DONETSK, Ukraine — The Ukrainian Army appears to have fired cluster munitions on several occasions into the heart of Donetsk, unleashing a weapon banned in much of the world into a rebel-held city with a peacetime population of more than one million, according to physical evidence at the scene and interviews with witnesses and victims.
Sites where rockets fell in the city on Oct. 2 and Oct. 5 showed clear signs that cluster munitions had been fired from the direction of army-held territory, where misfired artillery rockets still containing cluster bomblets were found by villagers in farm fields.
The two attacks wounded at least six people and killed a Swiss employee of the International Red Cross based in Donetsk.
If confirmed, the use of cluster bombs by the pro-Western government could complicate efforts to reunite the country, as residents of the east have grown increasingly bitter over the Ukrainian Army’s tactics to oust pro-Russian rebels.
No, this does not mean Bush was right. They were old chemical weapons, improperly disposed of during the first Gulf invasion. But it is a harrowing story, not the least of which is the concept that we “support the troops.”
Now let’s see if they ever write about the depleted uranium.
“I am a deeply ignorant and cloistered old man,” should be the next sentence, “and no one should pay me for my views and opinions, because they are worthless.”…
This Richard Cohen column — and perhaps all Richard Cohen columns — should be read as a memo to Jeff Bezos, the new owner of the Post. Cohen is saying, perhaps subconsciously, that he has nothing to offer the Washington Post. He adds no value. “Buy me out,” Richard Cohen begs, between the lines. “Pay me to go away and stop embarrassing this once respected newspaper.” How much will it take? I am not sure, but Jeff Bezos is a very rich man, and I think he can afford it. Indeed, if his mission is to invest in quality journalism, paying Richard Cohen to go away would be one of the quickest and simplest ways to advance that mission.
Why do Americans hate beheadings but love drone killings? What accounts for our irrational response to these two very different forms of illegal execution, one very profitable and high-tech, usually resulting in many collateral deaths and injuries, and the other very low-tech, but provoking fear and righteous condemnation from the citizens whose country prefers the high-tech?
The answer lies in human psychology. And probably like the old observation about history, people who refuse to understand human psychology are doomed to be victims of psychological manipulation. How is it that even members of peace groups have now come to support U.S. bombing?
One woman framed the issue like this: “I request that we discuss and examine why the videotaped beheading of a human being is understood to be more egregious than the explosion (almost totally invisible to the public) of a human being by a missile or bomb fired from a drone.”
Ah yes, I remember when the Obamabots kept explaining to me how much we needed the constitutional law professor in the White House, so fake wars would never happen again! Funny, how few of them admit they were wrong. Glenn Greenwald:
Even more remarkable, it turns out the very existence of an actual “Khorasan Group” was to some degree an invention of the American government. NBC’s Engel, the day after he reported on the U.S. government’s claims about the group for Nightly News, seemed to have serious second thoughts about the group’s existence, tweeting:
Indeed, a Nexis search for the group found almost no mentions of its name prior to the September 13 AP article based on anonymous officials. There was one oblique reference to it in a July 31 CNN op-ed by Peter Bergen. The other mention was an article in the LA Times from two weeks earlier about Pakistan which mentioned the group’s name as something quite different than how it’s being used now: as “the intelligence wing of the powerful Pakistani Taliban faction led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur.” Tim Shorrock notedthat the name appears in a 2011 hacked Stratfor email published by WikiLeaks, referencing a Dawn article that depicts them as a Pakistan-based group which was fighting against and “expelled by” (not “led by”) Bahadur.
There are serious questions about whether the Khorasan Group even exists in any meaningful or identifiable manner. Aki Peritz, a CIA counterterrorism official until 2009, told Time: “I’d certainly never heard of this group while working at the agency,” while Obama’s former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said: ”We used the term [Khorasan] inside the government, we don’t know where it came from….All I know is that they don’t call themselves that.” As The Intercept was finalizing this article, former terrorism federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Reviewthat the group was a scam: “You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan … had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.”
What happened here is all-too-familiar. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.
So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda™, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS™. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of “hardened terrorists,” posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the “final stages” of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could “launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.””
As usual, anonymity was granted to U.S. officials to make these claims. As usual, there was almost no evidence for any of this. Nonetheless, American media outlets — eager, as always, to justify American wars — spewed all of this with very little skepticism. Worse, they did it by pretending that the U.S. government was trying not to talk about all of this — too secret! — but they, as intrepid, digging journalists, managed to unearth it from their courageous “sources.” Once the damage was done, the evidence quickly emerged about what a sham this all was. But, as always with these government/media propaganda campaigns, the truth emerges only when it’s impotent.
In a Congressional hearing last year, Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown professor and former Pentagon official under President Obama, explained how the administration sees drone strikes thusly: “Right now we have the executive branch making a claim that it has the right to kill anyone, anywhere on Earth, at any time, for secret reasons based on secret evidence, in a secret process undertaken by unidentified officials. That frightens me.”
It frightens John Oliver too, who spent fifteen minutes last night laying out exactly why the US drone program is so disturbing. Among the highlights:
* Military-age males killed in strikes are allegedly considered guilty of being “militants” by the CIA until proven innocent.
* The US government doesn’t actually know the specific identities of many people it kills, or indeed how many people it has killed overall.
According to the Justice Department, for something to be an imminent threat justifying a strike “does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” despite, as Oliver notes, that being “what the fucking word imminent means.”
“It is completely natural for us not to want to think about the consequences of our drone program,” Oliver concludes, after airing testimony from a 13-year-old drone strike survivor. “But when children from other countries are telling us we’ve made them fear the sky, it might be time to ask some hard questions.”
U.S. veteran communities are reportedly grieving at news of the suicide of Jacob George, a three-tour veteran of America’s last decade-plus of war, after he failed to find relief from physical and mental injuries he sustained in battle. In a clip from a veterans event last year, he spoke of his experience with various types of therapy and performed his original song, “Soldier’s Heart.”
George’s suicide occurred after President Obama announced new war plans against the militant group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
In his presentation, which is viewable below, George spoke of the limitations of the Department of Veterans Affairs, which he said “isn’t designed to address the depths of the wounds we have.” The VA doesn’t “really look at the soul and how the soul has been injured in war.”
George regarded antiwar work as the most important part of his recovery. “I marched with my brothers and sisters to the NATO summit and I threw my medals back. And the act of throwing released something inside of me. I don’t know what it is. I’m still trying to figure it out. But it played a role in healing my soul.”
His therapist noted that “the VA could never endorse something like that. Because it’s so politically loaded. … The VA couldn’t say ‘Hey, look, you need to organize a protest. You need to march to the Pentagon with 100,000 veterans.’ ”
George responded: “Do you hear what you’re saying? You’re telling me that you can’t offer me the actual healing rituals and ceremonies that I need, that an entire generation of people needs in order to heal their soul.”
Because if we acknowledged that Israel has illegal nukes, we’s look pretty silly going after other Middle Eastern nations for the same thing, amirite?
Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Former CIA director Robert Gates said so during his 2006 Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of defense, when he noted — while serving as a university president — that Iran is surrounded by “powers with nuclear weapons,” including “the Israelis to the west.” Former President Jimmy Carter said so in 2008 and again this year, in interviews and speeches in which he pegged the number of Israel’s nuclear warheads at 150 to around 300.
But due to a quirk of federal secrecy rules, such remarks generally cannot be made even now by those who work for the U.S. government and hold active security clearances. In fact, U.S. officials, even those on Capitol Hill, are routinely admonished not to mention the existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal and occasionally punished when they do so.
The policy of never publicly confirming what a scholar once called one of the world’s “worst-kept secrets” dates from a political deal between the United States and Israel in the late 1960s. Its consequence has been to help Israel maintain a distinctive military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the scrutiny — and occasional disapprobation — directed at the world’s eight acknowledged nuclear powers.
But the U.S. policy of shielding the Israeli program has recently provoked new controversy, partly because of allegations that it played a role in the censure of a well-known national laboratory arms researcher in July, after he published an article in which he acknowledged that Israel has nuclear arms. Some scholars and experts are also complaining that the government’s lack of candor is complicating its high-profile campaign to block the development of nuclear arms in Iran, as well as U.S.-led planning for a potential treaty prohibiting nuclear arms anywhere in the region. Continue reading “Kumquats”→
The subject gets little publicity nowadays, but until the mid-1990s, the US Air Force openly funded research on how to destroy human eyeballs at a distance with lasers. At the time, the justification was that such a technology—causing permanent blindness—was no worse than burning people with napalm, irradiating them, or blasting them to bits with bombs.
The research got quite far along; in 1995, Human Rights Watch identified at least 10 different laser blinding programs of concern, which the military ran under the names “laser countermeasure system,” BOSS, Persuader, LX-5, Saber 203, TLOS, Green Laser, Nighthawk, and Y-Blue, among others. In that same year a treaty, the New Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, was adopted by the United Nations; it banned such weaponry, and Bulletin contributing editorWilliam Arkin penned a full-page story applauding the ban. He wrote: “The humanitarian considerations of this potentially horrific new chapter in warfare far outweighed the minor—and redundant—military benefit.”
But while the weapon itself was banned, research into laser weaponry was not, so work on it continued, under other rubrics. While I was an editor at a laser magazine in the early 2000s, my colleagues and I attended a year-round litany of multi-day conferences on the latest developments in lasers—and usually found Air Force researchers there, including those in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Modesto, California. (Though located in California, their particular research was funded by the University of Illinois and the US Air Force.) In interviews in the year 2000, they said that technically speaking, they were researching with the aim of protecting America’s soldiers in the field from getting blinded by lasers, and doing so required them to study the precise laser settings that would cause the most damage to the human cornea. (For the record, researchers typically test their laser beams on artificial, eyeball-like tissue grown in petri dishes, which often consist of five layers of epithelial cells, each layer 0.450 nanometers thick.)
Researchers may have been careful to say that they were trying to protect US soldiers, but their logic could be interpreted as a fig leaf to get around the ban, which went into force in 1998. In interviews in 2000, Air Force-funded researchers admitted that it would be easy to turn their work to protect American soldiers around and use it to blind the enemy. It seems that at least part of the military rationale behind the technology is that a dead soldier is just dead, but a blinded one needs the help of others, thus tying up several enemy soldiers at once—similar to the thinking behind the use of landmines to blow off legs and arms.
Military-funded research in this area continues to be conducted by the Optical Radiation Bioeffects and Safety program—which sometimes contracts out the work to outside engineering firms. Research and development is also being conducted by firms such as B.E. Meyers Electro-Optics, makers of a laser device called the Glare Mout Plus, while the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate of the Defense Department leads the Pentagon’s end.
I remember the nasty, often-racist things people said about Rep. Barbara Lee after this vote. But I applauded her. Leave it to a female Congress member to have the cajones to vote against the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) resolution, the same one Obama now plans to use to attack ISIS without a Congressional votes. That’s exactly what Lee predicted.
Very interesting article about her, and the reactions she got. I strongly urge you to read it, but here’s a small piece:
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Lee’s story is how little credit she or her constituents receive for what they got right. Even though a majority now considers the war most understood the AUMF to authorize to be a mistake; even though it has been used to justify military interventions that no one conceived of on September 14, 2001; even though there’s no proof that any war-making of the last 13 years has have made us safer; even though many more Americans have died in wars of choice than have been killed in terrorist attacks; even though Lee and many of her constituents were amenable to capturing or killing the 9/11 perpetrators, not pacifists intent on ruling out any use of force; despite all of that, Representative Lee is still thought of as a fringe peacenik representing naive East Bay hippies who could never be trusted to guide U.S. foreign policy. And the people who utterly failed to anticipate the trajectory of the War on Terrorism? Even those who later voted for a war in Iraq that turned out to be among the most catastrophic in U.S. history are considered sober, trustworthy experts.
People whose plan was to install Western democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq–even today, they’re the ones who aren’t considered naive, and that’s even true in the Democratic Party, where the vice-president, the last two secretaries of state, and the secretary of defense were all supporters of the AUMF and the Iraq War. Lee and many letter writers who supported her were far more prescient in their analysis than Hillary Clinton or John McCain. Try telling the average American that many Berkeley liberals were more correct about the War on Terror than those two. They’ll laugh in your face, even if they personally supported and now oppose those two wars. Many Americans have grappled with their mistaken positions. But how many of those people now take Lee’s foreign policy analysis seriously?
The stand she took on September 14, 2001, is still being vindicated.
Even now, the AUMF gives the White House a free hand to wage war in many countries, just as Lee predicted. And last week, the Obama administration cited the September 14, 2001, AUMF to justify war in Syria without seeking or receiving permission from Congress. The target, ISIS, is a group that did not exist for years after 9/11, one that is explicitly separate from and antagonistic toward al-Qaeda.
In taking this action, Obama is calling for unity.
“I believe we are strongest as a nation when the President and Congress work together… to show the world that Americans are united in confronting this danger,” he said. But Americans are not united. And pressuring Congress to fabricate consensus does not strengthen America, it weakens us, as any student of the recent past should know–especially one who won the presidency touting his opposition to a “stupid” war. Had there been even more dissenters like Lee 13 years ago, had her tiny minority’s warnings been heeded, we’d be stronger today.
Whether offered in the bromides of Obama’s speeches or the ugly rants of Lee’s critics, calls for unanimity have no place in a pluralistic, representative democracy. For all who believe that a president is in error, dissent is patriotic—and useful.
