We are a military police state. We will detain citizens. Will wage war forever.

For those of you complaining about how the Senate is all screwed up and they can't get anything done, you might be tempted to applaud the overwhelming bipartisanship in the 93-7 vote in favor of the $662 billion defense authorization bill.

Hold your applause.

It is about the military. It is about the War on Terror. It is about government's powers to haul citizens too, and without having to worry about due constitutional processes. Right in your backyard!

First, from Glenn Greenwald:

the 9/11 attack happened more than a decade ago; Osama bin Laden is dead; the U.S. Government claims it has killed virtually all of Al Qaeda’s leadership and the group is “operationally ineffective” in the Afghan-Pakistan region; and many commentators insisted that these developments would mean that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. And yet here we have the Congress, on a fully bipartisan basis, acting not only to re-affirm the war but to expand it even further: by formally declaring that the entire world (including the U.S.) is a battlefield and the war will essentially go on forever.

Now, perhaps you are also thinking, "hey, we killed Osama, and isn't it time we started winding up things?"  Ha ha, the joke's on you us.

More from Greenwald, who, as I noted earlier, can easily make one depressed:

One of the nation’s most stalwart war cheerleaders and one of the bill’s most vocal proponents, Sen. Lindsey Graham, made clear what the provision’s intent is: “If you’re an American citizen and you betray your country, you’re not going to be given a lawyer . . . I believe our military should be deeply involved in fighting these guys at home or abroad.” As Graham made chillingly clear, one key effect of the provision is that the U.S. military — rather than domestic law enforcement agencies — will be used to apprehend and imprison accused Terrorists on American soil, including U.S. citizens.
In doing so, Graham and the bill he supports — exactly like all those who supported Obama’s due-process-free assassination of Anwar Awlaki – have apparently decided simply to dispense with Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution, which provides that nobody can be punished for treason without heightened due process requirements being met. In that regard, compare (a) Graham’s pronouncement (widely shared by those supporting Awlaki’s assassination) that “if you’re an American citizen and you betray your country, you’re not going to be given a lawyer” to (b) the Constitutional requirement in Art. III, Sec. 3 that “No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.” To deny a citizen the right to a lawyer and go to court on the ground that they’ve “betrayed their country” and thus deserve to be imprisoned without a trial (or, worse, to be assassinated without one) is as violent a betrayal of the U.S. Constitution as one can imagine, literally.

So, what's with this fixation on violating the Constitution?  Take it away, Dahlia Lithwick:

So forget the presumption of innocence. Forget the protections of the Constitution. If you are suspected of terrorism, you may be held indefinitely, maybe even shipped off to Guantanamo. And in this war that will last forever and play out on every square inch of the planet, the chances that these new powers will ever be rolled back are negligible. Even long after the war on terror has waned.

Ok, I am now scared shitless that I can be made to suddenly disappear!  But, why such a bill from the Senate?

The underlying rationale for allowing the military such unprecedented power is the tiresome assertion that all of our current strategies against terrorism have failed. It’s almost as if the bill’s sponsors think that there have been multiple successful terrorist attacks since 9/11; that dozens of terrorists have been freed as a result of the sloppy civilian justice system; and that domestic law enforcement has failed in its efforts to combat terror. None of that is true. Congress appears determined to do away with every tactic that has identified and halted terror attacks in the past 10 years, and to enshrine into the law everything that has failed.

WTF!

Lithwick adds:

The secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, the director of the FBI, the CIA director, and the head of the Justice Department’s national security division have all said that the indefinite detention provisions in the bill are a bad idea. And the White House continues to say that the president will veto the bill if the detainee provisions are not removed. It sees the proposed language as limiting its flexibility.

WTF!

I remembered this from my own blog entry from two years ago:

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More on the failed "War on Terror"

It is such a relief to read commentaries by Glenn Greenwald and Christopher Hitchens, a day after writing that the Norwegian terror attack reveals the hollowness of our obsession with wiping out terror and linking terrorist acts with Islamism and al-Qaeda.

Hitchens opens thus:

Having had 16 years to reflect since Oklahoma City, we should really have become a little more refined in our rapid-response diagnoses of anti-civilian mass murder.

But, of course, as Greenwald also documents, there was an insane rush to concluding that the Oslo massacre was somehow linked to Islamic terrorists and al-Qaeda.

Greenwald, who has been writing for years now against this "War on Terror" and the atrociousness of naming a violent activity as terrorism only when the agent is a Muslim, writes:

Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target.  Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn't Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn't).  As Maz Hussain -- whose lengthy Twitter commentary on this event yesterday was superb and well worth reading -- put it:

That Terrorism means nothing more than violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes has been proven repeatedly.  ... [As] NYU's Remi Brulin has extensively documented, Terrorism is the most meaningless, and therefore the most manipulated, word in the English language.  Yesterday provided yet another sterling example.

The Norwegian mass murder ought to have convinced us once and for all that there is no winnable war on terror.

Among the Muslims who have been sidelined because of our baseless and shameful obsession with Islamic terrorists are the ones who have been suffering through the Arab Spring, which is now well into a summer of discontent.  Hitchens points out:

Meanwhile, the streets and squares of Syria and the committees of the Libyan civic opposition fill up with eager and anxious people who want to know if they have been naive to place their bets—in some cases to wager their lives—on democratic transition, peaceful tactics, the transparent allocation of previously stolen funds for long-overdue reconstruction, and the removal of a parasitic military and police caste.

How awful in the manner in which we are messing with people!  Were politicians and pundits always this terrible?

The "war on terror" is a failure

The Economist has a neat way of summarizing the Norway terrorism:

Relative to Norway’s population, the two attacks taken together are of a similar magnitude to the September 11th hijackings in the United States.

Norway's dead from the twin attacks are proportionally worse, strictly on the basis of population.  Norway has a shade under five million people, while the US is home to more than sixty times that number.

Soon after the news of the explosion, pundits were theorizing about Islamic fundamentalist militants and even Kurdish and Uighur elements.  When, as was the case in the Oklahoma City violence, it was "home-grown" terrorism. 

Apparently this extreme right winger boasted about having been in contact with the English Defence League.  Thanks to the New Yorker's profile of this outfit and its leader, only a couple of weeks ago, I can understand why the EDL might have such fanatics. 

One of the many aspects of this atrocious violence in Oslo is that the Bush/Cheney "War or Terror" as a response to 9/11 was one of the worst things they could have done.  And for Obama to continue to wage that war against terror, as if it is something like an identifiable army that can be defeated, is a tragedy.

I am all the more reminded of the television program I watched when I was in India a couple of years ago.  It was in one of those news channels, and was a talk show featuring some wannabe public intellectuals.  The question for this panel was this: "all Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims."  I had to force myself to watch it for a while.  It was awful to hear most of them assert that all terrorists are Muslims.

They conveniently forgot all kinds of non-Islamic terrorism within India's borders alone, leave alone the rest of the world.  Two prime ministers were assassinated, and neither was caused by terrorists who were Muslims.  Indira Gandhi was felled by bullets fired by a Sikh, and Rajiv Gandhi was blown to pieces by a Srilankan Tamil suicide bomber.  In contemporary India, Maoist guerrillas use violence, and these are not driven by any religion, Islam or otherwise.

Yet, there was only the Islamic terrorism that was discussed.

It seems to be a similar story in the rest of the world, and definitely in the West.  Even when unfortunate events like in Oslo repeatedly point out that terrorism comes in all flavors.

A rational rethink might then question the War on Terror that the US continues to fight.  But, apparently not.

A violent crime proportionally greater in magnitude than the 9/11 event.  I recall being depressed for a few days after that happened.   I can't begin to imagine the emotions among Norwegians now ...

War uninterrupted, under Barack O'Bush. Or is it George Obama?

The best way to settle this: we will call them Tweedledum and Tweedledee!

Up until the 2008 elections, progressives were furious with President Bush for dragging the country not only into Iraq, but into a War on Terror.  Candidate, Senator Obama promised hope and change.  "We are the ones we have been waiting for" the messiah proclaimed.

That was the story then.

Three years later?

We are very much there in Afghanistan.

We will continue to have a significant presence in Iraq for generations more, it seems like. 
Afghanistan? Better not to even talk about it anymore.
The drone attacks in Pakistan have vastly increased under Obama

As if these are not enough to worry us over the what has turned out to be the third term of President Bush, the War on Terror has been increased in its geographic reach

According to The Nation:

As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners.

I suppose the advantage that Obama has over Bush is this: as a constitutional law professor, Obama doesn't need any minions like Yoo to write legal briefs and make arguments in favor of his monarchy.

Thus, under O'Bush, we have expanded military operations in Yemen, Somalia, and Libya.

Would you then hypothesize that the US is more popular in the Arab World after the election of Obama, or Was Bush's America more popular?

Glenn Greenwald answers:

A new poll released today of six Arab nations -- Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco -- contains even worse news on this front:

The hope that the Arab world had not long ago put in the United States and President Obama has all but evaporated.
Two and a half years after Obama came to office, raising expectations for change among many in the Arab world, favorable ratings of the United States have plummeted in the Middle East, according to a new poll conducted by Zogby International for the Arab American Institute Foundation.
In most countries surveyed, favorable attitudes toward the United States dropped to levels lower than they were during the last year of the Bush administration . . . Pollsters began their work shortly after a major speech Obama gave on the Middle East . . . Fewer than 10 percent of respondents described themselves as having a favorable view of Obama.

What's striking is that none of these is among the growing list of countries we're occupying and bombing.  Indeed, several are considered among the more moderate and U.S.-friendly nations in that region, at least relatively speaking.  Yet even in this group of nations, anti-U.S. sentiment is at dangerously (even unprecedentedly) high levels.

 Hey liberals, progressives, Democrats, whatever you call yourselves ... happy now?

Mumbai terror yet again reveals the difference between India and the US

I was reminded of one of my posts from almost a couple of years ago where I had excerpted from the prolific Pankaj Mishra:

India may have been passive after the Mumbai attacks. But India has not launched wars against either abstract nouns or actual countries that it has no hope of winning or even disengaging from. Another major terrorist assault on our large and chaotic cities is very probable, but it is unlikely to have the sort of effect that 9/11 had on America.
This is largely because many Indians still live with a sense of permanent crisis, of a world out of joint, where violence can be contained but never fully prevented, and where human action quickly reveals its tragic limits. The fatalism I sense in my village may be the consolation of the weak, of those powerless to shape the world to their ends. But it also provides a built-in check against the arrogance of power — and the hubris that has made America’s response to 9/11 so disastrously counterproductive.

 How counterproductive?  Like so:

Afghanistan.
     Iraq.
          Pakistan.
               Yemen.
                    Libya.
                         Somalia.

And counting :(

May we please get the hell out of Afghanistan?

Cartoon of the day: Afghanistan

The latest news?
More US/NATO fatalities, including one from Oregon:

Lance Cpl. Joseph Rodewald wanted to enlist for as long as anyone can remember, even asking his father if he could attend a military school as a boy, family and friends said Thursday.

Rodewald's family couldn't afford to send him to the expensive school, so the energetic young man waited until after his graduation from South Albany High School in 2007 to sign up with the U.S. Marine Corps.

The former high school football player and wrestler, who would have turned 22 next Tuesday, was killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan.

The hi-tech anarchist: WikiLeaks

Julian Assange now identifies himselfas the editor of WikiLeaks.  Which then has set off a whole range of discussions on whether what Assange does is journalism at all.

And then there are those who have already branded Assange a threat to national security and that he ought to be arrested. Who would have imagined that Time would have a piece with the title, "Should the US kidnap WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange?"

So, from my home-office in Eugene, Oregon, I have a different take on all these--Assange and WikiLeaks are the latest version of anarchism and anarchists who have always challenged the state and status quo.

It used to be that the meetings of the World Trade Organization or the G-8 or the IMF were the venues that provided anarchists with an outlet for their political and cultural dissent.  Most governments treated them as a nuisance, and every once in a while would make their police reaction so strong that anarchists ended up getting a lot more publicity and sympathy than would otherwise have been the case.

So, to all these rebels without a cause, al Qaeda and the Anglo-American "war on terror" have provided an ideal outlet for their passions, and with quite a focus as well.  This entire format of information-anarchy also works well for them--no need to gather in public places, and no visible confrontation with the establishment.  Given that the wars have affected the entire world now, and given the outright horrors of, say, waterboarding or Guantanamo or ... I can easily imagine that while those of us who are pacifists (or wimpy?) simply blog or write op-eds or grumble to our local Congress member, the young and radical anarchists have WikiLeaks.

To a large extent, this is a sign of the times--the information and technology world in which we live.  If our government can, from the comforts of military bases in Nevada, fly unmanned planes that kill people all the way across the world in Pakistan, then, hey, is it any surprise that these radical dissenters have their own remote operations?
WikiLeaks, I suspect, is only the beginning of all kinds of cyber-activities yet to come. 

Cartoon of the day: the war in Afghanistan

The massive leak through WikiLeaks

In case the FBI is snooping around even here, I want to clarify to them that my post last week was purely an accident :)

More on Kashmir, and the dark clouds of war

While the web has made it possible to follow events from thousands of miles away, it is equally possible to be misled because of that very distance.  Which is why I feel better--even when discussing awful developments--when I find that I am not the only one worried about, in this case, Kashmir.  Here is Tariq Ali writing in the London Review of Books:

An ugly anti-Muslim chauvinism accompanies India’s violence. It has been open season on Muslims since 9/11, when the liberation struggle in Kashmir was conveniently subsumed under the war on terror

I second his view that in India it has been open season on Muslims.  I was too shocked to make any comment when watching a television show during one of my trips there.  It was on NDTV, I think, and seemed to be an Indian version of the American talk-fest among pundits, with audience participation.  The question they were discussing?  "All Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims."

I was shocked at the topic itself, not to speak of the comments that were made.  This in a country where two prime ministers had been assassinated not by people with Islamic faith--Indira Gandhi was felled by bullets from her bodyguards who were Sikh, and Rajiv Gandhi was brutally exploded by a Sri Lankan Tamil suicide bomber.  Of course, Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi was killed by a Hindu zealot.

Ok, these were before 9/11.  But, all contemporary terrorists being Muslims is contradicted by, for instance, the Maoist rebels who seem to strike and kill at ease, which has the government responding by deploying paramilitary forces in large numbers.  And, of course, the communal terror launched by the BJP and Shiv Sena .... Or, how about Gujarat's Modi coordinating the violence that killed and terrorized Muslims in the state in which he was elected chief minister to protect and serve those very people?

That TV show was no exception.  Maybe one needs such an outsider's perspective to see through all these ...

Very depressing all the developments in Kashmir have been ... Ali concludes:

Now a new generation of Kashmiri youth is on the march. They fight, like the young Palestinians, with stones. Many have lost their fear of death and will not surrender. Ignored by politicians at home, abandoned by Pakistan, they are developing the independence of spirit that comes with isolation and it will not be easily quelled. It’s unlikely, however, that the prime minister of India and his colleagues will pay any attention to them. And just to show who’s master, the Indian army flag-marched through the streets of Srinagar on 7 July in an awesome show of strength.

I have problems with many of Tariq Ali's takes on the world ... but, in this case, I agree with him.

Successive Pakistani governments continue to capitalize on the Kashmir issue, and the explicit and implicit anti-Muslim tendencies in India--and they screw the country and the people in the process.  I mean, this is a no-win for anybody involved.  Bloody hell all around.

In the immortal words of Rodney King, why can't we all get along?

I wonder if I might never get to see Kashmir's famous Dal Lake that I thought I would visit some day--it was in the textbook for the "social studies" class a long time ago (what was that teacher's name? I can kind of picture her even  now! Was it Sitalakshmi Ramaswamy?) that I came across a photo of Dal Lake.  And then there were so many Hindi movie song/dance sequences from that lake and the state itself.  My graduate school mate, Gazala, who was from Srinagar, added to my interests with her descriptions of Dal Lake ...
Here is one of my favorite Hindi film songs--this one is from "Kashmir Ki Kali" (lyrics translation here)

The late Sen. Byrd and the Iraq War

He was one of the few who stood up against the war chants; his speech in two parts ...

this administration has directed all of the anger, fear, and grief which emerged from the ashes of the Twin Towers and the twisted metal of the Pentagon towards a tangible villain, one we can see and hate and attack. And villain he is. But he is the wrong villain. And this is the wrong war .

Part 1


Part 2

"The law is a ass--a idiot"--continued

A follow-up to this earlier posting where I used the Charles Dickens quote in the context of a law suit that had worked its way up to the Supreme Court.  A quick recap of that case:

Ralph Fertig hardly resembles a terrorist, but the soft-spoken 79-year-old pacifist and human rights activist from Los Angeles might well qualify as one under the government's strong anti-terrorism law.
He is the lead plaintiff in a Supreme Court case to be heard next week that will test whether speaking out on behalf of an oppressed foreign minority -- represented by a group that's been deemed a terrorist organization by the U.S. -- can result in a long prison term.

So, what did the Supremes say?  Are we to be surprised that the uber-conservative Supreme Court supports the government's position?

The court ruled 6-3 Monday that the government may prohibit all forms of aid to designated terrorist groups, even if the support consists of training and advice about entirely peaceful and legal activities.

Material support intended even for benign purposes can help a terrorist group in other ways, Chief Justice John Roberts said in his majority opinion.

Six to three!  even the retiring Stevens sided with the conservatives on the bench.  (Well, this is merely another piece of evidence that Stevens is not that much a "liberal" justice, as is often mistakenly presented.)

What did the three dissenting justices say?  Here is their spokesman, Justice Breyer:

I cannot agree with the Court’s conclusion that the Constitution permits the Government to prosecute the plaintiffs criminally for engaging in coordinated teaching and advocacy furthering the designated organizations' lawful political objectives. In my view, the Government has not met its burden of showing that an interpretation of the statute that would prohibit this speech- and association-related activity serves the Government's compelling interest in combating terrorism. And I would interpret the statute as normally placing activity of this kind outside its scope.

It is bloody f*ed up, I say. Again, as a reminder, what did Ralph Fertig do, and what does he want to achieve?

The Palestine Liberation Organization and the Irish Republican Army, two of history’s most notorious terrorist groups, have never appeared on the State Department’s List of Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations. By the time the list was first compiled in 1997, both groups were deemed to be moving away from violence and toward a peaceful resolution of their grievances.
Ralph Fertig, president of the Humanitarian Law Project, wants to encourage a similar change within the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a violent separatist group in Turkey also known as the PKK (its Kurdish initials). But he worries that doing so will expose him to prosecution for providing “material support” to a terrorist organization, a crime Congress has defined so broadly that it includes a great deal of speech protected by the First Amendment. When it hears Fertig’s case next week, the Supreme Court will have a chance to correct that error.
Fertig, a civil rights lawyer and former administrative law judge, seeks, as the district court described it, to “provide training in the use of humanitarian and international law for the peaceful resolution of disputes, engage in political advocacy on behalf of the Kurds living in Turkey, and teach the PKK how to petition for relief before representative bodies like the United Nations.” Fertig says he also wants to “advocate on behalf of the rights of the Kurdish people and the PKK before the United Nations and the United States Congress.”

I am looking forward to Glenn Greenwald's and Dahlia Lithwick's analyses ...

BTW, does this mean that the 80-year old Ralph Fertig is looking at prison time?

Meet "Uncle Ali": the Yemen version of Musharraf!

The president of Yemen is Ali Abdullah Saleh .... but is more well known as Uncle Ali:

Yemenis call him "Uncle Ali," and he is the only president in Yemen’s chaotic modern history whom they’ve had time to get to know on a first-name basis. Ibrahim al-Hamdi, who led a military coup that toppled the civilian government of the northern Yemen Arab Republic and became president in 1974, was assassinated three years later. His successor, Ahmad al-Ghashmi, lasted barely eight months before he was blown up by an exploding briefcase. Saleh, a former army tank driver with a primary school education who grew up in the dusty tribal village of Bayt al-Ahmar, was elected by a committee to the presidency of the republic later that same year. He stayed in office until 1990, when the north and the formerly Soviet-allied South Yemen rejoined, and has held on to power as president of reunited Yemen ever since.

 What kind of a ruler is he?  He is the Yemeni Pervez Musharraf:

The best reason Saleh has not to push hard against al Qaeda may be a paradoxical one: if he were to eliminate America’s enemies in Yemen, he wouldn’t be able to fight them anymore. If the group remains a threat, Saleh’s cash-strapped government receives huge sums of money and pledges of political support from the international community, so why would Saleh slaughter his cash cow? "So long as there is al Qaeda, no one will let him fail. It’s simple," said Naif al-Gunas, the speaker of the opposition coalition, the Joint Meetings Party. A war against a dissolute enemy like al Qaeda also allows Saleh to use counterterrorism funds and military resources to battle his internal enemies—the Shiite rebel group in the north, and the separatists in the south—simply by accusing them both of being allied with al Qaeda, which he has done repeatedly. (The alliances are mostly unproven, but, as one parliament member put it, "Shared enemies make unlikely bedfellows.")

At the end of the day, Saleh’s ability to sell his own temporary allegiance to the highest bidder is his main political asset, and for the time being the U.S. seems to have secured the dubious prize. While the concern, following the attempted Christmas bombing, was that Yemen would be the next Afghanistan, and Saleh the next Hamid Karzai, in truth the Yemeni president resembles no one so much as former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Like Saleh, Musharraf took vast amounts of American military aid intended for the fight against terrorism and spent it on his own military priorities, including an arms buildup against India and a secret nuclear weapons program. Like Saleh, he balanced occasional crackdowns on al Qaeda with a broader live-and-let-live gentleman’s agreement, allowing the organization to thrive and metastasize in the tribal areas. And like Saleh, he was seen by Washington as the best available partner we had, regardless of his flaws—which, perhaps, he was, at least for awhile. In Yemen, as in Pakistan, the only thing more daunting than the odds of the alliance producing anything of value is the lack of other options.

And we know how well the pro-Musharraf angle worked for the US and Pakistan, don't we?

"The law is a ass—a idiot"

So said Mr. Bumble in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.

That is what I could think of when I read a LA Times news story about this man and a Supreme Court case:

He went to the South as a "freedom rider" in 1961, joining other civil rights activists on behalf of African Americans seeking the right to travel freely on interstate buses. He was arrested, then badly beaten by white cellmates. "When I went to jail in Alabama for violating the Jim Crow laws, they charged me with disturbing the peace," he said.

Guess what? According to the government, this man is a terrorist!

Who is he and why is he a terrorist?

He is Ralph Fertig, a retired judge and USC professor.  The guy turns 80 next week (Happy birthday, Mr. Fertig.)

What did he do?  Hide explosives in his underwear while on a plane?  Nope.

Fertig says he wants no part of terrorism or violence, but rather the freedom to advocate for the rights of the Kurdish minority in Turkey. He is troubled that Kurds can be punished for speaking their own language or displaying their national colors. And he believes the 1st Amendment protects his right to counsel Kurdish leaders to steer away from violence and to take their cause to the United Nations.

"I am opposed to violence. It seems crazy to me that I could go to jail for trying to persuade people to engage in nonviolence," said Fertig, a retired judge and a USC professor of social work.

The State Department has named the Kurdistan Workers Party, or the PKK, as a terrorist organization. The PKK, which seeks an independent state for the Kurds, has been accused of violent attacks on Turkish targets, including civilians.

See, the law is a ass.

BTW, apparently even writing columns in newspapers can warrant a terrorist label:

Government lawyers say [the anti-terrorism law] even forbids filing a legal brief or writing an op-ed essay on behalf of a designated terrorist group.

Great! Now my colleagues will be happy to report to the feds my opinions as terrorist activity in their attempts to oust me:)

For once, Juan Williams makes sense on Faux News

Can the CIA kill American citizens?

Apparently the answer to that question is ... "yes, we can"

The global war on terror, which led us to torture, Blackwater, drones, ..... now takes us to wondering about the legality of the CIA targeting an American citizen, not for capturing so that we might try the American in our courts but, instead, for assassination.  During Barack Obama's presidency?

I first came across this in Greenwald's post at Salon. Boy, that Greenwald is an excellent writer, with a clear logic.  Anyway, Greenwald writes:

The Washington Post's Dana Priest today reports 

that "U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people."   ...

But buried in Priest's article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret "hit list" of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military,authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

I wonder if this is the change for which Obama won the presidency.
Greenwald further writes:

Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests."  They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations.  Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years.  That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution.  Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?

The point is not to condone terrorism; but the fact that the President can simply order "off  with your head" as much as a king could do back in the 15th century--even though we are not a monarchy, and the Constitution establishes a due process .... Hmmm....
The LA Times adds:

Decisions to add names to the CIA target list are "all reviewed carefully, not just by policy people but by attorneys," said the second U.S. official. "Principles like necessity, proportionality, and the minimization of collateral damage -- to persons and property -- always apply."
The U.S. military, which has expanded its presence in Yemen, keeps a separate list of individuals to capture or kill. Awlaki is already on the military's list, which is maintained by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command. Awlaki apparently survived a Dec. 24 airstrike conducted jointly by U.S. and Yemeni forces.
The CIA has also deployed more operatives and analysts to Yemen. CIA Deputy Director Stephen Kappes was in the country last month, just weeks before a Nigerian accused of training with Al Qaeda in Yemen boarded a jetliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day.
From beginning to end, the CIA's process for carrying out Predator strikes is remarkably self-contained. Almost every key step takes place within the Langley, Va., campus, from proposing targets to piloting the remotely controlled planes. 

We are at war! We are at war! :( .... well, war is NOT the answer

So we've spent the last decade screaming to the world that WE ARE AT WAR!, that we're a War Nation, that we're led by a War President.  That we are "at war" -- not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but generally against Islamic extremists -- is an absolute bipartisan orthodoxy that must be affirmed by all Serious people.  And we are currently waging some form of actual war in no fewer than five predominantly Muslim countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia); are threatening Iran with "crippling" sanctions and -- from our more deranged quarters -- war

Glenn Greenwald, as always, is sharp in his commentary, with a laser-like focus, and has a powerful way with words. He then writes:

It's truly astounding to watch us -- for a full decade -- send fighter jets and drones and bombs and invading forces and teams of torturers and kidnappers to that part of the world, or, as we were doing long before 9/11, to overthrow their governments, prop up their dictators, occupy what they perceive as holy land with our foreign troops, and arm Israel to the teeth, and then act surprised and confused when some of them want to attack us.  In general, the U.S. only attacks countries with no capabilities to attack us back in the "homeland" -- at least not with conventional forces.  As a result, we have come to believe that any forms of violence we perpetrate on them over there is justifiable and natural, but the Laws of Humanity are instantly breached in the most egregious ways whenever they bring violence back to the U.S., aimed at Americans.  It's just impossible to listen to discussions grounded in this warped mentality without being astounded at how irrational it is.  What do Americans think is going to happen if we continue to engage in this conduct, in this always-widening "war"?

It is absolutely disheartening that for us here in the US, the first decade of the 21st century was all about war.  And it does not look like it will end soon either.  We are becoming a phenomenally huge version of Israel, which views its need for security and war as existential.  But, it is not--our daily lives are not subject to security threats that Israel faces every single day.  Israel fought wars with countries--yes, in plural--that were/are its neighbors.  Oh well .... I do not mean to imply that everything that Israel does is justifiable.  Not at all.  But, at least there is a reason for that madness.  Other than toppling the Taliban regime, and apprehending bin Laden and Zawahiri, well, we had no reason to do anything else.

Greenwald ends his updates with this:

Just contemplate how many Balawis [the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA officers] there are in the world:  Muslims who begin with sympathy towards the U.S. and hostility towards Al Qaeda who are completely transformed into the opposite as a result of the constant civilian death we and Israel bring (regardless of intent) to that part of the world.

Shah Rukh Khan on The Daily Show :-)

Who better than the folks at The Daily Show to comment on the Shah Rukh Khan incident, eh!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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Rethink Afghanistian. And Pakistan.

I am relieved that at least now, and slowly, the American polity and media are understanding that Afghanistan cannot be looked at without simultaneously figuring out Pakistan.
I am not at ease with the escalation of war--a surge--in Afghanistan.
All the more the reason I urge you to sign the petition to Rethink Afghanistan by clicking here. The following video is a trailer of the videos available here.