Barack Obama – Page 4

After Putin trip, U.S unhappy, but no change in Obama's India plans

December 13, 2014 by Nasheman

Washington: The US is unhappy over India doing “business as usual” with Russia, but it will have no effect on President Barack Obama’s upcoming visit to India which remains an “important partner.”

“No. India remains an important partner,” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters Friday when asked whether deals reached during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s just concluded visit to India would change Obama’s plans.

Obama has been invited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be the chief guest at India’s Republic Day parade on January 26. He will be the first US president to get that honour and the first one to visit India twice while in office.

“Obviously, our economic relationship is a big part of what we continue to work on,” Psaki said while repeating its caution to “allies and partners” that it was not time for doing business with Russian following its intervention in Ukraine.

The US, she said had seen reports about India and Russia signing agreements in oil exploration, infrastructure, defence and nuclear energy including construction of 12 Russia-built nuclear units in India over the next two decades,

“We continue to monitor it, but we haven’t looked at all the specifics of the contracts, for obvious reasons,” Psaki said. But “We continue to urge all countries not to conduct business as usual with Russia.”

Noting that “there are already sanctions in place” imposed on Russia by the US and its Western allies, Psaki said it was not calling for sanctions on other countries.

“In general, though, given the situation, it shouldn’t be business as usual,” she said.

Asked if the US had spoken to the Indians before Putin’s trip that it’s not the right time to do business with Russia, Psaki said: “Well, we’ve been engaged in that discussion.”

“I’d remind you India doesn’t support the actions of Russia and the actions – their intervention into Ukraine,” she said. “They’ve been pretty outspoken about that as well.”

On the presence of Sergey Aksyonov, prime minister of Crimea, the former Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia, in Putin’s delegation to India, which too has upset Washington, Psaki said: “I don’t have anything new to offer on that.”

Asked if the US had confirmed if he was there or not, she said: “There have been a range of reports.” But “I don’t have any US government confirmation. We’re obviously not in on the trip with them.”

Asked again if there’s any change in Obama’s trip to India, the spokesperson said emphatically: “No. No, no.”

(IANS)

Putin: ‘U.S wants to subdue Russia, but no one did or ever will’

November 20, 2014 by Nasheman

President of Russia Vladimir Putin. (RIA Novosti / Alexey Druzhinin)

by RT

The US has no plans to humiliate Russia, but instead wants to subdue it, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said, adding that no one had ever succeeded in doing so – and never will.

Speaking at a forum of the All-Russia Peoples’ Front in Moscow on Tuesday, the Russian leader said that history was not about to change, and that no one would manage to suppress the country.

“Throughout history no one has ever managed to do so toward Russia – and no one ever will,” Putin said.

Responding to a question about whether America was trying to humiliate Russia, Putin disagreed, saying that the US wanted “to solve their problems at our expense.”

He said that people in Russia really like the Americans, but it’s the US politics that are not accepted so well. “I think America and its people are more liked than disliked by people here [in Russia]. It’s the politics of the ruling class [in the US] that is likely negatively viewed by the majority of our citizens,” he said.

The Russian leader said the US had managed to subordinate its allies to its influence – with such countries “trying to protect foreign national interests on obscure conditions and perspectives.”

One of the means of changing the balance of power in the world to eventually subdue Russia was NATO’s gradual approach to its borders, which made Russia “nervous”, Russian presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told BBC.

Russia needs a “100% guarantee that no-one would think about Ukraine joining NATO,” Peskov added.

Heads of states and international organizations pose for the “family photo” during the G20 Summit in Brisbane on November 15, 2014. (AFP Photo/Saeed Khan)

The Russian president has last met with his American counterpart last week, while attending the G20 summit in Australia. Despite the focus on the world economy, the crisis in Ukraine was one of the hottest topics at the G20. Talking about the summit’s results at a press conference, US President Barack Obama did not announce any significant changes in his country’s approach to Russia.

“We would prefer a Russia that is fully integrated with the global economy,” the US president told a news conference, adding that his country was “also very firm on the need to uphold core international principles.”

Before leaving Brisbane, Putin said that a solution to the crisis in Eastern Ukraine was possible. “Today the situation [in Ukraine] in my view has good chances for resolution, no matter how strange it may sound,” he said, as quoted by Reuters.

The Russian leader also said he was satisfied with both the results and atmosphere of the meetings.

Australian authorities created an exceptionally friendly atmosphere for discussing solutions to economic challenges at the G20 summit in Brisbane, the Russian president said, dispelling rumors there were any confrontations.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (L) shaking hands with members of his motorcycle escort at the airport in Brisbane as he leaves the G20 Summit.(AFP Photo / Steve Holland)

“Our Australian partners created an exceptionally friendly working atmosphere, very heartfelt, I should say, that was conducive to finding solutions to the challenges faced by the global economy,” Putin said at a forum of the All-Russian People’s Front, adding that it was a pleasant surprise for him to see the warm reception of the Russian delegation from Australian citizens on the streets of Brisbane.

Answering a question about Abbott’s idea to “shirtfront” Putin over the downing of the MH17 jetliner, the Russian president said no such confrontation took place at the Brisbane summit.

“We had very constructive discussions of not only the themes that had brought us together, but some very grave issues involving the Malaysian Boeing. We discussed that in every detail. I can assure you that everything was decent and rather friendly,” said the Russian leader.

Though many media outlets speculated that Putin had left the summit early, skipping a Sunday working breakfast because of an icy welcome at the G20, the Russian leader reiterated on Tuesday that practically all work had been finished by that time. “I addressed all sessions,” Putin said, adding: “Our stance was heard.”

‘We crossed the line’, US admits to UN anti-torture body

November 14, 2014 by Nasheman

by Agence France-Presse

The United States said Wednesday it did not condone torture under any circumstances, but acknowledged to a UN anti-torture watchdog it had “crossed the line” following the September 11 attacks.

“The US is proud of its record as a leader in respecting, promoting and defending human rights and the rule of law, both at home and around the world,” acting US legal advisor Mary McLeod told the 10-member UN Committee on Torture.

“But in the wake of 9/11 attacks, we regrettably did not always live up to our own values,” she said.

“We crossed the line and we take responsibility for that,” she said, quoting US President Barack Obama.

McLeod was one of about 30 top US officials gathered in Geneva for Washington’s first grilling by the committee since 2006.

In its first review since Obama came to power, several delegates acknowledged abuses had occurred during the so-called “War on Terror” under the previous administration of George W. Bush.

“We recognise that no nation is perfect, ours included,” Keith Harper, US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council, told the committee.

The delegation faced a barrage of questions from committee members on how the country was dealing with rectifying and providing redress for acknowledged abuses during the “war on terror”.

The US delegation was asked to explain why the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba remains open, why many detainees remain there without charge and when Washington plans to shut it down.

The committee members also questioned the treatment of prisoners there, and lack of redress for victims of the widely publicised abuses by US troops at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in the early 2000s.

Beyond the “war on terror” legacy, the committee members raised issues of abuses in US prisons, rape in prisons, the broad use of drawn-out solitary confinement, and long years on death row.

And they asked how Washington could justify its widespread detention of non-violent, non-criminal illegal immigrants, including minors.

And they slammed police brutality that appears to disproportionately affect minorities, such as 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri last August.

His parents were in Geneva this week to take part in events on the sidelines of the committee hearing.

The committee is set to publish its conclusions on November 28.

The U.S. launches another dumb war in the Middle East. Why hitting ISIS will just make matters worse

November 11, 2014 by Nasheman

For most of this century, we’ve been fighting wars to enhance our security, and each time, we find ourselves with more enemies and less security.

by Steve Chapman, Reason

War, it’s been said, is God’s way of teaching Americans geography. Maybe we do learn how to locate the countries we invade or bomb on a map. But recent experience indicates how much we don’t know about those societies and how slow we are at learning.

The United States is still involved in a 13-year-old war in Afghanistan, and President Barack Obama has undertaken a new one against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, just three years after he withdrew the last of our troops from Iraq. The administration is also carrying on a drone missile campaign—which looks eerily like war from the receiving end—in Pakistan and Yemen.

Yet the republic has just concluded an election campaign that gave almost no attention to what the United States government is doing, or should be doing, in these places. For the most part, the topic was discussed in only the vaguest terms, but often it was simply absent. No country in history has ever done so much fighting in so many places with so little interest from its own citizens.

Nor do the people in power who make these ambitious commitments necessarily have a clue where they will lead. Over and over, things turn out in ways that come as a complete and thoroughly unwelcome surprise.

No one could have imagined in October 2001, when we went into Afghanistan to crush the Taliban and al-Qaida, that we would still be there 13 years later and so would they. Nor did we realize that our crucial supposed ally in the fight, Pakistan, would prove not merely unhelpful but downright hostile.

As New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall documented in her book “The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014,” the government of Pakistan was actively helping our foes while reaping $23 billion in aid from Washington. U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke eventually realized, “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.”

Unexpected? Of course. But it’s the sort of thing that happens when governments act with slivers of knowledge and mountains of hubris, relying on bright visions and brute force. That’s how we stormed into Iraq and won a swift military victory—which we proceeded to squander by disbanding the Iraqi military and banning former members of Saddam Hussein’s party from the new government.

Both decisions sounded sensible—but only because our leaders were so ignorant of Iraq that they had no idea what the effects would be. In practice, we managed to turn huge numbers of Iraqis against us and spawn an insurgency that would kill thousands of our troops. We also inadvertently rained blessings on our longtime enemy to the east. The U.S. fought a war against Iraq, and the winner was Iran.

The war on Islamic State is even more rife with uncertainty, because so many of its enemies are our enemies. If we do damage to it, we are indirectly strengthening the mullahs in Tehran, al-Qaida and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. We’re also bolstering the irresponsible Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad whose persecution of Sunnis gave rise to the group.

The Wall Street Journal reports that by hitting Islamic State targets in Syria, we helped al-Qaida units to defeat the “moderate” Syrian rebels we have helped in their fight against Assad. Meanwhile, our NATO ally Turkey balks at assisting us. Why? Because those fighting on “our” side include Kurdish groups allied with separatists it has been fighting for 30 years.

For that matter, the U.S. air war is the best recruiting tool the Islamic State ever had. Already, a confidential UN Security Council report recently noted, some 15,000 foreigners have poured into the region to join it and other extremist groups.

“Numbers since 2010 are now many times the size of the cumulative numbers of foreign terrorist fighters between 1990 and 2010—and are growing,” it said, according to The Guardian. As usual, we’re creating jihadis faster than we kill them. Chances are excellent that we are also sowing an array of unforeseen problems that will haunt us for years to come.

For most of this century, we’ve been fighting wars to enhance our security, and each time, we find ourselves with more enemies and less security. By now it should be clear that is not a coincidence. If the war on Islamic State solves nothing or makes things worse, we will be unhappy, but we shouldn’t be surprised.

Steve Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune.

How many Muslim countries has the U.S bombed or occupied since 1980?

November 7, 2014 by Nasheman

Barack Obama, Oslo, Norway Photo: Sandy Young/Getty Images

by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

Barack Obama, in his post-election press conference yesterday, announced that he would seek an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) from the new Congress, one that would authorize Obama’s bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria—the one he began three months ago. If one were being generous, one could say that seeking congressional authorization for a war that commenced months ago is at least better than fighting a war even after Congress explicitly rejected its authorization, as Obama lawlessly did in the now-collapsed country of Libya.

When Obama began bombing targets inside Syria in September, I noted that it was the seventh predominantly Muslim country that had been bombed by the U.S. during his presidency (that did not count Obama’s bombing of the Muslim minority in the Philippines). I also previously noted that this new bombing campaign meant that Obama had become the fourth consecutive U.S. President to order bombs dropped on Iraq. Standing alone, those are both amazingly revealing facts. American violence is so ongoing and continuous that we barely notice it any more. Just this week, a U.S. drone launched a missile that killed 10 people in Yemen, and the dead were promptly labeled “suspected militants” (which actually just means they are “military-age males”); those killings received almost no discussion.

To get a full scope of American violence in the world, it is worth asking a broader question: how many countries in the Islamic world has the U.S. bombed or occupied since 1980? That answer was provided in a recent Washington Post op-ed by the military historian and former U.S. Army Col. Andrew Bacevich:

As America’s efforts to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Islamic State militants extent into Syria, Iraq War III has seamlessly morphed into Greater Middle East Battlefield XIV. That is, Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed, and in which American soldiers have killed or been killed. And that’s just since 1980.

Let’s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew.

Bacevich’s count excludes the bombing and occupation of still other predominantly Muslim countries by key U.S. allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, carried out with crucial American support. It excludes coups against democratically elected governments, torture, and imprisonment of people with no charges. It also, of course, excludes all the other bombing and invading and occupying that the U.S. has carried out during this time period in other parts of the world, including in Central America and the Caribbean, as well as various proxy wars in Africa.

There is an awful lot to be said about the factions in the west which devote huge amounts of their time and attention to preaching against the supreme primitiveness and violence of Muslims. There are no gay bars in Gaza, the obsessively anti-Islam polemicists proclaim—as though that (rather than levels of violence and aggression unleashed against the world) is the most important metric for judging a society. Reflecting their single-minded obsession with demonizing Muslims (at exactly the same time, coincidentally, their governments wage a never-ending war on Muslim countries and their societies marginalize Muslims), they notably neglect to note thriving gay communities in places like Beirut and Istanbul, or the lack of them in Christian Uganda. Employing the defining tactic of bigotry, they love to highlight the worst behavior of individual Muslims as a means of attributing it to the group as a whole, while ignoring (often expressly) the worst behavior of individual Jews and/or their own groups (they similarly cite the most extreme precepts of Islam while ignoring similarly extreme ones from Judaism). That’s because, as Rula Jebreal told Bill Maher last week, if these oh-so-brave rationality warriors said about Jews what they say about Muslims, they’d be fired.

But of all the various points to make about this group, this is always the most astounding: those same people, who love to denounce the violence of Islam as some sort of ultimate threat, live in countries whose governments unleash far more violence, bombing, invasions, and occupations than anyone else by far. That is just a fact.

Those who sit around in the U.S. or the U.K. endlessly inveighing against the evil of Islam, depicting it as the root of violence and evil (the “mother lode of bad ideas“), while spending very little time on their own societies’ addictions to violence and aggression, or their own religious and nationalistic drives, have reached the peak of self-blinding tribalism. They really are akin to having a neighbor down the street who constantly murders, steals and pillages, and then spends his spare time flamboyantly denouncing people who live thousands of miles away for their bad acts. Such a person would be regarded as pathologically self-deluded, a term that also describes those political and intellectual factions which replicate that behavior.

The sheer casualness with which Obama yesterday called for a new AUMF is reflective of how central, how commonplace, violence and militarism are in the U.S.’s imperial management of the world. That some citizens of that same country devote themselves primarily if not exclusively to denouncing the violence and savagery of others is a testament to how powerful and self-blinding tribalism is as a human drive.

Report to UN condemns US government’s “international criminal program of torture”

November 4, 2014 by Nasheman

by Thomas Gaist, WSWS

A recent report to the UN Committee Against Torture concludes that the US presidential administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama are responsible for far-reaching violations of international law for directing and covering up a global torture program developed by the US Central Intelligence Agency in the years following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The report, prepared by the “Advocates for US Torture Prosecutions,” Dr. Trudy Bond, Prof. Benjamin Davis, Dr. Curtis F. J. Doebbler, and The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School, states unequivocally that entire sections of the state apparatus are responsible for “breathtaking” crimes against international law.

“Civilian and military officials at the highest level created, designed, authorized and implemented a sophisticated, international criminal program of torture,” the report states.

The report details the vast scale of the torture system, noting that detainees were tortured not just at the US Guantanamo Bay Military Base in Cuba, but in numerous secret black sites worldwide, including in “Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Libya, Lithuania, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Syria, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom (Diego Garcia), and Yemen.”

Having been “conceived and authorized at the highest levels” of the US government, responsibility for the crimes committed is shared by numerous top officials, the report concludes, including “President George W. Bush, then Vice President Dick Cheney, then Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) George Tenet, then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, and then Attorney General John Ashcroft.”

The torture techniques were devised by the CIA in collaboration with intelligence officers from the Egyptian and Saudi regimes, according to the report.

“The techniques in question, sometimes styled as interrogation techniques and sometimes as detention procedures, included near-drowning (‘waterboarding’), sleep deprivation for days, and forced nudity,” the report notes.

“They have caused many people intense suffering, including severe mental harm and, in some cases, death,” the report notes.

“Retroactive legal approval” was then contrived by US government lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

In order to justify the new methods of “enhanced interrogation,” the torture lawyers of the Bush administration drew up an “absurdly narrow” definition of torture to justify the administration’s policies.

As a CIA lawyer commented to personnel at Guantanamo Bay when summarizing the content of the Bush administration torture memos, “…it is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong.”

“The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees,” notes a report by the US Senate Armed Services Committee, cited in the new report to the UN.

Using the definition advanced under Bush, former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein himself “would be exculpated” for the systematic torture carried out by his regime, Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh told the rapporteurs.

Far from being limited to the Bush administration, the report makes clear that the Obama administration, the Justice Department and multiple federal courts have upheld the conception that those involved in “waterboarding, dietary manipulation, walling, long-time standing, sleep deprivation and water dousing” should receive immunity, and that these techniques do not constitute torture.

The Obama administration has sought to safeguard all the senior Bush administration officials most directly responsible for torture from prosecution or any form of legal or punitive action for their involvement in torture.

As the report notes, all senior US government officials have received blanket immunity for their involvement in orchestrating a worldwide torture network, and “courts-martial and administrative proceedings for acts of torture have been almost exclusively limited to low-level private contractors or soldiers.”

The authors conclude that the “enhanced interrogation” methods violated the UN Convention Against Torture or Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment, which builds on the ban on torture contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The report maintains that “the prohibition against torture is absolute,” rejecting the legal concepts of the Bush administration and calling for the prosecution of top Bush administration lawyers, including the drafter of the three main “Torture Memos,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo.

The failure of the US government to hold accountable any of the leadership elements that organized the torture is undermining the “preemptory norm against torture,” according to the report. Torture is becoming more widespread and viewed as more acceptable by states everywhere in response to the unabashed repudiation of international law by the US.

In its concluding recommendation to the UN Committee Against Torture, the legal scholars demand that the US government adopt a legal and policy course that is 180 degrees opposed to that followed by the Obama administration since taking office.

“The United States should promptly and impartially prosecute senior military and civilian officials responsible for authorizing, acquiescing or consenting in any way to acts of torture committed by their subordinates,” the rapporteurs write.

Were the demands of the report to be implemented, the result would be the prosecution of command elements and numerous individuals within the upper layers of the most powerful agencies of the American government, including the CIA, the military and the Department of Justice, together with numerous high-ranking members of the Bush and Obama administrations.

Countless figures, many now ensconced in academia and the corporate establishment, would face long jail sentences.

No such accountability will be forthcoming from any section of the political establishment, however, given that the torturers and their defenders are the preeminent political servants and military-intelligence specialists of the capitalist class.

The torture program was developed and implemented as part of an explosion of American militarism, as the ruling class has sought to maintain its global position through war and violence in every corner of the globe. It is also part of a wholesale assault on democratic rights, directed fundamentally against any opposition to the policies of the corporate and financial elite.

Far from prosecuting those responsible, the Obama administration is currently seeking to prevent the release of a Senate Intelligence Committee summary on CIA torture, working closely with the spy agency itself to cover up its crimes.

US ordered to explain withholding of Iraq and Afghanistan torture photos

October 23, 2014 by Nasheman

Obama admistration must justify suppression of never-before-seen photographs depicting US military torture of detainees

The photographs discussed in court on Tuesday are said to be even more disturbing than the infamous prison photos from Abu Ghraib. Photograph: Khalid Mohammed/AP

by Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

The Obama administration has until early December to detail its reasons for withholding as many as 2,100 graphic photographs depicting US military torture of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal judge ordered on Tuesday.

By 12 December, Justice Department attorneys will have to list, photograph by photograph, the government’s rationale for keeping redacted versions of the photos unseen by the public, Judge Alvin Hellerstein instructed lawyers. But any actual release of the photographs will come after Hellerstein reviews the government’s reasoning and issues another ruling in the protracted transparency case.

While Hellerstein left unclear how much of the Justice Department’s declaration will itself be public, the government’s submission is likely to be its most detailed argument for secrecy over the imagery in a case that has lasted a decade.

“The only thing that bothers me is that we’re taking a lot of time,” Hellerstein told a nearly empty courtroom.

At issue is the publication of as many as 2,100 photographs of detainee abuse, although the government continues not to confirm the precise number. Said to be even more disturbing than the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs that sparked a global furor in 2004, the imagery is the subject of a transparency lawsuit that both the Bush and Obama administrations, backed by the US Congress, have strenuously resisted.

In 2009, US president Barack Obama reversed his position on the photographs’ release and contended they would “further inflame anti-American opinion and … put our troops in greater danger”. That year, Congress passed a law, the Protected National Security Documents Act, intended to aid the government in keeping the images from the public. Two secretaries of defense, Robert Gates in 2009 and Leon Panetta in 2012, have issued assertions that US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq would be placed at risk by the disclosure.

But in August, Hellerstein said the government’s declaration was overbroad. Some of the photographs, which he said on Tuesday he had seen behind closed doors, “are relatively innocuous while others need more serious consideration”, Hellerstein said in August.

Disclosure, sought by the American Civil Liberties Union since 2004, will not come this year. Hellerstein scheduled a hearing to discuss the upcoming government declaration for 23 January.

The return of the US to war in Iraq raises the stakes for the case. Unlike in 2012, when Panetta certified that the release of the photographs would endanger the US military in Afghanistan, some 1,600 US troops are also now in Iraq again, this time to confront the Islamic State (Isis).

But while Hellerstein indicated he was interested in an “update” about current exposure to danger, he only ordered the government to specify its reasons for keeping each individual photograph withheld as of Panetta’s November 2012 declaration.

Potential release of the photographs dovetails with another imminent torture disclosure. The Senate intelligence committee is expected to soon unveil sections of its long-awaited investigation into CIA torture. The government’s most recent filing in a different transparency suit indicated the report’s release will come on 29 October, though the government has asked for extensions in the past and may do so again.

Marcellene Hearn, an attorney for the ACLU, portrayed the release of the torture photographs as an accountability measure.

“It’s disappointing that the government continues to fight to keep these photographs from the public,” Hearn said after the half-hour hearing. “The American people deserve to know the truth about what happened in our detention centers abroad. Yet the government is suppressing as many as 2,100 photographs of detainee abuse in Iraq and elsewhere. We will continue to press for the release of the photos in the courts.”

McCain insists on sending US ground troops to Syria, Iraq

October 22, 2014 by Nasheman

Senator John McCain (Reuters / Joshua Roberts)

by RT

If Republicans gain control of the US Senate following the November midterm elections, President Barack Obama should expect an old rival in a powerful position to push for US ground troops in Iraq and Syria.

Sen. John McCain, who lost the 2008 presidential election to Obama, is currently the most senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. If his party wins a majority in the Senate, as it is expected to do, McCain would become chairman of the committee, which oversees defense policy and the military.

The longtime senator from Arizona said over the weekend that he would use his perch on the committee to advocate sending ground troops to buttress US-led airstrikes against extremist group Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL), which has come to control large areas of Iraq and Syria since the latter’s civil war brought the group to prominence.

“Frankly, I know of no military expert who believes we are going to defeat ISIS with this present strategy,”McCain said at a Pacific Council on International Policy conference, according to The Huffington Post.

McCain has hit the campaign trail ahead of election day to support his party’s Senate candidates. The GOP has painted President Obama’s foreign policy and national security policies as weak as well as insufficient in the fight against jihadist group du jour, Islamic State.

“We may be able to ‘contain,’ but to actually defeat ISIS is going to require more boots on the ground, more vigorous strikes, more special forces, further arming the Kurdish peshmerga forces and creating a no-fly zone and buffer zone in Syria,” McCain said.

Syrian President Bashar Assad, a fellow foe of Islamic State, must be removed from office if the US wants to see success against extremism in the region, McCain added.

Many top congressional Republicans have stated a desire to send combat troops back to Iraq and into Syria ever since American airstrikes against Islamic State began this summer. President Obama has repeatedly said no ground troops will be sent to the region, despite the stated willingness of top Pentagon brass to suggest that this very option might be necessary to “destroy and degrade” Islamic State.

Public opinion seems to tilt slightly to the side of withholding troop deployments. A recent Gallup poll found that 54 percent of respondents opposed sending ground troops to fight Islamic State.

Outside of American troop deployments, McCain said the US must arm Kurdish forces currently fighting Islamic State, send more arms to the Free Syrian Army, and institute a no-fly zone and buffer zones to safeguard territory and appease regional allies like Turkey. US military leaders have signaled they are open to installing a no-fly zone over Syria.

“It’s immoral to tell [Syrians and Kurds] to fight ISIS but then let them get bombed by Assad,” McCain said.“It’s the most immoral thing since Henry Kissinger abandoned the Kurds many years ago.”

American-led airstrikes have been accompanied by airdrops of weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies to Kurdish forces in the Syrian city of Kobani.

McCain also stated that he was “very, very worried about the Iranians, not just because of the nuclear weapons issue but because of their other activities in the region.” The US and other world powers are in talks with Iran to decide how much and in what manner it must deplete its nuclear power program in order for an easing of draconian economic sanctions currently imposed by the West. McCain said he and other Republicans fear this deal will simply delay Iran’s achievement of a nuclear weapon.

McCain said that as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he would seek to boost the defense budget after slight cuts in recent years. He added that a Republican-controlled Senate would work with the US House, already run by the GOP, to evade Obama’s reach.

“We could work with the House and leave the President two choices — either sign or veto. But I’m hoping that if we gain the majority, it will be incumbent on Obama to look at the last two years of his presidency and look at what we can accomplish together.”

Key Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton, leave no doubt that endless war is official U.S. doctrine

October 9, 2014 by Nasheman

Photo: Reuters

– by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

Long before Americans were introduced to the new 9/11 era super-villains called ISIS and Khorasan, senior Obama officials were openly and explicitly stating that America’s “war on terror,” already 12 years old, would last at least another decade. At first, they injected these decrees only anonymously; in late 2012, The Washington Post – disclosing the administration’s secret creation of a “disposition matrix” to decide who should be killed, imprisoned without charges, or otherwise “disposed” of – reported these remarkable facts:

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”

In May, 2013, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether it should revise the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). A committee member asked a senior Pentagon official, Assistant Secretary Michael Sheehan, how long the war on terror would last; his reply: “At least 10 to 20 years.” At least. A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed afterward “that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today — atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted.” As Spencer Ackerman put it: “Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War,” one which – by the Obama administration’s own reasoning – has “no geographic limit.”

Listening to all this, Maine’s independent Sen. Angus King said: “This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today.” Former Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith – himself an ardent advocate of broad presidential powers – was at the hearing and noted that nobody even knows against whom this endless war is being waged: “Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.”

All of that received remarkably little attention given its obvious significance. But any doubts about whether Endless War – literally – is official American doctrine should be permanently erased by this week’s comments from two leading Democrats, both former top national security officials in the Obama administration, one of whom is likely to be the next American president.

Leon Panetta, the long-time Democratic Party operative who served as Obama’s Defense Secretary and CIA Director, said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama – who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed) – for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”

Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.

At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.

It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the “homeland security” and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the “defense sector”).

Just yesterday, Bloomberg reported: “Led by Lockheed Martin Group (LTM), the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.” Particularly exciting is that “investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq”; moreover, “the U.S. also is the biggest foreign military supplier to Israel, which waged a 50-day offensive against the Hamas Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip.” ISIS is using U.S.-made ammunition and weapons, which means U.S. weapons companies get to supply all sides of The New Endless War; can you blame investors for being so giddy?

I vividly recall how, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing, Obama partisans triumphantly declared that this would finally usher in the winding down of the War on Terror. On one superficial level, that view was understandable: it made sense if one assumes that the U.S. has been waging this war for its stated reasons and that it hopes to vanquish The Enemy and end the war.

But that is not, and never was, the purpose of the War on Terror. It was designed from the start to be endless. Both Bush and Obama officials have explicitly said that the war will last at least a generation. The nature of the “war,” and the theories that have accompanied it, is that it has no discernible enemy and no identifiable limits. More significantly, this “war” fuels itself, provides its own inexhaustible purpose, as it is precisely the policies justified in the name of Stopping Terrorism that actually ensure its spread (note how Panetta said the new U.S. war would have to include Libya, presumably to fight against those empowered by the last U.S. war there just 3 years ago).

This war – in all its ever-changing permutations – thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes. And that’s all independent of the vicarious sense of joy, purpose and fulfillment which the sociopathic Washington class derives from waging risk-free wars, as Adam Smith so perfectly described in Wealth of Nations 235 years ago:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace.They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

The last thing the Washington political class and the economic elites who control it want is for this war to end. Anyone who doubts that should just look at the express statements from these leading Democrats, who wasted no time at all seizing on the latest Bad Guys to justify literally decades more of this profiteering and war-making.

Ex-Pentagon chief predicts 30-year ISIS war

October 8, 2014 by Nasheman

Panetta says Obama now has an opportunity to ‘repair the damage’ by showing leadership after having ‘lost his way’ in the fight against ISIS. (File Photo: AFP)

– by Al Arabiya News

The war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could go on for decades because of poor decision-making on the part of the U.S. administration, the former chief of the Pentagon Leon Panetta said in an interview published Monday.

In the interview with USA Today, Panetta also criticized Obama for a deciding not the arm the moderate Syrian rebels in the early stages of the conflict in Syria.

“I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war” that could extend to threats in Libya, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen, Panetta told the newspaper.

Panetta, a respected policymaker who served under Obama, blamed the challenges on decisions the president made over the past three years.

Among those decisions, he cited Obama’s failure to push the Iraqi government hard enough to allow a residual U.S. force to stay in the country after troops withdrew in 2011, saying that created a security “vacuum.”

The former defense secretary also pointed to Obama’s rejection of advice in 2012 from Panetta and then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton to begin arming Syrian rebels fighting against President Bashar al-Assad.

“I do think we would be in a better position to kind of know whether or not there is some moderate element in the rebel forces that are confronting Assad,” Panetta said.

And Panetta said Obama lost credibility when he warned Assad not to use chemical weapons against his own people and then failed to act when the Syrian leader crossed that “red line” last year.

Panetta says Obama now has an opportunity to “repair the damage” by showing leadership after having “lost his way” in the fight against the extremist group that has seized chunks of territory in Iraq and Syria.

The former Pentagon chief was speaking ahead of the release of his new book, “Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace,” set for Tuesday by Penguin Press.

USA Today said that Panetta is explicitly critical Obama in his book, writing that his “most conspicuous weakness” was “a frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause.”

The president too often “relies on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader,” the former defense chief added, saying that approach means Obama “avoids the battle, complains and misses opportunities.”

At times, Obama “gets so discouraged by the process” that he sometimes stops fighting, Panetta told USA Today.

But Panetta also expressed hope Obama would change course during his last two years in office and recover from his mistakes.

“My hope is that the president, recognizing that we are at a kind of critical point in his administration, will take the bit in his teeth and will say, ‘We have got to solve these problems,’” Panetta said.

(With AFP)