Archive for category Military
Did President Obama Just Apologize for the Drone Campaign?
Posted by Richard Warnick in Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Military, National Politics, Terrorism, This Blog, War, War Crimes on May 23, 2013
Via Spencer Ackerman and HuffPo.
Here’s the take-away from President Obama’s speech today at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, in Washington DC.
The drone surge may finally be over. By some estimates, 98% of drone strike casualties were civilian noncombatants (50 for every one “suspected terrorist”). The Bureau of Investigative Journalism issued a report detailing how the CIA deliberately targeted rescuers who show up after an attack, and mourners at funerals as a part of a “double-tap” strategy eerily reminiscent of methods used by terrorist groups like Hamas.
In the months and years ahead, drone strikes once conducted by the CIA will become more of a U.S. military responsibility. The rules for launching the strikes will become stricter — there must be a “near certainty” that no civilians will be killed, for instance — and they’ll become less frequent. “To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective,” Obama said… “is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance.”
Yet neither Obama nor senior administration officials ruled out the most controversial aspect of Obama’s counterterrorism measures: so-called signature strikes, in which the CIA does not know the identities of the people it targets, but infers terrorist affiliation based on their observed patterns of behavior.
President Obama says he’s sorry.
Of the civilians who have died in the strikes, Obama said: “For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred through conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Of course, the other guys kill civilians too.
“Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes,” he added.
Bradley Manning’s Nobel Peace Prize
Posted by Richard Warnick in Activist groups, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, Iraq, Military, National Politics, Transparency, War on March 26, 2013
PFC Bradley Manning has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Alfred Nobel’s will left funding for a prize to be awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
The intent of the prize was to fund this work. As a result of enormous legal expenses, Bradley Manning is in need of that funding (currently $1.2 million).
A record 259 nominations have been received for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, with candidates including PFC Manning and 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai, an education activist who was shot in the head by Taliban militants while on her way home from school in Pakistan. Around 50 of the nominations are for organizations. Last year, the prize went to the European Union for promoting peace and human rights in Europe following the devastation of World War II. Nobel Prize winners are usually announced in October.
Bradley Manning: The Face of Heroism
Posted by Richard Warnick in 4th Estate (Media), Bush Administration, Iraq, Military, National Politics, This Blog, Transparency, War, War Crimes on March 3, 2013
Through his lawyer, 25-year-old Army Private Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty to 10 charges that include possessing and wilfully communicating to an unauthorized person all the main elements of the WikiLeaks disclosure. That covered the so-called “collateral murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq; some US diplomatic cables including one of the early WikiLeaks publications the Reykjavik cable; portions of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, some of the files on detainees in Guantanamo; and two intelligence memos.
These lesser charges each carry a two-year maximum sentence, committing PVT Manning to a possible upper limit of 20 years in prison. He pleaded not guilty to “aiding the enemy,” which carries a life sentence. Manning’s court martial is expected to begin on June 3.
For the first time, Bradley Manning explained why he decided to reveal U.S. government secrets to the media.
Manning spoke for over an hour as he read from a 35-page document detailing and explaining his actions that drove him to disclose what he said he “believed, and still believe… are some of the most significant documents of our time.”
…Manning’s motivations in leaking, he said, was to “spark a domestic debate of the role of the military and foreign policy in general,” he said, and “cause society to reevaluate the need and even desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore their effect on people who live in that environment every day.” Manning said he was in sound mind when he leaked, and did so deliberately, regardless of the legal circumstances.
Remarkably, Manning said he first tried to take his information to the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico, before contacting WikiLeaks.
…He said he took “full responsibility” for a decision that will likely land him in prison for the next 20 years — and possibly the rest of his life.
Without question, Manning’s leaks produced more significant international news scoops in 2010 than those of every media outlet on the planet combined.
This was all achieved because a then-22-year-old Army Private knowingly risked his liberty in order to inform the world about what he learned. He endured treatment which the top UN torture investigator deemed “cruel and inhuman”, and he now faces decades in prison if not life. He knew exactly what he was risking, what he was likely subjecting himself to. But he made the choice to do it anyway because of the good he believed he could achieve, because of the evil that he believed needed urgently to be exposed and combated, and because of his conviction that only leaks enable the public to learn the truth about the bad acts their governments are doing in secret.
Heroism is a slippery and ambiguous concept. But whatever it means, it is embodied by Bradley Manning and the acts which he unflinchingly acknowledged Friday he chose to undertake.
This is where we are today. We only learn about government crimes when someone in the know is courageous enough to risk torture and life imprisonment in order to reveal the truth. Consider how thousands of people had access to the same information, but only Bradley Manning did the right thing. By the way, nothing he gave to Wikileaks damaged operational security. The court-martial judge will determine whether publishing evidence of un-prosecuted war crimes amounts to “aiding the enemy.”
More info:
Wikileaks Obtains Video of 2007 War Crime (April 5, 2010)
UPDATE: Leaked Audio: US Citizens Can Now Hear Bradley Manning Give His Statement
Jonathan Chait: Why Republicans Can’t Propose Spending Cuts
Posted by Richard Warnick in Barack Obama, Federal Budget, John Boehner, Military, National Politics, Republicans on December 13, 2012
New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait explains what ought to be obvious to everyone, but isn’t:
Republicans think government spending is huge, but they can’t really identify ways they want to solve that problem, because government spending is not really huge. That is to say, on top of an ideological gulf between the two parties, we have an epistemological gulf. The Republican understanding of government spending is based on hazy, abstract notions that don’t match reality and can’t be translated into a workable program.
…The United States spends way less money on social services than do other advanced countries, and even that low figure is inflated by our sky-high health-care prices. The retirement benefits to programs like Social Security are quite meager. Public infrastructure is grossly underfunded.
The Bowles-Simpson “plan” was an earnest and badly needed attempt to reconcile the GOP’s hazy belief that government is enormous with reality. They did everything they could possibly do: They brought in representatives from all sides for long meetings with budget experts, going through all aspects of federal policy in detail, in the hope of reaching an agreement on the proper scope of government and how to pay for it. It failed. The Bowles-Simpson plan wound up punting on all the major questions because it simply couldn’t bridge that gulf between perception and reality.
…The real domestic savings in Bowles-Simpson came from building on Obamacare’s steps to save money by holding down the growth of health-care costs and to cut defense spending by pretty steep levels. But these turned out to be ideas that alienated rather than satisfied Republicans. So basically it turned out to be impossible to find real spending cuts that Republicans wanted.
…This is why the spending side of the fiscal cliff negotiation is so discouraging. The potential cuts on the table range from fairly painful steps like reducing the Social Security cost-of-living index to even more painful steps like raising the Medicare retirement age, and none of them would save all that much money — certainly not on the scale that Republicans want.
When the only cuts on the table would inflict real harm on people with modest incomes and save small amounts of money, that is a sign that there’s just not much money to save. It’s not just that Republicans disagree with this; they don’t seem to understand it. The absence of a Republican spending proposal is not just a negotiating tactic but a howling void where a specific grasp of the role of government ought to be. And negotiating around that void is extremely hard to do. The spending cuts aren’t there because they can’t be found.
Fortunately, there is already a deficit-reduction plan that has passed Congress and been signed into law by President Obama. It lets the Bush-Obama Tax Cuts For The Rich expire at the end of the 2012, and cuts Pentagon spending by $500 billion over the next 10 years, with $55 billion of it expected in the first year.
UPDATE: Rep. Chris Van Hollen: Boehner is stalling on a so-called “fiscal cliff” deal until after his re-election as Speaker of the House on January 3.
UPDATE: Paul Krugman: “It’s a dangerous situation. The G.O.P. is lost and rudderless, bitter and angry, but it still controls the House and, therefore, retains the ability to do a lot of harm, as it lashes out in the death throes of the conservative dream.”
WikiLeaks Releases Prisoner Treatment Manual From Guantanamo
Posted by Richard Warnick in Bush Administration, George W. Bush, Human Rights, Military, National Politics, Prisons, The Constitution, Torture, Transparency, War Crimes on October 25, 2012
Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks website on Thursday started publishing more than 100 US Department of Defense documents including the first prisoner treatment manual for Guantanamo Bay.
…Among the documents is the 2002 manual for staff at Camp Delta at Guantanamo, shortly after it was set up by US President George W. Bush to house alleged Al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees from the “war on terror”.
“This document is of significant historical importance. Guantanamo Bay has become the symbol for systematised human rights abuse in the West with good reason,” said Assange, the founder of the website.
He added: “‘The ‘Detainee Policies’ show the anatomy of the beast that is post-9/11 detention, the carving out of a dark space where law and rights do not apply, where persons can be detained without a trace at the convenience of the US Department of Defense.
“It shows the excesses of the early days of war against an unknown ‘enemy’ and how these policies matured and evolved, ultimately deriving into the permanent state of exception that the United States now finds itself in, a decade later.”
UPDATE: WikiLeaks Releases US Military Policies for Detention & Avoiding Accountability for Torture
Military’s Own Report Card Gives Afghan Surge an ‘F’
Posted by Richard Warnick in Afghanistan, Military, National Politics, This Blog, War on September 27, 2012
The U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan ended last week. Conditions in Afghanistan are mostly worse than before it began.
That conclusion doesn’t come from anti-war advocates. It relies on data recently released by the NATO command in Afghanistan, known as ISAF, and acquired by Danger Room. According to most of the yardsticks chosen by the military — but not all — the surge in Afghanistan fell short of its stated goal: stopping the Taliban’s momentum.
…[The] suppressive force provided by the surge did not tamp down insurgent activity to levels seen in 2009, when Afghanistan looked sufficiently dire that a bipartisan consensus of Washington policymakers came to believe that a surge was necessary.
Here is what the Afghanistan “surge” accomplished. It provided the Taliban with more opportunities to attack U.S. and NATO forces.
The alternative to Drone Strikes
Posted by Nathan Erkkila in Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, Military, Terrorism, War on August 5, 2012
Seeing that we have a lot of posts on domestic policy, I think it’s time we discuss foreign policy. We all know about drone strikes. Basically it’s another way of saying you kill enemies of the state by having a military soldier who doesn’t have the balls to get into an A-10 and putting him in a cubicle to bomb someone half a world away. That is a drone strike. Now Obama has been getting flack for it because these strikes kills civilians and the target’s family. But somehow this complaint seems rather off considering that the last way we took out members of Al Qaeda was to invade a country. So with that, I will give out a comparison of Bush’s method of combating terrorism as opposed to Obama’s method of combating terrorism.
Bush’s policy was to invade a country that no empire has ever held onto before. That tactic forced the Taliban into a neighboring country that has nukes and as a result, Swat Valley is in Taliban Control.Then he completely ignored Bin Laden and went after Iraq to take their oil at the cost of a million lives.
Obama’s policy is to do it by espionage. Use the CIA to track down terrorists and then either order special forces to attack or use drones to take them out, minimizing collateral damage. The end result shows Al Qaeda faltering. No terrorist attack as of yet.
NBC ‘Reality’ Show: War For Fun and Profit
Posted by Richard Warnick in 4th Estate (Media), Disgrace to the Military, Entertainment, Federal Budget, Military, Military Industrial Complex, National Politics, War on August 1, 2012
I’ve seen the promos, and wondered out loud if this is an actual show or just a clever satire of corporate-sponsored “reality” TV. Turns out that NBC is truly going to air “Stars Earn Stripes,” an incredibly stupid faux-war celebrity contest co-hosted by retired U.S. general Wesley Clark. Bear in mind that NBC is owned by defense contractor GE, which profits from the normalization of permanent war.
Dean Cain, Dolvett Quince, Eve Torres, Laila Ali, Nick Lachey, Picabo Street, Terry Crews, and Todd Palin will compete in allegedly dangerous warlike activities — in which no one gets hurt. None of them have ever served in the real military.
RootsAction.org and Just Foreign Policy have set up a petition at StarsEarnStripes.org challenging NBC to tell the truth about war.
Dear NBC,
Your entertainment show “Stars Earn Stripes” treats war as sport. This does us all a disservice. We ask that you air an in-depth segment showing the reality of civilian victims of recent U.S. wars, on any program, any time in the coming months. (StarsEarnStripes.org has provided a few resources to help you with your research.)
It’s not a revelation that American corporate media don’t tell the truth about war. However, this is ridiculous. “Reality” TV has never departed this much from actual reality. General Clark ought to be ashamed of himself — being a tool of the military-industrial complex is bad enough, but he’s gone too far now.
More info: NBC Invents War-o-tainment
UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald weighs in:
It’s actually necessary that America have a network reality show that pairs big, muscular soldiers with adoring D-list celebrities — hosted by a former Army General along with someone who used to be on Dancing with the Stars – as they play sanitized war games for the amusement of viewers, all in between commercials from the nation’s largest corporations. That’s way too perfect of a symbol of American culture and politics for us not to have.
UPDATE: ‘Stars Earn Stripes,’ NBC Reality Show, Criticized By Veterans And Military Reporter
The Consequences of the Invasion of Iraq – Exactly the Opposite of What the Bushies Proposed
Posted by Glenden Brown in American People, Bush Administration, Bush Failures, Disgrace to the Military, Iraq, Liars (politics), Military, Military Industrial Complex, Neocons, Proof Bush Lied on July 14, 2012
In a devastating article, Dan Froomkin observes:
Ten bloody and grueling years later, Iraq is finally emerging from its ruins and establishing itself as a geopolitical player in the Middle East — but not the way the neocons envisioned.
Though technically a democracy, Iraq’s floundering government has degenerated into a tottering quasi-dictatorship. The costs of the war (more than $800 billion) and reconstruction (more than $50 billion) have been staggeringly high. And while Iraq is finally producing oil at pre-war levels, it is trying its best to drive oil prices as high as possible.
Most disturbing to many American foreign policy experts, however, is Iraq’s extremely close relationship with Iran. Today, the country that was formerly Iran’s deadliest rival is its strongest ally.
In other words, the Neo Cons were not just wrong but absolutely 100% wrong, their predictions turned out exactly 180 degrees from what actually happened.
Predicting what’s next in Iraq is next to impossible. In virtually no scenario, however, do things turn out how the neocons intended.
“Whatever [the war] was about, which was never entirely explained, it hasn’t worked out terribly well,” said Freeman, “and in fact Iraq continues to evolve in ways that are, if not fatal to American interests, certainly negative.”
At this point, I’m even more certain the Iraq war was not worth what it cost. It was a colossal waste of time, resources, lives – an exercise in imperial vanity and posturing that was so destructive in every imaginable way, more costly, more ruinous than anyone predicted.
We need a national truth and reconciliation commission. We need it now.
Yes, Iraq Definitely Had WMD, Vast Majority Of Polled Republicans Insist
Posted by Richard Warnick in Barack Obama, Biological Weapons, Bush Failures, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Lying, Military, National Politics, Proof Bush Lied, Republicans, This Blog, War on June 22, 2012
To this day, the U.S. government has not come up with a credible reason why our military was ordered to invade Iraq in March 2003. One thing is certain, the invasion had nothing to do with so-called “weapons of mass destruction,” also known as nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. President Bush was informed unequivocally, well in advance of the invasion, that there were no such weapons in Iraq. The claim that the Iraqis posed an immediate threat to U.S. national security has been called “one of the greatest lies in modern American political history.”
How potent a lie was it? A recent foreign policy poll (PDF) by Dartmouth government professor Benjamin Valentino and conducted by YouGov from April 26 to May 2, found that fully 63 percent of Republican respondents still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003. Even 27 percent of independents and 15 percent of Democrats still buy the story about the nonexistent WMDs, eight years after it was disproved.
President Bill Clinton had the best explanation of how Americans get fooled. “When people are insecure, they’d rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who’s weak and right.”
Also: 55.6% of Republicans agree with the statement, “I have always believed President Obama was born in another country,” while 14.7% say they don’t know. Another 8% of Republicans say, “I used to think President Obama was born in the United States, but now I think he was born in another country.” That adds up to 78.3 percent.
The entire poll is worth reading. It asks a lot of interesting questions, such as whether we want to be the world’s number one military power (Yes), and whether we’re willing to pay more taxes to keep the United States military the strongest in the world (Not so much).
h/t Dan Froomkin, HuffPo.
UPDATE: According to the Gallup Poll, 18% of Republicans believe President Obama is a Muslim, 24% say Christian and 47% don’t know.
Caller Knocks Over The Proverbial Water Cooler
Posted by Larry Bergan in 4th Estate (Media), Barack Obama, Bush Failures, censorship, Disgrace to the Military, War Crimes on May 25, 2012
Of course, at least one caller to the Diane Rehm show, on NPR, knocks the cooler over every day Diane Rehm is actually on her own show. A multitude of Americans have been asking this question ever since the invasion of Iraq. I just thought I’d add to the repetition, since the call happened this morning, in hopes of nudging my fellow citizens into some kind of conversation at the water cooler that isn’t about dancing with stars, or the latest sex scandal manufactured for the US.
The caller refers to the latest BIG AMERICAN SEX SCANDAL before going where she really wants to go.
(listen here at about 42 minutes in)
REHM
All right. To San Francisco, Calif. Good morning, Denise.DENISE
Good morning, Diane. My question is going back to the GSA scandal…REHM
Sure.DENISE
…you know, with them going to Las Vegas. And my point is that where is the outrage over a manufactured war and the cherry-picked intelligence and the trillions of dollars spent and that hundred, maybe 200,000 Iraqi citizens and thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of young men and women living their lives as amputees or with head trauma. Where are the pallets of cash that went missing in Iraq? The bungles and irresponsible way that the Bush administration funded those wars, where does this debt come from? Where is the outrage about that?REHM
Susan.DAVIS
It’s a great question. I do think one of the things that’s been really striking to me about this election year is how little Afghanistan and the on-going wars have been as part of the debate. And I think that may intensify as we get closer to the general election, but you have a president whose policy has more in line with Republicans. And I think Democrats thought — that they thought it was gonna be when he came into office.He’s actually have been fairly hawkish about his foreign policy, and you have a progressive left that is not particularly organized or willing to go after the president in any kind of coordinated way. I think there’s been a willful silence in the Democratic Party of unity behind the president on this. And it has been surprisingly not an issue in this election year so far.
No doubt about it, $822,751 is a lot of taxpayers money to be spending on pleasure seeking, but trillions of dollars, crippled and dead soldiers are probably a little more noteworthy on the eve of memorial day, which most working Americans will spend – uh – working.
Did you notice how Susan Davis tried desperately to steer the conversation towards Obama and the progressive left’s failings. Well, I’ve learned not to expect much from “USA Today” and always turn off the radio whenever that other Susan from “USA Today” fills in for Diane.
The entire American media is a cesspool, except for NPR and PBS, which gives us a window of truth some of the time. I’ve been listening a lot more lately, and I, mostly, like the national and local fare.
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