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Mass Assassinations Lie at the Heart of America’s Military Strategy in the Muslim World

Evans Liberal Politics
August 30, 2010

 

Mass Assassinations Lie at the Heart
of America’s Military Strategy in the Muslim World

 

Mass Assassinations Lie at the Heart of America’s Military Strategy in the Muslim World, AlterNet, August 24, 2010, by Fred Branfman, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Greatly expanded U.S. military Special Ops teams, U.S. drone strikes and private espionage networks run by former CIA assassins create a threat to our security.


[General McChrystal says that] “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.” — “The Runaway General,” Rolling Stone, 6/22/10.

The truth that many Americans find hard to take is that that mass U.S. assassination on a scale unequaled in world history lies at the heart of America’s military strategy in the Muslim world, a policy both illegal and never seriously debated by Congress or the American people. Conducting assassination operations throughout the 1.3 billon-strong Muslim world will inevitably increase the murder of civilians and thus create exponentially more “enemies,” as Gen. McChrystal suggests — posing a major long-term threat to U.S. national security. This mass assassination program, sold as defending Americans, is actually endangering us all. Those responsible for it, primarily General Petraeus, are recklessly seeking short-term tactical advantage while making an enormous long-term strategic error that could lead to countless American deaths in the years and decades to come. General Petraeus must be replaced, and the U.S. military’s policy of direct and mass assassination of Muslims ended.

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The U.S. has conducted assassination programs in the Third World for decades, but the actual killing — though directed and financed by the C.I.A. — has been largely left to local paramilitary and police forces. This has now has changed dramatically.

What is unprecedented today is the vast number of Americans directly assassinating Muslims — through greatly expanded U.S. military Special Operations teams, U.S. drone strikes and private espionage networks run by former CIA assassins and torturers. Most significant is the expanding geographic scope of their killing. While CENTCOM Commander from October 2008 until July 2010, General Petraeus received secret and unprecedented permission to unilaterally engage in operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, former Russian Republics, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else he deems necessary.

Never before has a nation unleashed so many assassins in so many foreign nations around the world (9,000 Special Operations soldiers are based in Iraq and Afghanistan alone) as well as implemented a policy that can be best described as unprecedented, remote-control, large-scale “mechanized assassination.” As the N.Y. Times noted in December 2009: “For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war.”

This combination of human and technological murder amounts to a worldwide “Assassination Inc.” that is unique in human affairs.

The increasing shift to direct U.S. assassination began on Petraeus’s watch in Iraq,where targeted assassination was considered by many within the military to be more important than the “surge.” The killing of Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was considered a major triumph that significantly reduced the level of violence. As Bob Woodward reported in The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008:

“Beginning in about May 2006, the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence agencies launched a series of top secret operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups.

A number of authoritative sources say these covert activities had a far-reaching effect on the violence and were very possibly the biggest factor in reducing it.

Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) responsible for hunting al Qaeda in Iraq, (conducted) lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent operations When I later asked the president (Bush) about this, he offered a simple answer: ‘JSOC is awesome.’” [Emphasis added.]

Woodward’s finding that many “authoritative sources” believed assassination more important than the surge is buttressed by Petraeus’ appointment of McChrystal to lead U.S. forces in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s major qualification for the post was clearly his perceived expertise in assassination while heading JSOC from 2003-’08 (where he also conducted extensive torture at “Camp Nama” at Baghdad International Airport, successfully excluding even the Red Cross).

Another key reason for the increased reliance on assassination is that Petraeus’ announced counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan obviously cannot work. It is absurd to believe that the corrupt warlords and cronies who make up the “Afghan government” can be transformed into the viable entity upon which his strategy publicly claims to depend — particularly within the next year which President Obama has set as a deadline before beginning to withdraw U.S. troops. Petraeus is instead largely relying on mass assassination to try and eliminate the Taliban, both within Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The centrality of assassination to U.S. war plans is revealed by the fact that it was at the heart of the Obama review of Afghan policy last fall. The dovish Biden position called for relying primarily on assassination, while the hawkish McChrystal stance embraced both assassination and more troops. No other options were seriously considered.

A third factor behind the shift to mass assassination is that Petraeus and the U.S. military are also determined to attack jihadi forces in nations where the U.S. is not at war, and which are not prepared to openly invite in U.S. forces. As the N.Y. Times reported on May 24, “General Petraeus (has argued) that troops need to operate beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to better fight militant groups.”

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The most significant aspect of this new and expanded assassination policy is President Obama’s authorizing clandestine U.S. military personnel to conduct it. The N.Y. Times has also reported:

In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists (Military) Special Operations troops under secret “Execute Orders” have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies.

Particularly extraordinary is the fact that these vastly expanded military assassination teams are not subject to serious civilian control. As the N.Y. Times has also reported, Petraeus in September 2009 secretly expanded a worldwide force of assassins answerable only to the military, without oversight by not only Congress but the president himself:

The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents. The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa. Unlike covert actions undertaken by the C.I.A., such clandestine activity does not require the president’s approval or regular reports to Congress. [Emphasis added]

Although sold to the American public and Congress as targeted, selective assassination aimed only at a handful of “high value” insurgent leaders, the program has in fact already expanded far beyond that. As personnel and aircraft devoted to assassination exponentially increase, so too do the numbers of people they murder, both “insurgents” and civilians.

While it is reasonable to assume that expanding the number of Special Operations commandos to its present worldwide level of 13,000 will result in increasing assassinations, the secrecy of their operations makes it impossible to know how many they have murdered, how many of those are civilians, and the effectiveness of their operations. It is not known, for example, how many people U.S. military assassins murder directly, and how many they kill indirectly by identifying them for drone strikes. Much of their activity is conducted, for example, in North Waziristan in northwest Pakistan which, as the N.Y. Times reported on April 4 “is virtually sealed from the outside world.”

More information, however, has emerged about the parallel and unprecedented mass mechanized assassinations being carried out by the C.I.A. drone programs. It is clear that they have already expanded far beyond the official cover story of targeting only “high-level insurgent leaders,” and are killing increasing numbers of people.

The CIA, of course, is no novice at assassination. Future CIA Director William Colby’s Operation Phoenix program in South Vietnam gave South Vietnamese police quotas of the number of civilians to be murdered on a weekly and monthly basis, eventually killing 20-50,000 people. CIA operatives such as Latin American Station Chef Duane “Dewey” Clarridge also established, trained and operated local paramilitary and death squads throughout Central and Latin America that brutally tortured and murdered tens of thousands of civilians, most notably in El Salvador where CIA-trained and -directed killers murdered Archbishop Romero and countless other Salvadorans.

But the present CIA assassination program in Pakistan and elsewhere is different not only because it is Americans who are themselves the assassins, but because of the unprecedented act of conducting mechanized mass assassination from the air. The CIA, as as Nick Turse has reported for TomDispatch.com, is exponentially increasing its drone assassination program:

“(Drone) Reapers flew 25,391 hours (in 2009). This year, the air force projects that the combined flight hours of all its drones will exceed 250,000 hours. More flight time will, undoubtedly, mean more killing.”

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Posted on August 30, 2010 by , 13 comments

The US Has Lost in Afghanistan — We Have to Come to Grips with What That Means

Evans Liberal Politics
August 22, 2010

 

The US Has Lost in Afghanistan –
We Have to Come to Grips with What That Means

 

The US Has Lost in Afghanistan — We Have to Come to Grips with What That Means, AlterNet, August 16, 2010, by Conn Hallinan of Foreign Policy in Focus, photo by Steve Evans, quoted verbatim:

There never was a goal set by NATO and Afghanistan that was achievable; because their blood and capital are finite.

Wars are rarely lost in a single encounter; Defeat is almost always more complex than that. The United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies have lost the war in Afghanistan, but not just because they failed in the battle for Marjah or decided that discretion was the better part of valor in Kandahar. They lost the war because they should never have invaded in the first place; because they never had a goal that was achievable; because their blood and capital are finite.

a bright blue Afghan mosque with flowers in the foreground hightlights this AlterNet article on how we are losing the war in Afghanistan

The face of that defeat was everywhere this past month.

According to the Afghanistan Rights Monitor, “In terms of insecurity, 2010 has been the worst year since the demise of the Taliban regime in late 2001.”

A recent U.S. government audit found that despite $27 billion spent on training, fewer than 12 percent of Afghan security forces were capable of operating on their own.

Some 58 percent of the American public think the war is “a lost cause,” and 60 percent think the United States should begin to withdraw in July 2011. Only Republican votes in Congress saved the Obama administration’s request for $33 billion to fuel the war in the coming fiscal year. The war is currently hemorrhaging money at a rate of $7 billion a month.

The British public — the United Kingdom is the second largest armed contingent in Afghanistan — opposes the war by 72 percent, and other coalition forces are quickly abandoning the effort in the war-torn Central Asian nation. Poland announced it would withdraw its 2,600 troops in 2012. The Dutch will be out this August. The Canadians in 2011. The Australians, along with the rest of the NATO allies, declined a plea in July to send more combat troops.

In a sign of the dire circumstances of the war effort, twice in this past month, Afghan soldiers turned their guns on NATO soldiers.

A poll by the International Council on Security and Development reaffirms that the NATO alliance is failing to win over Afghan civilians, a cornerstone of success in the current strategy employed in Afghanistan. The poll found that in the two provinces currently at the center of the war — Helmand and Kandahar — 75 percent of Afghans believe foreigners disrespect their religion and traditions; 74 percent think working for foreign forces is wrong; 68 percent believe NATO will not protect them; and 65 percent think Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar should be part of the government.

The Arithmetic of Defeat


So does one calculate the arithmetic of defeat. But “defeat” does not mean the war is over. Indeed, the moment when it becomes obvious that victory is no longer an option can be the most dangerous time in a conflict’s history. The losers may double down, as the French and the United States did in Vietnam. They may lash out in a frenzy of destruction, as the United States did in Laos and Cambodia. Or they may poison the well for generations to come by dividing people on the basis of ethnicity, religion and tribe, as the British did when their empire began to disintegrate.

Faced with rising opposition at home, increased casualties on the battlefield, and growing isolation from its allies, the United States is casting about for a way to salvage the Afghan disaster, and coming up with schemes that may end up destabilizing not only Afghanistan, but much of Central and South Asia.

The most radical of these schemes is being floated by the former U.S. ambassador to India, Robert Blackwell, a neoconservative mainstay and currently a lobbyist for India. Blackwell proposes partitioning Afghanistan into two countries: an independent, Pashtun-dominated south, and a northern and western section where Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras make up the majority. According to the scheme, “Pashtunistan” would be kept in line by armed drones and 30,000 to 40,000 U.S. Special Forces.

Such an independent country would almost certainly destabilize Pakistan’s Northern Frontier and Tribal areas, where 40 million Pashtuns currently reside. Many of those Pashtuns have never accepted the 1893 Durand Line that the British used to divide Afghanistan from what was then India.

Pashtunistan would also be a template for an independent Baluchistan, further dismembering Afghanistan — certainly something the Indian Army would be delighted with — and serve as a rallying cry for marginalized ethnic groups all over the region, including those in Kashmir, China, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, Russia, and areas in northern India.

It is not clear how much support the partition plan has, given the deep opposition of countries like Pakistan and China, but Blackwell has sprung the genie, and getting it back into the lamp will not be easy.

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A second proposal — to create an army of local militias to fight the Taliban — is already underway, in spite of the disastrous experience with similar armed groups during the Soviet occupation. Those militias turned into warlord armies, which shook down local residents, protected the growing drug trade, and fought over tribal turf.

U.S. commander, Gen. David Petraeus insists that the armed groups will not be “militia,” but more like police — uniformed, armed, and paid by the government of President Hamid Karzai. But given that the Kabul government has virtually no presence outside the capital, how these groups will be controlled is not obvious. Furthermore, if for some reason these militias do confront the Taliban, they will be outgunned by more experienced guerilla fighters.

A June 9 incident in Kandahar is a case in point. The Taliban attacked a local militia that had gathered to celebrate a wedding, killing 40 and wounding 87. The unit had been recruited by U.S. Special Forces, which promised weapons and ammunition. But according to the New York Times, when militia commander, Mohammed Nabi Kako went to the Special Forces, the commander fobbed him off to the Karzi regime, which turned down his request — whether from fear of forming independent militias, or plain old corruption is not clear. When the Taliban attacked, the militia couldn’t defend itself.

The United States has a long track record of recruiting local people to fight and then abandoning them. The Montagnards in Vietnam’s highlands and the Hmong in Laos come to mind.

The model that has the most parallels with the situation in Afghanistan, however, is Guatemala, where the United States helped the military dictatorship create village militias to fight insurgents. If the militias did not fight the guerillas, the Guatemalan Army slaughtered the villagers. If the militias did fight, the villagers became targets in the long-running civil war.

Indeed, an argument can be made that the very idea of militias violates the Geneva Conventions against using civilians to fight in a war, although the United States could finesse that argument by claiming the militia members are “uniformed.” What is certain is that entire villages will be pulled into the war by making them targets for retaliation by a more experienced and better-armed Taliban.

However, the most obvious use for the militias will be to protect the vast drug trade that has made Afghanistan the source of 90 percent of the world’s opium. It is a trade that corrupts not only Afghans, but the police and military of surrounding countries. Indeed, it is a poisonous chain that leads into the heart of Europe, leaving dead and maimed in its path. More than 30,000 addicts die of heroin overdoses each year in Russia alone.

Arbitrary partitions and local militias will not salvage the war for the United States and NATO. The only way out is to cut a deal with the people we are fighting. That will not be easy. The Taliban offered a reasonable peace plan in 2007, and it was turned down. Given the obvious collapse of the allied effort, why should the Taliban want to negotiate? But the Pakistanis say the deal is doable, and of all the counties in the region, Islamabad has the closest ties to the mélange of groups waging war in Afghanistan.

We have lost the war. It is time to recognize reality and start talking.

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist. He also writes the blog, Distpatches from the Edge.

UPDATE: See Karzai: Private contractors ‘looting and stealing,’ working with terrorists, The Raw Story, August 22, 2010, by Daniel Tencer, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday defended his decision to ban private security contractors from operating in public in Afghanistan, saying many of the organizations tasked with providing security are engaging in terrorist activities, working with “Mafia-like” organizations and “looting and stealing from the Afghan people.”

Karzai also speculated that some groups may be acting as security contractors during the day and as terrorist groups “at nighttime.”

Last week, Karzai gave security contractors working in Afghanistan four months to cease operations In an interview with Christiane Amanpour on ABC’s This Week, the Afghan president said the move was necessary because the for-profit contractors were destabilizing the country’s fight against militants.

UPDATE: See As public sours on war, GOP senator backs Afghan pullout deadline, The Raw Story, August 22, 2010, by David Edwards.

See Opposition to Afghanistan conflict not just a liberal issue anymore, The Hill, August 20, 2010, by Sean J. Hill, excerpt quoted verbatim:

A majority of voters want the conflict to end quickly — no matter their party affiliation, according to recent polls.

…SNIP….

North Carolina Senate candidate Elaine Marshall (D) opposed the surge of troops to Afghanistan and wants American forces to withdraw from the country in an orderly fashion.

“We’re spending billions to train a corrupt police force there, and here at home we’re laying off policemen and firefighters,” she said in a statement. “We’re hiring teachers over there, and here we’re sending teachers to the unemployment lines. If there’s a country we need to rebuild, it’s America.”

Democratic strategist Jim Spencer, who has consulted for Marshall, said her position is no longer considered liberal or left-wing. “It’s a very mainstream message, it’s not a left-wing message at all,” he said.

See The Great Myth: Counterinsurgency, Dispatches from the Edge, July 25, 2010, by Conn Hallinan.

See Petraeus’ risky militia maneuver for Afghanistan, Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2010, Editorial.

See FACTBOX-Security developments in Afghanistan, Aug 22, Reuters, August 22, 2010, by Andrew Hammond and Sayed Salahuddin.

See NATO not winning Afghan hearts and minds: poll, Reuters, July 17, 2010, by Adrian Croft.

See Plan B for Afghanistan.

See Review: The Most Dangerous Place, Financial Times, July 18, 2010, Editorial. On the northwestern tribal provinces of Pakistan.

Visit ReThinkAfghanistan.com, and see the new videos.

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Posted on August 22, 2010 by , 6 comments

That was no experiment; it was torture

Evans Liberal Politics
June 11, 2010

 

That was no experiment; it was torture

 

Note from Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: I get from ten up to 20 visitors a day from McLean, Virginia (CIA headquarters). The most I had was 22 from there, the day I put up some somewhat speculative data and predictions about Iran’s nuclear program. Since you guys are so interested, I thought I’d say "hi!"

That was no experiment; it was torture, L.A. Times Opinion, June 8, 2010, by Michael McGough, quoted verbatim:

It’s a startling and stomach-turning allegation: that CIA doctors subjected suspected terrorists to "Human Subject Research and Experimentation." But a new report from Physicians for Human Rights doesn’t deliver on that assertion, which conjures up images of Nazi concentration-camp laboratories.

official seal of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States

The “white paper” does, however, document the role medical professionals played in enabling waterboarding and other acts of what any reasonable person would call torture. Their role is shocking even if one accepts the explanation that the CIA’s Office of Medical Services collected data on these “enhanced interrogation techniques” in order to ensure that interrogators didn’t go too far.

Consider these findings by Physicians for Human Rights:

“1. Medical personnel were required to monitor all waterboarding practices and collect detailed medical information that was used to design, develop and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures.

“2. Information on the effects of simultaneous versus sequential application of the interrogation techniques on detainees was collected and used to establish the policy for using tactics in combination. These data were gathered through an assessment of the presumed “susceptibility” of the subjects to severe pain.

“3. Information collected by health professionals on the effects of sleep deprivation was used to establish the ‘enhanced’ interrogation program’s (EIP’s) sleep deprivation policy.”

What shocks the conscience about these techniques, and the role of health professionals in enabling them, is not Nazi-like “medical experimentation” designed to amass academic information, but the acts themselves. By overreaching and alleging “human experimentation,” the report distracts attention from its really damning findings.

– Michael McGough

Download the Physicians for Human Rights white paper Experiments in Torture (PDF), hosted here.

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: It splits semantic hairs to argue that this was more “torture” than it was experimentation. I don’t care which you’d rather call it. It was definitely torture to experiment with multiple applications of various pain producing techniques for effectiveness. Waterboarding itself is an exquisite torture, a technique close to deliberate drowning which originated in the Inquisition of Spain long ago. The United States is a signer of four different treaties which prohibit torture. Surely, that should have been enough to stop this madness. The fact that it wasn’t, no matter what Obama and Holder do about it, does does not in any way put these activities outside of criminal acts. Certainly, waterboarding and multiple application of pain producing techiques fall in the realm of criminal, prosecutable activity — torture.

Those who made legal justification of these procedures and those who implemented the policy need to be punished. The operatives who carried this out, both CIA personnel, medical enablers and members of the armed forces, are complicit here in a crime. However, I don’t believe that most of these people understood that at the time. Most are patriotic and decent men (and women) and should perhaps be reprimanded. The people who instituted these programs were well aware of the international treaties governing these activities and the fact that the activities fell within the internationally recognized, legal definitions of “torture”. Bush lawyers like Bybee knew that they were coming up with garbage justifications of illegal activities, they just didn’t care. They were probably ordered by Cheney and Rumsfeld and company to come up with legal justifications, and they produced them. These people need to be punished to the full measure of the law. It’s all very well for Obama and Holder to speak of “moving forward” and looking to the future, but these activities were created and justified by high officials in the Bush administration, and that was criminal, if not a war crime.

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” – Bertrand Russell

“It’s not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true.” –Henry Kissinger

Posted on June 10, 2010 by , 1 comment

Message to Obama, Karzai and Congress: Americans and Afghans Need Jobs, Not War

Evans Liberal Politics
May 13, 2010

 

Message to Obama, Karzai and Congress:
Americans and Afghans Need Jobs, Not War

 

Message to Obama, Karzai and Congress: Americans and Afghans Need Jobs, Not War, CommonDreams.org, May 12, 2010, by Code Pink:

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is in Washington this week to meet with the Obama administration and Congress about the status of the war. Despite the platitudes coming from both sides, the conflict is intractable and there is no military solution. President Karzai is well aware of this, which is why he is organizing a peace gathering (called a jirga) in Afghanistan starting on May 20 to set the ground rules for negotiating with the Taliban and other armed insurgents.

Wikipedia photo of Afganistand President Hamid Karzai

After much pressure by Afghan women, 200 of them have won the right to be represented at the 1,200-person peace jirga. CODEPINK supports the jirga as a step in the process of negotiating a settlement and the reintegration of insurgents while demanding respect for women’s rights.

This is a delicate process that requires the full commitment and energy from the U.S. government. Instead, our government is focusing on a new military offensive. The looming June military attack against Kandahar will undoubtedly lead to the death of more innocent Afghans; it will lead to the spilling of more of our soldiers’ blood; and it will lead to more resentment and blowback against us, as we saw in the attempted Times Square bombing.

Just look at what happened in Marjah, where February’s offensive left locals feeling more negative about NATO forces than before the operation. Unlike Marjah, Kandahar is one of Afghanistan’s largest cities and the potential for massive civilian casualties is frightening. Tribal leaders and the public in Kandahar are strongly opposed to the forthcoming attack.

We call on President Obama , the Commander-in-Chief, to call off the Kandahar offensive and instead focus on peace talks. We need President Obama to protect us from terrorist attacks here at home, not wage endless wars overseas.

We call on President Karzai to promote a reconciliation process that ensures Afghan women a prominent place at the table and protects women’s rights. President Karzai should also promote economic policies that provide jobs for women, especially the over one million war widows who are desperately trying to care for their children.

We call on Congress to stop funding the war. Congress has been asked by the Administration to approve a $33 billion supplemental request. The money is supposed to pay for the 30,000 additional troops President Obama ordered to Afghanistan in December and are now starting to arrive for the offensive. Congress must take a stand and refuse to fund the war.

We also call on our Congressional representatives to co-sponsor the McGovern-Feingold bill (HR 5015, S.3197) requiring the President to provide a plan and timetable for “the safe, orderly and expeditious redeployment of US troops from Afghanistan.” There are presently 82 co-sponsors of this bill. We hope over 100 representatives will sign on, and the bill will generate a long overdue Congressional debate about the need to end this war.

We call on the American people to join us in calling for jobs, not war. After 9 years of U.S. occupation, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world. They need jobs, not war. The American people are suffering from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We need jobs, not war. With just a fraction of the over $270 billion we have spent on this war (www.costofwar.com), we could be creating millions of jobs for both Americans and Afghans.

Let’s demand that our leaders put an end to this war and instead protect us here at home. Let’s tell them our national security includes a good education system, clean energy, healthcare and putting people to work in productive jobs that improve the lives of our communities.

CODEPINK is a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, stop new wars, and redirect our resources into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming activities.

See Obama’s Afghanistan: No Political Strategy, No Benchmarks, No End Point, Politics Daily, May 12, 2010, by David Wood, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Afghan President Karzai’s meetings in Washington this week ended with no sign of a badly needed joint political strategy to buttress the U.S.-led military campaign.

In official meetings and public appearances over two days, neither Karzai nor administration officials defined what they want Afghanistan to look like in one year, or five, or 10. Nor did anyone mention benchmarks that could help chart progress or lack of progress toward that goal.

See Afghanistan Crossroads: Highlights from Karzai’s meeting with Obama, CNN, May 12, 2010, by CNN Wire staff.

See Karzai, Clinton wrap up visit in televised meeting, AP News hosted on Google, May 13, 2010, by Matthew Lee (AP), excerpt quoted verbatim:

WASHINGTON — Afghan President Hamid Karzai is wrapping up a four-day visit to Washington with a televised give-and-take with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The Obama administration has done its best to repair strained relations with the Afghan leader, its partner in the war against militants in Afghanistan. Karzai, meanwhile, will continue to seek to convince Americans that his regime is worth fighting and dying for, with a visit to Arlington National Cemetery and private talks with top lawmakers.

After a Capitol Hill lunch hosted by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., Karzai was to appear with Clinton at the U.S. Institute of Peace for what was billed as a “moderated discussion.” They were expected to talk about the ups and downs of the relationship and the way ahead.

Karzai leaves Washington on Friday. Before heading back to Kabul he is expected to visit Fort Campbell, Ky., home of the 101st Airborne Division, which is going to Afghanistan over the next several weeks, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.

Visit ReThinkAfghanistan.com.

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Posted on May 13, 2010 by , 8 comments

EXCLUSIVE: Secret Recording of Erik Prince Reveals Previously Undisclosed Blackwater Ops

Evans Liberal Politics
May 4, 2010

 

EXCLUSIVE: Secret Recording of Erik Prince
Reveals Previously Undisclosed Blackwater Ops

 

Investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill obtains a rare audio recording of a recent, private speech delivered by Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, to a friendly audience in January. The speech, which Prince attempted to keep from public consumption, provides a stunning glimpse into his views and future plans and reveals details of previously undisclosed activities of Blackwater. In a Democracy Now! exclusive broadcast we play excerpts of the recording and speak with Scahill about the revelations.

Posted on May 4, 2010 by , Reply

Video: NYC Bomb Suspect Will Face Terror Charges

Evans Liberal Politics
May 4, 2010

 

NYC Bomb Suspect Will Face Terror Charges

 

See AG: Times Square bomb suspect admits role
(MSNBC, May 4, 2010, by NBC, msnbc.com and news services)

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Posted on May 4, 2010 by , Reply

Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe: the Threat from the Right

Evans Liberal Politics
March 10, 2010

 

Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe:
the Threat from the Right

 

Originally published as What Obama and the DOJ Can Learn From the Right, AlterNet, March 8, 2010, excerpt quoted verbatim:

On March 2, “Keep America Safe,” the neo-con think tank run by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol, released a video demanding information about a group of Obama administration lawyers it labeled “the al-Qaeda Seven.” Since these lawyers once voluntarily represented Guantanamo inmates, K.A.S. argued, their continued practice jeopardizes the safety of American families.

Six days later, 19 prominent lawyers — including a few on the right — issued a statement slamming Cheney’s organization. “We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications,” they wrote. A “zealous representation of unpopular clients” is a necessary feature of a fair legal system.

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The lawyers’ words validated a chorus of defiance heard almost unanimously on progressive blogs, effectively imbuing the left’s critique of Cheney with some bipartisan momentum. For once, it seemed, folks at the Center for American Progress were able to find some common ground with Ken Starr.

But is this an argument that the right will win anyway? As a recent New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer illustrated, the superior efficacy of civilian trials for terror suspects is irrelevant to those who want simplified, no-bullshit revenge. People like Obama and Holder (and, in a broader sense, people on the left) can talk (and blog) about legal nuance, detainee rights etc. till they’re blue in the face and fingers; in the end, their best shot at maintaining some kernel of legal fairness will be to use neo-cons’ own weapons against them — that is, to make the fight for constitutional trials a battle about patriotism, not legal logistics.

The argumentative line could go something like this: “By jeopardizing the principles upon which our entire legal system was founded in the name of revenge, we are being coerced into an American self-sabotage, courtesy of Osama bin Laden.” Repeat. An oversimplified view, certainly, but one that would resonate on the same visceral level the right so masterfully taps. That the position actually involves a fair upholding of important legal structures is great. But that fact should be residual, not the argument’s central thesis.

Right now, we’re looking at a good example of the right outplaying the left in appealing to a base instinct.

Read the full article, here.

See Keep America Safe, and read the evil bullsh*t.

See Republicans scold Liz Cheney, March 3, 2010, by Ben Smith.

A group that includes leading conservative lawyers and policy experts, former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and several senior officials of the last Bush administration is denouncing as “shameful” Republican attacks on lawyers who came to the Obama Justice Department after representing suspected terrorists.

Senate Republicans have demanded details of the lawyers’ past work and Liz Cheney’s group “Keep America Safe” has questioned their “values.” A drumbeat of Republican criticism forced the Justice Department reluctantly to identify seven of them last week. But the harshness of the criticism – Keep America Safe labeled a group of them the “Al Qaeda Seven” — has provoked a backlash from across the legal establishment.

“We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications,” wrote the 19 lawyers whose names were attached to the statement as of early Monday.

See Mukasey calls Liz Cheney’s ‘Al-Qaeda 7′ ad ‘shoddy and dangerous.’, Think Progress, March 10, 2010, by Ben Armbruster, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Yesterday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) joined a growing chorus of conservatives condemning the McCarthy-like tactics of Keep America Safe, the new group led by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney, which recently released an ad questioning the loyalties of Justice Department lawyers who were once involved in representing al-Qaeda terror suspects. Today in the Wall Street Journal — without mentioning Cheney, Kristol, their group, or the ad — former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey denounced their campaign:

See Cheney Group Attacks Obama’s DOJ, Where’s the Dem Pushback?, Daily Kos, March 3, 2010, by mcjoan, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Coming from the crew that turned the Department of Justice into a political arm of the Republican party, replete with loyalty oaths and politically motivated hirings and firings–remember the prosecutor purge that brought down Alberto Gonzales?–this is all the more despicable.

Liz Cheney’s group Keep America Safe, which has led the resurgent Republican attacks on President Obama’s national security policies, is releasing a video this morning that questions the loyalties of Justice Department lawyers who advocated for detained terror suspects during the Bush Administration.

The group has been hammering Attorney General Eric Holder for months on the issue, which has drawn increasing attention from Senate Republicans. Senator Charles Grassley last month pushed Holder to identify any lawyers who had represented detainees, and the Department said last month that nine Justice Department appointees filled that category — but he refused to name those whose work hadn’t been previously reported. Conservatives view the partial disclosure as another Holder misstep, and in a new video, the group is going on offense.

Adam Sewer has a must-read article on this effort–taken up by Andrew McCarthy at National Review.

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For a Good Time Read
Is There Really a Backlash Against Casual Sex?,
AlterNet, March 10, 2010, by Vanessa Richmond.

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Posted on March 10, 2010 by , 2 comments
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