At a time when sequestration is about to take a big bite out of the Pentagon budget, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will be sending thousands of its citizen lobbyists to Capitol Hill next week to make sure Israel is exempted from any spending cuts.
This could prove a very risky strategy at a time when millions of Americans will be feeling the bite of the sequestration debacle, from the defense budget to the school lunch program.
But not aid to Israel, which will be untouched if AIPAC gets its way.
This resolution could easily backfire and damage Israel far more than any cuts in its very generous grant aid program.
With no agreement between the administration and Congressional Republicans by March 1, sequestration will kick in.The 13,000 expected AIPAC activists will be telling Congress not to touch Israel’s $3-billion-plus annual security assistance and to vote for legislation declaring the Jewish state a “major strategic ally.”
That is a designation not enjoyed by any other nation, JTA pointed out, noting it may be a step toward the goal of some conservatives of divorcing assistance to Israel from all other foreign aid spending.
Category: The Regime
Bradley Manning
Don’t be distracted by the “he took an oath” crowd. The fact is, soldiers are told if they see an illegal act, they’re supposed to report it. (Manning tried.) And they’re still taught about the Geneva Conventions.
If he’d successfully leaked to the New York Times, he’d be hailed as a hero. The fact is, Bradley Manning is a hero. We should be grateful for what he did to help end this Iraq war.
And the liars, crooks and profiteers who got rich and furthered their careers at the expense of the war dead? Why, you can see them every Sunday morning on the talk shows. And the allegedly anti-war constitutional law professor looks on in approval.
The gulag
Remember when we looked down on the Soviets for the human rights violations in their prison camps? Good times!
St. Ronnie
Robert Parry on how Reagan promoted genocide in Central America:
Soon after taking office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s national security team agreed to supply military aid to the brutal right-wing regime in Guatemala to pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but their “civilian support mechanisms,” according to a newly disclosed document from the National Archives.
Over the next several years, the military assistance from the Reagan administration helped the Guatemalan army do just that, engaging in the slaughter of some 100,000 people, including what a truth commission deemed genocide against the Mayan Indians in the northern highlands.
Recently discovered documents at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, also reveal that Reagan’s White House was reaching out to Israel in a scheme to circumvent congressional restrictions on military equipment for the Guatemalan military.
In 1983, national security aide Oliver North (who later became a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal) reported in a memo that Reagan’s Deputy National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane (another key Iran-Contra figure) was approaching Israel over how to deliver 10 UH-1H helicopters to Guatemala to give the army greater mobility in its counterinsurgency war.
According to these documents that I found at the Reagan library – and other records declassified in the late 1990s – it’s also clear that Reagan and his administration were well aware of the butchery underway in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America.
The relaxed attitude toward the Guatemalan regime’s brutality took shape in spring 1981 as Reagan’s State Department “advised our Central American embassies that it has been studying ways to restore a closer, cooperative relationship with Guatemala,” according to a White House “Situation Room Checklist” dated April 8, 1981.
The document added: “State believes a number of changes have occurred which could make Guatemalan leaders more receptive to a new U.S. initiative: the Guatemalans view the new administration as more sympathetic to their problems [and] they are less suspect of the U.S. role in El Salvador,” where the Reagan administration was expanding support for another right-wing regime infamous for slaughtering its political opponents, including Catholic clergy.
Of course
And being treated like heroes probably doesn’t help:
In the first study of its kind, researchers with the Defense Department have found that pilots of drone aircraft experience mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.
“Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews,” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.
1000 days
That Bradley Manning has been detained on suspicion of leaking what our government was up to in Iraq.
Police state
So not only do they fuck up, one of them gets a medal? Well, we give medals to remote drone operators, so why not?
American gulag
I can’t read beyond the first few paragraphs, it’s too upsetting to read what we do to people here in the “civilized” United States of America.
When Jack Powers arrived at maximum-security federal prison in Atlanta in 1990 after a bank robbery conviction, he had never displayed symptoms of or been treated for mental illness. Still in custody a few years later, he witnessed three inmates, believed to be members of the Aryan Brotherhood gang, kill another inmate. Powers tried to help the victim get medical attention, and was quickly transferred to a segregated unit for his safety, but it didn’t stop the gang’s members from quickly threatening him.
Not then. And certainly not after Powers testified (not once but twice) for the federal government against the assailants. The threats against him continued and Powers was soon transferred to a federal prison in Pennsylvania, where he was threatened even after he was put into protective custody. By this time, Powers had developed insomnia and anxiety attacks and was diagnosed by a prison psychologist as suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Instead of giving Powers medicine, or proper mental health therapy, officials transferred him yet again, this time to another federal prison in New Jersey. There, Powers was informed by officials that he would be removed from a witness protection program and transferred back into the prison’s general population. Fearing for his life, Powers escaped. When he was recaptured two days later he was sent to ADX-Florence, part of a sprawling prison complex near Florence, Colorado often referred to as “ADX” or Supermax,” America’s most famous and secure federal prison.
From there, things got worse. The Supermax complex, made up of different secure prison units and facilities, is laden with members of the Brotherhood and Powers was no safer than he had been anywhere else. Over and over again he was threatened at the Colorado prison. Over and over again he injured or mutilated himself in response. Over and over again he was transferred to federal government’s special mental health prison facility in Missouri, diagnosed with PTSD, and given medication. Over and over again that medication was taken away when he came back to Supermax.
As he sits today in Supermax, Powers had amputated his fingers, a testicle, his scrotum and his earlobes, has cut his Achilles tendon, and had tried several times to kill himself. Those tattoos you see? Powers had none until 2009, when he started mutilating with a razor and carbon paper. He did much of this — including biting off his pinkie and cutting skin off his face — in the Control Unit at ADX while prison officials consistently refused to treat his diagnosed mental illness. Rules are rules, prison officials told him, and no prisoners in that unit were to be given psychotropic medicine no matter how badly they needed it.
Wow
So Rand Paul is the only one asking tough questions about targeted killings. We truly are beyond the looking glass
Drone cheerleaders
Our national discourse has become so distorted, attacking children from robot planes is now considered “more humane”:
As you know if you’ve paid attention to recent news, drone war proponents are currently facing inconvenient truths. This month, for instance, they are facing a new United Nations report showing that President Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan War – which is defined, in part, by an escalation in drone airstrikes – is killing hundreds of children “due notably to reported lack of precautionary measures and indiscriminate use of force.” They are also facing news that the rise in drone strikes is accompanying a rise in al-Qaida recruits, proving that, in predictable “blowback” fashion, the attacks may be creating more terrorists than they are neutralizing.
Drone-war cheerleaders will no doubt find this news difficult to explain away on the merits. And so many are trying to change the linguistic foundation of the discourse from one rooted in fact to one rooted in a sophistry that narrows the public’s perception of available choices.
Sen. Angus King’s (I-Maine) comments justifying the drone war last week exemplify the talking points.
“Drones are a lot more civilized than what we used to do,” he told a cable television audience. “I think it’s actually a more humane weapon because it can be targeted to specific enemies and specific people.”
Designed to obscure mounting civilian casualties, King’s Orwellian phrase “humane weapon” is the crux of the larger argument. The idea is that an intensifying drone war is necessary – and even humane! – because it is more surgical than violent global ground war, which is supposedly America’s only other option. As New York Times columnist David Brooks summed it up: drone strikes are great because “they inflict fewer civilian deaths than bombing campaigns, boots on the ground or any practical alternative.” Or, as one drone-war defender put it on Twitter: “Drones? 160,000 pairs of boots on the ground? Hmm.”
In a country whose culture so often (wrongly) portrays bloodshed as the most effective problem solver, many Americans hear this now-ubiquitous drone-war argument and reflexively agree with its suppositions. Having been told in so many ways that killing is the best and only possible policy prescription, most simply assume that our only national security choice is between drone wars and ground wars – between different forms of preemptive violence, and nothing else.