May 4th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 17

May-04-2012 | Comments (0)

**No Tikkunista next week, due to travel plans. Back on May 18th, insh’Allah.**

1. How’s that Global War on Terror Thing Working Out for Ya?

Bird’s Eye: The US has been waging war on terror for twelve years now. Originally framed as a hunt for Osama and Al-Qaida, the goals seemed to have …uh…diffused. Andrew Bacevitch breaks the war into three parts (Rumsfeld, Petraeus, and Michael Vickers) and examines the characteristics of each part. Glenn Greenwald looks at how the nature of the war has escalated since bin Laden’s death. And Schneier, whose log on security is always a treat, looks at the costs in money and lives of the farce through which we go when we travel via US airports.

* Scoring the Global War on Terror NationofChange

With the United States now well into the second decade of what the Pentagon has styled an “era of persistent conflict,” the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism (unofficial acronym WFKATGWOT) appears increasingly fragmented and diffuse. Without achieving victory, yet unwilling to acknowledge failure, the United States military has withdrawn from Iraq. It is trying to leave Afghanistan, where events seem equally unlikely to yield a happy outcome.

…Viewed close-up, the “war” appears to have lost form and shape. Yet by taking a couple of steps back, important patterns begin to appear. What follows is a preliminary attempt to score the WFKATGWOT, dividing the conflict into a bout of three rounds. Although there may be several additional rounds still to come, here’s what we’ve suffered through thus far.

So what tentative judgments can we offer regarding the ongoing WFKATGWOT? Operationally, a war launched by the conventionally minded has progressively fallen under the purview of those who inhabit what Dick Cheney once called “the dark side,” with implications that few seem willing to explore. Strategically, a war informed at the outset by utopian expectations continues today with no concretely stated expectations whatsoever, the forward momentum of events displacing serious consideration of purpose. Politically, a war that once occupied center stage in national politics has now slipped to the periphery, the American people moving on to other concerns and entertainments, with legal and moral questions raised by the war left dangling in midair…..

Round 3. The Vickers Era: Assassination. Unlike Donald Rumsfeld or David Petraeus, Michael Vickers has not achieved celebrity status. Yet more than anyone else in or out of uniform, Vickers, who carries the title Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, deserves recognition as the emblematic figure of the WFKATGWOT’s round three….The Vickers approach means acting aggressively to eliminate would-be killers wherever they might be found, employing whatever means are necessary. Vickers “tends to think like a gangster,” one admirer comments. “He can understand trends then change the rules of the game so they are advantageous for your side.” Round three of the WFKATGWOT is all about bending, breaking, and reinventing rules in ways thought to be advantageous to the United States. Much as COIN supplanted “shock and awe,” a broad-gauged program of targeted assassination has now displaced COIN as the prevailing expression of the American way of war

* Since Bin Ladin’s Death Glenn Greenwald Salon

In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s summary execution one year ago, many predicted that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. Here’s what has happened since then:

*With large bipartisan majorities, Congress renewed the once-controversial Patriot Act without a single reform, and it was signed into law by President Obama; Harry Reid accused those urging reforms of putting the country at risk of a Terrorist attack.

* For the first time, perhaps ever, a U.S. citizen was assassinated by the CIA, on orders from the President, without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield; two weeks later, his 16-year-old American son was also killed by his own government; the U.S. Attorney General then gave a speech claiming the President has the power to target U.S. citizens for death based on unproven, secret accusations of Terrorism.

* With large bipartisan majorities, Congress enacted, and the President signed, a new law codifying presidential powers of worldwide indefinite detention and an expanded statutory defintion of the War on Terror.

* Construction neared completion for a sprawling new site in Utah for the National Security Agency to enable massive domestic surveillance and to achieve “the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration.”

* President Obama authorized the use of “signature” drone strikes in Yemen, whereby the CIA can target people for death “even when the identity of those who could be killed is not known.”

* Harms of Post-9/11 Airline Security Schneier on Security

[Previously] I made two basic arguments about post-9/11 airport security. One, we are not doing the right things: the focus on airports at the expense of the broader threat is not making us safer. And two, the things we are doing are wrong: the specific security measures put in place since 9/11 do not work. Kip Hawley doesn’t argue with the specifics of my criticisms, but instead provides anecdotes and asks us to trust that airport security—and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in particular—knows what it’s doing.

He wants us to trust that a 400-ml bottle of liquid is dangerous, but transferring it to four 100-ml bottles magically makes it safe. He wants us to trust that the butter knives given to first-class passengers are nevertheless too dangerous to be taken through a security checkpoint. He wants us to trust the no-fly list: 21,000 people so dangerous they’re not allowed to fly, yet so innocent they can’t be arrested. He wants us to trust that the deployment of expensive full-body scanners has nothing to do with the fact that the former secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, lobbies for one of the companies that makes them. He wants us to trust that there’s a reason to confiscate a cupcake (Las Vegas), a 3-inch plastic toy gun (London Gatwick), a purse with an embroidered gun on it (Norfolk, VA), a T-shirt with a picture of a gun on it (London Heathrow) and a plastic light saber that’s really a flashlight with a long cone on top (Dallas/Fort Worth).

The humiliation, the dehumanisation and the privacy violations are also harms. That Mr Hawley dismisses these as mere “costs in convenience” demonstrates how out-of-touch the TSA is from the people it claims to be protecting. Additionally, there’s actual physical harm: the radiation from full-body scanners still not publicly tested for safety; and the mental harm suffered by both abuse survivors and children: the things screeners tell them as they touch their bodies are uncomfortably similar to what child molesters say.

In 2004, the average extra waiting time due to TSA procedures was 19.5 minutes per person. That’s a total economic loss—in –America—of $10 billion per year, more than the TSA’s entire budget. The increased automobile deaths due to people deciding to drive instead of fly is 500 per year. Both of these numbers are for America only, and by themselves demonstrate that post-9/11 airport security has done more harm than good.

2. Voices From the Other Side of the Media

Apr-20-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: What’s the other side? The one the main stream media don’t carry. Mehanna’s speech is hugely moving, utterly cogent, depressingly convincing, essential reading. Barghouti, the Palestinian leader is also convincing on why “apartheid” is the right word. I don’t know of any other to describe this system of rule. I’ve been enjoying Cenk Uygur’s rants… and I haven’t seen that the supreme head of Iran ruled officially that the use of nuclear weapons is forbidden. Curious how all our papers and radio and TV missed that, isn’t it?

* Sentencing Statement By American Tarek Mehanna, Convicted Of Helping Al Qaeda Salon

In one of the most egregious violations of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech seen in quite some time, Tarek Mehanna, an American Muslim, was convicted this week in a federal court in Boston and then sentenced yesterday to 17 years in prison. He was found guilty of supporting Al Qaeda (by virtue of translating Terrorists’ documents into English and expressing “sympathetic views” to the group) as well as conspiring to “murder” U.S. soldiers in Iraq (i.e., to wage war against an invading army perpetrating an aggressive attack on a Muslim nation)…. I urge everyone to read something quite amazing: Mehanna’s incredibly eloquent, thoughtful statement at his sentencing hearing, before being given a 17-year prison term.

In your eyes, I’m a terrorist, and it’s perfectly reasonable that I be standing here in an orange jumpsuit. But one day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the US military in foreign countries, yet somehow I’m the one going to prison for “conspiring to kill and maim” in those countries – because I support the Mujahidin defending those people. They will look back on how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a ”terrorist,” yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to life in the moment she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put her on that witness stand and ask her who the “terrorists” are, she sure wouldn’t be pointing at me.

The government says that I was obsessed with violence, obsessed with ”killing Americans.” But, as a Muslim living in these times, I can think of a lie no more ironic.

* Mustafa Barghouti to J Street: I know you don’t like the word apartheid, but what do you call a system that gives a settler 50 times more water than a Palestinian? via Mondoweiss

On March 26, at the J Street conference in Washington, D.C., Palestinian leader Mustafa Barghouti described apartheid in Palestine to a largely-Jewish audience. As he spoke, you could have heard a pin drop in a room jammed with 500 people hearing about the one-state option. His comments have resonated in the weeks since.

Some people might not like the word apartheid, when we say that we live in a system of apartheid and segregation, and I understand why you wouldn’t like it. Because there is nothing to be proud about having a system of apartheid and segregation in the 21st century. But as Menachem [Klein] said, we actually live in that system. It’s one regime.

What is apartheid? Apartheid is a system where you have two laws, two different laws, for two people living in the same area. If you don’t like the word apartheid, give me an alternative to a situation where a Palestinian citizen is allowed to use no more than 50 cubic meters of water per capital year, while an Israeli illegal settler from the West Bank is allowed to use 2400. How would you classify a situation where the Israeli gdp per capita is about $30,000 while a Palestinian’s gdp per capita is less than $1400?

Yet we are obliged to pay the same prices for products as Israelis do. More than that: We are obliged to pay double the price for electricity and water that Israelis do though they make 30 times more than we do.

* Khamenei’s Fatwa against Nukes (Cenk Uygur Rant) via Informed Comment

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks on the progressive network Current TV gives us an insightful rant on Big TV News’ lack of interest in Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s fatwa declaring making, stockpiling and using nuclear weapons a sin. He points out that you almost never hear about this fatwa on television news, and performs a thought experiment. How often would a fatwa to the opposite effect have been mentioned?

3. Stratfor & Wikileaks

Mar-02-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Wikileaks this week released 5 million documents from Stratfor, a right-wing research firm. Some chaff, but also some amazing stories. The first one is just mind-blowing.

* No Honour among Thieves Arms Merchants Ynet

WikiLeaks has released an e-mail exchange between employees of Stratfor, the US-based global intelligence company, which reveals Israel and Russia made a deal to swap access codes for defense and surveillance equipment.

According to the leaked document, Israel gave Russia the “data link codes” for unmanned aerial vehicles that the Jewish state sold to Georgia, and in return, Russia gave Israel the codes for Tor-M1 missile defense systems that Russia sold Iran.

* Top 5 Stratfor Revelations Juan Cole Informed Comment

Wikileaks is publishing internal memos of the Stratfor security analysis firm. A few tidbits have emerged in these very early days, to wit:

1. Up to 12 Pakistani active-duty and retired officers from the Inter-Services Intelligence agency knew that Usama Bin Laden was in Abbottabad and were in regular contact with him. The Pakistani chief of staff is denying the report.

2. Dow Chemicals hired Stratfor to spy on activists in Agra who continue to protest over the Bhopal environmental disaster that blinded many workers and destroyed their health. I.e., Stratfor was not just doing analysis but was involved in private intelligence operations against civil society groups that had a right to protest.

3. Stratfor Vice President Fred Burton, a former State Department official involved in counter-terrorism, lamented that in the old days the US would simply have assassinated Venezuelan leftist leader Hugo Chavez and Bolivian leftist leader Evo Morales.

* Wikileaks’ Stratfor Dump Lifts Lid On Intelligence-Industrial Complex Pratap Chatterjee Guardian

What price bad intelligence? …The most striking revelation from the latest disclosure is not simply the military-industrial complex that conspires to spy on citizens, activists and trouble-causers, but the extremely low quality of the information available to the highest bidder. Clients of the company include Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, as well as US government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Marines.

Analysts working on the Middle East for the company appeared to be very poorly informed, with no more experience than a semester of studying abroad, according to journalists who have studied the documents. “They used Google translate to read al-Akbar news articles,” says an incredulous Jamal Ghosn, associate editor of that newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon. “This is a guaranteed way for good intelligence to be lost in translation.”

Mike Bonnano of the Yes Men, a group of international pranksters who impersonate corporate executives and government leaders to highlight environmental and social abuses, was astonished to discover that his group was being tracked by Stratfor, which was apparently making money selling a list of his public-speaking engagements.

4. US Decline: As Seen By Chomsky

Feb-17-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Every website I went to this week had reposts of these two major pieces by Chomsky. That’s a slight hyperbole, but Google reports over 1000 reposts already of these two. As always, Noam is scathing, cogent, and specific about the ongoing decline of the American Empire.

* “Losing” the World Noam Chomsky NationofChange

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated — Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.

At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops. … The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When the war ended eight horrendous years later, mainstream opinion was divided between those who described the war as a “noble cause” that could have been won with more dedication, and at the opposite extreme, the critics, to whom it was “a mistake” that proved too costly. By 1977, President Carter aroused little notice when he explained that we owe Vietnam “no debt” because “the destruction was mutual.”

There are important lessons in all this for today, even apart from another reminder that only the weak and defeated are called to account for their crimes. One lesson is that to understand what is happening we should attend not only to critical events of the real world, often dismissed from history, but also to what leaders and elite opinion believe, however tinged with fantasy.

* The Imperial Way Noam Chomsky Truthout

In the years of conscious, self-inflicted decline at home, “losses” continued to mount elsewhere. In the past decade, for the first time in 500 years, South America has taken successful steps to free itself from western domination, another serious loss. The region has moved towards integration, and has begun to address some of the terrible internal problems of societies ruled by mostly Europeanized elites, tiny islands of extreme wealth in a sea of misery. They have also rid themselves of all U.S. military bases and of IMF controls.

A newly formed organization, CELAC, includes all countries of the hemisphere apart from the U.S. and Canada. If it actually functions, that would be another step in American decline, in this case in what has always been regarded as “the backyard.”

Even more serious would be the loss of the MENA countries — Middle East/North Africa — which have been regarded by planners since the 1940s as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Control of MENA energy reserves would yield “substantial control of the world,” in the words of the influential Roosevelt advisor A.A. Berle.

3. Sacrificing Freedom for Security

Jan-13-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Once the US was a country in which one was innocent till proven guilty, and in which there was the rule of law. Well, we aren’t in that particular state of Kansas any more. Ben Franklin said it first, “Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.” Sometimes the sacrifices are farcical (the TSA confiscated a cupcake this week, claiming the icing was a gel and could be explosive!) but sometimes (habeus corpus, state-sponsored terrorism in Iran, etc). And the language, as Orwell once noted presciently, is always revealing. If your term for dead innocents is “bugsplat”, are you still fully human?

* He Signed It on the Dotted Line Alexander Cockburn NationofChange

Sacrificial offerings to the Pentagon aren’t news. But this time, snugly ensconced in the NDAA, came ratification by legal statute of the exposure of U.S. citizens to arbitrary arrest without subsequent benefit of counsel and to possible torture and imprisonment sine die. Goodbye, habeas corpus. I wrote about this here before Obama signed the bill, but when a president tears up the Constitution the topic is worth revisiting.

We’re talking about citizens within the borders of the United States, not sitting in a hotel or out driving in some foreign land. In the latter case, as the late Anwar al-Awlaki’s incineration in Yemen bore witness a few months ago, that the well-being or summary demise of a U.S. citizen is contingent upon a secret determination of the president as to whether the aforementioned citizen is waging a war of terror on the United States. If the answer is in the affirmative, the citizen can be killed on the president’s say-so without further ado.

We’re also most emphatically not talking about non-U.S. citizens or possibly even legal residents (though I’d urge green card holders to file for citizenship ASAP). Non-citizens get thrown in the Supermax without a prayer of having a lawyer. Under the terms of the NDAA, a suspect’s seizure by the military is a “requirement” if the suspect is deemed to have been “substantially supporting” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces.”

* What Civilization Means Andrew Sullivan – The Daily Beast

Here’s how Rick Santorum responded to these kinds of killings:

On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly.

…Here’s the response from the Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai:

I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding a tear.

Not even for his fatherless child? Or wife? Here’s Greenwald’s account of one of the previous assassinations:

In November, 2010, two separate car bombs exploded within minutes of each other on the same day, one that killed nuclear scientist Majid Shahriar and wounded his wife, and the other which wounded another nuclear scientist, Fereidoun Abbasi, along with his wife. Then, in July of last year, Darioush Rezaei, 35, was shot dead and his wife was wounded by two gunmen firing from motorcycles outside of their daughter’s kindergarten.

I fear sometimes that we have badly lost our way here. When Americans rejoice in the assassination of scientists, they have lost their moral compass. When they cannot shed a tear for a dead man’s wife or child, they are becoming dangerously close to the barbarians they claim to be fighting.

* ‘Bugsplat’: The Civilian Toll Of War Robert Koehler Baltimore Sun

And, according to a 2003 Washington Post story, it’s …casual terminology among Pentagon operation planners and the like to refer to the collateral damage itself … you know, the dead civilians. CIA drone operators talk about bugsplat. The British organization Reprieve calls its effort to track the number of people killed by U.S. drone strikes — in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen — Project Bugsplat.

It’s a term I’ve only recently come across, but I can’t get it out of my head. The only way I know how to begin thinking about it is to quote that passage from Rupert Ross’ extraordinary book about Native American wisdom, “Returning to the Teachings,” and contemplate the idea of a people who have “no language for insulting other orders of existence.” Such a thought, it seems to me, is worth sitting with for a while, especially as we read or listen to the news and behold the daily unfolding of our casual disrespect for every order of existence, including our own.

Mr. Ross goes on to talk about “the core teaching that all aspects of Creation were essential, none were superior and each must be respected if all are to survive.”What if this is actually true? What if this is the depth at which we need to transform ourselves, not merely personally but at every level of our interaction with the world, including geopolitically?

5. “Ding-Dong, the Hitch is Dead”

Dec-23-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The Romans had a phrase, “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” (of the dead, speak nothing but good). But the recently departed Chris Hitchens was never one to let either truth or taste impede a clever line, so. Amidst the tedious choruses of praise for Hitchens’ unwillingness to ever not say what he was thinking, a few of his contemporaries describe him somewhat differently.

* Regarding Christopher Katha Pollitt, his colleague for 20 years at The Nation

So many people have praised Christopher so effusively, I want to complicate the picture even at the risk of seeming churlish. His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nationcruise, interns (especially female interns). Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking.

So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reporting—the sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id. Women aren’t funny. Women shouldn’t need to/want to/get to have a job. The Dixie Chicks were “fucking fat slags” (not “sluts,” as he misremembered later). And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as “possessive individualism.” I don’t suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that.

* What’s With All The Adulation?Glen Greenwald Salon

I rarely wrote about Hitchens because, at least for the time that I’ve been writing about politics (since late 2005), there was nothing particularly notable about him. When it came to the defining issues of the post-9/11 era, he was largely indistinguishable from the small army of neoconservative fanatics eager to unleash ever-greater violence against Muslims: driven by a toxic mix of barbarism, self-loving provincialism, a sense of personal inadequacy, and, most of all, a pity-inducing need to find glory and purpose in cheering on military adventures and vanquishing some foe of historically unprecedented evil even if it meant manufacturing them. … Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading.

The blood on his hands — and on the hands of those who played an even greater, more direct role in all of this totally unjustified killing of innocents — is supposed to be ignored because he was an accomplished member in good standing of our media and political class. It’s a way the political and media class protects and celebrates itself: our elite members are to be heralded and their victims forgotten. One is, of course, free to believe that. But what should not be tolerated are prohibitions on these types of discussions when highly misleading elegies are being publicly implanted, all in order to consecrate someone’s reputation for noble greatness even when their acts are squarely at odds with that effort.

* Do Not Judge Public Figures On How “Nice” They Are Ian Welsh

I don’t, personally, think Hitchens was brilliant most of the time, but let’s say he was. So what? He helped commit the same war crime Nazis were hung for. In a just world, he would have been hung or locked up for life, alongside Henry Kissinger, whom he hated and George Bush, whose policies he helped push.

Contemptible. If you knew him personally, I can forgive your love of him, I have loved evil people. But an intellectual has the responsibility to separate those personal feelings from judgement. Hitchens was an evil man. Helping kill large numbers of people in an unprovoked war is not just a war crime, it is, as was noted at Nuremburg, the crime from which all war crimes come — every rape, every death, every person who lost their home, every person tortured with power drills in Iraq, every dead child—those are Hitchens legacy.

The refusal to hold people responsible for the entirely forseeable results of policies they work hard to enable is also evil. It is at the root of why you no longer have functioning democracies.

1. Followups

Oct-21-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The US “false flag” claims to have unearthed an Iranian plot are flagging as they look falser. Outside of people whose jobs depend on taking them seriously, no one believes them, and the more the story unravels the phonier it looks. 00bama further exercises his license to kill; this time the victim is a 16 year old US citizen who, the government claims, was a terrorist. No trial, no evidence, just a dead body. Home of the grave. And a clear and simple bar chart shows the air-conditioning budget in Iraq and Afghanistan to be more than the entire NASA budget.

* The FBI Goes Rogue on Iran NationofChange

The FBI’s approach to “terror prevention” rely on spinning crime scenarios so as to lure unsuspecting “terrorists” into a criminal trap.

The recently announced arrest of the American-Iranian, Mansor Arbsibsiar, a “failed used car salesman turned drug peddler (who has a cousin employed by Iran’s Quds Force, the special operations unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards) falls neatly into this MO. The U.S. Justice Department alleges that Arbsibsiar planned to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington. At the same time the Department assures us that… “for the entire operation, the government’s confidential sources were monitored and guided by federal law enforcement agents.” In this case the confidential source was a Drug Enforcement Agency operative, who is himself a convicted felon. According to Gareth Porter, the operative is heard on one of the FBI’s clandestine recording “inducing Arbarsiar to agree to the assassination of the Saudi ambassador.” That is entrapment and it is illegal. The “guides” are FBI agents who are involved in fabricating the crime itself. The result is a guaranteed arrest for the government. As Glenn Greenwald has noted, “nobody can deny its [the Department of Justice] record of excellence in thwarting its own terrorist plots.”

* Obama authorizes assassination of 16-year old U.S Citizen Glen Greenwald Salon

Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people. …Every now and then it’s worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody — certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people’s lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids — in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts.

What’s most striking about this is how little effort is needed to induce America’s political and media elites to acquiesce to it. The government need do nothing more than utter empty nationalistic phrases such as “we’re at war” and “Terrorist!” and this unparalleled, endless state violence all becomes instantly justified.

* AC vs NASA

4. 00bama: Licensed to Kill

Oct-14-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The Times lays it out: Obama has given himself the right to order Americans (or other nationalities) killed, should he judge it necessary “ despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war.” This is so absolutely wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. Here are some fine writers’ attempts, though.

* The Day America Died Counterpunch:

Many expected President Obama to re-establish the accountability of government to law. Instead, he went further than Bush/Cheney and asserted the unconstitutional power not only to hold American citizens indefinitely in prison without bringing charges, but also to take their lives without convicting them in a court of law. Obama asserts that the US Constitution notwithstanding, he has the authority to assassinate US citizens, who he deems to be a “threat,” without due process of law. In other words, any American citizen who is moved into the threat category has no rights and can be executed without trial or evidence.

On September 30 Obama used this asserted new power of the president and had two American citizens, Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan murdered.

* Secret U.S. Memo Made Legal Case to Kill a Citizen New York Times

The memo, written last year, followed months of extensive interagency deliberations and offers a glimpse into the legal debate that led to one of the most significant decisions made by President Obama — to move ahead with the killing of an American citizen without a trial.

The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis.

* Obama Thinks He Has The Right To Kill You If He Wants Undernews

It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki. No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was “considering” indicting him). Despite substantial doubt among Yemen expertsabout whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. When Awlaki’s father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were “state secrets” and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts. He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner. When Awlaki’s inclusion on President Obama’s hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that “it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.”

Sept 9th, 2011 :: Year 8, Issue 25

Sep-09-2011 | Comments (0)

1. 9/11: The International Results

Bird’s Eye: Three sections on 9.11 this week (and at that we didn’t rerun the iconic pictures!) We look at the effects internationally, at the effects internally, and at the growing fight to regain those freedoms we have lost. Internationally, we start with a blazingly insightful Robert Fisk, who explores the unasked question: Why? Chomsky gives an accurate overview on the decade, and explores some of the roads not taken, and Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Beast) asks if we let Bin Laden win… but concludes that we let our fear win, and concludes that, “Until we decide to grasp hope again, the war will live on. Within us all.”

* For 10 Years, We’ve Lied To Ourselves To Avoid Asking The One Real Question Robert Fisk The Independent (Thanks, Antonia!)

By their books, ye shall know them.

I’m talking about the volumes, the libraries – nay, the very halls of literature – which the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001 have spawned. Many are spavined with pseudo-patriotism and self-regard, others rotten with the hopeless mythology of CIA/Mossad culprits, a few (from the Muslim world, alas) even referring to the killers as “boys”, almost all avoiding the one thing which any cop looks for after a street crime: the motive.

Why so, I ask myself, after 10 years of war, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, lies and hypocrisy and betrayal and sadistic torture by the Americans – our MI5 chaps just heard, understood, maybe looked, of course no touchy-touchy nonsense – and the Taliban? Have we managed to silence ourselves as well as the world with our own fears? Are we still not able to say those three sentences: The 19 murderers of 9/11 claimed they were Muslims. They came from a place called the Middle East. Is there a problem out there?

* Was There an Alternative? Looking Back on 9/11 a Decade Later Noam Chomsky

We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1st, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo.

A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S. “He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them,” Eric Margolis writes. “’Bleeding the U.S.,’ in his words.” The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap… Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction… may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States” — particularly when the debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with the collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.

* Did Osama Win? Andrew Sullivan

...I was, like most of us, simply terrorized. And it’s only now, a decade later, that I’ve come to see how significant that feeling was, how transformative it would become. We often talk about terror in terms of the terrorist. We do so less in terms of the terrorized. But it was how this act changed those of us who were bystanders that made this event more awful than a mere mass murder. It was mass murder as theater and as threat.

It took months for this initial trauma to ebb, years for my psyche to regain its equilibrium. And it took me close to a decade to realize just how slickly Osama bin Laden had done his evil work, how insidiously his despicable performance art had reached into my mind and altered it, how carefully he had set the trap and how guilelessly I—we—had walked right into it.

We need to understand that 9/11 worked. It worked as a tactic to induce American self-destruction, even if it failed spectacularly as a strategy to advance Al Qaeda—and its heretical message of suicidal warfare—across the globe.

2. 9/11: The Domestic Results

Sep-09-2011 | Comments (0)

ird’s Eye: “Follow the money,” said Deep Throat to Bob Woodward. $42 million to raise Islamophobic fears in America (and Zadie Smith talks about the effects on her community). As a member of the NYFD says, ““The intersection of 9/11 and money is a busy intersection,” and we look at some of the players on that corner. Photographers can be detained these days “for taking pictures with no apparent aesthetic value”, as Stephen Harper plans to bring back draconian antiterrorist laws, possibly so as to fill the mega-prisons he’s planning to build.

* $42 Million From Seven Foundations Helped Fuel The Rise Of Islamophobia In America ThinkProgress

The Center for American Progress released a 130-page report today which reveals that more than $42 million from seven foundations over the past decade have helped fan the flames of anti-Muslim hate in America. The authors — Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matt Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and myself — worked to expose the Islamophobia network in depth, name the major players, connect the dots, and trace the genesis of anti-Muslim propaganda. The report, titled “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America,” lifts the veil behind the hate, follows the money, and identifies the names of foundations who have given money, how much they have given, and to whom they have given.

* Race, Religion, and Diversity in London After 9/11 Zadie Smith The New Yorker

Then came the cataclysm. The end of the world for nearly three thousand innocent people. The beginning of a different sort of world for the rest of us. From the epicenter in Manhattan, shock waves rippled across Europe. In North West London, a small but significant change: the stereotype of the Muslim boy was transformed. From quiet, sexless, studious child—sitting in the back of class and destined for an engineering degree—to Public Enemy No.1

*9|11: The Winners Village Voice

The September 11, 2001 attacks have been a symbol of many things and many causes, but like the lavish, flag-draped rebuilding of the site, it has also been a vehicle for enrichment. From corporations to politicians to government officials to nonprofits to the security industry to publishers to the health industry (not to mention the incidents of outright fraud over the years), many people have found ways to profit from one of the nation’s biggest disasters. 9/11 has created an economy all its own.“The intersection of 9/11 and money is a busy intersection,” says retired New York City firefighter Kenny Specht.

* Harper Plans To Bring Back Extraordinary Anti-Terror Powers For Police canada.com

Controversial clauses expanding the powers of police to combat terrorism are going to be reintroduced by the new Conservative majority government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in an interview with CBC. Harper said for the first time since the Tories took control of the House of Commons the government plans to bring back measures in the Anti-Terrorism Act that expired in 2007.

“We think those measures are necessary. We think they’ve been useful,” Harper said of the expired parts of the act. “They’re applied rarely, but there are times where they’re needed.”The clauses were part of the act, introduced in 2001, and were required to be renewed every three years. They allowed for preventive detention of suspects for up to 72 hours, granted police the ability to arrest terrorism suspects without a warrant and enabled judges to compel witness to testify.

3. 9/11: Fighting the Security State

Sep-09-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Why fight against those who just want to protect us? Because the Patriot Act in the US has been used 1618 times for drugs, 122 times for fraud, 15 times for terrorism. In the UK, anti-terrorist powers have produced over 100,000 searches, 506 arrests, 0 charges for terrorism. Because the use of torture has irrevocably removed any moral high ground that the brutal 9.11 attacks might have given the West. Because scanners and CCTV cameras simply don’t work.

* “Torture is Wrong and Never Justified” says ex-head of UK M15 Reith Lectures, BBC4

The use of torture is “wrong and never justified”, the former head of the security service MI5 has insisted. Eliza Manningham-Buller said it should be “utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives”. Giving the second of her BBC Radio Reith lectures, she acknowledged recent disclosures about alleged British intelligence operations in Libya would “raise widespread concerns”.

“No-one could justify what went on under Gaddafi’s regime,” she added…She said that the use of torture had not made the world a safer place, adding that the use of water-boarding by the United States was a “profound mistake” and as a result America lost its “moral authority”.

* The Heroism Of The Public Response Has Been Polluted By What Has Been Done To Prevent A Second 9/11 The Independent

The 10th anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers by two hijacked commercial airliners should be a moment of unambiguous moral clarity. In a way, it still is. Through special newspaper supplements and TV documentaries we are reminded (as if we ever could forget) of the horror of that beautiful sunny morning in New York City: the sight of office workers jumping to certain death as a merciful release from incineration; the desperate calls as husbands and wives, parents and children, made what they knew would be their final messages to those they loved and would never see again.

Yet this commemoration is mixed with something else; the feeling that the heroism of the public response to the horror of that day has been foully polluted by what has been done in our name to prevent a second 9/11. This is encapsulated by the revelations from documents discovered in abandoned buildings in Tripoli, appearing to show the complicity of the British Government in the rendition of a suspected Islamist terrorist from Hong Kong, into the hands of Colonel Gaddafi’s interrogators…. This, of course, was all part of the “war on terror”.

* Germany Kiboshes Body Scanners At Airports The Local

Body scanners being tested at Hamburg Airport are so error prone that the German government has decided not to introduce them across the country for the time being. The so-called backscatter scanners are supposed to show whether passengers are concealing dangerous items on their bodies. They are broadly similar to “naked” scanners already used in many US airports. The testing in Hamburg from September to the end of July was meant to be the prelude to a nationwide rollout.

But the German scanners had an error rate of 54 percent, according to government officials, who said that wrinkles in clothing or even perspiration caused false alarms. That meant security personnel were forced to waste an untold amount of time subsequently searching passengers by hand for no reason.

* Why CCTV Has Failed To Deter Criminals? Cory Doctorow The Guardian

The real story for me is about surveillance, and not the mere use of CCTV footage to apprehend rioters after the fact. It’s about the total failure of CCTV to deter people from committing crimes in the first place….The theory of street crime as a rational act is bankrupt. Evidence-led CCTV deployment shows us where CCTV does work, and that’s in situations where crimes are planned, not pulled off in the heat of the moment…. After the London riots, one thing is certain: anyone promoting CCTVs for deterrence is most likely selling something, probably CCTVs

1. The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

May-06-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: We have two sections on OBL’s death. The first looks at the real-politick: does it change anything, and if so what and how? Part two looks at the reactions to his death and the wider implication of targeted assassination as a tool. Juan Cole debunks some of the myths circulating around; Robert Fisk muses on the meaning of Bin Laden (whom he had interviewed three times). Al Jazeera supports on Fisk’s argument that Bin Laden was way past his “best by date” and the NY Times lets the people decide who good and how important OBL’s death is.

* Top Ten Myths about Bin Laden’s Death Juan Cole Informed Comment

New details of the operation against Usama Bin Laden have emerged. Here are the myths that people keep bombarding me with and which are now known to be untrue.

… 3. The intelligence that allowed the identification of Bin Laden’s courier, which led the CIA to the safe house in Abbottabad, was gained through waterboarding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. It was not. The information was elicited during conversations with the detainees.

…. 8. Bin Laden was assassinated. He was not. First of all, he was the leader of a para-statal organization that had declared war on the United States. …The SEALs fired only when he made a threatening move, which is a form of self-defense. There is every reason to believe that the US would have preferred to take Bin Laden alive, since they could have then interrogated him about ongoing terrorism plans.

* Was he betrayed? Of course. Pakistan knew Bin Laden’s hiding place all along Robert Fisk The Independent

A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday. And then the world went mad.

Fresh from providing us with a copy of his birth certificate, the American President turned up in the middle of the night to provide us with a live-time death certificate for Osama bin Laden, killed in a town named after a major in the army of the old British Empire. A single shot to the head, we were told. But the body’s secret flight to Afghanistan, an equally secret burial at sea? The weird and creepy disposal of the body – no shrines, please – was almost as creepy as the man and his vicious organisation.

But the mass revolutions in the Arab world over the past four months mean that al-Qa’ida was already politically dead. Bin Laden told the world – indeed, he told me personally – that he wanted to destroy the pro-Western regimes in the Arab world, the dictatorships of the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis. He wanted to create a new Islamic Caliphate. But these past few months, millions of Arab Muslims rose up and were prepared for their own martyrdom – not for Islam but for freedom and liberty and democracy. Bin Laden didn’t get rid of the tyrants. The people did. And they didn’t want a caliph.

* Osama’s death ‘a good career move’? Al Jazeera English

For Osama bin Laden, violent death must have come as a blessing. It has given him, at least fleetingly, a seeming prominence that in fact had long since ebbed away, not only in the Muslim world, but even within al-Qaeda itself…. One supposes that for bin Laden, if he had any clear conception of his place in the world nearly 10 years after the attack which brought him to global prominence, life must have become unbearable. For the violent extremists whom bin Laden has sponsored and encouraged, it is a mark of pride that they seek death for what they believe. And even for those among them who hide in the shadows, it is with the conviction that they live today to strike at their enemies tomorrow. … Consider, then, what it must have been like for such an ego to fade into functional obscurity. As he was reduced to issuing occasional audio tapes of increasing irrelevance, even the core of the organisation he founded learned to live without him. And the scattered little groups around the globe which had appropriated the al-Qaeda name in fact had little connection to bin Laden’s organisation, and still less to bin Laden himself.

* Death of Osama Bin Laden: How Significant a Moment? New York Times

President Obama’s announcement Sunday night about Osama bin Laden’s death produced an outpouring of reaction. We asked readers the following questions: Was his death significant in our war against terror? And do you have a negative or positive view of this event? Readers — 13,864 of them — answered by plotting a response on the graph and adding a comment to explain the choice. Each light blue dot represents one comment. Darker shades represent multiple comments made on a single point.

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May 4th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 17

**No Tikkunista next week, due to travel plans. Back on May 18th, insh’Allah.**

1. How’s that Global War on Terror Thing Working Out for Ya?

2. Voices From the Other Side of the Media

3. Stratfor & Wikileaks

4. US Decline: As Seen By Chomsky

3. Sacrificing Freedom for Security

5. “Ding-Dong, the Hitch is Dead”

1. Followups

4. 00bama: Licensed to Kill

Sept 9th, 2011 :: Year 8, Issue 25

2. 9/11: The Domestic Results

3. 9/11: Fighting the Security State

1. The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

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