War crimes
I guess the people like Glenn and those who agree with him are just Obama haters?
Archive | Terra Terra Terra!
Iran
Israeli officials told visiting US Joint Chief of Staff Martin Dempsey that it would give President Barack Obama no more than 12 hours notice if and when it attacks Iran, The London Times reported Sunday.
The Netanyahu government also will not coordinate with the United States an attack on the Islamic Republic, according to the report, the latest in a number of supposed scenarios concerning cooperation or lack of it between Jerusalem and Washington.
It is left to speculation whether the rumors are based on facts or are leaked by officials to mask the possibility of secret military coordination.
The London Times said its sources explained that that Israel fears that President Obama would try to torpedo an Israel attack if more notice were given because he is concerned that Iran will respond by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, sparking a rise in the price of oil that could cripple Western economies. If the attack were to occur in the next 10 months, it would put President Obama in a tight spot on the eve of his bid for re-election.
Free people do bad things
An oldie but goodie from my friend Joe Bageant:
My redneck psychotherapist friend Brad Blanton tells me that militarization and open democratic societies do not work together at all and produce pathologies at both the individual and collective levels. Thus we get such conflicted bullshit as the U.S. soldiers being kind to that Iraqi boy wiggling around in his pus stained bed like a bandaged grub because an America bomb took off his arms and legs. “Attention private first class Leroy Rodriquez Jackson! Stand forward and give that dusky little torso with a head a chocolate bar and a Wal-Mart teddy bear. And grin for the camera, for Christ sake! Hey let’s airlift the kid to Germany, mount four metal claws on the stumps, and hang him on the playground monkey bars. Make a great PR shot! One thing for sure, that one won’t ever be driving any suicide car bombs into the compound, right private?” (Heh, heh,heh!)
But you have to feel sorry for Private Jackson. It is his ass that gets caught in the disconnect, as he tries to wrap his head around how to be “lethal and compassionate.” As in “Kill the motherfuckers, but be loving and kind to children as you blow their parents’ guts out onto the sidewalk.” People who kill other people are desensitized. Humans are hardened to the face of suffering; the killing becomes reality, compassion an abstraction. Private Jackson is totally screwed. When he does his soldierly duty of causing misery, death and maiming, he must do it compassionately, according to some hallucination generated in the Pentagon by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The hallucination is transferred through the chain of command until it reaches where the rubber meets the road — then five privates go on trial for hurting an enemy they were specifically trained to kill. Anyone who has ever been in the armed forces understands the certain hypocrisy of the proposition.
For some reason though, civilians, smugly ensconced in their recliners and on barstools, cannot grasp why ignorant kid soldiers do horrible things during wars. I once defended Lynndie England in print and got hundreds of emails demonizing the poor Appalachian mutt girl, saying that she dishonored our “heroes” in Iraq. State generated garbage such as “Lethal and compassionate” works fine for these people, whose entire lives have been spent in the controlled environment of America’s industrial military state marketing messages. All these post-teens in desert camo, the ones making the “good kills”, as an appropriately conducted murder of an Iraqi is deemed military parlance, they are heroes on the TV news. Funny how you cannot see their Clearasil on TV. I have never seen as much acne medicine as when I was in the military during the Nam era, of which this war reminds me greatly.
As James Carroll brilliantly put it in “A Nation Lost” (Boston Globe, 4/22/03):
Photographic celebrations of our young warriors, glorifications of released American prisoners, heroic rituals of the war dead all take on the character of crass exploitation of the men and women in uniform. First they were forced into a dubious circumstance, and now they are themselves being mythologized as its main post-facto justification — as if the United States went to Iraq not to seize Saddam (disappeared), or to dispose of weapons of mass destruction (missing), or to save the Iraqi people (chaos), but ”to support the troops.” War thus becomes its own justification. Such confusion on this grave point, as on the others, signifies a nation lost.
Off the books
Seriously, is it likely that such a murky enterprise was set up without being approved by someone higher up the food chain, like Tenet? Of course not. The question is, did the authorization reach even higher?
The top lawyer at the CIA never approved sending one of its officers to help the New York Police Department create a domestic spying program, raising the possibility that the agency may have violated a ban on domestic spying.
Last August, the Associated Press reported that the CIA had violated that prohibition when it “played a key role in transforming the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit into a cutting edge spy shop dedicated to gathering information on Muslims.”
New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly insisted in October that the arrangement was legal under a 1981 presidential order, which allows the CIA to provide local law enforcement with “specialized equipment, technical knowledge or assistance of expert personnel,” provided the guidelines are spelled out in advance and the agency’s general counsel approves of the arrangement.
The AP is now reporting, however, that according to intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, neither of those things was done in 2002 when then-CIA director George Tenet sent a veteran officer to set up “spying programs that transformed the NYPD into one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies.”
An internal CIA investigation launched in September by newly-appointed Director David Petraeus concluded there had been no wrongdoing, but the AP report casts fresh doubt on that conclusion.The AP story points out that the role of CIA officer Lawrence Sanchez — and of a second, unidentified, CIA officer who succeeded him in 2010 — was “murky,” which enabled US officials to claim his presence did not violate the ban because he was never directly instructed to help set up the spying programs.“Officially, he is there on a sabbatical to observe the NYPD’s management,” the AP story notes.
Isn’t that nice
That they’re so devoted to their jobs:
Undercover police agents in the UK infiltrated environmental groups, had sex with their members, struck up long-term relationships with women in these groups, fathered children with these women, and then abandoned the children.
Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring, the Guardian can reveal.
In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers – whom they have not seen in decades – were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children’s mothers for many years.
The human cost
It’s not just that we’ve killed all those innocent civilians – we’ve destroyed the lives of so many of our own troops while doing it:
WASHINGTON — Suicides among active-duty soldiers hit another record high in 2011, Army officials said on Thursday, although there was a slight decrease if nonmobilized Reserve and National Guard troops were included in the calculation.
The Army also reported a sharp increase, nearly 30 percent, in violent sex crimes last year by active-duty troops. More than half of the victims were active-duty female soldiers ages 18 to 21.
“This is unacceptable,” Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the departing vice chief of staff of the Army, said at a news conference, referring to the jump in violent sex offenses. “We have zero tolerance for this.” General Chiarelli said factors driving the increase in sex crimes were alcohol use and new barracks that offered more privacy. He said it was also possible that reporting of the offenses had increased.
General Chiarelli said that 164 active-duty Army, National Guard, and Reserve troops took their own lives in 2011, compared with 159 in 2010 and 162 in 2009. The increase occurred even as the Army expanded suicide prevention efforts and drug and alcohol counseling, in large part in response to a steady rise in Army suicides that began in 2004.
Julian Assange
In diplomatic cables, the investigation into WikiLeaks by the U.S. government has been called “unprecedented both in its scale and nature.” How much do you know about it?
Since last September, a secret grand jury was empaneled in Alexandria, Virginia. There is no defense counsel. There are four prosecutors, according to witnesses who have been forced to testify before the grand jury. The jury itself is taken from the local area, and Alexandria has the highest density of government and military contractors anywhere in the United States. It is a place where the U.S. government chooses to conduct all national-security grand juries and trials because of that makeup of the jury pool.
The investigation has involved most of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the FBI, the State Department, the United States Army. It has subpoenaed the records of most of my U.S. friends or acquaintances. Under what are called Patriot Act production orders, the government has also asked for their Twitter records, Google accounts and individual ISPs. The laws which they’re working toward an indictment on are the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.
And they’re going after Manning, who is facing a life sentence, to get him to say that you’re a spy?
To be another chess piece on the board in the attack on us. The U.S. government is trying to redefine what have been long-accepted journalistic methods. If the Pentagon is to have its way, it will be the end of national-security journalism in the United States.
How so?
They’re trying to interpret the Espionage Act to say that any two-way communication with a source is a collaboration with a source, and is therefore a conspiracy to commit espionage where classified information is involved. The Pentagon, in fact, issued a public demand to us that we not only destroy everything we had ever published or were ever going to publish in relation to the U.S. government, but that we also stop “soliciting” information from U.S. government employees. The Espionage Act itself does not mention solicitation, but they’re trying to create a new legal precedent that includes a journalist simply asking a source to communicate information. A few years ago, for example, the CIA destroyed its waterboarding interrogation videos. In the Manning hearing, prosecutors described how we had a most-wanted list, which included those interrogation videos if they still existed.
The WikiLeaks site had a “most-wanted” list of stories you were eager to get?
This list was not put together by us. We asked for nominations from human rights activists and journalists from around the world of the information they most wanted, and we put that on a list. The prosecution in the Manning hearing has been attempting to use that list as evidence of our solicitation of information that is likely to be classified, and therefore our complicity in espionage, if we received such information.
From a journalist’s perspective, a list like that would be the equivalent of a normal editorial meeting where you list the crown jewels of stories you’d love to get.
Exactly.
So if you’re going to jail, then Bob Woodward’s going to jail.
Individuals like Sy Hersh and Dana Priest and Bob Woodward constantly say to their sources, “Hey, what about this, have you heard anything about it? I heard that there’s been an airstrike in Afghanistan that’s killed a bunch of civilians – do you have any more details, and can you prove them with paper?” And all those would be defined as conspiracy to commit espionage under the Pentagon’s interpretation.
Given the broader implications, it’s surprising that you haven’t received much support from what you call the “Anglo-American press.” In fact, The New York Times and The Guardian, both of which collaborated with you on releasing some of the documents, have done their best to distance themselves from you.
The Times ran in the face of fire; it abandoned us once the heat started from the U.S. administration. In doing so, it also abandoned itself, and it abandoned all journalists working on national-security journalism in the United States.
[...]
Whodunnit?
Who’s killing the Iranian nuclear scientists? Probably the U.S. Kinder, gentler foreign policy! Thank you, Department of Pre-Crime!
Terrorism
Minnesota has a very large Somali population, and this is a very stupid thing.
No nukes
It’s been coming from all sides as if it’s a settled fact, so it’s interesting that Leon Panetta says Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons:
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta let slip on Sunday the big open secret that Washington war hawks don’t want widely known: Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.
Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Panetta admitted that despite all the rhetoric, Iran is not pursuing the ability to split atoms with weapons, saying it is instead pursuing “a nuclear capability.”
That “capability” falls in line with what Iran has said for years: that it is developing nuclear energy facilities, not nuclear weapons.
“I think the pressure of the sanctions, the diplomatic pressures from everywhere, Europe, the United States, elsewhere, it’s working to put pressure on them,” Panetta explained on Sunday. “To make them understand that they cannot continue to do what they’re doing. Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that’s what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is, do not develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us.”
Republicans have been beating the drums of war in recent weeks as tensions in the Iranian gulf have soared. Iran has threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil transport hub crucial to global industry, if U.S. warships return to monitor their activities.
Iran said it was planning to hold military exercises in the Strait of Hormuz in the coming weeks, and prior wargames saw the Iranians test missiles that are designed to sink warships.
An Iranian university professor working at a key nuclear facility has been killed in a bomb explosion, the latest in a series of assassinations and attempted killings linked by the country’s authorities to a secret war by Israel and the US to stop the development of what Tehran insists would be a peaceful nuclear capability.
Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, a chemistry expert and a director of the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in central Iran, died after two assailants on a motorcycle attached magnetic bombs to his car, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.
Two other Iranian nationals were reported injured in the blast, which comes at a time of rising international tension.
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