Category Archives: Issues

Iran vows revenge against Israel after Revoltionary Guard general is killed in Syria

Business Insider reports: Iran vowed revenge against Israel after a senior commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) was shot dead in southwestern Syria last week while traveling to Lebanon.

A closer look at General Hassan Shateri (aka Hessam Khosnevis) shows just how important this man was, and why Iran quickly blamed “agents and supporters of the Zionist regime.”

Shateri was a senior officer in the IRGC’s elite Quds force — the international arm of the Revolutionary Guards — and reportedly “the highest ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officer to be killed outside Iran.”

Iran’s official Press TV described him as leading “the Iranian-financed reconstruction projects in the south of Lebanon” — where Shi’ites form a majority of the population — for the last seven years.

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned “Khosnevis” and others for supporting Hezbollah, describing Khosnevis as a provider of technical support of “the terrorist group’s private communications network” and Iranian President Mahmoud. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Equal opportunity, America’s national myth

Joseph Stiglitz writes: President Obama’s second Inaugural Address used soaring language to reaffirm America’s commitment to the dream of equality of opportunity: “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible. The Pew Research Center has found that some 90 percent of Americans believe that the government should do everything it can to ensure equality of opportunity.

Perhaps a hundred years ago, America might have rightly claimed to have been the land of opportunity, or at least a land where there was more opportunity than elsewhere. But not for at least a quarter of a century. Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches stories were not a deliberate hoax, but given how they’ve lulled us into a sense of complacency, they might as well have been.

It’s not that social mobility is impossible, but that the upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity. According to research from the Brookings Institution, only 58 percent of Americans born into the bottom fifth of income earners move out of that category, and just 6 percent born into the bottom fifth move into the top. Economic mobility in the United States is lower than in most of Europe and lower than in all of Scandinavia. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Gangster bankers: too big to jail

Matt Taibbi writes: The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks’ profit – but they didn’t extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses.

People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often cease to amaze. But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching­ sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated­ with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder – well, aiding and abetting it, anyway.

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that “they make the guys on Wall Street look good.” The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The right to remain invisible and assume fictitious identities

When online communication first took shape, it often involved exchanges between individuals who had professional reasons to want to conceal their identities. Software engineers, who tend to be libertarian by nature, wanted to be able to engage in freewheeling discussions with like-minded cyber-adventurers without being constrained too much by overbearing managers or corporate dictates. Free speech and anonymity seemed to dovetail together.

But when the use of anonymity or fictitious identities is regarded as a right, all too often this ends up turning into a license for irresponsibility. The liberating effect of not having to be held accountable for ones own communication, breeds a fake boldness: the willingness to say things one would otherwise not dare say; the courage to “speak out” on the condition that one can do so while remaining in hiding.

The New York Times reports: There is a saying about academia that the disputes are so vicious because the stakes are so low. In the case of Raphael Haim Golb, a son of a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, the last few years have provided ample support for the first half of the saying. But the second half is less accurate.

Raphael and Norman Golb

In his cluttered fifth-floor walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village, Mr. Golb, 53, is waiting to begin serving a six-month sentence for waging an Internet campaign against his father’s academic rivals, including sending e-mails under a rival professor’s name. The younger Mr. Golb, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard and a law degree from New York University, is six feet tall, 120 pounds; digressive, tightly wound, bookish; a gadfly, an irritant, an obsessive. If you saw him on the street, you might worry about his safety.

Between 2006 and 2009, he created more than 80 online aliases to advance his father’s views about the Dead Sea Scrolls against what he saw as a concerted effort to exclude them. Along the way, according to a jury and a panel of appellate court judges, he crossed from engaging in academic debate to committing a crime.

What he accomplished through this manner of intellectual warfare is, like the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, a topic on which opinion is passionately diverse, with no shortage of bad blood.

“This has nothing to do with scholarly debate,” said Lawrence H. Schiffman, vice provost of Yeshiva University and a widely published authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, who became the prime target of Mr. Golb’s online activities. “It has to do with criminal activity.

“Fraud, impersonation and harassment are criminal matters,” he continued. “This was actually designed to literally end my career.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why the Pentagon hates Obama’s drone war

Micah Zenko writes: General Stanley McChrystal is speaking out against the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes, echoing previous warnings and clashing with the White House’s carefully cultivated narrative:

To the Daily Telegraph:

It’s very tempting for any country to have a clean, antiseptic approach, that you can use technology, but it’s not something that I think is going to be an effective strategy, unless it is part of a wider commitment.

To Reuters:

They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.

To journalist Trudy Rubin:

[Drones are] a very limited approach that gives the illusion you are making progress because you are doing something.

And to television anchor Candy Crowley:

It can lower the threshold for decision making to take action that at the receiving end, feels very different at the receiving end.

McChrystal offers a unique perspective on the debate surrounding drone strikes. Serving as the commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 to 2008, he restructured the secretive unit to capture or kill hundreds of suspected militants and terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. During this time, he had the authority to deploy U.S. forces into Pakistan — without prior approval from the White House — in order to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. As commander of the international and U.S. forces in Afghanistan from June 2009 to July 2010, he significantly tightened the rules of engagement for airstrikes in populated areas, noting, “Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction.” (Full disclosure: McChrystal served on the advisory committee of my recent report on U.S. drone strikes, although that does not mean he agreed with my findings or recommendations.)

Although his candor is rare in his field, many of McChrystal’s concerns are increasingly shared by active-duty and retired military officials with whom I’ve spoken. The vast majority of these officers, who held a wide range of positions while in uniform, are deeply troubled by the Obama administration’s ongoing drone wars for five reasons. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Living under occupation: ‘I have no memory of a time without struggle’

Emad Burnat is a Palestinian farmer and director of the Oscar-nominated documentary 5 Broken Cameras. His film is raising the profile of the Palestinian non-violent resistance movement. Most Americans still know nothing about the occupation, but with testimony such as Burnat’s now appearing on mainstream outlets like CNN, awareness is starting to grow.

I come from Palestine. I have lived my entire life under military occupation, and I have no memory of a time without struggle.

I have seen my neighbors beaten, blindfolded, and kidnapped. I have seen children snatched from their mothers in the dead of night. I have seen my brother shot and friend murdered.

I can’t tell you how this holy land felt before the armored jeeps’ rumble. I can’t trace a path from here — from where the Wall surrounds me — to the sea.

But for as long as I can remember, I could not forget. Forget the checkpoints, the harassment, the detentions. Forget that I am not free.

Like all prisoners, my memories are what sustain me. But what I need now are new memories. Happy memories.

That’s why I started filming.

I wanted to make memories of my son, Gibreel. I wanted to capture his smile, to chronicle his life in close-up. I wanted to crop out the occupation, the violence, the hopelessness.

You know the scenes. Maybe you, too, have captured your loved ones’ firsts: the first words, the first steps, the first glimpse of that way he angles his head and grins. Just like his mother.

Soraya’s gentle voice is in so many scenes of our son’s early life. But as I continued filming, Gibreel taught me that there are other sounds more urgent in his world.

His first words were “army” and “wall.” His first steps were in the shadow of groaning bulldozers and screeching cranes. Not the kind children play with. The kind that build the colonies that are stealing our land. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Solar radiation management — a cheap, easy fix for climate change the could wreck the planet

Climate change has resulted from unplanned geoengineering — for most of the last two centuries, we have been pumping vast quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without pausing to consider the results. So geoengineering that would involve seeding the upper atmosphere with solar-reflecting sulfate aerosols might look like a technological fix for a technological problem.

Climate change, however, is not just a technical problem. It is a planetary crisis with a human cause. While the direct cause is human behavior, this behavior has psychological and philosophical roots. It is the expression of a worldview in which humanity has set itself apart from nature. It is the expression of a value system that respects the accumulation of wealth more than the cultivation of wisdom. It is the expression of lifestyles in which people have become increasingly dependent upon objects rather than themselves and each other.

“Solar radiation management” (SRM) far from offering a solution to climate change, seems much more like another expression of the mindset that brought us to this perilous juncture.

MIT Technology Review: Critics of SRM — and even its advocates — note that the technology has numerous limitations, and that no one is entirely sure what the consequences would be. Sulfate aerosols reflect sunlight in the upper atmosphere, thus directly cooling the planet. But greenhouse gases operate very differently, trapping long-wave infrared radiation escaping from Earth’s surface and thus warming it. While sulfates would be likely to offset warming, it’s not clear exactly how they would counteract some of the other effects of greenhouse gases, particularly changes in precipitation patterns. And SRM would do nothing to reduce the acidification of the oceans caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“The term ‘solar radiation management’ is positively Orwellian,” says ­Raymond Pierre­humbert, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago. “It’s meant to give you a feeling that we really understand what we would be doing. It’s a way to increase comfort levels with this crazy idea. What we’re really talking about is hacking the planet in a case where we don’t really know what it is going to do.” In delivering the prestigious Tyndall Lecture at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting last December, he said the idea of putting sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere was “barking mad.”

Pierre­humbert also rejects the value of doing field experiments. “The whole idea of geoengineering is so crazy and would lead to such bad consequences, it really is pretty pointless. We already know enough about sulfate albedo engineering to know it would put the world in a really precarious state. Field experiments are really a dangerous step on the way to deployment, and I have a lot of doubts what would actually be learned.”

The fundamental problem with albedo engineering, says Pierrehumbert, is that once we start using it, we’ll need to continue indefinitely. Since it only offsets warming, once the process stops, temperature changes caused by greenhouse gases will manifest themselves suddenly and dramatically. “If you stop — or if you have to stop — then you’re toast,” he says. Even using it as a temporary Band-Aid doesn’t make sense, he argues: “Once you get to the point in terms of climate changes that you feel you have to use it, then you have to use [SRM] forever.” He believes that this makes the idea a “complete nonstarter.”

Besides, Pierrehumbert says, our climate models “are nowhere near advanced enough for us to begin thinking of actually engineering the planet.” In particular, computer models don’t accurately predict specific regional precipitation patterns. And, he says, it’s not possible to use existing models to know how geoengineering might affect, say, India’s monsoons or precipitation in such drought-prone areas as northern Africa. “Our ability to actually say what the regional climate patterns will be in a geoengineered world is very limited,” he says.

Alan Robock, meanwhile, has a long list of questions concerning SRM, at the top of which is: can it even be done? Robock, an expert on how volcanoes affect climate and a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University, cautions that while the Pinatubo eruption confirmed the cooling effect of sulfate aerosols, it injected a massive amount of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere over a few days. Solar geoengineering would use far less sulfur but disperse it continuously over an extended period. That could be a critical difference. The optimal way to achieve SRM is with sulfur particles only about half a micrometer in diameter. Sunlight reflects off the surface of the particles, and smaller particles have more surface area than larger ones, making them far more efficient at blocking the sun. Robock worries that as sulfur is continuously injected and concentrations build up, the small particles will clump together into large ones, necessitating far more sulfur than some current proposals assume.

These details of aerosol chemistry could help determine the viability of SRM. “David [Keith] thinks it is going to be easy and cheap, and I don’t agree,” says Robock. He estimates that several million tons of sulfur would have to be injected into the atmosphere annually to offset doubled levels of carbon dioxide, but if the particles clump together, “it could be many times that.”

Research so far shows that producing a cloud in the stratosphere — Robock’s preferred description of SRM — “could cool the climate,” he says. “But you would have a very different planet, and other things could be worse.” He points out, for example, that in the aftermath of Mount Pinatubo, rainfall decreased significantly in some parts of the world. Robock supports more modeling on solar geoengineering, but “right now, I don’t see a path in which it would be used,” he says. “I don’t see how the benefits outweigh the negatives.”

Facebooktwittermail

The Guantanamo prosecutor who decided that being a Christian trumped being an American

Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch, a military prosecutor at Guantanamo, truly believed that Mohamedou Ould Slahi was guilty, but he also believed Slahi’s interrogators should face prosecution for torture.

Jess Bravin writes: It would be months before Stu Couch got a fuller picture of the Slahi interrogation. But as he began to piece together the facts, he became increasingly alarmed. Each detail suggested a sustained, systematic regime of physical and psychological coercion that undermined the reliability of everything Slahi said. The trial could end up being more about what the government did to Slahi than what he did for al Qaeda.

Couch was convinced that Slahi had spent years organizing the Qaeda network in Europe, culminating with recruitment of the Hamburg cell that supplied hijackers for 9/11. If any detainee deserved the death penalty, it was Slahi.

Yet Couch hesitated. He ruminated for weeks. Was the United States justified in beating Slahi, in subjecting him to isolation, sensory deprivation, temperature extremes, and sexual humiliation? Was it justified in constructing elaborate scenarios that literally put the fear of death in him, convincing him that he was about to be killed?

One threat, Couch believed, was the worst of all: To have his mother raped.

“Military guys are real big about their mommas,” Couch said. And few more than Stu Couch. “Other than my wife, my mom is my best friend,” he said. “That’s just who I am.”

Couch wondered if he could prosecute Slahi at all.

He would lie awake for hours almost every night. During the 10-hour workdays at commissions, dark circles under Couch’s eyes exaggerated his hangdog look.

One Sunday, as usual, Couch drove his family to church. He was distracted as the service unfolded, possessed by the Slahi case. He mechanically obeyed when the minister called on worshippers to stand.

“Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself ?”

“I will, with God’s help,” came the echo. All persons. That included Osama bin Laden. And Mohamedou Ould Slahi.

“Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” Every human being.

He was surrounded by people, but suddenly Couch felt very, very small. It was as if he stood alone in a dark, cavernous hall, a bright, single shaft of light illuminating him, unseen persons, or powers, awaiting his answer.

“I will,” he said. “With God’s help.”

After the service, he told his wife, Kim, of the threat to rape the prisoner’s mother. It was the linchpin to the prisoner’s cooperation, the foundation of the entire case.

He told Kim he would have to drop a case. A 9/11 case. “I hate to say it,” he said, “but being a Christian is gonna trump being an American.”

Facebooktwittermail

Israel needs to be threatened by international sanctions

In Haaretz, Yitzhak Laor writes: It’s doubtful if there was such foolishness in global politics since World War II as the settlement enterprise. The fact that the Israeli political leadership has engaged in it since 1967 makes the pill all the more bitter.

The sparse population in the West Bank, relative to the crowdedness of central Israel, created for Israel interests to suppress from the beginning any Palestinian efforts to organize. Moshe Dayan was considered an enlightened occupier thanks to the permission he gave Palestinians to work in Israel, for dirt cheap, and to import money from Jordan through the open bridges policy. As a colonialist, he was a cruel and short-tempered ruler. Only Ariel Sharon competed with him in historical blindness.

The army rushed to refer to the territories by their biblical names Judea, Samaria and Gaza. They called residents of the territories “locals,” as if to say they lacked any other connection to land, people, and history. They were quickly treated as a danger during the process of parceling out their privately held land, a process in which an entire people was humiliated for decades. Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, masses of them methodically tortured, tried in kangaroo courts, put under curfew in honor of our holidays, and had their land expropriated. An entire nation was subjected to hunger, siege, humiliation of parents in front of their children, killing without distinction, as well as – how could it be otherwise? – being preached to about the injustice of resistance. Israel created with its own hands the security threat and through that threat the right controls us. Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

Saturday Night Live on the Hagel hearings

The Israel lobby made sure that this Saturday Night Live sketch on the Chuck Hagel hearings was dropped from the show…

Well, maybe the lobby didn’t need to intervene. More likely, the show’s writers had to reconcile themselves to the fact that their audience doesn’t pay too much attention to what happens in the U.S. Senate. It’s hard to satirize a particular form of behavior — in this case, shameless displays of slavish adoration of Israel — if the people who need to get the joke are ignorant about the thing being mocked. Still, thanks to SNL for giving it a shot.

Facebooktwittermail

So-called due process for so-called Americans

Amy Davidson writes: “One of the problems is, once the drone program is so public, and one American is caught up, people don’t know much about this one ‘American citizen’ — so called,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, in her questioning of John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee for C.I.A. director, on Thursday. (John Cassidy has more on the hearing.) She was referring to Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone strike in Yemen, in 2011, and was a “so-called” American because he was an American, born in New Mexico. “They don’t know what he’s been doing,” Feinstein continued. “They don’t know the incitement he has stirred up. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about Mr. Awlaki and what he’s been doing.”

Brennan demurred at first, since the question was about an “operation.” Feinstein jumped in:

See, that’s the problem. When people hear “American,” they think someone who’s upstanding. And this man was not upstanding by a long shot.

BRENNAN: Yes.

FEINSTEIN: And maybe you cannot discuss it here, but I’ve read enough to know that he was a real problem.

Brennan agreed, saying that al-Awlaki “was intimately involved in activities that were designed to kill innocent men, women, and children, mostly Americans. He was not just a propagandist.” (He neglected to mention that al-Awlaki’s American teen-age son was also killed, in a separate strike.) Feinstein then led him through a number of incidents; in some cases, Brennan agreed that al-Awlaki was an organizer, and in others he spoke obliquely about “inspiring” and “inciting individuals.” Feinstein summed up the exchange with what may have been the most disturbing line in the three-hour hearing, worse, even, than the waterboarding joke that Senator Burr told a few minutes later:

“And, so, Mr. Awlaki is not an American citizen by where anyone in America would be proud.”

“Proud,” “upstanding,” “so-called American” — is this the basis on which the Senate is judging fundamental questions of American rights and due process?

It’s natural and appropriate the Americans should be concerned that the U.S. president has decided that he can at his discretion deprive U.S. citizens of their right to due process, but in considering the assassination of Anwar al Awlaki, we should not be alarmed merely because he was an American. Much more significant, it seems to me, is why he was killed.

At the time of his death, U.S. officials described Awlaki as an operational leader of al Qaeda, yet have never supported this claim with any evidence. Lack of evidence presumably explains why he was never indicted and never placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

What Awlaki was guilty of was being a charismatic preacher, capable of exerting great influence and quite possibly inspiring others to engage in acts of terrorism. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal reported:

A businessman in [Yemen’s capital,] San’a said he met the cleric two years ago, while Mr. Awlaki was hunting for real estate in the capital. The businessman said he was immediately struck by the charisma of the cleric. “It was like talking to [Bill] Clinton,” he said. “You felt like he understood everything about you.”

Awlaki represented a national security nightmare: a Bin Laden with an American accent. He was feared much less for what he had done than for what he might become.

The idea that he was killed because he posed some kind of imminent threat is an idea that can only be accepted on blind faith. What the preponderance of evidence shows is that this was a political assassination.

When the U.S. government starts executing people for political crimes, the nationality of those being killed should really be the least among our concerns.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks was arrested rather than being summarily executed. No doubt at the time he was regarded as being much more valuable alive than dead. The same can’t be said of Awlaki. Indeed, the difficulties the Obama administration might have faced imprisoning him and attempting to put him on trial, strongly suggest that he was killed as a matter of convenience. He was a problem that needed to be removed — snuffed out — and the choice to do that, turned the position of the president into that of a mobster.

Facebooktwittermail

How we made killing easy

David Cole writes: On Monday, NBC published a leaked Justice Department “white paper” laying out the Obama administration’s case for when the president, or indeed any “informed, high-level official” of the federal government, can authorize the secret killing of a US citizen without charges, a hearing, or a trial. The paper, which appears to summarize a still-classified internal memorandum drafted by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to authorize the targeted killing in September 2011 of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, provides more detail than has yet been made public about the administration’s controversial drone program.

Consistent with the positions taken in public speeches by former State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh, Attorney General Eric Holder, and White House counterterrorism advisor and CIA director-nominee John Brennan, the sixteen-page white paper argues that killing a US citizen with a drone and without trial is legal under domestic and international law, even if the individual is far from any battlefield, not a member of al-Qaeda, and not engaged in planning an imminent attack on the United States. To date, much of the concern about the administration’s drone program has stemmed from its largely secret character; unfortunately, the more we learn, the greater those concerns become.

It is unclear why this document had to be leaked in order to enter the public domain. It is not marked classified, and appears to be designed for public consumption — why else would a separate white paper need to be drawn up to describe legal reasoning already contained in a classified OLC memorandum? It may well have been drafted to see whether the contours of the OLC memorandum could be made public without disclosing any classified or sensitive information. But if that’s the case, why didn’t the Obama administration release the paper as an official public act? In opposing a Freedom of Information Act suit filed by the ACLU, the administration is fighting tooth and nail to keep everything about the drone program secret, but this paper suggests that much more could be disclosed — for example, the procedures and standards employed for placing someone on the “kill list,” and the general bases for and results of actual strikes — without the sky falling. If this administration is truly committed to transparency, memos like this should not have to be obtained by the media through back channels.

The white paper addresses the legality of killing a US citizen “who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda or an associated force.” Such a person may be killed, the document concludes, if an “informed, high-level official” finds (1) that he poses “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States;” (2) that his capture is not feasible; and (3) the operation is conducted consistent with law-of-war principles, such as the need to minimize collateral damage. However, the paper offers no guidance as to what level of proof is necessary: does the official have to be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt, by a preponderance of the evidence, or is reasonable suspicion sufficient? We are not told.

Nor does the paper describe what procedural safeguards are to be employed. It only tells us what is not required: having a court determine whether the criteria are in fact met. The paper asserts that this assessment is best left entirely to the executive because it involves foreign affairs and military tactics, and maintains that judicial review would impermissibly require a court to “supervise inherently predictive judgments by the President and his national security advisors.” But courts review executive predictive judgments every time they rule on a government request for a search or wiretap warrant, including those sought for national security purposes under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. If courts routinely issue warrants for arrests and searches, why are they somehow unable to issue warrants for drone strikes?

From news reports, we know that the targeted killing program involves elaborate preparation and review of “kill lists,” debated in weekly conference calls in which as many as one hundred people take part. The US citizen and radical Islamist Anwar al-Awlaki was reportedly on such a list for more than a year before he was killed. With that kind of time frame, there is no logistical reason why independent judicial review could not have taken place. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The law of war does not shield the CIA and John Brennan’s drone kill list

Morris Davis, a retired U.S. military officer and former chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, writes: The disclosure Tuesday evening of the Department of Justice white paper on targeted killing (pdf) has sparked a lot of debate, much of it focused on the Obama administration’s extraordinarily broad interpretation of what constitutes an “imminent” threat that justifies lethal force as an act of self-defense. As Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky) told reporters during a conference call on Wednesday, “only a team of lawyers could define ‘imminent’ to mean the exact opposite” of what the word means in the real world.

There are, no doubt, many Americans alive today who should be thankful their healthcare providers did not apply the administration’s interpretation of “imminent” to decide if they had crossed over the line of imminent death and said pull the plug.

Some people have acquired power and profits in post-9/11 America by pandering to and perpetuating fear. As has been the case on a range of legal issues – torture, indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, kill lists – all it takes is for someone to say “terrorism” and “threat to security” in the same breath for the vast majority of the public to handover its principles. Rather than a serious discussion on the proper law/liberty/security balance, too often the public accepts the false syllogism that whatever it takes to stop “them” from hurting “us” is obviously, as White House spokesman Jay Carney might say, “legal, ethical and wise“.

Targeted killing falls into that category. The discussion tends to glom what should be several discrete inquiries – where will the lethal operation take place; who is the imminent threat and why; who will conduct the operation; and what laws apply, among others – into one big ball that slides through with little scrutiny.

The DOJ white paper discusses the right to take military action against a US citizen who is part of the enemy forces, law of war principles that govern application of military power, judicial deference to military judgments in the conduct of warfare, and combatant immunity that gives legal sanction to a deliberate killing by a member of the armed forces acting in compliance with the law of war. In and of themselves, those are all very valid points.

What the white paper ignores, however, is that the US has both a military and a CIA drone program, each one subject to its own rules. The CIA is a civilian agency with civilian employees and civilian contractors. It is not part of the US armed forces and its drone program is not immune from liability by the law of war principles that might apply to the military drone program. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why Israelis are frightened of the Israel lobby

Chemi Shalev writes: Far more Americans know of the Palestinian BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement today than did a week ago. Many millions of people have been exposed for the first time to the idea that Israel should be boycotted, divested and sanctioned for its occupation of the territories. Many more Americans, one can safely assume, have formed a positive image of the BDS movement than those who have now turned against it.

Tafasta merube lo tafasta, the Talmud teaches us: grasp all, lose all. The heavy-handed, hyperbole heavy, all-guns-blazing campaign against what would have been, as Mayor Bloomberg put it, “a few kids meeting on campus” mushroomed and then boomeranged, giving the hitherto obscure BDS activists priceless public relations that money could never buy.

Rather than focusing attention on what BDS critics describe as the movement’s deceitful veneer over its opposition to the very existence of Israel, the disproportionate onslaught succeeded in casting the BDS speakers who came to the Brooklyn campus as freedom-loving victims being hounded and oppressed by the forces of darkness.

Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz’s article about the “hate orgy’ that is being co-sponsored by the College’s Political Science Department may have been tactically ill advised, but Dershowitz is a private citizen and is entitled to free speech, no less than the Israel-baiting speakers invited by the students. The same is true of the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman, who took out a large ad in Friday’s New York Times in which he reprimanded Bloomberg for “confusing the issues”, and tried to equate support for the Palestinian “right of return” with anti-Semitism, a point which may have been lost on anyone but the most informed and involved of his readers.

But the true tipping point came when attention-seeking politicians got into the act. When a New York City council member engaged in nuclear overkill by claiming that a meeting of several dozen students in Brooklyn is tantamount to “a second holocaust”. And especially when eager beaver municipal pols – emulating, unfortunately, far too many of their counterparts in Israel – thought it proper to threaten cutting off city funding to a well respected academic institution because of one single student meeting that they found objectionable.

The result of all of this surfeit and excess was a clear-cut, perhaps unprecedented PR coup for BDS and a humiliating defeat for Israel’s interests. When the New York Times and Mayor Bloomberg found it necessary to step in and publicly stand up for a decidedly anti-Israeli movement – whatever one thinks of their true intentions- that only a few had ever heard of before. When the “pro-Israel camp” found itself, not for the first time, portrayed not only as heavy handed but a bit unhinged as well. Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail