Classified reports raise doubts about the legality of Obama’s drone war

McClatchy reports: Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.

The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.

“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”

Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn’t adhere to those standards.

The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn’t on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn’t exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as “other militants” and “foreign fighters.”

In a response to questions from McClatchy, the White House defended its targeting policies, pointing to previous public statements by senior administration officials that the missile strikes are aimed at al Qaida and associated forces.

Micah Zenko, an expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank, who closely follows the target killing program, said McClatchy’s findings indicate that the administration is “misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.”

The documents also show that drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been “exceedingly rare.” [Continue reading…]

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Has the CIA used drones to engaged in contract killing?

Rolling Stone: In a major story in Sunday’s New York Times, national security reporter Mark Mazzetti details the troubling origins of the CIA’s targeted killing program in Pakistan – which he says began in 2004 with the killing of one of that country’s internal enemies, not a member of al Qaeda. The piece, which is adapted from Mazzetti’s new book, The Way of the Knife, also claims that the agency switched to killing accused terrorists – rather than capturing them – because of a 2004 internal review that was highly critical of the agency’s detention and interrogation program.

Targeted killing gave the CIA a way out of the prison business – but into the assassination business – and, as Mazzetti tells it, also a way to get access to Pakistani skies by taking out one of their enemies. Nek Muhammad was a tribal leader who had led a rebellion against Pakistan’s army and had been declared an “enemy of the state.” Pakistan wanted him dead. The CIA wanted access to airspace to conduct drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions, which that country had previously considered a breach of sovereignty. The two countries made a deal – a high-stakes game of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” – that resulted in the CIA killing Nek Muhammad with a Predator drone, and Pakistan opening up part of its skies for CIA use. Pakistan’s military claimed responsibility for the killing, which Mazzetti notes was a lie, and to this day neither country has publicly given the real story.

The revelation that this first target was not part of al Qaeda, but rather a target picked by an ally country, has raised serious questions for critics of the CIA’s actions. “How many other killings have been carried out not pursuant to a strict legal analysis and examination of threat to the U.S., but rather as a bargaining chip, at the request of another government?” Sarah Knuckey, a lawyer and the director of NYU Law School’s Project on Extrajudicial Executions, asks Rolling Stone.

The secrecy in which the targeted killing program is shrouded makes that question impossible to answer conclusively at this time, but there is reason to believe that some of the individuals on the kill list (or lists) are known as “side payment” targets – people who are enemies of a U.S. ally, not the U.S. itself. Blogger Marcy Wheeler has argued that Nek Muhammad’s case “is surely” such a side-payment strike. [Continue reading…]

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Drone war causing suffering on unprecedented scale in northwest Pakistan

AFP reports: After nine friends and relatives were killed in a US drone strike four years ago, Mohammed Fahim took tranquillisers to blot out the nightmares.

The 19 year-old is one of a growing number of Pakistanis living in the tribal areas on the Afghan border who has suffered from conditions related to depression, anxiety and mental health problems because of war.

US drone strikes, fighting between Pakistani Taliban and the army, mass displacement, chronic unemployment and disillusionment are all causing mental suffering on an unprecedented scale in northwest Pakistan, say psychiatrists.

Mohammed lost an eye in the January 2009 attack, but the mental scarring has been even more traumatic. The flashbacks are still sudden and powerful.

“I feel like my head is exploding,” he says when he remembers how four uncles, a cousin and four neighbours died when they came round for tea in North Waziristan, the most notorious of Pakistan’s Taliban and Al-Qaeda bastions.

“We heard the sound of a missile. A fraction of a second later, they were all dead, their bodies mutilated,” says Mohammed, who happened to be in the other room when the missile struck.

He insists that no one in his family was associated with Islamist militancy. US officials say the covert drone war in Pakistan involves surgical, pin-pointed strikes against known killers that cause few if any civilian casualties.

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How Margaret Thatcher fueled the conflict in Ireland

Gerry Adams writes: Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. Her right wing politics saw Thatcher align herself with some of the most repressive and undemocratic regimes in the late 20th century – including apartheid South Africa and Chile’s Pinochet. Her description of the ANC and Mandela as terrorists was evidence of her ultra conservative view of the world.

She championed the deregulation of the financial institutions, cuts in public services and was vehemently anti-trade union. She set out to crush the trade union movement. The confrontation with the miners and the brutality of the British police was played out on television screens night after night for months. The current crisis in the banking institutions and the economic recession owe much to these policies. And she went to war in the Malvinas.

But for the people of Ireland, and especially the north, the Thatcher years were among some of the worst of the conflict. For longer than any other British Prime Minister her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights.

Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. She famously changed the law after Bobby Sands was elected in Fermanagh South Tyrone. And when I and several other Sinn Féin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain.

Margaret Thatcher’s government defended structured political and religious discrimination and political vetting in the north, legislated for political censorship and institutionalised to a greater extent than ever before collusion between British state forces and unionist death squads.

It under her leadership that in 1982 that the Force Research Unit (FRU) was established as a unit within the British Army Intelligence Corps. This British Army agency recruited agents who were then used to kill citizens. Among them was loyalist Brian Nelson. He was a former British soldier and member of the Ulster Defence Association who was recruited by FRU in 1983. He became the UDA’s Senior Intelligence Officer and his associates in FRU helped him to update his intelligence files, including photo-montages of potential victims.
In the summer of 1985 Nelson travelled to South Africa where he helped negotiate a deal for that ultimately saw the UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance acquire 200 AK47 automatic rifles, 90 Browning pistols, 500 fragmentation grenades, ammunition and 12 RPG rocket launchers. The shipment arrived in the north in late 1987 or early 1988.

The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. In the three years prior to receiving this weapons shipment the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded countless scores more.

The extent of the role of FRU in the killing of citizens is formidable. But it was the killing of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in February 1989 that reveals the depth of the structured state collusion policy being pursued by the Thatcher government. [Continue reading…]

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Al Nusra distances itself from announced merger with al Qaeda in Iraq

AFP reports: The head of Syria’s jihadist Al-Nusra Front on Wednesday pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri in an audio message, but distanced his group from claims it had merged with Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

“The sons of Al-Nusra Front pledge allegiance to Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri,” Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani said in the recording.

But, he added, “we were not consulted” on an announcement by Al-Qaeda in Iraq chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Tuesday of a merger with Al-Nusra Front.

“We inform you that neither the Al-Nusra command nor its consultative council, nor its general manager were aware of this announcement. It reached them via the media and if the speech is authentic, we were not consulted,” Jawlani said.

He added that the group would not be changing its flag or its “behaviour.”

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How Obama follows in the footsteps of Pinochet

Remi Brulin writes: Imagine a world where the security forces of several non-democratic states “coordinate intelligence activities closely,” “operate in the territory of one another’s countries” and have established a program “to find and kill terrorists” anywhere around the world as part of a “war” against “terrorism.” Such a dystopian reality appears to be precisely what Executive Director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth had in mind when writing, in his December 7, 2010 letter to President Obama, that current US policies of “targeted killings” may “set a dangerous precedent for abusive regimes around the globe to conduct drone attacks or other strikes against persons who they describe in vague or overly broad terms as terrorists.”

Such a nightmarish vision is much more, however, than a description of what could be. The first sentence above is a description of what was, taken verbatim from an August 3, 1976 secret memorandum by Assistant Secretary for Latin America Harry Shlaudeman to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and describing the system of international cooperation between Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay known as Operation Condor. Between 1976 and 1980 these regimes would, thanks to an elaborate and modern intelligence network, closely collaborate to “disappear” hundreds of people across state borders, among them some members of guerrilla movements but mostly political opponents, former legislators and even Presidents, journalists, religious personalities, often killed after having been submitted to the worst kinds of torture. Entitled “The “Third World War” and South America,” this memorandum makes for fascinating reading as it highlights how, over 35 years ago, close allies of the United States had already developed both a set of specific practices implemented in secret and aimed at fighting “the terrorists,” and a full discourse emphasizing at every turn the fact that they were “at war” against “terrorism.” Only a few weeks later, Orlando Letelier would become the most prominent victim to date of Operation Condor, a Chilean citizen assassinated by the Chilean intelligence services in the streets of Washington D.C.

A few week ago, Argentina opened a major trial into Operation Condor. In contrast, no US official has ever been held accountable for their potential role in this program, a form of impunity bolstered by the continued refusal of the US government to declassify hundreds of documents that would shed light onto the exact nature and extent of its knowledge and involvement at the time. The Shlaudeman memorandum testifies to the dangers of a policy shrouded in secrecy and a complete lack of accountability. It also underlies the importance of current calls on the government to provide much greater transparency regarding “war on terrorism” policies such as “targeted killings” or the resort to extraordinary renditions and torture, policies which, at least to some degree, bear resemblance to some of Operation Condor’s practices.

At the most basic level, this memorandum reminds us that long before America’s current “war on terrorism,” other States did develop a similar discourse. That various regimes have, historically, used the concept of “terrorism” to delegitimize their enemies (and the cause they claim to fight for) and thus justify the use of often profoundly immoral methods against them (think France in Algeria in the 1950s, or South Africa in its fight against Mandela’s African National Congress from the 1960s onward) is neither a new nor a very original notion. The Latin American case is especially relevant to current discussions however, for at least a couple reasons. First, because the United States government was intimately involved in some of the worst practices of these regimes, although the extent and exact nature of this involvement remains, to this day and especially as it pertains to Operation Condor, mostly unknown and classified. Second, because, as I document in my PhD dissertation, it is precisely in the Latin American context that the Reagan administration put the “fight against terrorism” at the heart of the American foreign policy discourse for the very first time. Not only that but, as I discussed in some detail in this interview with Glenn Greenwald, in doing so the US government essentially adopted the discourse used and developed by these authoritarian regimes during the previous decade. [Continue reading…]

In March, Democracy Now interviewed John Dinges, author of “The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents,” who talked about the Operation Condor trial currently underway in Argentina.

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How Obama justifies murder

The scene above, which comes from Steven Spielberg’s Munich, depicts the murder of Wael Zuaiter, a Palestinian intellectual and representative of Fatah who was not known to have any connections to terrorism. He was shot in Rome by Israeli secret service agents on October 16, 1972, in revenge for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian members of Black September during the Olympic Games six weeks earlier.

Spielberg goes to some length to humanize Zuaiter’s murder. The Mossad agents are portrayed as experiencing ambivalence about killing an unarmed man in cold blood. They pause before shooting him several times in the chest.

But the evidence suggests the killing was much more clinical, including a shot to the head.

Thus began Operation Wrath of God whose goal was not only to avenge the deaths of Israel’s athletes but to terrorize Palestinian militants. The campaign continued for twenty years involving shootings and bombings, killing intended targets and some mistaken, along with innocent bystanders, as Mossad fought terrorism with terrorism.

The problem with sanctioning a policy of assassination is that assassins are murderers and governments that authorize murder are flirting with tyranny. Democracy can’t be sustained if those in power believe they can suspend the rule of law whenever it seems convenient.

When President Obama authorizes a drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen, or anywhere else, he is ordering members of the CIA to engage in murder. The targets might not be as transparently unthreatening as was Wael Zuaiter and the method of killing might be so obviously murder as is a bullet to the head at point-blank range. Indeed, this is what makes drone warfare a salable policy: the fact that rather than having the appearance of cold-blooded killing, it looks like military operations carried out on the battlefield — even though these attacks are taking place in locations where the United States is not at war. There are no bullet-ridden bodies, no autopsies, no police investigations, no agents on the run or in prison, and no trials.

And even now, when the use of drones is being widely questioned and a New York Times reporter can write in a matter of way that for this administration “killing is more convenient than capture,” there is little prospect that Obama’s authorization of murder will face legal scrutiny. Instead, the CIA is in the process of quietly handing over to the Pentagon responsibility for drone operations.

Questions about whether Obama’s kill list and the deaths of more than 3,000 people involve any kind of criminality will never be addressed and America can retain its sense of innocence with the soothing thought that whatever was done, was done in order to save precious American lives.

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Unlike Margaret Thatcher, miners believed in society

Ken Capstick writes: In 1984 Britain had 186 working coalmines and approximately 170,000 coalminers. Today we have four coalmines and around 2,000 miners. They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. Miners were a hardy race of people who faced constant danger in the cause of mining coal but underneath that they were caring, sensitive individuals with a commitment to the communities in which they lived. They looked after their old and young as well as those who were ill or infirm.

They built and provided their own welfare facilities and, well before today’s welfare state was built, miners created their own welfare systems to alleviate hardship. They rallied around each other when times were hard. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. The latest pit to close, Maltby in Yorkshire, still has a death and general purpose fund to help fellow miners and their families in times of hardship. In short, miners believed in society.

These values were the exact opposite of those Margaret Thatcher espoused. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. From the valleys of Wales to the far reaches of Scotland, miners were, by and large, socialists by nature but this was tempered by strong Christian beliefs. Thatcher’s threat to butcher the mining industry, destroy the fabric of mining communities and in particular the trade union to which miners had a bond of loyalty, was met with the fiercest resistance any government has met in peacetime.

It might just be a scene in a film, but Pete Postlethwaite’s speech at the end of Brassed Off perfectly captures the spirit of the miners and the grievous suffering that Thatcher inflicted on industrial workers across Britain.

The Guardian reports: “I’ll tell you what really annoyed us miners,” said Pete Mansell, sipping a pint of John Smith’s on Monday. “She said we were the enemy within. We weren’t. We were just looking after our lives, our families, our kids and our properties, everything that we ever had. We were fighting for that big style.”

Along with most of the other men drinking in the Black Bull pub in Aughton, Rotherham, the 55-year-old former pit worker had borne witness to the fiercest confrontation in the miners strike at the nearby Orgreave coking plant on 18 June 1984.

Almost 30 years have gone by since Margaret Thatcher characterised those who took part in the “battle of Orgreave” as thugs. But in a village that one drinker said had been “decimated by Thatcher”, the words still cut deep. It is perhaps no surprise that those gathered in the pub were having what they described as a party after hearing about her death.

“I’m not a hypocrite,” said Mansell, who is from the nearby pit village of Swallownest and worked underground for 22 years. “I spoke ill of her when she was alive and I’ll speak ill of her now she’s dead. She doesn’t mean two iotas to me.”

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The rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher

In ‘Revolution,’ an episode from Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, his assessment of Margaret Thatcher becomes most unpalatable when he veers towards gushing admiration, yet more importantly he highlights the worst feature of Thatcher’s reign: the extent of her influence.

Dancing on the streets in celebration of her death is a bit like celebrating the death of a monarch while remaining the subject of a monarchy.

After Thatcher fell from power, Thatcherism lived on, not least through her ideological step-child, Tony Blair. Since she had already sold off all of Britain’s other assets, he sold off politics itself and exchanged ideology for marketing. The only ideology that remained sacrosanct was the one he had been bequeathed by Thatcher: that of small government and free-market economics.

The Thatcher-Blair era helped set the stage for global economic crisis and through Britain’s vassal status to the U.S., a decade of wars in the Middle East.

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Monsanto’s next target: democracy

AlterNet: Big Food’s greatest fear is materializing. A critical mass of educated consumers, food and natural health activists are organizing a powerful movement that could well overthrow North America’s trillion-dollar junk food empire. Savvy and more determined than ever, activists are zeroing in on the Achilles heel of Food Inc. — labeling.

But as consumers demand truth and greater transparency in labeling, it isn’t just Big Food whose empire is vulnerable. The biotech industry, which makes billions supplying junk food manufacturers with cheap, genetically engineered (GE) ingredients, has even more to lose. Monsanto knows that if food producers are forced to label the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in their food products, they’ll reformulate those products to meet consumer demand for GMO-free alternatives. That’s why companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Dow, along with Coca-Cola and Pepsi, last year spent more than $46 million to defeat Proposition 37, California’s GMO labeling initiative.

The junk food and biotech industries narrowly (48.5% – 51.5%) prevailed in California, but they know it’s only a matter of time before one or more states pass a mandatory GMO labeling law. More than 30 state legislatures are now debating GMO labeling bills. And consumers have broadened the fight beyond just labeling. Five counties and two cities in California and Washington have banned the growing of GE crops. In addition, given the near total absence of FDA regulation, 19 states have passed laws restricting GMOs.

How is the biotech industry fighting back? By attacking democracy. Experts say the laws are on the side of consumers. But consumers will no doubt still have to defend democracy against an increasingly desperate, and aggressive, industry bent on protecting the highly profitable business of genetically engineered food. [Continue reading…]

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How Big Pharma profits from war

Richard A. Friedman writes: Last year, more active-duty soldiers committed suicide than died in battle. This fact has been reported so often that it has almost lost its jolting force. Almost.

Worse, according to data not reported on until now, the military evidently responded to stress that afflicts soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan primarily by drugging soldiers on the front lines. Data that I have obtained directly from Tricare Management Activity, the division of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, shows that there has been a giant, 682 percent increase in the number of psychoactive drugs — antipsychotics, sedatives, stimulants and mood stabilizers — prescribed to our troops between 2005 and 2011. That’s right. A nearly 700 percent increase — despite a steady reduction in combat troop levels since 2008.

The prescribing trends suggest that the military often uses medications in ways that are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration and do not comport with the usual psychiatric standards of practice.

The military tests prospective enlistees with an eye toward screening out those with serious psychiatric disorders. So you would expect that the use of these drugs in the military would be minimal — and certainly less than in the civilian population. But the opposite is true: prescriptions written for antipsychotic drugs for active-duty troops increased 1,083 percent from 2005 to 2011; the number of antipsychotic drug prescriptions in the civilian population increased just 22 percent from 2005 to 2011, according to IMS Health, an independent medical data company.

The data suggest that military doctors may prescribe psychoactive drugs for off-label use as sedatives, possibly so as to enable soldiers to function better in stressful combat situations. Capt. Michael Colston, a psychiatrist and program director for mental health policy in the Department of Defense, confirmed this possibility. In an e-mail to me, Dr. Colston acknowledged that antipsychotic drugs have been used to treat insomnia, anxiety and aggressive behavior.

Yes, the medicating of combat troops has been done in such a way that it constitutes a form of drug abuse. A year ago the Army Surgeon General warned that medications being widely used to treat PTSD risk making the condition worse. And the dramatic rise in suicides has been widely linked to the effects of suicide-triggering medications.

But there is a gaping whole in Friedman’s commentary: no recognition that the misprescribing of psychiatric drugs by military doctors does not so much contrast with the practice of civilian doctors — it is merely an amplification of already excessive use in the wider population.

Look at the numbers that the author cites. A 1,083 percent increase in prescriptions for antipsychotic drugs for troops is contrasted with a 22 percent increase among civilians during the same period, 2005 to 2011. Yes, that’s a massive difference, but consider the 22 percent increase on its own.

This has nothing to do with a rise in the incidence of mental illness during this period. What it reflects is the massively effective marketing operations of the pharmaceutical manufacturers, in collusion with doctors who either get bribed or brainwashed, as they push off-label prescribing of these powerful and dangerous drugs.

At the same time there has been a relentless drive to expand the boundaries of diagnosis so that problems previously not regarded as illnesses — such as grief — can be medicated, or so that diagnoses previously reserved for adults are broadened to include teenagers and now even young children. Moreover, this class of drugs has been prescribed with increasing frequency to seniors even when this is known to increase the risk of mortality.

There is a reason that psychiatry is arguably the most corrupt branch of medicine and the most natural partner for the pharmaceutical industry. No other doctors have the opportunity to offer treatments based purely on subjective opinion.

Marcia Angell, former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine writes:

As psychiatry became a drug-intensive specialty, the pharmaceutical industry was quick to see the advantages of forming an alliance with the psychiatric profession. Drug companies began to lavish attention and largesse on psychiatrists, both individually and collectively, directly and indirectly. They showered gifts and free samples on practicing psychiatrists, hired them as consultants and speakers, bought them meals, helped pay for them to attend conferences, and supplied them with “educational” materials. When Minnesota and Vermont implemented “sunshine laws” that require drug companies to report all payments to doctors, psychiatrists were found to receive more money than physicians in any other specialty. The pharmaceutical industry also subsidizes meetings of the APA and other psychiatric conferences. About a fifth of APA funding now comes from drug companies.

Drug companies are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers. Called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) by the industry, these are the people who through their writing and teaching influence how mental illness will be diagnosed and treated. They also publish much of the clinical research on drugs and, most importantly, largely determine the content of the DSM. In a sense, they are the best sales force the industry could have, and are worth every cent spent on them. Of the 170 contributors to the current version of the DSM (the DSM-IV-TR), almost all of whom would be described as KOLs, ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.

The drug industry, of course, supports other specialists and professional societies, too, but [Daniel] Carlat [author of Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry — A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis] asks, “Why do psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies?” His answer: “Our diagnoses are subjective and expandable, and we have few rational reasons for choosing one treatment over another.” Unlike the conditions treated in most other branches of medicine, there are no objective signs or tests for mental illness — no lab data or MRI findings — and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often unclear. That makes it possible to expand diagnostic boundaries or even create new diagnoses, in ways that would be impossible, say, in a field like cardiology. And drug companies have every interest in inducing psychiatrists to do just that.

Since the misfortune of Americans at large continues to provide such a lucrative market for those who trade in the myth that sorrow can be washed away with pills, then to the corporate drug cartels the misery of war must look like nothing less than El Dorado.

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Rogue state: For the U.S. killing is more convenient than capture

Scott Shane reports: When Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, was taken into American custody at an airport stopover in Jordan last month, he joined one of the most select groups of the Obama era: high-level terrorist suspects who have been located by the American counterterrorism juggernaut, and who have not been killed.

Mr. Abu Ghaith’s case — he awaits a federal criminal trial in New York — is a rare illustration of what Obama administration officials have often said is their strong preference for capturing terrorists rather than killing them.

“I have heard it suggested that the Obama administration somehow prefers killing Al Qaeda members rather than capturing them,” said John O. Brennan, in a speech last year when he was the president’s counterterrorism adviser; he is now the C.I.A. director. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

In fact, he said, “Our unqualified preference is to only undertake lethal force when we believe that capturing the individual is not feasible.”

Despite Mr. Brennan’s protestations, an overwhelming reliance on killing terrorism suspects, which began in the administration of George W. Bush, has defined the Obama years. Since Mr. Obama took office, the C.I.A. and military have killed about 3,000 people in counterterrorist strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, mostly using drones. Only a handful have been caught and brought to this country; an unknown number have been imprisoned by other countries with intelligence and other support from the United States.

This policy on targeted killing, according to experts on counterterrorism inside and outside the government, is shaped by several factors: the availability of a weapon that does not risk American casualties; the resistance of the authorities in Pakistan and Yemen to even brief incursions by American troops; and the decreasing urgency of interrogation at a time when the terrorist threat has diminished and the United States has deep intelligence on its enemies.

Though no official will publicly acknowledge it, the bottom line is clear: killing is more convenient than capture for both the United States and the foreign countries where the strikes occur. [Continue reading…]

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Criminalizing justice: Taping of farm cruelty is becoming the crime

The New York Times reports: On one covert video, farm workers illegally burn the ankles of Tennessee walking horses with chemicals. Another captures workers in Wyoming punching and kicking pigs and flinging piglets into the air. And at one of the country’s largest egg suppliers, a video shows hens caged alongside rotting bird corpses, while workers burn and snap off the beaks of young chicks.

Each video — all shot in the last two years by undercover animal rights activists — drew a swift response: Federal prosecutors in Tennessee charged the horse trainer and other workers, who have pleaded guilty, with violating the Horse Protection Act. Local authorities in Wyoming charged nine farm employees with cruelty to animals. And the egg supplier, which operates in Iowa and other states, lost one of its biggest customers, McDonald’s, which said the video played a part in its decision.

But a dozen or so state legislatures have had a different reaction: They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms.

Critics call them “Ag-Gag” bills.

Some of the legislation appears inspired by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a business advocacy group with hundreds of state representatives from farm states as members. The group creates model bills, drafted by lobbyists and lawmakers, that in the past have included such things as “stand your ground” gun laws and tighter voter identification rules.

One of the group’s model bills, “The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,” prohibits filming or taking pictures on livestock farms to “defame the facility or its owner.” Violators would be placed on a “terrorist registry.”

Officials from the group did not respond to a request for comment.

Animal rights activists say they have not seen legislation that would require them to register as terrorists, but they say other measures — including laws passed last year in Iowa, Utah and Missouri — make it nearly impossible to produce similar undercover exposés. Some groups say that they have curtailed activism in those states. [Continue reading…]

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Young America doesn’t love Israel

Haaretz columnist, Chemi Shalev, writes: A Pew Research poll released this week found that for the first time, a majority of Americans favor the legalization of marijuana, by a 52%-45% margin. Support is lowest among older, conservative Republicans and highest among younger, liberal Democrats.

The same trend holds true, in varying degrees, in all the recent polling on the issues that top the current American domestic agenda, such as gun control, gay marriage and immigration reform. The younger and more liberal you are, the more you are likely to support such measures; the older and more conservative you are, the more you are likely to oppose them.

Support for Israel, on the other hand, runs in the opposite direction: older, conservative and Republican Americans tend to prefer Israel over the Palestinians by overwhelming numbers, while younger, liberal and Democratic Americans are more ambivalent. In a January Pew poll, the gap between “conservative Republicans” and “liberal Democrats” on this matter was no less than a staggering 75%-33%.

Thus, while Israel continues to enjoy substantial overall support in the American public, its weakest links are to be found among the groups that are now on the ascendant on most domestic and social issues of the day. Generational gaps and demographic trends have combined to produce a significant shift in American public opinion, as the National Journal wrote this week: “The culture wars now favor the Democrats. The wind is in their backs.”

The question, therefore, is whether this wind might not eventually erode traditional support for Israel in American public opinion as well. Is the so-called “partisan gap” on Israel a permanent feature of the American political landscape that should worry Israelis or is it a reversible trend that will change with the times?

It is tempting, for example, to comfort oneself with the assumption that support for Israel comes with age, that young liberals who are now equivocating about the Jewish state will evolve over the years and become strong Israel-supporters, just like their elders. But that intuitive theory is rebuffed in a paper published earlier this year by Israel’s Institute of National Strategic Studies (INSS) in which researchers Owen Alterman and Cameron Brown cite polls showing that in the late 1970s, the generational divide was the other way round: Americans aged 18-29 were more supportive of Israel than those 65+ and over.

“Generations seem to develop views toward Israel that guide their opinions throughout their lifetime,” the authors note. If that is true, then the so-called Millenials born after 1980, will maintain their tepid support for Israel throughout the coming decades as the Israel-backing Silent Generation and Baby Boomers slowly leave the stage.

Alterman and Cameron also dissect the correlation between religiosity and support for Israel, and come to the far less surprising conclusion that the most supportive are the most religious, both Christian and Jewish, and that the coolest toward Israel are those who cite “none” as their main religion. The entire “partisan gap” on support for Israel created in the past two decades, after all, isn’t so much a decrease in left-wing backing for Israel as a dramatic increase in right-wing support that stems from the growing prominence of Israel among Evangelical Christians and their increasing dominance of Republican politics.

Right-wing Jewish ideologues like to gloat over the growing political divide as proof of liberal perfidy in general and the left’s animus toward Israel in particular. They tend to gloss over their own role in turning Israel into a “wedge issue” which they unsuccessfully tried to exploit in order to pry Jewish voters away from U.S. President Barack Obama in the recent elections. By portraying support for Israel as a uniquely Republican and conservative cause, Republican Jewish propagandists are steadily ensuring that many young liberals will be instinctively repelled from embracing Israel too ardently. [Continue reading…]

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Iain Banks: why I’m supporting a cultural boycott of Israel

Iain Banks writes: I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign because, especially in our instantly connected world, an injustice committed against one, or against one group of people, is an injustice against all, against every one of us; a collective injury.

My particular reason for participating in the cultural boycott of Israel is that, first of all, I can; I’m a writer, a novelist, and I produce works that are, as a rule, presented to the international market. This gives me a small extra degree of power over that which I possess as a (UK) citizen and a consumer. Secondly, where possible when trying to make a point, one ought to be precise, and hit where it hurts. The sports boycott of South Africa when it was still run by the racist apartheid regime helped to bring the country to its senses because the ruling Afrikaaner minority put so much store in their sporting prowess. Rugby and cricket in particular mattered to them profoundly, and their teams’ generally elevated position in the international league tables was a matter of considerable pride. When they were eventually isolated by the sporting boycott – as part of the wider cultural and trade boycott – they were forced that much more persuasively to confront their own outlaw status in the world.

A sporting boycott of Israel would make relatively little difference to the self-esteem of Israelis in comparison to South Africa; an intellectual and cultural one might help make all the difference, especially now that the events of the Arab spring and the continuing repercussions of the attack on the Gaza-bound flotilla peace convoy have threatened both Israel’s ability to rely on Egypt’s collusion in the containment of Gaza, and Turkey’s willingness to engage sympathetically with the Israeli regime at all. Feeling increasingly isolated, Israel is all the more vulnerable to further evidence that it, in turn, like the racist South African regime it once supported and collaborated with, is increasingly regarded as an outlaw state. [Continue reading…]

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