Writing History: The Pen Is Dipped In Palestinian Blood

"The fundamental reason for the ill health of the population in Gaza is of course the siege and the bombing"

“Israeli impunity is one of the greatest moral challenges of our time”

Iranian Sanctions Intended To Foster Unrest

Nima Shirazi explains:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee today and reiterated the same assessmentregarding Iran as was delivered last month.

The exact same statements – verbatim – were included in Clapper’s unclassified report, including the assessment that, “Iran is developing nuclear capabilities to enhance its security, prestige, and regional influence and give it the ability to develop nuclear weapons, should a decision be made to do so. We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

Of course, as Clapper notes, Iran’s ability to potentially manufacture the components is inherent to its advanced nuclear infrastructure and is not an indication of an active nuclear weapons program, which all U.S. intelligence agencies agree Iran does nothave.

As such, Clapper again reported to the Senate Committee, “Iran has the scientific, technical, and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons. This makes the central issue its political will to do so.”

In his testimony, Clapper stated that, were the decision to weaponize its nuclear energy program to be made by Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran could theoretically reach a “breakout” point within “months, not years.” His report repeats the assessment, though, that “[d]espite this progress, we assess Iran could not divert safeguarded material and produce a weapon-worth of WGU before this activity is discovered.”

Again, undermining the bogus claims that Iran is an irrational and reckless actor, Clapper maintained the judgment that “Iran’s nuclear decisionmaking is guided by a cost-benefit approach,” balancing its own domestic interests with “the international political and security environment.”  Iran also has a defensive – not aggressive – military posture, one based on “its strategy to deter – and if necessary retaliate against – forces in the region, including US forces” were an attack on Iran to occur.

During questioning from Senators following his prepared remarks, Clapper admitted – as a number of recent independent reports have shown – that the increasingly harshsanctions levied upon Iran have had no effect on the decision-making process of the Iranian leadership, yet has produced considerable damage to the Iranian economy and resulted in increased “inflation, unemployment, [and the] unavailability of commodities” for the Iranian people.

This, he said, is entirely the point.  Responding to Maine Senator Angus King, who asked about the impact sanctions have on the Iranian government, Clapper explained that the intent of sanctions is to spark dissent and unrest in the Iranian population, effectively starting that Obama administration’s continued collective punishment of the Iranian people is a deliberate (and embarrassingly futile) tactic employed to foment regime change.

“What they do worry about though is sufficient restiveness in the street that would actually jeopardize the regime. I think they are concerned about that,” Clapper said of the Iranian leadership. It is no wonder, then, that Clapper refers in his own official report to the economic warfare waged against Iran as “regime threatening sanctions.”

Not mentioned in the session, of course, are the decades of repeated affirmations by senior Iranian officials that Iran rejects nuclear weapons on strategic, moral and religious grounds.  Within the past six weeks, this position has been reiterated by Iran’s envoy to the IAEA Ali Asghar Soltanieh, President Ahmadinejad, and Ayatollah Khamenei himself.

Just two days ago, for instance, during a three-day diplomatic visit to Africa, Ahmadinejad declared, “The era of the atomic bomb is over. Atomic bombs are no longer useful and have no effect on political equations. Atomic bombs belong to the last century, and anyone who thinks he can rule the world by atomic bombs is a political fool,” according to a report by Iran’s state-run PressTV. He also pushed back the constant conflation in Western discourse of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. “Nuclear energy is one thing and an atomic bomb is another. This useful energy must belong to all nations,” he added.

Furthermore, reports that Iran has continued converting its stockpiled 19.75% enriched uranium into fuel plates for its cancer-treating medical research reactor gained absolutely no traction within the Committee or Clapper’s comments. For Congress, Iran is a threat simply by virtue of having independent political considerations, inalienable national rights and refusing to accept American hegemony over its own security interests.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who spends most of his time advocating for new, illegal military adventures in the Middle East, presented this wholly disingenuous and misleading question to Clapper: “Over the last six months, as we’ve been imposing sanctions and been negotiating with the P5+1 regime, [does Iran] have more or lessenriched uranium for a nuclear bomb?”

None of Iran’s enriched uranium is “for a nuclear bomb” insofar as it is all far fromweapons-grade and under the safeguard and seal of the IAEA. Iran’s enriched uranium is no more “for a nuclear bomb” than Graham’s fanciest set of steak knives are for throat-slitting.

“Can I just say it’s more?,” Graham proffered, revealing that he already knew the answer he wanted to hear, at which point Clapper chimed in. “Not highly-enriched,” he said, “but up to the 20% level.” Graham was undeterred from his propagandizing and grandstanding. “Well, they’re marching in the wrong direction,” he said. “We talk, they enrich.” AIPAC poetry at its finest.

Shortly before ending the session, in response to questions from Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, Clapper stated that the relationship between the American and Israeli intelligence communities – especially on the Iranian nuclear program – has “never been closer or more pervasive,” citing unprecedented levels of “intimacy.”

While each state continues to maintain its own unique sources for intelligence gathering, Clapper said, “generally speaking,” the United States and Israel are “on the same page” when it comes to Iran.

Pressing the issue on behalf of his AIPAC backers, Blumenthal asked whether allinformation is shared between the two nuclear-armed nations, at which point Clapper declined to agree completely.

“Pretty much,” he replied.

Why was Clapper being so cagey?  An Associated Press report from last July seems to provide an answer:

Despite inarguable ties between the U.S. and its closest ally in the Middle East and despite statements from U.S. politicians trumpeting the friendship, U.S. national security officials consider Israel to be, at times, a frustrating ally and a genuine counterintelligence threat.

In fact, the AP states, “The CIA considers Israel its No. 1 counterintelligence threat” in the Middle East, meaning that the agency “believes that U.S. national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel.” This is unsurprising, of course, as “Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, and its FBI equivalent, the Shin Bet, both considered among the best in the world, have been suspected of recruiting U.S. officials and trying to steal American secrets.”

Did any of that make it into Clapper’s “Worldwide Threat Assessment” today? No, of course not. Israel was only mentioned as a victim and an ally. One might think an untrustworthy, nuclear-armed serial aggressor, constantly threatening to drag the United States into an unprovoked military conflict with inevitable devastating consequences, all with the allegiance and blessing of Congress, would rank rather high on potential security threats to the United States.

But James Clapper isn’t allowed to say that.

U.S. Drone Wars

Drone warfare has increased dramatically since 2008 and there are over 60 bases across the globe engaging in a US drone missions. US drones are currently deployed in the skies of over 14 different countries, some for surveillance and others for attacking ground targets. Are these weapons keeping us safe, or do they just incite further terrorist attacks? And is their use a violation of the Geneva Conventions?

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. ~George Bernard Shaw

Produced by Alternative Focus.

Drone Wars



The Drone Economy 

Predator drones are manufactured in Poway, near San Diego, where over 4,000 people are employed at General Atomics at the taxpayers’ expense. We examine the implications of this kind of warfare, and the loop of finance that rewards contractors and the politicians they support.



The Drone Morality 

Who bears responsibly for lethal action when weapons are fully automated? Can a machine have a code of ethics? While their accuracy might, in theory, minimize innocent deaths, drones also enable illegal political assassinations, and by keeping US troops out of harm’s way they also make war easier. A serious debate on these topics is long overdue

Follow-Up Drone Strikes Target First Responders

Survivors Vow Revenge Against America

The true casualty figures of US drone strikes in Yemen “don’t always match up” with “the official version of events,” according to an investigation by National Public Radio.

Visiting the site of an airstrike in the southern town of Jaar that took place in May, reporters interviewed eye-witnesses who said an American aircraft destroyed a house on the main street, killing one man inside. But when dozens of civilians rushed to the scene, another strike hit.

“We didn’t think it would come back,” one witness told NPR. “Suddenly we see it come back…and shoot again.” The second strike killed at least 12 people instantly. “They were cut … in pieces,” he says.

“A wall where the second strike hit is still covered with blood,” the reporter says.

This practice of “follow-up strikes” resembles policies in the drone war in Pakistan, wherein targets are often hit twice, after rescuers have had a chance to swarm to the site. Citing reports that the US has conducted follow-up drone strikes aimed at people coming to the strike scene to rescue the injured, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary execution Christof Heyns said last month, if it is true, “those further attacks are a war crime.”

Follow-up strikes are apparently a hallmark of the so-called “signature strikes” President Obama recently approved for use in Yemen. Signature strikes are those that target unidentified individuals in unidentified groups that are not engaged in direct hostilities with the US, nor are they presenting any imminent threat the administration is willing to establish.

“Our lives are valueless in the eyes of our government,” said one resident of Jaar at the time of the strikes, “and that is why civilians are being killed without a crime.”

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recorded up to 746 people killed in US strikes in Yemen since 2002, with as many as 117 confirmed civilians, 24 of them children. Neither the US government, nor the Yemeni government will comment on these airstrikes or the casualties associated with them.

In a hospital near Jaar, NPR spoke to a young boy who was injured and badly burned from the May airstrike. Another man Ali Al Amoudi said a strike “hit his house and three others just a few weeks ago in the town of Shaqra, just down the road from Jaar. His 4-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter were hit. They died in his arms on the way to the hospital.”

Saleh Qaid Toayman was a Yemeni who was killed in an airstrike in October and is supposed to have “fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s with men who would later join al-Qaida,” NPR reports. His son, Azzedine, was nearby when an airstrike killed him and another of his sons.

“I went to see my father and my brother. They were scattered into pieces.” Azzedine and his other surviving siblings “say they want to fight against those who killed their father, namely against America.” Saleh’s eldest son has already formally joined Ansar al Sharia, an al-Qaeda-linked group, to avenge his father’s death.

Via: "Anti-War"

The Moral Abomination Of Sanctions

By Jacob G. Hornberger
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Courtesy Of "The Future Of Freedom Foundation"

A recent New York Times op-ed entitled Pinched and Griping in Iran by Timescolumnist Nicholas D. Kristof shows how differently statists think in comparison to us libertarians, especially when it comes to foreign policy and moral principles.

4

Kristof is traveling in Iran and reporting on his experiences in the country. In his article, he focuses on the horrible economic effects of the sanctions that the U.S. government has imposed on Iran.

While U.S. officials sometimes like to claim that their sanctions target foreign government officials, nothing could be further from the truth. Kristof carefully documents how the Iranian people are bearing the brunt of the sanctions. He writes:

Largely because of Western sanctions, factories are closing, workers are losing their jobs, trade is faltering and prices are surging. This is devastating to the average Iranian’s pocketbook – and pride.
To be blunt, sanctions are succeeding as intended: They are inflicting prodigious economic pain on Iranians and are generating discontent.

Kristof then goes on to provide specific examples of people who are suffering the effects of the sanctions.

Kristof says, “I regret this suffering, and let’s be clear that sanctions are hurting ordinary Iranians more than senior officials. I’m also appalled that the West blocks sales of airline parts, thus risking crashes of civilian aircraft.”

Apparently, Kristof is unaware that the sanctions have already caused civilian planes to crash in Iran, as I detailed in my 2010 article “Another ‘Success’ Story from U.S. Sanctions.”

But Kristof’s apparent lack of knowledge of those plane crashes is not the worst of it. The worst part of his article, the part that reflects the skewed moral compass of statists everywhere, is that notwithstanding the horrible harm that the sanctions are doing to the Iranian citizenry, Kristof says they should be continued nonetheless.

What’s his reasoning? He sees the suffering inflicted by the sanctions on the Iranian people as a way to squeeze the Iranian government into complying with U.S. dictates or to reduce its power. Kristof bluntly writes: “Yet, with apologies to the many wonderful Iranians who showered me with hospitality, I favor sanctions because I don’t see any other way to pressure the regime on the nuclear issue or ease its grip on power.”

Apparently, Kristof’s fantasy is that anger among the Iranian citizenry will scare the Iranian government into complying with the dictates of U.S. officials. Perhaps Kristof even fantasizes about a coup that brings a pro-U.S. regime into power, like the one that the CIA engineered in 1953, which installed the brutal pro-U.S. regime of the Shah of Iran into power.

Kristof’s position reminds me of the infamous statement that U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright made when asked about the U.S. sanctions against Iraq. The sanctions on Iraq, like those in Iran, were squeezing the economic lifeblood out of the Iraqi people. Things got so bad that newborn babies and small children were dying from the harsh effects of the sanctions.

What was Albright’s reaction to all that death and suffering among Iraqi families? In essence, it was remarkably similar to that of Kristof. Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes said to Albright, “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, this is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright responded, “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

So, yes, maybe millions of Iranians will lose their life’s savings from the sanctions. Why, if things get bad enough, they might also suffer a high child mortality rate too. And, yes, maybe hundreds of Iranians, adults and children, might die in plane crashes as a result of the sanctions.

But, you see, in the minds of the statist, it’s all worth it because it increases the likelihood that Iranian officials will get so scared of their citizenry that they will comply with the dictates of U.S. officials or, even better, peacefully relinquish power to a pro-U.S. regime.

Surely Kristof recognizes that such hoped-for scenarios oftentimes don’t pan out. In Iraq, the sanctions continued for 11 brutal years, bringing death, impoverishment, and suffering to the Iraqi people, year after year. It finally took the post-9/11 U.S. military invasion of Iraq, one based on deceptive premises, to finally achieve the regime change that the sanctions were intended to produce.

Moreover, while some of the anger and frustration from the Iraqi sanctions might have been directed toward the Iraqi regime, it ultimately boiled over with terrorist strikes against the United States with the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the attack on the USS Cole, the attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa, and, worst of all, the 9/11 attacks.

What will Nicholas Kristof say if a few Iranian families who have lost everything, including money and children, as a result of the sanctions come over to the United States and retaliate with a massive terrorist strike? My hunch is that in such an event, Kristof will immediately take the standard statist line, “The terrorist strike has nothing to do with the sanctions on Iran. These terrorists just hate us for our freedom and values.”

The U.S. sanctions against Iran are a moral abomination, just as they were against Iraq and just as they are against Cuba and just as they are against every other country in the world. In actuality, they are an act of war, one that is waged against the civilian population of another country. They target the innocent in the hope that the citizenry will influence the direction of their government. They are the perfect embodiment of the adage, “The end justifies the means.” And they produce the continuous climate of terrorist retaliation, which, not so coincidentally, is used to justify ever-increasing budgets for the military and the CIA and ever-increasing infringements on the freedom and privacy of the American people.

There is only one moral answer to the likes of Nicholas Kristof and his statist ilk, and, not surprisingly, that answer comes from us libertarians: Lift all U.S. sanctions against every country in the world and liberate the American people to freely travel wherever they want and freely trade with whomever they wish.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Hornberger’s Blog Archives

The Assassin-In-Chief

Praying At The Church Of St. Drone

By Tom Engelhardt,
June 06, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

The President and His Apostles

Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they — and the vast national-security structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self — are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against. They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.

Thanks to a long New York Times piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” we now know that the president has spent startling amounts of time overseeing the “nomination” of terrorist suspects for assassination via the remotely piloted drone program he inherited from President George W. Bush and which he has expanded exponentially. Moreover, that article was based largely on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” In other words, it was essentially an administration-inspired piece — columnist Robert Scheer calls it “planted” — on a “secret” program the president and those closest to him are quite proud of and want to brag about in an election year.

The language of the piece about our warrior president was generally sympathetic, even in places soaring. It focused on the moral dilemmas of a man who — we now know — has personally approved and overseen the growth of a remarkably robust assassination program in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan based on a “kill list.” Moreover, he’s regularly done so target by target, name by name. (The Times did not mention a recent U.S. drone strike in the Philippines that killed 15.) According to Becker and Shane, President Obama has also been involved in the use of a fraudulent method of counting drone kills, one that unrealistically de-emphasizes civilian deaths.

Historically speaking, this is all passing strange. The Times calls Obama’s role in the drone killing machine “without precedent in presidential history.” And that’s accurate.

It’s not, however, that American presidents have never had anything to do with or been in any way involved in assassination programs. The state as assassin is hardly unknown in our history. How could President John F. Kennedy, for example, not know about CIA-inspired or -backed assassination plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, and South Vietnamese autocrat (and ostensible ally) Ngo Dinh Diem? (Lumumba and Diem were successfully murdered.) Similarly, during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the CIA carried out a massive assassination campaign in Vietnam, Operation Phoenix. It proved to be a staggeringly profligate program for killing tens of thousands of Vietnamese, both actual enemies and those simply swept up in the process.

In previous eras, however, presidents either stayed above the assassination fray or practiced a kind of plausible deniability about the acts. We are surely at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or his election team) assembles his aides, advisers, and associates to foster a story that’s meant to broadcast the group’s collective pride in the new position of assassin-in-chief.

Religious Cult or Mafia Hit Squad?

Here’s a believe-it-or-not footnote to our American age. Who now remembers that, in the early years of his presidency, George W. Bush kept what the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward called “his own personal scorecard for the war” on terror? It took the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world’s most dangerous terrorists, each ready to be crossed out by Bush once captured or killed. That scorecard was, Woodward added, always available in a desk drawer in the Oval Office.

Such private presidential record-keeping now seems penny-ante indeed. The distance we’ve traveled in a decade can be measured by the Times’ description of the equivalent of that “personal scorecard” today (and no desk drawer could hold it):

It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die. This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases, and life stories of suspected members of al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia. The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by [counterterrorism "tsar" John O.] Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name.

In other words, thanks to such meetings — on what insiders have labeled “terror Tuesday” — assassination has been thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the president. Without the help of or any oversight from the American people or their elected representatives, he alone is now responsible for regular killings thousands of miles away, including those of civilians and even children. He is, in other words, if not a king, at least the king of American assassinations. On that score, his power is total and completely unchecked. He can prescribe death for anyone “nominated,” choosing any of the “baseball cards” (PowerPoint bios) on that kill list and then order the drones to take them (or others in the neighborhood) out.

He and he alone can decide that assassinating known individuals isn’t enough and that the CIA’s drones can instead strike at suspicious “patterns of behavior” on the ground in Yemen or Pakistan. He can stop any attack, any killing, but there is no one, nor any mechanism that can stop him. An American global killing machine (quite literally so, given that growing force of drones) is now at the beck and call of a single, unaccountable individual. This is the nightmare the founding fathers tried to protect us from.

In the process, as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the president has shredded the Fifth Amendment, guaranteeing Americans that they will not “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel produced a secret memo claiming that, while the Fifth Amendment’s due process guarantee does apply to the drone assassination of an American citizen in a land with which we are not at war, “it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.” (That, writes Greenwald, is “the most extremist government interpretation of the Bill of Rights I’ve heard in my lifetime.”) In other words, the former Constitutional law professor has been freed from the law of the land in cases in which he “nominates,” as he has, U.S. citizens for robotic death.

There is, however, another aspect to the institutionalizing of those “kill lists” and assassination as presidential prerogatives that has gone unmentioned. If the Timesarticle — which largely reflects how the Obama administration cares to see itself and its actions — is to be believed, the drone program is also in the process of being sanctified and sacralized.

You get a sense of this from the language of the piece itself. (“A parallel, morecloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan…”) The president is presented as a particularly moral man, who devotes himself to the “just war” writings of religious figures like Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, and takes every death as his own moral burden. His leading counterterrorism adviser Brennan, a man who, while still in the CIA, was knee-deep in torture controversy, is presented, quite literally, as a priest of death, not once but twice in the piece. He is described by theTimes reporters as “a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama.” They then quote the State Department’s top lawyer, Harold H. Koh, saying, “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”

In the Times telling, the organization of robotic killing had become the administration’s idée fixe, a kind of cult of death within the Oval Office, with those involved in it being so many religious devotees. We may be, that is, at the edge of a new state-directed, national-security-based religion of killing grounded in the fact that we are in a “dangerous” world and the “safety” of Americans is our preeminent value. In other words, the president, his apostles, and his campaign acolytes are all, it seems, praying at the Church of St. Drone.

Of course, thought about another way, that “terror Tuesday” scene might not be from a monastery or a church synod, but from a Mafia council directly out of a Mario Puzo novel, with the president as the Godfather, designating “hits” in a rough-and-tumble world.

How far we’ve come in just two presidencies! Assassination as a way of life has been institutionalized in the Oval Office, thoroughly normalized, and is now being offered to the rest of us as a reasonable solution to American global problems and an issue on which to run a presidential campaign.

Downhill All The Way On Blowback Planet

After 5,719 inside-the-Beltway (largely inside-the-Oval-Office) words, the Times piece finally gets to this single outside-the-Beltway sentence: “Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president.”

Arguably, indeed! For the few who made it that far, it was a brief reminder of just how narrow, how confining the experience of worshiping at St. Drone actually is. All those endless meetings, all those presidential hours that might otherwise have been spent raising yet more money for campaign 2012, and the two countries that have taken the brunt of the drone raids are more hostile, more dangerous, and in worse shape than in 2009. (And one of them, keep in mind, is a nuclear power.) News articles since have only emphasized how powerfully those drones have radicalizedlocal populations — however many “bad guys” (and children) they may also have wiped off the face of the Earth.

And though the Times doesn’t mention this, it’s not just bad news for Yemen or Pakistan. American democracy, already on the ropes, is worse off, too.

What should astound Americans — but seldom seems to be noticed — is just how into the shadows, how thoroughly military-centric, and how unproductive has become Washington’s thinking at the altar of St. Drone and its equivalents (including special operations forces, increasingly the president’s secret military within the military). Yes, the world is always a dangerous place, even if far less so now than when, in the Cold War era, two superpowers were a heartbeat away from nuclear war. But — though it’s increasingly heretical to say this — the perils facing Americans, including relatively modest dangers from terrorism, aren’t the worst things on our planet.

Electing an assassin-in-chief, no matter who you vote for, is worse. Pretending that the Church of St. Drone offers any kind of reasonable or even practical solutions on this planet of ours, is worse yet. And even worse, once such a process begins, it’s bound to be downhill all the way. As we learned last week, again in the Times, we not only have an assassin-in-chief in the Oval Office, but a cyberwarrior, perfectly willing to release a new form of weaponry, the most sophisticated computer “worm” ever developed, against another country with which we are not at war.

This represents a breathtaking kind of rashness, especially from the leader of a country that, perhaps more than any other, is dependent on computer systems, opening the U.S. to potentially debilitating kinds of future blowback. Once again, as with drones, the White House is setting the global rules of the road for every country (and group) able to get its hands on such weaponry and it’s hit the highway at 140 miles per hour without a cop in sight.

James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the rest of them knew war, and yet were not acolytes of the eighteenth century equivalents of St. Drone, nor of presidents who might be left free to choose to turn the world into a killing zone. They knew at least as well as anyone in our national security state today that the world is always a dangerous place — and that that’s no excuse for investing war powers in a single individual. They didn’t think that a state of permanent war, a state of permanent killing, or a president free to plunge Americans into such states was a reasonable way for their new republic to go. To them, it was by far the more dangerous way to exist in our world.

The founding fathers would surely have chosen republican democracy over safety. They would never have believed that a man surrounded by advisers and lawyers, left to his own devices, could protect them from what truly mattered. They tried to guard against it. Now, we have a government and a presidency dedicated to it, no matter who is elected in November.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’sTomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Engelhardt discusses drone warfare and the Obama administration, click here or download it to your iPod here.

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Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt

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“Militants”: Media Propaganda

To Avoid Counting Civilian Deaths, Obama Re-Defined "Militant" To Mean "All Military-Age Males In A Strike Zone"

BY GLENN GREENWALD
TUESDAY, MAY 29, 2012 12:32 AM EDT
Courtesy Of "Salon"


Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in

headlines that the dead were ”militants” – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed “officials” claiming that the dead were “militants.” It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true.

This practice continues even though key Obama officials have been caught lying, a term used advisedly, about how many civilians they’re killing. I’ve written and said many times before that in American media discourse, the definition of “militant” is any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates (that term was even used when Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen two weeks after a drone killed his father, even though nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent: “Another U.S. Drone Strike Kills Militants in Yemen”).

This morning, the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” I’mwriting separately about the numerous revelations contained in that article, but want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a “militant.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

For the moment, leave the ethical issues to the side that arise from viewing “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”; that’s nothing less than sociopathic, a term I use advisedly, but I discuss that in the separate, longer piece I’ve written. For now, consider what this means for American media outlets. Any of them which use the term “militants” to describe those killed by U.S. strikes are knowingly disseminating a false and misleading term of propaganda. By “militant,” the Obama administration literally means nothing more than: any military-age male whom we kill, even when we know nothing else about them. They have no idea whether the person killed is really a militant: if they’re male and of a certain age they just call them one in order to whitewash their behavior and propagandize the citizenry (unless conclusive evidence somehow later emerges proving their innocence).

What kind of self-respecting media outlet would be party to this practice? Here’s the New York Times documenting that this is what the term “militant” means when used by government officials. Any media outlet that continues using it while knowing this is explicitly choosing to be an instrument for state propaganda — not that that’s anything new, but this makes this clearer than it’s ever been.