Category Archives: Issues

Why the U.S. government must release information on al-Majalah killings

Vincent Warren writes: It is a bedrock principle of democratic government that the state cannot be judge, jury and executioner all at once. Yet the CIA and Pentagon maintain lists of suspected terrorists to be targeted for killing and have these “kill lists” approved only by an internal executive process. They then hand them over to drone operators who sit thousands of miles away from their targets and execute the strikes via a video monitor that makes it hard to remember that “targeted killing” is a real government program and not the name of a cool new Xbox game. In this depersonalized, dehumanized setting, drone victims are referred to as “bug splats,” as Michael Hastings reported in Rolling Stone this week, because on the video monitors “viewing the body… gives the sense of an insect being crushed.”

Among the thousands of bodies crushed in this way are the bodies of hundreds of civilians, including 168 children since 2004, according to the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Also crushed is any accountability for the decisions on who is marked to die and who is actually killed, whether the intended targets or bystanders who solely by accident of birth live, and die, in a country that the U.S. is not at war with but has decided it needs to kill in.

The case of the December 17, 2009, attack in Yemen demonstrates everything that is horribly wrong with the targeted killing program, and serves as a call to action to all those concerned about the rule of law and respect for human life. On that day, U.S. cruise missiles loaded with cluster bombs struck a remote mountain community in the al-Majalah region, killing 41 people, including 21 children and 14 women. Initially, the Yemeni government claimed responsibility for the killings, but reports that the U.S. had actually executed the strike began leaking out almost immediately. The publication of a January 2010 diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks confirmed these reports as well as an orchestrated U.S.-Yemeni effort to cover up the truth. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” the cable quotes Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh telling U.S. General David Petraeus.

Yet to date, no one in the U.S. has had to answer for the al-Majalah attack, the carnage it caused, or the attempted cover-up of the U.S.’s role in it. No one has had to explain the government’s legal basis in U.S. or international law for this strike in a country that the U.S. is not at war with, or to account for the decision of the target and what knowledge officials had of the civilians present.

Today — with the filing of a Freedom of Information Act request for documents in this case by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union — answers and accountability are being demanded. The ACLU and CCR are part of a growing chorus of critics pressing for answers in this case.

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America’s drone war: Never have so few killed so many by remote control

Michael Hastings writes: One day in late November, an unmanned aerial vehicle lifted off from Shindand Air Base in western Afghanistan, heading 75 miles toward the border with Iran. The drone’s mission: to spy on Tehran’s nuclear program, as well as any insurgent activities the Iranians might be supporting in Afghanistan. With an estimated price tag of $6 million, the drone was the product of more than 15 years of research and development, starting with a shadowy project called DarkStar overseen by Lockheed Martin. The first test flight for DarkStar took place in 1996, but after a crash and other mishaps, Lockheed announced that the program had been canceled. According to military experts, that was just a convenient excuse for “going dark,” meaning that DarkStar’s further development would take place under a veil of secrecy.

The drone that was headed toward Iran, the RQ-170 Sentinel, looks like a miniature version of the famous stealth fighter, the F-117 Nighthawk: sleek and sand-colored and vaguely ominous, with a single domed eye in place of a cockpit. With a wingspan of 65 feet, it has the ability to fly undetected by radar. Rather than blurting out its location with a constant stream of radio signals – the electronic equivalent of a trail of jet exhaust – it communicates intermittently with its home base, making it virtually impossible to detect. Once it reached its destination, 140 miles into Iranian airspace, it could hover silently in a wide radius for hours, at an altitude of up to 50,000 feet, providing an uninterrupted flow of detailed reconnaissance photos – a feat that no human pilot would be capable of pulling off.

Not long after takeoff – a maneuver handled by human drone operators in Afghanistan – the RQ-170 switched into a semiautonomous mode, following a preprogrammed route under the guidance of drone pilots sitting at computer screens some 7,500 miles away, at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. But before the mission could be completed, something went wrong. One of the drone’s three data streams failed, and began sending inaccurate information back to the base. Then the signal vanished, and Creech lost all contact with the drone.

Today, even after a 10-week investigation by U.S. officials, it’s unclear exactly what happened. Had the Iranians, as they would later claim, hacked the drone and taken it down? Did the Chinese help them? If so, had they pulled off a sophisticated attack – breaking open the drone’s encrypted brain and remotely piloting it to the ground – or a cruder assault that jammed the drone’s signal, causing it to crash? Or did the drone operators back at Creech simply make a mistake, sparking a glitch that triggered the aircraft to land? “After a technical fuck-up, people panic and start trying to fix it, doing things they shouldn’t have done,” says Ty Rogoway, a drone expert who runs an industry website called Aviation Intel. “It was fishy from Day One.”

What we do know is that the government lied about who was responsible for the drone. Shortly after the crash on November 29th, the U.S.-led military command in Kabul put out a press release saying it had lost an “unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan.” But the drone wasn’t under the command of the military – it was operated by the CIA, as the spy agency itself was later forced to admit.

Ten days after the crash, the missing drone turned up in a large gymnasium in Tehran. The Iranian military displayed the captured aircraft as a trophy; an American flag hung beneath the drone, its stars replaced with skulls. The drone looked nearly unscathed, as if it had landed on a runway. The Iranians declared that such surveillance flights represented an “act of war,” and threatened to retaliate by attacking U.S. military bases. President Obama demanded that Iran return the drone, but the damage was done. “It was like when someone from Apple left a prototype of the next iPhone at a bar,” says Peter Singer, a defense specialist at the Brookings Institute and the author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. “It was a propaganda win for Iran.”

The incident also underscored the increasingly central role that drones now play in American foreign policy. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military conducted only a handful of drone missions. Today, the Pentagon deploys a fleet of 19,000 drones, relying on them for classified missions that once belonged exclusively to Special Forces units or covert operatives on the ground. American drones have been sent to spy on or kill targets in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Libya. Drones routinely patrol the Mexican border, and they provided aerial surveillance over Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In his first three years, Obama has unleashed 268 covert drone strikes, five times the total George W. Bush ordered during his eight years in office. All told, drones have been used to kill more than 3,000 people designated as terrorists, including at least four U.S. citizens. In the process, according to human rights groups, they have also claimed the lives of more than 800 civilians. Obama’s drone program, in fact, amounts to the largest unmanned aerial offensive ever conducted in military history; never have so few killed so many by remote control. [Continue reading…]

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Afghan assaults signal evolution of Haqqani network

The New York Times reports: Western military and intelligence officials acknowledged on Monday that they were surprised by the scale and sophistication of the synchronized attacks in Afghanistan on Sunday, seeing it as a troubling step in the evolution of the Haqqani Taliban network from a crime mob to a leading militant force.

Even as the Western officials praised the Afghan security forces’ response and sought to play down the attacks’ strategic impact, they privately agreed with the criticism by President Hamid Karzai on Monday. He said the assaults — involving dozens of attackers who crossed hundreds of miles to strike at seven different secured targets, all around 1:45 p.m. on Sunday — represented an “intelligence failure for us, and especially NATO.”

The officials said the episode raised two pivotal questions: whether the militants now had the ability to mount such audacious assaults repeatedly, rather than just once every several months, and whether the Afghan government would be able to blunt such plots after 2014, the deadline for Western troop withdrawal, when its access to allied intelligence assistance would be limited.

“It certainly seems there’s some kind of gap in intelligence collection or in sifting through the volume of what’s collected,” said John K. Wood, an associate professor at the National Defense University who was senior director for Afghanistan on the National Security Council in the Bush and Obama administrations, and who just visited Kabul.

For the Haqqani network, a family of border criminals and smugglers that has gained an astonishing notoriety in recent years as a leading killer of allied troops in Afghanistan, the attacks on Sunday represented more than just the ability to paralyze the mostly tightly secured districts of Kabul for hours. They were proof that the Taliban offshoot could create the vast network of logistical support and planning needed to mount terrorist attacks without anything leaking to the intelligence groups so tightly focused on it.

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EU must back Palestinians cut off from farmlands by Israel

Human Rights Watch: The farmers of the West Bank village of Beit Surik used to make their living selling oil from their olive trees. Now, says Abu Rami, the head of the village farmers’ association, they cannot produce enough olive oil for their own families. The problem is the system Israel has set up for getting access to their land in the West Bank is on the other side of Israel’s separation barrier. In effect, Israel treats all Palestinians living in or seeking to reach their own lands on the Israeli side of the barrier as though they were security threats.

Israel began building its separation barrier – in some places a fence, in others an eight metre-high concrete wall with guard towers – in 2002, for the stated purpose of preventing Palestinian suicide bombers from attacking Israeli civilians. The International Court of Justice ruled, in 2004, that the barrier route violates international law where it veers into the occupied Palestinian territories. Today, 85 per cent of the barrier’s route lies inside the West Bank, cutting tens of thousands of Palestinians off from lands they own or previously farmed without restriction.

Israel argues that it has opened gates in the barrier to allow West Bank Palestinians to reach their lands. But the daily reality belies this claim. By preventing these Palestinian farmers from reaching their land for most of the year, Israel is reducing many of them to poverty. To pass through the gates, Palestinians must “coordinate” – the Israeli term for getting advance permission from the military. The Palestinians must also obtain special military permits to reach the more than 18,400 hectares on the other side that Israel has designated “seam zones”: areas that are closed military zones to Palestinians, though not to Israelis.

In a confidential report from July 2011, which was later leaked; European Union heads of mission dealing with Palestinian issues recommended that the EU should “encourage Israel to open the gates to the seam zone on a more regular basis without prior coordination”. One affected area is known as the Biddu enclave. It consists of eight villages with 30,000 residents surrounded by the barrier on three sides. The barrier has cut off a group of Palestinian farmers there from 50 per cent of their farmlands and 70 per cent of their grazing lands.

In response to petitions to Israel’s High Court of Justice, the military built five gates for Palestinian farmers in the barrier around the enclave. All five gates require advance “coordination”. And one is also a seam zone gate, meaning Palestinians need special permits to use it. The result has been that farmers from the enclave were unable to reach their farmlands for 268 days in 2009, 282 days in 2010, 328 days in 2011 and 84 days in 2012 – as of April 3, according to UN monitors. On the limited days that Israel grants access, it does so without adequately considering the seasonal variations in farming and harvesting. A farmer from the village of Biddu, Faruq Radad, says that he owns two hectares of grape vines beyond the barrier – but that for the past two years, the days that Israel allowed access did not correspond to the grape harvest season. His grapes rotted on the vine.

Israel’s High Court has rejected arguments that security needs could be met with a less restrictive system, such as soldiers checking farmers for weapons before allowing them to cross the barrier. But Israel imposes a much less restrictive system on Palestinians working in Israeli settlements. For example, about 150 Palestinians from one of the villages in the Biddu enclave work in the settlement of Har Adar – according to the Beit Iksa village council. Their settler employers collect their identification documents and give them to the Israeli military for security checks. The Palestinians receive permits that are typically valid for three months, generally renewed, and they can cross through a gate in the separation barrier six days a week. It appears that Israel is willing to adopt a more discerning security system when the issue is the convenience of settlers, but not when it concerns Palestinian farmers trying to make a living on their own land.

The Israeli military now allows only 15 farmers from Beit Iksa to pass through the same gate, and has only opened that gate to them on 10 days so far in 2012 – according to United Nations monitors. In November 2010, the military granted permits to 70 farmers – which were valid for three weeks. Months later, in March 2011, the military renewed only 15 of the 70 – for bureaucratic rather than specific security reasons. It has been 10 years since Israel began constructing its separation barrier. Without meaningful pressure on Israel to change its barrier policies, Palestinian farmers are likely to suffer continued rights violations. The EU could best help Biddu’s farmers avoid being forced into poverty by vigorously advocating for Israel to allow them to work their land.

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First they come for the Muslims

Chris Hedges writes: Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced Thursday in Worcester, Mass., to 17½ years in prison. It was another of the tawdry show trials held against Muslim activists since 9/11 as a result of the government’s criminalization of what people say and believe. These trials, where secrecy rules permit federal lawyers to prosecute people on “evidence” the defendants are not allowed to examine, are the harbinger of a corporate totalitarian state in which any form of dissent can be declared illegal. What the government did to Mehanna, and what it has done to hundreds of other innocent Muslims in this country over the last decade, it will eventually do to the rest of us.

Mehanna, a teacher at Alhuda Academy in Worcester, was convicted after an eight-week jury trial of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq and providing material support to al-Qaida, as well as making false statements to officials investigating terrorism. His real “crime,” however, seems to be viewing and translating jihadi videos online, speaking out against U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and refusing to become a government informant.

Stephen F. Downs, a lawyer in Albany, N.Y., a founder of Project Salam and the author of “Victims of America’s Dirty War,” a booklet posted on the website, has defended Muslim activists since 2006. He has methodically documented the mendacious charges used to incarcerate many Muslim activists as terrorists. Because of “terrorism enhancement” provisions, any sentence can be quadrupled—even minor charges can leave prisoners incarcerated for years.

“People who have committed no crime are taken into custody, isolated without adequate recourse to legal advice, railroaded with fake or contrived charges, and ‘disappeared’ into prisons designed to isolate them,” Downs told me when we met last week at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

Downs calls the process of condemning people before they have committed a crime “pre-emptive prosecution.” The concept of pre-emptive prosecution mocks domestic law as egregiously as pre-emptive war mocks the foundations of international law. [Continue reading…]

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Does the 2012 Presidential Election matter?

Matt Stoller writes: If you picked up a newspaper in DC this week, it would have been hard to avoid noticing that a bizarre and irrelevant spat is consuming much of the insider political media and top political officials. Earlier this week, a corporate lobbyist named Hilary Rosen tweeted a vague insult at GOP Presidential nominee wife Ann Romney. Rosen said that Romney had never worked a day in her life, and so could not credibly speak to the economic concerns of women. The Republicans demanded an apology. Rosen refused. Obama advisors like David Axelrod and Jim Messina then weighed in on Romney’s side. Eventually, Rosen caved to the pressure and apologized. This is why.

By the end of Thursday, the most prominent voices in Washington had weighed in, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the first lady, Michelle Obama, and the president himself, who said that there is “no tougher job than being a mom” and that anyone who thinks otherwise “needs to rethink their statement.”

Just what is going on? How did one mildly annoying tweet from a corporate lobbyist who isn’t working on a political campaign come to dominate the electoral coverage for days for the office of the most powerful political position in the world?

Political scientist Tom Ferguson has noted that there are always two elections at work concurrently in America, a public election that voters see, and a hidden election where funders operate in shifting coalitions to pull the levers of power. In this case, it’s the very triviality that is on display that speaks to what is going. Rosen, a corporate lobbyist who represents or has represented copyright interests, for-profit colleges, and BP, is fighting with David Axelrod, who has made money from the nuclear industry, and Anna Romney, who rides expensive horses bought by her husband’s private equity millions. This is staged kabuki between powerful millionaires, none of whom can credibly speak from recent experience on economic struggles.

The 2012 election, in other words, is at this point a completely empty enterprise, bereft of substance, or integrity. This is new to our era, reminiscent of the late 19th century electoral landscape which was dominated by policy consensus around corruption and plutocracy while electoral contests were organized around “bloody shirt” smear campaigns. Populism intruded briefly, but there’s a reason that time period was known as the time of the robber barons. It’s increasingly analogous to our time.

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Inside the mind of Anders Breivik

The Independent reports: They met for the first time on 19 February: Terje Torrisen, the Norwegian psychiatrist given the task of assessing the sanity of a mass murderer, and Anders Behring Breivik, the man who today goes on trial for one of the most shocking crimes in European post-war history.

Breivik was well-mannered and co-operative, according to Mr Torrisen: “My first impression was that he was a polite man. He was answering all of our questions and did whatever he could to make the process as smooth as possible.”

Throughout the 24-hour-a-day observation Mr Torrisen and the rest of his team were able to watch and analyse how the self-confessed mass murderer eats, sleeps and interacts with others. When Breivik sleeps alone in his cell – or spends time weight-training, or reading world history – the team has always been around him, scrutinising his behaviour for more than 200 hours, building up the most complete profile of Norway’s worst-ever serial killer.

“He’s not like a normal person,” Mr Torrisen told The Independent, seemingly stating the obvious by adding that Breivik has an extreme personality. “During conversations, he is friendly,” Mr Torrisen explained. He said Breivik spends a lot of time, as he has done during his handful of public appearances, talking about his own thoughts and political opinions. He “smiles every time he discovers himself in newspapers or on television,” Mr Torrisen said.

Breivik has told the psychiatrists and doctors that he is “incredibly proud” of what he has done, and that “the operation was a major ego boost, in a way I am probably a little attention-whore”.

Last week, Mr Torrisen and Agnar Aspas, the other analyst to assess Breivik’s mental state, delivered a report about his mental health to the court in Oslo. The report was commissioned after an earlier assessment declared him insane. According to newspapers in Norway, the new report – still confidential – concludes that Breivik has a narcissistic and antisocial personality disorder – a diagnosis that has certain similarities with other psychopaths. It concludes, however, that he is mentally fit enough to face trial.

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Complex attack by Taliban sends message to the West

The New York Times reports: Taliban suicide bombers and gunmen barraged the diplomatic quarter and the Parliament in the Afghan capital for hours on Sunday and struck three eastern provinces as well, in a complex attack clearly designed to undermine confidence in NATO and Afghan military gains.

Though the overall confirmed death toll was low, with six victims initially reported across four provinces, they were among the most audacious coordinated terrorist attacks here in recent years. The multiple sieges ended in Kabul on Monday morning after nearly 18 hours, and silence fell on the city with roads in the bullet-strafed areas beginning to reopen. The last of the attacks to be resolved was the one on the Parliament, which ended at 7:30 a.m., according to a statement by the Afghan Interior Ministry. “The situation is normal,” the ministry said.

The attacks came near the peak of the American military troop “surge” in Afghanistan, some of it designed around ensuring the security of the capital. And they were an early test for the Afghan National Security Forces, who responded with only minimal help from NATO, Western military officials said.

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Iran demands U.S., Europe hold off attack as long as nuclear talks continue, sources say

Haaretz reports: The round of nuclear talks between the six major world powers and Iran ended on Saturday in Istanbul without a significant breakthrough but with an agreement to reconvene next month. Sources close to the talks told Haaretz that the Iranians are demanding an American and European commitment not to carry out a military attack on their country as long as the talks continue.

Western and Turkish diplomats said Saturday’s meeting, which involved the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China – in addition to Germany and the Iranians, was held in a positive atmosphere.

“They met in a constructive atmosphere,” said Michael Mann, a spokesman for European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, after the morning session of talks Saturday. “We had a positive feeling that they did want to engage.”

Iran’s ISNA news agency reported that an American envoy had asked for a meeting with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili and that Jalili had accepted, but another news agency, Fars, later denied that.

The Istanbul talks were the first such meeting for 15 months. A second round is scheduled to take place in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on May 23.

Expectations for the talks in Istanbul had been low at the outset. The United States termed them a last chance at a diplomatic solution to the crisis over the Iranian nuclear program. The U.S. and Israel have not ruled out military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites.

The major drama at the talks in Turkey was simply the fact that they took place, this time without prior conditions. In January last year, the Iranians refused to enter into discussions without a commitment to lift international sanctions against their country. For its part, the U.S. had refused at the time to discuss removing sanctions without a halt by the Iranians of their nuclear fuel enrichment operations.

This time around, among the details leaked from the conference hall was an indication that the world powers would agree to continued Iranian nuclear enrichment activities at the relatively low level of 3.5 percent, and would not require that the Fordo underground facility near the Iranian city of Qom be dismantled. The world powers would require continuous monitoring of nuclear fuel production sites, according to the leaks.

Western officials have made clear their immediate priority is to persuade Tehran to cease the higher-grade uranium enrichment it began in 2010. It has since expanded that work, shortening the time it would need for the relatively rapid development of nuclear weapons. Iran has signaled some flexibility over limiting its uranium enrichment to a fissile purity of 20 percent, compared with the 5 percent level required for nuclear power plants, but also suggests it is not ready to do so yet.

A Turkish government source told Haaretz that following a series of contacts by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with the Iranian leadership, there was a sense that Iran was ready to forgo uranium enrichment at a level of 20 percent for a short period, but would demand the immediate lifting of some of the international sanctions in return and the gradual scrapping of others.

Also to be considered in the next round of discussions is a Russian proposal for a blueprint for the talks including a time line, in an effort to build a sense of trust between Iran and the Western powers. The plan would call for Iran to gradually halt uranium enrichment while the West would at the same time remove sanctions. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has vowed that his country would not cede its right to enrichment activities, claiming that they are designed for peaceful purposes.

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Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails to go on hunger strike

The Guardian reports: Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are expected to embark on hunger strikes this week to draw attention to imprisonment without charge and solitary confinement. They will build on a protest that has resulted in deals to release two inmates who refused food for prolonged periods.

At least 11 prisoners are already on hunger strike, three of whom have been transferred to hospital. One began refusing fluids last week, increasing concern about the rate of deterioration of his health.

A wave of hunger strikes is planned to begin on or around Prisoners’ Day on Tuesday, held under the slogan: “We will live in dignity.” About 1,600 prisoners have agreed to take part in the protest, according to Palestinian prisons minister Issa Qaraqi. “The situation inside Israeli prisons has become very dangerous and serious,” he was quoted as saying.

There are around 4,600 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, according to the prisoners’ rights group Addameer. More than 300 are held under “administrative detention”, meaning they and their lawyers are not informed of accusations or evidence against them, no trial is held, and their term of imprisonment is determined by an Israeli military judge.

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The return of CREEP

By Kim Barker, ProPublica, April 12, 2012

With 300-plus super PACs and counting, it would be easy to miss CREEP. But last Thursday, a new super PAC ingeniously named the Committee for the Re-Election of the President registered with the Federal Election Commission.

The committee is based out of a post office box at the Watergate Complex2014an homage, of course, to the other Committee for the Re-Election of the President, the fundraising committee for President Richard Nixon that became embroiled in the Watergate scandal.

It’s an inside joke with a serious punchline. The old CREEP (which used the acronym CRP and at one point was called the Committee to Re-Elect the President) helped spur the creation of the FEC. The website for CREEP Super PAC says it’s committed “to raising voices not dollars” and advocates disclosure.

“It’s an excellent chance for people to step back and say, 2018Are we happy with 40 years of campaign finance and the lack of disclosure?'” said Robert Lucas, 22, founder of the new CREEP and a graduate student in public policy at Georgetown University. “There’s a lot of irony, with the 40th anniversary of Watergate and where we are now.”

The latest FEC disclosures show that super PACs are forming at an accelerated pace, taking advantage of court rulings in 2010 that opened the door to political action committees that can raise unlimited amounts of money as long as they don’t coordinate with a candidate.

Seven new super PACs turned up yesterday morning alone, while one dropped out today, bringing the tally to 324. Only 159 have reported raising or spending any money. Of those, just 11 reported having more than $1 million in their coffers in their most recent filings with the FEC, led by GOP super PAC American Crossroads, which had more than $23.5 million at the end of February. (CREEP, being new, hasn’t reported raising any money, and Lucas says he has no plans to do so.)

Another 27 super PACs reported having at least $100,000 in the bank. The rest seem to be counting their pennies and hoping for a millionaire. (The Friends for a Democratic White House PAC, for instance, reported having only $12.02.)

Several of the money-less super PACs appear to be following the mocking trail blazed by comedian Stephen Colbert with his super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow. These have names like Just Drink the Koolaid, Joe Six PAC, Americans for America, and Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Yesterday.

Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney’s decision to put his dog in a kennel strapped to the roof of his car for a 1983 family vacationhas sparked the formation of four super PACs: DogPAC, Dogs Against Romney, I Ride Inside-The Pets Against Romney Committee, and, the latest in the genre, Mitt Is Mean2014The Animal Lovers Against Romney Committee.

Despite being accused of chronic deadlock and doing nothing to rein in super PACs, the FEC has quietly taken action against certain committees. It warned 15 for failing to file annual financial reports from 20112014unless they do, they’ll be off the list. (Which might mean the end of super PACs such as the Brady Bunch PAC, Men Against Prostitution and Trafficking and the Bucket Tea Party Political Action Committee.)

The FEC also has shed 60 super PACs registered by super PAC man Josue Larose.  All of Larose’s super PACs were terminated by the FEC on March 7, apparently because they didn’t do much for a year. So farewell to the Unites States Celebrities Super PAC, the United States Billionaires Super PAC and the Wall Street Corporations Super PAC.

It was never quite clear what Larose was doing with all his super PACs. They attracted virtually no donations. (One exception: the $5,000 contributed by a PAC of employees of Contran Corp. to Larose’s Rick Perry 2012 Victory Committee super PAC, which had nothing to do with Rick Perry. Contran is run by billionaire Harold Simmons, the largest single donor to GOP super PACs.)

Florida just filed more than 2,000 counts of state election violations against Larose.  

So what does all this mean for the 2012 election? CREEP’s back, but we won’t have Larose to kick around anymore.


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Multiple attacks on Kabul, Taliban claims “spring offensive”

Reuters reports: Gunmen launched multiple attacks in the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday, assaulting Western embassies in the heavily guarded, central diplomatic area and at the parliament in the west.

Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for the assault, one of the most serious on the capital since U.S.-backed Afghan forces removed the group from power in 2001.

“These attacks are the beginning of the spring offensive and we had planned them for months,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters.

The Taliban said the main targets were the German and British embassies and the headquarters of Afghanistan’s NATO-led force. Several Afghan members of parliament joined security forces repelling attackers from a roof near the parliament.

Taliban fighters also launched assaults in at least two provinces, a spokesman for the insurgents said.

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Limping out of Afghanistan

Immanuel Wallerstein writes: The two candidates for the U.S. presidency seem to be trying to outshout each other concerning Iran, Syria, and Israel/Palestine. Each is claiming he is doing more to support the same objectives. Isn’t it therefore strange that no similar verbal contest is going on at the moment concerning Afghanistan? [ Shah Marai/Agence France-Presse/Getty] In February 2012, some Korans were burned by U.S. soldiers, which led to violent public protests in Afghanistan. (Photo: Shah Marai/Agence France-Presse/Getty

Not so long ago, we were witness to the same Democratic-Republican game about Afghanistan. Which party was the more macho? Remember the concept that a “surge” in troops would win the war, a concept embraced by President Obama in his speech to the U.S. Military Academy in December 2009. Now all of a sudden, since March 2012, it seems to have become a subject no one wants to espouse too loudly.

There are some simple explanations. In the longest war that the United States has ever waged, the war in Afghanistan, the United States has precious little to show for it. The designated enemy, the Taliban, constitute an ever-resilient force, particularly of course in the Pashtun areas, which constitute the largest single ethnic zone in the country.

The United States more or less single-handedly imposed Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun but not a Taliban, as president of Afghanistan. Karzai was not, is not, appreciated by the leaders of the various other ethnic zones in the north and west of the country, who have tried over the years to oust him. These other groups find support in some external powers: Russia, Iran, and India, all of which are as determined as the United States to prevent the return to power of the Taliban. But the United States won’t work with Iran, is doubtful about working with Russia, and doesn’t seem to co-ordinate with India.

In February 2012, some Korans were burned by U.S. soldiers, which led to violent public protests in Afghanistan. Then 16 Afghan children, women, and men were massacred by a U.S. soldier. The United States apologized for both of these, but that hardly calmed the storm. On March 18, President Karzai denounced the Americans in Afghanistan as “demons” engaged in “Satanic acts.” He said Afghanistan was beset by two demons – the Taliban and the Americans.

The New York Times cited an anonymous European diplomat as saying: “Never in history has any superpower spent so much money, sent so many troops to a country, and had so little influence over what its president says and does.”

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Gunter Grass was right

Frank Browning and Steve Weissman write: With his controversial poem on Israel and Iran, Günter Grass has irritated, provoked and outraged people everywhere. As Germany’s greatest living writer and a Nobel laureate in literature, he has also raised a question both inconvenient and impolite. How can decent people support a preemptive war against Iran for moving ever closer to a limited nuclear capability and, at the same time, turn a blind eye to Israel’s extensive arsenal of existing atomic bombs?

Especially in a country with so much Jewish blood on its hands, this is – or was – a question that no Good German should ask in public. It was even more verboten when asked by someone who had belatedly admitted that as a teenager he had served, however briefly, in the Nazi paramilitary unit, the Waffen SS. But the 84-year-old Grass dared to break the taboo. He spoke out and said “What Must Be Said.”

Yet why do I hesitate to name
that other land in which
for years—although kept secret—
a growing nuclear power has existed
beyond supervision or verification,
subject to no inspection of any kind?

Predicting he would be branded an anti-Semite, as he has been in full measure, Grass named Israel and called its atomic power a threat to “an already fragile world peace.” Nor did he stop there. He berated his own country for complicity by selling the Israelis “yet another submarine equipped to transport nuclear warheads.”

Germany had already given Israel two Dolphin-class submarines, and subsidized one-third of the $540 million cost of another. The Germans are planning to similarly subsidize the sale of the latest submarine.

Nuclear arms and submarines are enough to drag down any poem, and “What Must Be Said” lacks elegance and grace, at least in the English translation by Breon Mitchell. But as a poet, Grass risks even more in suggesting a political solution. Our leaders should renounce the use of force, he writes, directly countering Obama’s insistence on keeping a military option on the table. And they should “insist that the governments of both Iran and Israel allow an international authority free and open inspection of the nuclear potential and capability of both.”

No other course offers help
to Israelis and Palestinians alike,
to all those living side by side in enmity
in this region occupied by illusions,
and ultimately, to all of us.

Will any significant world leader take up the challenge and publicly support such an even-handed and common-sense approach? Not if the Israeli government of Bibi Netanyahu and his defenders in Europe and the United States have their way. Their purpose in reviling Grass as a Nazi and anti-Semite is precisely to silence anyone who might even consider following his lead.

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Far-right anti-Muslim network on rise globally as Breivik trial opens

The Guardian reports: The international network of counter-jihadist groups that inspired Anders Behring Breivik is growing in reach and influence, according to a report released on the eve of the Norwegian’s trial.

Far-right organisations are becoming more cohesive as they forge alliances throughout Europe and the US, says the study, with 190 groups now identified as promoting an Islamophobic agenda.

This week Breivik will appear on trial in Oslo after confessing to the murder of 77 people in Norway last July, killings that he justified as part of a “war” between the west and Islamists.

The report, by anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, states that since the 33-year-old’s killing spree, the counter-jihad movement – a network of foundations, bloggers, political activists and street gangs – has continued to proliferate.

Campaigners cite the formation three months ago of the Stop Islamization of Nations (Sion) group, designed to promote an umbrella network of counter-jihad groups across Europe and the US, as evidence of a global evolution.

An inaugural Sion summit is planned in New York this year to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11. Speakers are set to include Paul Weston, chairman of the anti-Islamic British Freedom Party (BFP), which recently announced a pact with the English Defence League. In the manifesto that Breivik published online 90 minutes before his attacks, he cited blog postings by Weston which discussed a “European civil war” between the west and Islam.

Researchers at Hope Not Hate name the UK as one of Europe’s most active countries in terms of counter-jihad extremism, with 22 anti-Islamic groups currently operating.

In Europe as a whole, 133 organisations were named in the report, including seven in Norway, and another 47 in the US, where a network of neo-conservative, evangelical and conservative organisations attempts to spread “negative perceptions of Islam, Muslim minorities and Islamic culture”.

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1,500 activists prepare to visit Palestine via Ben-Gurion Airport

Mya Guarnieri: I’m writing this from somewhere in Europe. Sunday morning, I will board a plane* bound for Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport. Organizers of the “Welcome to Palestine” campaign tell me that more than half the passengers on my flight will be international activists.

When they arrive in Ben-Gurion Airport on Sunday, the activists will openly declare their intent to visit Palestine, more specifically, the West Bank city of Bethlehem, which is in Palestinian Authority-controlled Area A.

While thousands upon thousands of tourists make their way from Israel to Bethlehem every year without a problem, Israeli authorities have made it clear that the activists, who number over 1500, will not be allowed to pass. They will be detained and deported.

The activists have been invited by 25 Palestinian civil society organizations to spend next week in the Bethlehem area building an elementary school, planting trees, and repairing village wells that Palestinians say have been damaged by Israeli settlers.

Israeli authorities say the fly-in is a provocation and an attempt to de-legitimize Israel.

On Sunday, hundreds of undercover policemen and Special Forces will be deployed in Ben Gurion Airport in an attempt to stop the activists–who the Israeli authorities call “hostile elements”– from reaching Bethlehem. Israel has also reportedly sent no-fly lists to foreign airlines and has warned the companies that if they do not comply with the state’s demands to prohibit the activists from boarding, the airlines will have to eat the deportation costs.

Associated Press adds: Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian campaign organizer, said the activists were coming to exercise their right to visit the Palestinian territories.

“The object is not to fly in to make a protest at the airport. The object is for foreigners to visit us,” Qumsiyeh said. “Even prisoners are allowed visits.”

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