merely supported, with the intent of quelling violence, a fascist dictator. Reagan, it’s worth noting, said of Montt:

I know that President Rios Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice. My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts.

Let’s turn again to the most authoritative source we have on the crimes – the UN Report. Rather than fingering the U.S. as merely a financial supporter, the report argues that many of the crimes originated from U.S. doctrines. From the report:

In the case of Guatemala, military assistance was directed towards reinforcing the national intelligence apparatus and for training the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques, key factors which had significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation.

Later on:

Anti-communism and the National Security Doctrine (DSN) formed part of the anti-Soviet strategy of the United States in Latin America. In Guatemala, these were first expressed as anti-reformist, then anti-democratic policies, culminating in criminal counterinsurgency.

From the right we have a story of the Reagan administration being entirely unaware of the abuses and seeking a means of quelling the violence. From the truth commission we get an entirely different story: U.S. National Security Doctrine actively encouraged violence.

Continue reading “How to Spin a Genocide”

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President Obama managed to deliver a speech on Thursday in many ways reminiscent of the rhetoric employed by candidate Obama, condemning the recklessness of the previous administration, hailing the rule of law, and citing James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

But whereas Obama made the right sounds, history shows his words fall far short, and often contradict, his actions as president. When he wasn’t using such rhetoric, he was dodging the truth on issues including drone warfare, Guantanamo Bay and indefinite detention, the AUMF, and how to prevent terrorism so as to not always be fighting it.

The Drone War

According to the president, when the option of “detention and prosecution of terrorists…is foreclosed” because “they take refuge in remote tribal regions” where “the state lacks the capacity or will to take action,” his administration chooses to secretly use drones to bomb targets as opposed to deploying boots on the ground to apprehend the suspects.

We’ve heard this justification for the drone war before, but there are two main problems to start with. First, this explanation simply assumes the validity of the targeting process. It is quite plainly inconsistent with the rule of law for the unchallenged executive branch accusations against mostly unnamed suspects to be sufficient for a death warrant by covert assassination.

As Rosa Brooks, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, told a Senate committee last month, “When a government claims for itself the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals, it undermines the rule of law.”

According to reports, of the 3,000-4,000 people killed in drone attacks under Obama, less than 2 percent were described by the government’s own classified documents as senior members of al-Qaeda. The rest were either mid-level operatives, unidentified clumps of people killed in “signature strikes,” or civilians.

Secondly, just because President Obama identifies some logistical obstacles in apprehending mere suspects doesn’t give him the right to bypass the rule of law. What limited legal restrictions on Executive power we do have are not measly options for him to either take or not. They aren’t suggestions. They are the law.

Obama also mentioned his decision this week to declassify the targeted killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, with the familiar justifications. But he papered over the killing of three other American citizens, including Alwaki’s 16-year old son. He professed respect for due process but didn’t say a word about what kind of accountability he should be subject to for the killings, accidental or otherwise, of four Americans.

The 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force

But “America’s actions are legal,” Obama insisted. “We were attacked on 9/11. Within a week, Congress overwhelmingly authorized the use of force. Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”

This is another dubious claim.

The AUMF empowered the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

In Senate hearings last week, top Pentagon lawyer Robert Taylor kept using the words “associated forces” to justify the legality of the drone war under the 2001 AUMF. Until Senator Angus King of Maine told him those words never appear in the text of the AUMF.

“You guys have invented this term, associated forces, that’s nowhere in this document,” King said. “It’s the justification for everything, and it renders the war powers of Congress null and void.”

Even as Obama used the AUMF to justify his dramatic expansion of the drone war, he warned of its dangers:

The AUMF is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.

I don’t think the President can have it both ways here. Either the AUMF is an overly expansive blank check for perpetual war, or it is the foremost legal instrument of the completely lawful drone war. Which is it?

It will be interesting to see in the near future if President Obama follows up on his pledge to “refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate,” or whether it will become another unfulfilled promise, like closing Guantanamo Bay within one year of his election in 2009.

Continue reading “Obama’s Dodges Hard Truths About War on Terror in Major Speech”

On The Scott Horton Show yesterday, Marcy Wheeler discussed the ACLU’s lawsuit – filed on behalf of Antiwar.com – against the FBI for unwarranted surveillance; the FBI memo stating Antiwar.com might be “a threat to national security” and working “on behalf of a foreign power;” Justin Raimondo’s controversial columns after 9/11 about Urban Moving Systems and Israeli “art students” that may have piqued the FBI’s interest; the loss of major donors who worried about being investigated themselves; and evidence that the FBI thinks anti-Zionism is criminal behavior.

I have to thank Marcy for her analysis of the FBI documents when they came out, she is able to explain complex government files in a way that regular folk (like me) can understand. Without Marcy, I am not sure there would be a lawsuit.

Listen to the interview at The Scott Horton Show.

“It’s terribly important that we see the horrors of war, because then we know what’s happening in our names,” Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney tells ReasonTV.

“If that stuff is kept secret, then we’re on our way to tyranny.”

In this ReasonTV interview, Gibney talks about Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, transparency and the horrors of the U.S. national security state.

More here.

Update: See here and here for WikiLeaks’s response to some of Gibney’s claims.