Obama speaks. Three key questions remain unanswered

Obama gave a major policy speech this week, principally addressing the question of the war on terror, drones and Gitmo.    It will be recalled that an outburst by a woman as Obama spoke (see post) attracted almost as much attention as the speech itself.   As this piece on truthdig points out Obama avoided 3 key issues in his speech.

"In the midst of his carefully scripted counterterrorism address Thursday at National Defense University in Washington, D.C., President Obama encountered an unexpected speed bump in the form of Medea Benjamin, the highly animated 60-year-old co-founder of anti-war group Code Pink whose track record for crashing high-profile political events and heckling speakers has earned her the reputation of being the country’s most disruptive protester.

As Obama shifted the focus of his wide-ranging remarks from drone attacks to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, attempting to craft a new and more transparent legal framework for the war on terror and promising an ultimate end to it, Benjamin shouted, “You are commander in chief. You can close Guantanamo today!”

Obama tried to quiet Benjamin, but she persisted, demanding to know with regard to the use of drones if the president valued Muslim lives as much as American ones, and if he would apologize to “the thousands of Muslims that you have killed?” Finally, Benjamin was escorted from the auditorium by a security detail, yelling as she left, “Abide by the rule of law. You’re a constitutional lawyer.”

Although the major media thus far have treated Benjamin’s antics as an amusing sideshow, the questions she raised about the legal basis for the administration’s policies are anything but funny or anywhere close to being resolved. Indeed, far from succeeding as a reassuring second-term milestone, the president’s speech left at least three core issues in the war on terror entirely unsettled"

As for that female interjector?   It was Media Benjamin, of CODEPINK.    She writes exclusively for CommonDreams in "Why I Spoke Out at Obama's Foreign Policy Speech":

"When the President was coming to the end of this speech, he started talking about Guantanamo. As he has done in the past, he stated his desire to close the prison, but blamed Congress. That’s when I felt compelled to speak out. With the men in Guantanamo on hunger strike, being brutally forced fed and bereft of all hope, I couldn’t let the President continue to act as if he were some helpless official at the mercy of Congress.

“Excuse me, Mr. President,” I said, “but you’re the Commander-in-Chief. You could close Guantanamo tomorrow and release the 86 prisoners who have been cleared for release.” We went on to have quite an exchange.

While I have received a deluge of support, there are others, including journalists, who have called me “rude.” But terrorizing villages with Hellfire missiles that vaporize innocent people is rude. Violating the sovereignty of nations like Pakistan is rude. Keeping 86 prisoners in Guantanamo long after they have been cleared for release is rude. Shoving feeding tubes down prisoners' throats instead of giving them justice is certainly rude."

It's a mugs game. They pay tax! The others?

It looks like one can "organise" ones affairs so as to avoid, or at least minimise, the payment of tax. Certainly corporations can, especially if they are multi-national.   Just look at what was revealed about Apple this past week.

"Earlier this week, a Senate panel investigated how Apple avoided billions in taxes through a web of offshore subsidiaries “so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen.” Although the company may have achieved, in the words of Sen. Carl Levin, the “holy grail of tax avoidance,” senators didn’t accuse Apple of doing anything illegal and it is by no means alone in its use of loopholes and gimmicks to avoid paying taxes.

Here’s a list, topped by Apple, of 10 companies that increased their offshore holdings in the past year.

The U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent — one of the highest in the world — but as The New York Times reported yesterday, the effective corporate tax rate (what companies actually pay) “fell to 17.8 percent in 2012 from 42.5 percent in 1960,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Another chart from the Citizens for Tax Justice shows 10 companies that managed to do much better than average, paying little or no taxes for the past five years. Dollar amounts are numbers in millions and “rate” is the effective tax rate that the companies paid."

Israel's IDF: Living in a parellel universe....and, as is customary, lying

Can anyone forget these graphic photos, believe it or not, back in 2000?  

Apart from the question of why it has taken 13 years to investigate and report on the incident, one really has to wonder at least two things.  What universe does Israel's IDF occupy? - and do they really believe that anyone will believe their tripe and lies?    

"Thirteen years after the iconic photo of his shooting helped spark the Second Intifada, Israel has issued a report finding that 12-year-old Muhammad Al-Durra was not killed by Israeli forces, and in fact might not even be dead. Yes. It says that. The new report, focusing on the infamous image of the terrified Muhammad huddling against his father amidst gunfire moments before he slumped to the ground, argues that the shooting was either staged or the fault of Palestinians and has long been unfairly used to justify terrorism and "the delegitimization of Israel." Muhammad is one of nearly 1,400 Palestinian children killed since 2000 as a result of the Israeli occupation. The latest travesty from Israel has sparked outrage from many, here and here. Muhammad's father Jamal's response struck at the broken heart of the matter.

"Israel says my son is not dead? Then let them bring him to me."

Yes, a horrid crime......but was it terrorism?

There can be no doubting that the vicious murder in London a couple of days ago was horrific.    Some aspects are downright bizarre.  But, was it an act of terrorism as it has been labelled by all and sundry, from the British PM downwards?

"It's true that the soldier who was killed yesterday was out of uniform and not engaged in combat at the time he was attacked. But the same is true for the vast bulk of killings carried out by the US and its allies over the last decade, where people are killed in their homes, in their cars, at work, while asleep (in fact, the US has re-defined "militant" to mean "any military-aged male in a strike zone"). Indeed, at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on drone killings, Gen. James Cartwright and Sen. Lindsey Graham both agreed that the US has the right to kill its enemies even while they are "asleep", that you don't "have to wake them up before you shoot them" and "make it a fair fight". Once you declare that the "entire globe is a battlefield" (which includes London) and that any "combatant" (defined as broadly as possible) is fair game to be killed - as the US has done - then how can the killing of a solider of a nation engaged in that war, horrific though it is, possibly be "terrorism"?

When I asked on Twitter this morning what specific attributes of this attack make it "terrorism" given that it was a soldier who was killed, the most frequent answer I received was that "terrorism" means any act of violence designed to achieve political change, or more specifically, to induce a civilian population to change their government or its policies of out fear of violence. Because, this line of reasoning went, one of the attackers here said that "the only reasons we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily" and warned that "you people will never be safe. Remove your government", the intent of the violence was to induce political change, thus making it "terrorism".

That is at least a coherent definition. But doesn't that then encompass the vast majority of violent acts undertaken by the US and its allies over the last decade? What was the US/UK "shock and awe" attack on Baghdad if not a campaign to intimidate the population with a massive show of violence into submitting to the invading armies and ceasing their support for Saddam's regime? That was clearly its functional intent and even its stated intent. That definition would also immediately include the massive air bombings of German cities during World War II. It would include the Central American civilian-slaughtering militias supported, funded and armed by the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s, the Bangledeshi death squads trained and funded by the UK, and countless other groups supported by the west that used violence against civilians to achieve political ends.

The ongoing US drone attacks unquestionably have the effect, and one could reasonably argue the intent, of terrorizing the local populations so that they cease harboring or supporting those the west deems to be enemies. The brutal sanctions regime imposed by the west on Iraq and Iran, which kills large numbers of people, clearly has the intent of terrorizing the population into changing its governments' policies and even the government itself. How can one create a definition of "terrorism" that includes Wednesday's London attack on this British soldier without including many acts of violence undertaken by the US, the UK and its allies and partners? Can that be done?

I know this vital caveat will fall on deaf ears for some, but nothing about this discussion has anything to do with justifiability. An act can be vile, evil, and devoid of justification without being "terrorism": indeed, most of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century, from the Holocaust to the wanton slaughter of Stalin and Pol Pot and the massive destruction of human life in Vietnam, are not typically described as "terrorism". To question whether something qualifies as "terrorism" is not remotely to justify or even mitigate it. That should go without saying, though I know it doesn't.

The reason it's so crucial to ask this question is that there are few terms - if there are any - that pack the political, cultural and emotional punch that "terrorism" provides. When it comes to the actions of western governments, it is a conversation-stopper, justifying virtually anything those governments want to do. It's a term that is used to start wars, engage in sustained military action, send people to prison for decades or life, to target suspects for due-process-free execution, shield government actions behind a wall of secrecy, and instantly shape public perceptions around the world. It matters what the definition of the term is, or whether there is a consistent and coherent definition. It matters a great deal."

Shades from the past....

Credited to Rick McKee, Cagle Cartoons

Amnesty International: Much of the world is not a good place

Amnesty International has issued its annual Report for 2013.   It doesn't make for happy reading.

"Amnesty International says the world has become an increasingly dangerous place for refugees and migrants.

In its annual report, the group said millions were forced to live on the margins of society and allowed to be the targets of "populist rhetoric".

Amnesty said governments were more interested in protecting their own borders than the rights of migrants."
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"The failure to address conflict situations effectively is creating a global underclass," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty's Secretary General.

"The rights of those fleeing conflict are unprotected. Too many governments are abusing human rights in the name of immigration control - going well beyond legitimate border control measures."

Increasingly, there is very little that governments and corporations can do in hiding behind 'sovereign' boundaries”

He added: "These measures not only affect people fleeing conflict. Millions of migrants are being driven into abusive situations, including forced labour and sexual abuse, because of anti-immigration policies which means they can be exploited with impunity. Much of this is fuelled by populist rhetoric that targets refugees and migrants for governments' domestic difficulties."

The report singled out the European Union, saying it implemented border control measures "that put the lives of migrants and asylum-seekers at risk and fails to guarantee the safety of those fleeing conflict and persecution".

"Around the world, migrants and asylum-seekers are regularly locked up in detention centres and in worst case scenarios are held in metal crates or even shipping containers," the report said."
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"The report says 101 countries repressed their people's rights to freedom of expression in 2012, up from 91 out of 155 countries recorded in 2011.

In its summary of events in 2012, Amnesty says numerous nations have failed to address the abuse of women."

Does the USA have a greater involvement in Syria than we know about?

Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, writing in his blog on FP, considers that the USA is much more involved in the Syrian conflict than we are being told.

"Permit me to indulge today in a bit of speculation, for which I don't have a lot of hard evidence. As I read this article yesterday on Hezbollah's involvement in the Syrian civil war, I began to wonder whether U.S. involvement in that conflict isn't more substantial than I have previously thought. And then I did a bit of web surfing and found this story, which seemed to confirm my suspicions. Here's my chain of reasoning:

1. The Syrian conflict has become a proxy fight between the opposition and its various allies (Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Turkey, etc.) and Bashar al-Assad's regime and its various outsider supporters (Iran, Russia, Hezbollah).

2. For Washington, this war has become a golden opportunity to inflict a strategic defeat on Iran and its various local allies and thus shift the regional balance of power in a pro-American direction.

3. Israel's calculations are more complicated, given that it had a good working relationship with the Assad regime and is concerned about a failed state emerging next door. But on balance, a conflict that undermines Iran, further divides the Arab/Islamic world, and distracts people from the continued colonization of the West Bank is a net plus. So Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won't object if the United States gets more deeply engaged.

4. Consistent with its buck-passing instincts, Barack Obama's administration does not want to play a visible role in the conflict. This is partly because Americans are rightly tired of trying to govern war-torn countries, but also because America isn't very popular in the region and anyone who gets too close to the United States might actually lose popular support. So no boots on the ground, no "no-fly zones," and no big, highly visible shipments of U.S. arms. Instead, Washington can use Qatar and Saudi Arabia as its middlemen, roles they are all too happy to play for their own reasons.

5. Since taking office, Obama has shown a marked preference for covert actions that don't cost too much and don't attract much publicity, combined with energetic efforts to prosecute leakers. So an energetic covert effort in Syria would be consistent with past practice. Although there have been news reports that the CIA is involved in vetting and/or advising some opposition groups, we still don't know just how deeply involved the U.S. government is. (There has been a bit of speculation in the blogosphere that the attack on Benghazi involved "blowback" from the Syrian conflict, but I haven't seen any hard evidence to support this idea.)

6. In this scenario, the Obama administration may secretly welcome the repeated demands for direct U.S. involvement made by war hawks like Sen. John McCain. Rejecting the hawks' demands for airstrikes, "no-fly zones," or overt military aid makes it look like U.S. involvement is actually much smaller than it really is.

To repeat: The above analysis is mostly speculative on my part. I have no concrete evidence that the full scenario sketched above is correct, and I don't know what the level of U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war really is. But that's what troubles me: I don't like not knowing what my government is doing, allegedly to make me safer or to advance someone's idea of the "national interest." And if you're an American, neither should you. If the United States is now orchestrating a lot of arms shipments, trying to pick winners among the opposition, sending intelligence information to various militias, and generally meddling in a very complicated and uncertain conflict, don't you think the president owes us a more complete account of what America's public servants are or are not doing, and why?"

Obama and press freedom (?)

Credited tocChristopher Weyant

Yes, Assange is the subject of being fitted up

There seems to be little doubt that Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame- ever the pariah - has been framed.     There is now even evidence of it, as UPI reports.

"WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said messages he got from a British agency included speculation he was framed by Swedish officials seeking his extradition.

The messages from the Government Communications Headquarters, obtained through an official request for information, included discussions by the government eavesdropping agency that speculated he was being framed by Swedish authorities seeking his extradition for questioning on rape allegations, The Guardian reported Sunday.

Assange spoke about the messages Sunday night during an interview with the Spanish television program, "Salvados."

The instant messages to which Assange had access remained unclassified by GCHQ.

Assange has spent the past 11 months in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid arrest and extradition to Sweden. He has maintained his innocence and said he feared he would be extradited to the United States. WikiLeaks posted millions of sensitive military and diplomatic documents and communiques

A GCHQ message from September 2012, read by Assange, allegedly said: "They are trying to arrest him on suspicion of XYZ. ... It is definitely a fit-up. ... Their timings are too convenient."

Assange provided little explanation about exactly who wrote the messages, The Guardian said.

Assange said GCHQ was unaware it may have anything on him that wasn't classified, The Guardian said.

"It won't hand over any of the classified information," he said. "But, much to its surprise, it has some unclassified information on us."

Another instant message conversation, as read by Assange, from August 2012 called the WikiLeaks founder a "fool" if he thought he could wait out Sweden's attempt to extradite him."

The agency confirmed it "responded formally to the subject who made the request. The disclosed material includes personal comments between some members of staff and do not reflect GCHQ's policies or views in any way."

Listening (is anyone?) Afghan voices

Essentially the voices we read and hear in the West in relation to the Afghan war, is those of Westerners, principally peddling the pr handouts from politicians and the military.   But what about Afghan peoples?    What are they thinking, feeling and experiencing?

"Since 2009, Voices for Creative Nonviolence has maintained a grim record we call the “The Afghan Atrocities Update” which gives the dates, locations, numbers and names of Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces.  Even with details culled from news reports, these data can't help but merge into one large statistic, something about terrible pain that's worth caring about but that is happening very far away.

It’s one thing to chronicle sparse details about these U.S. led NATO attacks. It’s quite another to sit across from Afghan men as they try, having broken down in tears, to regain sufficient composure to finish telling us their stories.  Last night, at a restaurant in Kabul, I and two friends from the Afghan Peace Volunteers met with five Pashtun men from Afghanistan’s northern and eastern provinces. The men had agreed to tell us about their experiences living in areas affected by regular drone attacks, aerial bombings and night raids.  Each of them noted that they also fear Taliban threats and attacks. “What can we do,” they asked, “when both sides are targeting us?”





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"The world doesn't seem to ask many questions about Afghan civilians whose lives are cut short by NATO or Taliban forces. Genuinely concerned U.S. friends say they can't really make sense of our list - news stories merge into one large abstraction, into statistics, into "collateral damage," in a way that comparable (if much smaller and less frequent) attacks on U.S. civilians do not.   People here in Afghanistan naturally don’t see themselves as a statistic; they wonder why the NATO soldiers treat civilians as battlefield foes at the slightest hint of opposition or danger; why the U.S. soldiers and drones kill unarmed suspects on anonymous tips when people around the world know suspects deserve safety and a trial, innocent until proven guilty.  

“All of us keep asking why the internationals kill us,” said Jamaludeen.  “One reason seems to be that they don’t differentiate between people.  The soldiers fear any bearded Afghan who wears a turban and traditional clothes. But why would they kill children?  It seems they have a mission.  They are told to go and get the Taliban.  When they go out in their planes and their tanks and their helicopters, they need to be killing, and then they can report that they have completed their mission.”

These are the stories being told here.  NATO and its constituent nations may have other accounts to give of themselves, but they aren’t telling them very convincingly, or well.  The stories told by bomb blasts or by shouting home-invading soldiers drown out other competing sentiments and seem to represent all that the U.S./NATO occupiers ever came here to say.  We who live in countries that support NATO, that tolerate this occupation, bear responsibility to hear the tales told by Afghans who are trapped by our war of choice. These tales are part of our history now, and this history isn’t popular in Afghanistan. It doesn’t play well when the U.S. and NATO forces state that we came here because of terrorism, because of a toll in lost civilian lives already exceeded in Afghanistan during just the first three months of a decade-long war – that we came in pious concern over precious stories that should not be cut short."

Oklahoma Tornado: The tragic consequences of cost-saving

The devastation wrought by the tornado in Oklahoma, USA, is hard to believe.   Even more difficult to fathom is how that there wasn't a greater, or better, warning to the populace about the pending tornado.     The answer seems readily available.    Lack of money for the weather service.   And this in the supposed richest country in the world?

"Was the severe weather system culminating in yesterday’s Oklahoma City tornado intensified – or even created – by climate change? That question will almost certainly be batted back and forth in the media over the next few days. After all, there is plenty of scientific evidence that climate change intensifies weather in general, but there remain legitimate questions about how – and even if – it intensifies tornadoes in specific.

One thing, however, that shouldn’t be up for debate is whether or not we should be as prepared as possible for inevitable weather events like tornadoes. We obviously should be – but there’s an increasing chance that we will not be thanks to the manufactured crisis known as sequestration.

As the Federal Times recently reported, sequestration includes an 8.2 percent cut to the National Weather Service. According to the organization representing weather service employees, that means there is “no way for the agency to maintain around-the-clock operations at its 122 forecasting offices” and also means “people are going to be overworked, they’re going to be tired, they’re going to miss warnings.”

Summarizing the problem, the American Institute of Physics put it bluntly: “The government runs the risk of significantly increasing forecast error and, the government’s ability to warn Americans across the country about high impact weather events, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, will be compromised.”

The good news is that the National Weather Service station in Norman, Oklahoma had a warning in effect for 16 minutes before the most recent Oklahoma City tornado hit. That’s better than the 13 minute average, so thankfully, more people probably had more time than usual to evacuate or find safe shelter."

A "new" angle on the reason for the war in Syria......lack of water!

Thomas Friedman, author and op-ed writer for The New York Times, has been travelling in Syria.  Now, whilst no one could ever say that Friedman is insightful, let alone knowledgable about foreign affairs - just to the contrary! - in his latest piece for the Times he notes one cause for the present conflict in Syria.   Drought!   To what extent he is on the money is hard to evaluate.     

“The drought did not cause Syria’s civil war,” said the Syrian economist Samir Aita, but, he added, the failure of the government to respond to the drought played a huge role in fueling the uprising. What happened, Aita explained, was that after Assad took over in 2000 he opened up the regulated agricultural sector in Syria for big farmers, many of them government cronies, to buy up land and drill as much water as they wanted, eventually severely diminishing the water table. This began driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had to scrounge for work.

Because of the population explosion that started here in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to better health care, those leaving the countryside came with huge families and settled in towns around cities like Aleppo. Some of those small towns swelled from 2,000 people to 400,000 in a decade or so. The government failed to provide proper schools, jobs or services for this youth bulge, which hit its teens and 20s right when the revolution erupted.

Then, between 2006 and 2011, some 60 percent of Syria’s land mass was ravaged by the drought and, with the water table already too low and river irrigation shrunken, it wiped out the livelihoods of 800,000 Syrian farmers and herders, the United Nations reported. “Half the population in Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers left the land” for urban areas during the last decade, said Aita. And with Assad doing nothing to help the drought refugees, a lot of very simple farmers and their kids got politicized. “State and government was invented in this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage irrigation and crop growing,” said Aita, “and Assad failed in that basic task.”

A real and true hero

Credited to Randall Enos, Cagle Cartoons

Russia shirt-fronts the West in relation to Syria

Putin, and the Russians, are playing hard-ball in relation to Syria.   The West, notably the US and Israel, are not finding that they can have things there way with regard to what is happening in Syria.   Of course, it's all a game of diplomacy and one-up-manship with Putin flexing his muscles in the process.

"President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation has drawn a line in the sand over Syria, the government of which he is determined to protect from overthrow. Not since the end of the Cold War in 1991 has the Russian Bear asserted itself so forcefully beyond its borders in support of claims on great power status. In essence, Russia is attempting to play the role in Syria that France did in Algeria in the 1990s, of supporting the military government against rebels, many of them linked to political Islam. France and its allies prevailed, at the cost of some 150,000 dead. Can Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad pull off the same sort of victory?

Even as Damascus pushes back against the rebels militarily, Putin has swung into action on the international and regional stages. The Russian government persuaded U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to support an international conference aimed at a negotiated settlement. Putin upbraided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his country’s air attacks on Damascus. Moscow is sending sophisticated anti-aircraft batteries, anti-submarine missiles and other munitions to beleaguered Assad, and has just announced that 12 Russian warships will patrol the Mediterranean. The Russian actions have raised alarums in Tel Aviv and Washington, even as they have been praised in Damascus and Tehran."