For years, the United States has danced around the fact that it has repeatedly enter the sovereign territory of other countries with drone attacks and in some cases small unit attacks without the permission of countries like Pakistan. Such acts violate international law and would be viewed by the United States as an act of war if committed on U.S. territory. This week,Defense Secretary Leon Panetta finally responded directly to those objections and said that the attacks would continue unabated. Panetta essentially stated that we can invade other nations because we can and that countries will have to come to accept that — using the same concept as “floggings will continue on ship until morale improves.”
Panetta insisted this is really not them (other countries) but us. Speaking in India, he proclaimed “This is about our sovereignty as well.” As for Pakistan, which has repeatedly objected to attacks on its territory, Panetta said “It’s a complicated relationship, often times frustrating, often times difficult. They have provided some cooperation. There are other times when frankly that cooperation is not there.” Strangely, we would not view the relationship as complicated if Mexico sent drones into Texas to take out suspects or landed Mexican special forces in Arizona to kill enemies. We would treat it as a matter of war.
Panetta has finally made “American exceptionalism” official policy. We do these things simply because we can; because we are the United States. From torture to military tribunals to hit lists, the United States is above the legal standards that we impose on others. The greatest danger is that our hypocrisy abroad is turning into hypocrisy at home where we continue to claim to be the “land of the free” while stripping citizens of basic rights and expanding unchecked presidential and police powers.
Obama has expanded drone attacks to an unprecedented level while expanding his claimed authority to kill citizens without a charge or trial. Now the most common image of the United States abroad is not our Constitution but our drones. For many people around the world, Panetta’s speech will be viewed as adding unrestained arrogance to unrestrained power.
Source: ABC
This damn system gripes me. Two carriage returns (savvy that?) gets it posted. Not meant at all. sheesh.
Now both Mespo and OS are “kill the bastards, they are our enemies, the government says so”. Sounds like mild RWA to me, including the “victim is as fault”. Especially the bit about association that OS stank up the arena with.
Never an answer as to what proof is offered against waki-kaki as to his guilt, what he supports for ideas as to
attacks on innocent Americans, etc. Do you also believe that the CIA can produce such good intelligence.
Mespo may be a nice guy, usually cheer him on, but here I can’t support him. My ass and all our asses are on the line now subject to Obama’s judgement. Just as laki-kaki was. Some others than I also feel insecure about O’s new imperial powers.
And, BTW, re juridiction- the treaty standpoint and thus the official one of the USA is that everything where we control is subject to our laws and judgments. And please advise what constitutional protections am I not accorded by my NOT residing in the USA itself?
You guys are all damn intelligent. Ain’t fun to see the fever of a fight get you to bring out such crap, in terms of reasoning, facts, argumentation, etc.
As for MM, I won’t review him, other than to say that he waves the “war is hell and peace is good”-flag He says he supports his land, and has a discharge to prove it. To then call him an “ex-pat=deserter” and other crap of that kind to counter his arguments seems a prima facie waste of time in terms of lasting value.
And do you guys never get tired of our government and the system? Many times. So what’s wrong with the facts as he sees them as to our endless feeding of the MIC with our bodies, dollars and foreign bodies? Foreign bodies that frankly I don’t think one person here cares a damn about.
Met an Ethiopian, an Eritrean family, polish tourists, an Iraqi (sunni) who came in 2008, and a few others. All of them smiled when they heard I was American. Guess none of them were terrorists.
And my Afghanistan helper was just here practicing her English before her oral exams. Americans, some of them, seem fully convinced that the Michaevellian statesmanship is the ultimiate answer, ie the one we are practicing now.
I don’t agree.
Hope this made some sense.
Bob,Esq.
Bron never mentioned the word “integrity.” That was Jill. Do you read Kant this way, too?
Bron:
I think Jefferson would likely agree the soft drink ordinance is an overreach. I wonder about his position though if he were confronted with the modern world and our interdependent society that was much different from his own. As for Locke, I’m in lock-step with that. 😀
Bob, Esq:
Anyone can read what you said. They can decide if it you or me crying wolf. No need for an apology since there is no deception possible.
I suppose then you are from the “I’ll destroy the village to save it” camp of American patriotism. -mespo727272 to this writer
Nope.
anonymously:
“And in the process, you’re creating god-only-knows how many others with a vehement hatred of anything and everything American.”
**********************
Yep, they really loved us before 9/11 and their love will only increase if we stand down. Let’s move out of the Middle East altogether and withdraw support for Israel, too. That should make ’em love us even more. Maybe we can bring all our troops home and become just another third rate power watching as a tide of Muslim fundamentalism runs rough-shod over the region with the express goal of denying us petroleum and wrecking our economy. That was Jimmy Carter foreign policy in Iran and we see how good that worked.
Why are you so afraid of these people that you would capitulate to their every tactical goal. You’d do well to recognize the wisdom of Machiavelli that if you can’t be loved you’d best be feared, and that you must deal a decisive blow to your enemy lest he be strong enough to retaliate. Pretty? No. Truth? Yes.
You don’t see an enemy when there is one.
Bron,
Loved your quip regarding a certain lack of integrity.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading most of the posts here; particularly those wherein reason stood its ground and refused to surrender to the cheap sophistry of those who pose as high minded patriots but actually have no respect for the constitution, freedom or rule of law and believe only in total control.
‘Mesposers’ if you will.
Perhaps if people like Mespo refrained from and apologized for intentionally misrepresenting someone’s argument and thence attacking it as if the opponent had made it himself the world would be just that much more civil. Until then, as this thread suggests, the beatings shall continue…
Mike A:
I’ve always liked that little segment of American history. Thought I ‘d see what you had to say about it.
Whichever leg I stand on it will be cut off. No matter.
Do any of you think that anything you say, or anything you do has any effect on the course of events?
GeneH, I love your differentiation between mild perjorative intro phrase which has support in facts (sort of) is OK, while a kick in the balls is not. Interesting to see you do that. His points as always are ignored.
And don’t bore me by saying I’m coming to play behind MM’s shielding figure. I admire your brains, it is the way you use them that disturbs me. Won’t be specific for that has always proven meaningless. And don’t bother getting aroused. I’m just saying.
BTW, thanks again for the passive-aggressive label. It is finally sinking in. And I think I found a reason and therefore a cure. Now if you could find one for
feeling of erternal superiority.
The US regularly funds all sides of conflicts. That’s where all the profit arises. This is a military govt. and it is completely out of control.
Propaganda has convinced people like mespo that killing civilians up to an including the advocacy of genocide is not only a rational response to terrorism but a just one.
This is why I keep harping on a very deep examination of who we are as a people. We have allowed torture and murder to become routine acts of this govt. We have allowed the complete breakdown of the rule of law. This could not have happened without the willing consent of the people. First it was the Republicans of gave consent under Bush. Now it is Democrats who will give consent under Obama. That consent is wrong. It must end.
I don’t hold out much hope for a citizen movement against a military govt., one that has been so successful in tricking the people of our nation into supporting horrific acts, misery and lawlessness. But we must try. Intellectual and moral integrity calls each of us to oppose injustice and throw off the lies we have been fed.
US FUNDS THE TALIBAN????
One of the most important issues today is the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan and the fact that US
Military Aid to Pakistan is being used to fund the Pakistani ISI which is in turn funding Taliban
and Al Quada fighters. While this has been reported sporadically in the media for whatever
reason political pundits on the left and right have effectively ignored this issue.
Joe Klein in an article for Time, August 9, 2010, p. 19, has written an article that every American
citizen should go to their library and read, he writes,
“The commanders are unanimous in their belief that the ISI is running the show….And so,
despite professions of alliance with the US by Pakistan’s then dictator Pervez Musharraf, a
decision was made to keep the Taliban alive. A spigot of untargeted military aid from the George
W. Bush Administration helped fund the effort. A commander of the vicious Haqqani Taliban
network tells Waldman that their funding comes from ‘the Americans–from them to the
Pakistani military, and then to us.’ Waldman reports that the commander receives from the
Pakistanis ‘a reward for killing foreign soldiers, usually $4000 to $5000 for each soldier killed'”.
American tax dollars if not directly, then indirectly are being used to fund the Taliban and put
a bounty on American boys and girls head… Makes one wonder why the establishment right
or left is not reporting on this? If the right is covering for
the mistakes of the Bush administration…why is the establishment left not reporting on this???
…this is the most important issue of the day…we will never win a war where if not directly then
indirectly the US is funding the opposition!!!!
woody voinche
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/un-official-urges-pakistan-to-query-legality-of-drones-20120608-201iu.html
UN official urges Pakistan to query legality of drones
Jon Boone, Islamabad
June 9, 2012
THE United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has advised Pakistan to seek an official UN investigation into whether US drone strikes there are legal.
Navi Pillay told Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani he should invite the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions to visit the country to examine the legality of missile attacks by remote-controlled aircraft in areas near the Afghan border.
”Drone attacks do raise serious questions about compliance with international law,” Dr Pillay told a press conference in Islamabad. ”Ensuring accountability for any failure to comply with international law is also difficult when drone attacks are conducted outside the military chain of command and beyond … transparent mechanisms of civilian or military control.”
Advertisement: Story continues below
This week the US confirmed that one of its planes had killed al-Qaeda’s second in command, Abu Yahya al-Libi.
The Obama administration has embraced the program, ordering a sharp increase in strikes against suspected terrorists in Pakistan in recent months. Dr Pillay’s intervention comes at a particularly fraught time for relations between Washington and Islamabad.
The Pakistani government has stepped up its denunciations, even calling in a top US diplomat for a dressing-down on Tuesday.
US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, meanwhile, said Washington was running out of patience over insurgent bases along Pakistan’s border.
Despite suspicions that the Pakistan government welcomes the killing of many dangerous militants, officially it has demanded an end to all US strikes. The US government and human rights organisations disagree on how many civilians are killed or hurt by drones.
Dr Pillay said it was vital all civilian casualties were investigated and compensated.
But Pakistan may be reluctant to take up her suggestion of inviting an inquiry by a special rapporteur. Dr Pillay said such an official would investigate not just drones but also ”the spate of killings” by militants, criminals and state military intelligence agencies.
In a visit to Kabul, Mr Panetta said it was difficult to achieve peace in Afghanistan ”as long as there is safe haven for terrorists” in Pakistan, singling out the Haqqani network. This is allied to the Taliban and believed to enjoy Pakistani intelligence support.
”We are reaching the limits of our patience here,” he said. ”For that reason it is extremely important that Pakistan take action to prevent this kind of safe haven from taking place and allowing terrorists to use their country as a safety net in order to conduct their attacks on our forces.
”We have made that very clear time and time again and we will continue to do that.”
Mr Panetta said Haqqani fighters had been seen leaving to attack US forces as recently as June 1, when they detonated a truck bomb and then tried to storm Forward Operating Base Salerno in Afghanistan’s Khost province.
The attack was repelled and 14 militants were killed.
Mr Panetta arrived in Afghanistan after a day of violence in which 21 people were killed by Taliban suicide attacks on a bazaar in the southern city of Kandahar, and 18 died in a NATO air strike on a house in eastern Logar province, where members of a wedding party were staying, Afghan officials said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai cut short a trip to China and issued a statement saying: ”NATO operations that inflict human and material losses to civilians can in no way be justifiable, acceptable and tolerable.”
NATO has said it is looking into reports of civilian deaths. It confirmed that an air strike had been called in during a raid to detain a Taliban commander, but originally said some fighters had been killed and only two women had been wounded.
Villagers displayed the bodies of five women, seven children and six men at the provincial capital after the strike.
■ A bomb yesterday tore through a bus carrying government employees and other civilians near the city of Peshawar in north-western Pakistan, killing 18 people and wounding 35.
MONDAY, MAY 14, 2012 12:21 PM EDT
Andrew Sullivan’s father figure
The tearful Newsweek writer speaks on why paternalistic acceptance from the president is so meaningful
BY GLENN GREENWALD
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/andrew_sullivans_father_figure/
An Interview With Medea Benjamin About the Life-and-Death Decisions of Drone Warfare
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
http://truth-out.org/news/item/9541-an-interview-with-medea-benjamin-about-the-life-and-death-decisions-of-drone-warfare
Medea Benjamin on How Drones May Be Used Against US Citizens Soon
By Medea Benjamin, OR Books | Book Excerpt
http://truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/9519-medea-benjamin-on-how-drones-may-be-used-against-us-citizens-soon
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/06/why-obama-embraced-drones.html
Here is an article that Suzanne Fisher Staples, an award-winning children’s author that I know, wrote for The Horn Book in 2001. Fisher had worked as a UPI correspondent in Asia for many years.
*****
Tolerance Is Not Enough
by Suzanne Fisher Staples
http://archive.hbook.com/magazine/articles/2001/nov01_staples.asp
In the late 1970s I was based in India, working as a newspaper reporter. The most important and terrible story I covered was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
When I think of Afghanistan, images of people flood my mind. I remember a man, employed by a European friend, who drove me back to my hotel in Kabul one night after dinner. He wore gloves because Secret Police interrogators had torn off his fingernails one at a time. They said he hadn’t informed on the foreigners he worked for in enough detail.
I think of a group of refugees walking across the border into Pakistan, some in bare feet in a light snow. Several of the women carried dead infants in their arms.
I remember a seven-year-old boy in a makeshift medical camp along the Afghan-Pakistan border. His face was horribly scarred, his eyes were gone, and his right arm was a bandaged stump. He said he and his brothers had tried to pick up what they thought were toys and watches — actually, antipersonnel devices dropped from Soviet helicopters by the hundreds of thousands over Afghan mountain passes and farmlands.
A little girl told me she had watched her mother die in her village in Afghanistan. “She opened her mouth to speak, and blood came out,” she said.
In my drawer sits a photograph of me sitting with a war council of tribal elders led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, the commander of Afghan resistance fighters known as the Northern Alliance, who was assassinated in early September by hit men disguised as Saudi journalists. “You will hear of this war for many years,” Massoud told me. Even then — in 1981 — I knew he was right.
The dominant image of Afghanistan is the most inhospitable landscape most of us can imagine. It is peppered with caves and inaccessible mountain passes. Even before five years of drought and twenty years of war, Afghanistan was a desolate tribal land of high desert mountains and plains. There is virtually nothing to eat, because the natural forage is dried up and the irrigation systems have been destroyed. It is not simply fear of an American attack that has millions of Afghans on the move.
Among the many things I learned living in that part of the world is that Christians and Jews and Muslims have a lot more in common than they have differences. The Koran is much like the Bible and the Judaic scriptures in its prescriptions for how people ought to behave toward one another.
From hours of sipping tea around fires in camps all over rural Pakistan and Afghanistan, I have also learned that relatively few Muslims are fundamentalists. They abhor terrorism and are more often victims of it than we are. Muslim terrorists are not regarded as religious martyrs but as fanatics who use religion to justify political acts.
The Soviet-Afghan war was of great strategic importance to the United States. At stake: Soviet access to the major shipping lanes from the Gulf of Arabia, the most important conduit for Middle Eastern oil to the West. And yet it was difficult to get news of it into American newspapers. Most of our stories were cut to one- or two-inch columns for the “World News in Brief” sections. Our editors told us that Americans weren’t interested because they had difficulty seeing the relevance of such a remote and strange country.
I began to realize that news reports seldom let Americans see what people from cultures very different from ours are really like. News reports about battles and politics and economics rarely show individual faces — and when people remain faceless, it’s easy not to care what happens to them.
I began to think then of story as a way of providing insight into the lives of people from other cultures, because story is based on the stuff of the human heart. Story shows what we have in common, not what separates us. That was when I decided I wanted to write fiction.
Stories can show us that the people of Afghanistan are more like us than not; that they are not equipment and targets, but people — most of them decent and moderate — just like us. They are afraid when they hear gunfire outside their houses in the middle of the night, just as you and I would be.
We in America pride ourselves on tolerance, but we must learn quickly that tolerance is not enough. It is diversity that must be embraced and celebrated if this madness is ever to stop. Diversity can fill us with surprise and touch us with familiarity. It is the richness of life, and is not to be feared.
*****
Suzanne Fisher Staples website:
http://suzannefisherstaples.com/
mespo:
I had to chuckle when I saw your comment on the Columbus, New Mexico raid. Since I lived a number of years in southern New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, I’ve actually been to Columbus. It’s not much more of a town now than it was at the time of the Villa raid.
When I studied New Mexico history many years ago, I was taught that the raid was in retaliation for the U.S. taking sides in the Mexican revolution. Wilson’s decision had less to do with protecting American interests than it did with jingoism.
The fact is, of course, that Pershing failed. And one of the reasons Pershing failed is that Villa was extremely popular among Mexican peasants for standing up to the gringos and Pershing received little civilian cooperation during his expedition.
In sum, my view is that it was an unnecessary waste of time, money and lives during another period of imperialist sentiment in this country.
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/30/glenn_greenwald_obamas_secret_kill_list
Glenn Greenwald: Obama’s Secret Kill List “The Most Radical Power a Government Can Seize”
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Glenn, I want ask you about another subject. On Tuesday, the New York Times published a major exposé about how President Obama personally oversees a, quote, “secret kill list” containing the names and photos of individuals targeted for assassination in the U.S. drone war. According to the Times, Obama signs off on every targeted killing in Yemen and Somalia and the more complex or risky strikes in Pakistan. Individuals on the list include U.S. citizens as well as teenage girls as young as 17 years old. Glenn, can you comment on that?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, we’ve, of course, known for a long time that the president of the United States believes that he has the power to order people killed, assassinated, in total secrecy, without any due process, without transparency or oversight of any kind. I really do believe it’s literally the most radical power that a government and a president can seize, and yet the Obama administration has seized this power and exercised it aggressively with very little controversy.
What the New York Times article does is it adds some important, though very disturbing, details, probably the most disturbing of which is that one of the reasons why the Obama administration runs around claiming that the casualties of civilians are so low from their drone attacks, which everybody knows is false, is because they’ve redefined what a militant is. And a militant, in the eyes of the Obama administration, formally means any male of fighting age, presumably 18 to 40, who is in a strike zone of a missile. So, if the United States shoots a missile or detonates a bomb by drone or by aircraft and kills eight or a dozen or two dozen people, without even knowing whom they’ve killed or anything about them, they will immediately label any male of a certain age a militant by virtue of their proximity to that scene. And what the New York Times article said was that the rationale for this is that they believe that anybody who is even near a terrorist or any terrorist activity is, quote, “probably up to no good.” Ironically, that is, as Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News pointed out, the exact phrase that George Zimmerman used when describing Trayvon Martin to the 911 call, that he must be up to no good, the sort of suspicion that even though we don’t know anything about somebody, the mere happenstance of where they are or what they’re doing entitles us not just to harbor suspicions about them, but to kill them.
And it’s amazing that American media outlets continue to use the word “militant” to describe people who are killed by American drones without knowing their identity, even though we now know that the Obama administration uses that word in an incredibly deceitful and propagandistic way. And the fact that Obama himself is sitting at the top of this pyramid, making decisions about life and death, issuing death sentences without a shred of oversight or transparency, really ought to be provoking widespread outrage. And yet, with the exception of a few circles and factions, it really isn’t.
AMY GOODMAN: And your response to William Daley, the White House chief of staff, in the Times saying Obama called the decision to strike the U.S.-born cleric Anwar Awlaki an easy one, Glenn?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, this is why I wrote yesterday, you know, I think one of the things that the New York Times article did was shed light on President Obama’s character. You know, we can talk a lot about his policies, and that usually is what’s most important, and we’ve known that he’s has been embracing these radical theories of executive power that even George Bush’s former former CIA and NSA chief, General Michael Hayden, has lavishly praised and other Bush officials are over the moon about in terms of President Obama endorsing them. So we know his policies have been extremist and radical. But here you have one of the most controversial things, as I said earlier, that a president can do: ordering an American citizen assassinated by the CIA in total secrecy with no due process, never been charged with any crime, even though they could have charged him if they really had evidence, as they claim, that he was guilty of plotting terrorist attacks, and instead of charging him, they simply secretly ordered his assassination.
And it turns out that there was no struggling in terms of the difficult constitutional and ethical and legal issues this obviously presents. According to the president’s own aides, they’re boasting to the New York Times that he’s declared that this was a, quote, “easy” decision, not anything that he struggled with, something that he made quite easily. And so, we find out that not only is he exercising this radical power, he’s not even having any struggles with conscience or constitutional questions or legal or intellectual quandaries about it. It’s something that—as his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, also bragged to the New York Times about, it shows how, quote, “comfortable” he is using force, even against American citizens. And that, I think, reflects really on the type of person that occupies the Oval Office.
AMY GOODMAN: You also write, Glenn Greenwald, in this piece—you recommend Aaron David Miller’s piece, the New York Times reporter who does a piece in Foreign Policy called “Barack O’Romney,” that the reason these candidates, Romney and Obama, are not particularly fighting over foreign policy, but domestic issues, is because of the broad Democratic-Republican consensus between the Republicans and the Democrats, even as they fight about what’s going on in Washington, people talk about no consensus at all. In fact, there’s a very serious consensus: unanimity in dealing with foreign policy, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, one of the things that progressives and Democratic partisans love to say is that Republicans will never give President Obama credit for anything. And this is a complete untruth; it’s a total falsehood. You can go back over the last three years and find instance after instance after instance where not just Republicans, but the furthest right neocons and national security state officials of the Bush administration have lavished President Obama with praise for his most defining and controversial policies, and, you know, I think represents exactly the kind of bipartisan consensus that he was talking about.
@Mike Appleton ” Terrorist organizations should be treated as criminal conspiracies and handled as police matters. ”
I would agree with you that the police and especially intelligence units have role to play in defeating terrorist organizations.
But how they should be treated depends on what it takes to defeat them.
Reasonable belief regarding strategies, tactics, choice of tools and weapons depends on understanding the fundamental nature of terrorist organizations.
These people are not in any essential way criminals. Even when they commit crimes there nature is not fundamentally criminal.
Terrorists are soldiers in the service of a cause. Whether we give them POW status is a very different question. There motivations are different from criminals. If they were criminal we might suppose that the prospect of long prison terms would be a deterrent. That does not seem to be the case. On the contrary, when a radical signs up for terrorist work, his most reasonable belief is that he will die. In that context the best possible outcome is that he will die instantly. It is more likely he will die in excruciating pain while he bleeds out.
The strategies and tactics or terrors are different from criminals. Even when terrorists commit crimes there motives are entirely different. For example there have been incidents where terrorists organizations robbed banks or kidnapped citizens. Criminals typically commit such crimes for personal enrichment. Terrorists do not. When they commit crimes to gather funds the purpose is to finance activities of the organization.
There is overlap in the weapons used by terrorists and criminals. But criminals rarely use weapons of the military or operate as military units (drug cartels might be an exception). From nuclear weapons to nerve gas to anthrax, the terrorists organizations we face today specifically target the most sophisticated military weapons for acquisition and use.
Criminals rarely have much support in the general population. Bonnie and Clyde might be an exception. Terrorist have huge support among some national populations. The fact is that terrorists organizations have the capability, much like nation states, to acquire and use resources, organize and deploy military forces, plan and implement military campaigns.
When we fail to understand that terrorist organizations are social movements with the capability to raise armies and apply military force we reduce the likelihood that we will defeat them.
Years ago a CIA analyst foolishly stated that terrorism was not really an important problem because worldwide only a few thousand people were killed each year. That kind of analysis would have completely misunderstood the threat of Stalin prior to 1917, Hitler prior to the ’30’s, or Pol Pot prior to the 70’s. The reasonable evaluation of the treat from terrorists organizations does not include the numbers they killed in the past. Those actions are over. Those action are not a threat. The evaluation of the threat from terrorist organizations must consider their ability to grow and become more powerful.
Terrorist organizations recruit from a population as large as any nation state. Terrorist organizations have an ideology as comprehensive and as motivating as any nation state. Terrorist organizations can and do field military organizations.
Police organizations have a role to play in suppressing terrorist organizations. Police organizations are probably not sufficient by themselves to curtail the activities of the terrorists organizations we face today.