Shades of the Third Reich

The shocking story of Israel's disappeared babies | Israel News | Al Jazeera

The first consequence is likely to be mounting pressure on the government to open the state's adoption files so that the true extent of the disappearances can be gauged and families reunited.

But Hanegbi's otherwise evasive comments will do little to end suspicions that officials are still actively trying to avoid confronting the most contentious questions: Why were the infants taken from their families? Did hospitals and welfare organisations traffic children in Israel's early years? And were state bodies complicit in the mass abductions?

When asked by Israeli TV programme Meet the Press whether government officials were involved, Hanegbi would say only: "We may never know." Read More

To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined “militant” to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone

Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were "militants" — even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed.

They simply cite always-unnamed "officials" claiming that the dead were "militants." It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true.

This practice continues even though key Obama officials have been caught lying, a term used advisedly, about how many civilians they’re killing. I’ve written and said many times before that in American media discourse, the definition of "militant" is any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates (that term was even used when Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen two weeks after a drone killed his father, even though nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent: "Another U.S. Drone Strike Kills Militants in Yemen").

This morning, the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with "three dozen of his current and former advisers." I’m writing separately about the numerous revelations contained in that article, but want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a "militant." The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths "did not significantly change" the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a "militant" to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage;

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. "Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs," said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the "single digits" — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it "guilt by association" that has led to "deceptive" estimates of civilian casualties.

"It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants," the official said. "They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are."

For the moment, leave the ethical issues to the side that arise from viewing "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants"; that’s nothing less than sociopathic, a term I use advisedly, but I discuss that in the separate, longer piece I’ve written. For now, consider what this means for American media outlets. Any of them which use the term "militants" to describe those killed by U.S. strikes are knowingly disseminating a false and misleading term of propaganda. By "militant," the Obama administration literally means nothing more than: any military-age male whom we kill, even when we know nothing else about them. They have no idea whether the person killed is really a militant: if they’re male and of a certain age they just call them one in order to whitewash their behavior and propagandize the citizenry (unless conclusive evidence somehow later emerges proving their innocence).

What kind of self-respecting media outlet would be party to this practice? Here’s the New York Times documenting that this is what the term "militant" means when used by government officials. Any media outlet that continues using it while knowing this is explicitly choosing to be an instrument for state propaganda — not that that’s anything new, but this makes this clearer than it’s ever been. More

 

 

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The Human Cost of Secret U.S. Drone Strikes in Yemen

 

For more than a decade now, the United States has been using armed drones to secretly kill suspected terrorists in Yemen. The public knows very little about these attacks. Neither the U.S. nor the Yemeni government has systematically disclosed who was killed and why, or whether civilians were among those killed.

Now, working with the Open Society Justice Initiative, researchers from the Yemeni nongovernmental organization Mwatana Organization for Human Rights have spent two years visiting the sites where some of these attacks took place. Their findings are detailed in a new report, Death by Drone: Civilian Harm Caused by U.S. Targeted Killings in Yemen, which gives the world a look at the reality of a counterterrorism strategy that the Obama administration has hailed as a model program.

The findings raise serious concerns over the lawfulness of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. It also provides credible evidence that U.S. strikes continued to kill civilians even after President Obama said in a May 2013 speech that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.” This raises serious questions about the extent to which the United States is complying with its own policy guidelines.

As Yemen sinks further into instability, the report seeks to ensure that the civilian victims of these strikes are not forgotten to new and future crises. And as the United States implements a new drone export policy purporting to be part of a broader effort to shape international standards on drone use, the report warns of the dangers associated with promoting the U.S. model of drone use.

The report, which documents civilian harm caused by nine U.S. airstrikes between May 2012 and April 2014, describes the experiences of civilians directly affected by U.S. drone strikes, individuals whose voices are all too easily forgotten because they are poor and without political influence, and because the drone strikes were conducted in secret, in remote locations far away from the United States.

The report is based on 96 interviews with injured survivors and eyewitnesses of the attacks, relatives of individuals killed or injured in these attacks, local community leaders, doctors and hospital staff who were involved in the treatment of victims, and Yemeni government officials. Where available, Yemeni government statements, photographs and videos of the aftermath of the drone strikes, and medical records corroborated these accounts. An independent munitions expert provided additional analysis.

But, as our report explains, this research was conducted in a context of pervasive U.S. and Yemeni government secrecy concerning the airstrikes. There were also tense security situations in many of the regions where the strikes took place, as well as the fear of reprisals for speaking openly about the strikes.

The testimonies in this report describe desperately poor communities left to fend for themselves amid the devastation caused by U.S. drone strikes. Mothers and fathers who lost their children in drone strikes speak of inconsolable loss. They speak of their children’s bodies charred beyond recognition. Wives speak of losing their breadwinners, and of young children asking where their fathers have gone. The victims of these strikes say that these strikes will not make the United States or Yemen safer, and will only strengthen support for al-Qaeda.

The report also describes the terrorizing effects of U.S. drones on local populations. In many of the incidents documented, local residents had to live with drones continually flying overhead prior to the strikes and have lived in constant fear of another attack since. Some fled their villages for months after the strike, and lost their source of livelihood in the process. Survivors of the attacks continue to have nightmares of being killed in the next strike. Men go to their farms in fear. Children are afraid to go to school.

The civilian victims of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen want justice. They want to know why they were targeted when they had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group. But none of the nine strikes documented in the report have been acknowledged by the U.S. government. Nor are the victims aware of investigations into civilian deaths and injuries caused by U.S. strikes. In most cases, civilians have not received adequate compensation.

In February 2013, then–White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan testified at his Senate confirmation hearing to become CIA director that the United States “need[s] to acknowledge … publicly” mistaken killings “in the interest of transparency.” More recently, the General Counsel for the Department of Defense publicly declared: “Transparency … strengthens our democracy and promotes accountability.”

It is time for the U.S. government to make good on these assurances. It should publicly disclose the May 2013 Presidential Policy Guidance relating to targeted killings as well as the numbers and identities of civilians killed or injured by U.S. airstrikes. It should also conduct effective investigations into unlawful killings and provide prompt and meaningful reparations for civilian harm caused by U.S. strikes. More

 

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UN backs resolution presented by Pakistan on drones

GENEVA: The United Nations called on all states on Friday to ensure that the use of armed drones complies with international law, backing a proposal from Pakistan seen as taking aim at the United States.

A resolution presented by Pakistan on behalf of co-sponsors including Yemen and Switzerland did not single out any state. The United States is the biggest drone user in conflicts including those in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia.

“The purpose of this resolution is not to shame or name anyone, as we are against this approach,” Pakistan's ambassador Zamir Akram told the UN Human Rights Council.

“It is about supporting a principle.”

The United States prizes drones for their accuracy against al Qaeda and Taliban militants. Pakistan says they kill civilians and infringe its sovereignty.

“The United States is committed to ensuring that our actions, including those involving remotely piloted aircraft, are undertaken in accordance with all applicable domestic and international laws and with the greatest possible transparency, consistent with our national security needs,” Paula Schriefer, US deputy assistant secretary of state, told the talks.

The resolution was adopted by a vote of 27 states in favour to six against, with 14 abstentions at the 47-member Geneva forum. The United States, Britain and France voted against.

The Council “urges all states to ensure that any measures employed to counter terrorism, including the use of remotely piloted aircraft or armed drones, comply with their obligations under international law ... in particular the principles of precaution, distinction and proportionality.”

The text voiced concern at civilian casualties resulting from the use of remotely-piloted aircraft or armed drones, as highlighted by the UN special investigator on counter-terrorism Ben Emmerson in a recent report.

It called on UN human rights boss Navi Pillay to organise expert discussions on armed drones and report back in September.

The United States, Britain and France said it was not appropriate for the forum to put weapons systems on its agenda.

The Obama administration preferred to discuss drones under an initiative of Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which it hoped would provide a “non-politicised forum” where military experts can discuss law of war issues, Schriefer said.

Akram, speaking before the vote, said opposition “can only lead to the conclusion that these states are guilty of violating applicable international law and demonstrate that they are afraid of being exposed in the expert panel.”

A separate UN human rights watchdog called on the Obama administration on Thursday to limit its use of drones and to curb US surveillance activities.

 

© 2014

Confessions of a Drone Warrior

From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan.

The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only light inside came from the glow of monitors. The air smelled spectrally of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. On his console, the image showed the midwinter landscape of eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar Province—a palette of browns and grays, fields cut to stubble, dark forests climbing the rocky foothills of the Hindu Kush. He zoomed the camera in on the suspected insurgents, each dressed in traditional shalwar kameez, long shirts and baggy pants. He knew nothing else about them: not their names, not their thoughts, not the thousand mundane and profound details of their lives.

He was told that they were carrying rifles on their shoulders, but for all he knew, they were shepherd’s staffs. Still, the directive from somewhere above, a mysterious chain of command that led straight to his headset, was clear: confirmed weapons. He switched from the visible spectrum—the muted grays and browns of “day-TV”—to the sharp contrast of infrared, and the insurgents’ heat signatures stood out ghostly white against the cool black earth. A safety observer loomed behind him to make sure the “weapon release” was by the book. A long verbal checklist, his targeting laser locked on the two men walking in front. A countdown—three…two…one…—then the flat delivery of the phrase “missile off the rail.” Seventy-five hundred miles away, a Hellfire flared to life, detached from its mount, and reached supersonic speed in seconds.

It was quiet in the dark, cold box in the desert, except for the low hum of machines.

He kept the targeting laser trained on the two lead men and stared so intently that each individual pixel stood out, a glowing pointillist dot abstracted from the image it was meant to form. Time became almost ductile, the seconds stretched and slowed in a strange electronic limbo. As he watched the men walk, the one who had fallen behind seemed to hear something and broke into a run to catch up with the other two. Then, bright and silent as a camera flash, the screen lit up with white flame.

Airman First Class Brandon Bryant stared at the scene, unblinking in the white-hot clarity of infrared. He recalls it even now, years later, burned into his memory like a photo negative: “The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s holding it, and he’s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it’s hitting the ground, and it’s hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.”

That was Brandon Bryant’s first shot. It was early 2007, a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, and Bryant was a remotely-piloted-aircraft sensor operator—a “sensor” for short—part of a U.S. Air Force squadron that flew Predator drones in the skies above Iraq and Afghanistan. Beginning in 2006, he worked in the windowless metal box of a Ground Control Station (GCS) at Nellis Air Force Base, a vast sprawl of tarmac and maintenance hangars at the edge of Las Vegas.

The airmen kept the control station dark so they could focus on controlling their MQ-1B Predators circling two miles above the Afghan countryside. Bryant sat in a padded cockpit chair. He had a wrestler’s compact build, a smooth-shaved head, and a piercing ice blue gaze frequently offset by a dimpled grin. As a sensor, his job was to work in tandem with the drone’s pilot, who sat in the chair next to him. While the pilot controlled the drone’s flight maneuvers, Bryant acted as the Predator’s eyes, focusing its array of cameras and aiming its targeting laser. When a Hellfire was launched, it was a joint operation: the pilot pulled a trigger, and Bryant was responsible for the missile’s “terminal guidance,” directing the high-explosive warhead by laser to its desired objective. Both men wore regulation green flight suits, an unironic Air Force nod to the continuity of military decorum in the age of drone warfare.

Since its inception, the drone program has been largely hidden, its operational details gathered piecemeal from heavily redacted classified reports or stage-managed media tours by military public-affairs flacks. Bryant is one of very few people with firsthand experience as an operator who has been willing to talk openly, to describe his experience from the inside. While Bryant considers leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden heroes willing to sacrifice themselves for their principles, he’s cautious about discussing some of the details to which his top-secret clearance gave him access. Still, he is a curtain drawn back on the program that has killed thousands on our behalf.

Despite President Obama’s avowal earlier this year that he will curtail their use, drone strikes have continued apace in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. With enormous potential growth and expenditures, drones will be a center of our policy for the foreseeable future. (By 2025, drones will be an $82 billion business, employing an additional 100,000 workers.) Most Americans—61 percent in the latest Pew survey—support the idea of military drones, a projection of American power that won’t risk American lives. More

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Chatham House Conference - Stop Killer Robots

 

© 2014

New Details of Attack on Yemeni Wedding Prompt More Demands Obama Explain Drone Policy

A new report on the U.S. drone missile strike that killed 12 members of a Yemeni wedding convoy has renewed calls for the Obama administration to make public its own investigations into the incident — and explain how such strikes are consistent with international laws of war.

The detailed, 28-page report from Human Rights Watch describes conflicting accounts of the December 12 attack, but nevertheless concludes that some, if not all, of the victims may have been civilians.

The laws of war prohibit attacks on civilians that are not discriminate or attacks that cause civilian loss disproportionate to the expected military advantage.

The report also calls on the U.S. government to explain how the attack could possibly have complied with the new policies President Obama announced in May 2013, and repeated less than three months before the wedding strike, that he had “limited the use of drones so they target only those who pose a continuing, imminent threat to the United States where capture is not feasible, and there is a near certainty of no civilian casualties.”

Obama administration officials have insisted since the strike that only members of al Qaeda were killed. Defense Department spokesman Bill Speaks reiterated toThe Intercept on Wednesday “that the Yemeni Government has stated that the targets of this operation were dangerous senior al Qaeda militants,” but he declined to provide any details or evidence to support that conclusion. National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden also declined.

The Associated Press reported Thursday morning that, according to three anonymous U.S. officials, two government investigations concluded that only members of al Qaeda were hit in the strike:

Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of Joint Special Operations Command, ordered an independent investigation by an Air Force general and the White House requested another by the National Counterterrorism Center. Both concluded no civilians were killed. Votel’s staff also showed lawmakers video of the operation. Two U.S. officials who watched the video and were briefed on the investigations said it showed three trucks in the convoy were hit, all carrying armed men.

But the officials provided no details, no evidence — and were not quoted by name. The AP explained:

The officials said the Pentagon can’t release details because both the U.S. military and the CIA fly drones over Yemen. By statute, the military strikes can be acknowledged, but the CIA operations cannot. The officials said that if they explain one strike but not another, they are revealing by default which ones are being carried out by the CIA.

But at its core, the Human Rights Watch report makes the case that a swirling mix of competing accounts surrounding the strike demands a transparent investigation and publicly available findings. In an interview with The Intercept Wednesday, Letta Tayler, the author of the report, said the contradictory claims her team uncovered investigating the strike were “mind boggling.”

“It would be comical if we were not talking about human beings who were killed and yet, that is what we’re talking about,” Tayler said. “And that’s why the silence is unconscionable.”

“The contradictory accounts that we documented cry out for an official explanation,” she added. “The families of those killed deserve to know what happened and why the U.S. turned this wedding procession into a funeral.”

Tayler said her organization has “serious questions about how intelligence is gathered in Yemen and how it is being used.” But, she noted: ”We do not know if faulty intelligence led to this strike or not, because we do not know enough about the strike itself.”

A Feb. 10 article in The Intercept described the National Security Agency’s role in locating targets for lethal drone strikes, raising concerns that the U.S. has been overly relying on the activity of mobile phones that targets are believed to be using, rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground. A former Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) drone operator and NSA analyst told The Intercept that during his time in Yemen, the U.S. gathered “almost zero” human intelligence gathered before strikes. “Every one of their strikes relies on signals and imagery for confirmation,” he said.

The level of detail in the Human Rights Watch report impressed close observers of the U.S. drone program. Micah Zenko, Douglas Dillon Fellow at Council on Foreign Relations and a leading expert on the U.S. targeted killings, told The Intercept, “It’s just a very careful and cautious study.” He said the report “raises incredibly troubling evidence” that “the United States might have blown it…might have killed civilians unintentionally.”

“The report is well documented and it is carefully measured in saying what the researchers know and don’t know,” Ryan Goodman, law professor at New York University and co-editor-in-chief of the national security blog, JustSecurity.org, said in an email to The Intercept. “Of course mistakes happen in wartime, but a key question for the laws of war is whether the mistake resulted from a failure to take the proper precautions,” Goodman added. “The report includes evidence that clearly suggests violations of the laws of war may have occurred.”

The attack took place late in the afternoon on December 12, 2013. According to the report, four Hellfire missiles slammed into a convoy of 11 cars stopped by a flat tire. The cars, Human Rights Watch confirmed, were carrying 50 to 60 wedding goers. They had been traveling from the bride’s home to the groom’s village.

Abdullah Muhammad al-Tisi, a local sheikh, was driving one of the vehicles. “Everyone was happy; everyone was celebrating the wedding,” he told Human Rights Watch. “Then the strike turned happiness to grief.”

Al-Tisi said he watched as four men piled out of 2005 Toyota Hilux pickup truck ahead of him and ran. Moments later a missile tore into the vehicle. Soon after, three more missiles rained down, throwing shards of hot metal through the air.

“Blood was everywhere, the bodies of the people who were killed and injured were scattered everywhere,” al-Tisi, a father of three, recalled. “I saw the missile hit the car that was just behind the car driven by my son. I went there to check on my son. I found him tossed to the side. I turned him over and he was dead. He was struck in his face, neck, and chest.”

In addition to the 12 men who died, 15 others were wounded. Shrapnel cut the bride’s face and tore her clothing. Roughly half the wedding party was killed or wounded. The youngest man to die was 20, the oldest 65.

Anonymous U.S. officials told reporters the military’s elite JSOC operatives carried out the strike — not the CIA.

The day after the attack, Yemen’s official news news agency cited an unnamed “official source” who claimed that a car belonging to an al Qaeda “leader” that was carrying “many terrorist members and leaders who were involved in plotting attacks against armed forces, police, and vital public facilities” had been targeted. There was no mention of civilian casualties until the following day, when a Yemeni general apologized for the attack at a local community meeting. The general said the attack was a “mistake,” and provincial officials paid the families a total of $159,000 in reparations and gave them 101 Kalashnikov assault rifles, a tribal gesture of apology.

Human Rights Watch found three government sources who disputed the official news agency account the strike. Those sources said five civilians were killed in the attack. None of the Yemeni sources said who among the dead was al Qaeda and who was a civilian wedding celebrant. One of the sources did say, however, that the dead included, “smugglers and arms dealers. They were guys for hire — shady.”

Unnamed U.S. officials later told the AP that the target was Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani, a member of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), who they said was one of Yemen’s most wanted terrorists and a key figure in the plot that resulted in the closure of 22 U.S. diplomatic posts the preceding summer. The Americans claimed he was wounded in the strike but escaped.

Human Rights Watch found two Yemeni government sources who claimed the first vehicle struck by the American missile was al-Badani’s and that he did indeed escape. Two other Yemeni sources, however, said he was residing in a city more than 100 miles from the scene of the strike.

Witnesses and relatives told Human Rights Watch they did not know al-Badani and that he was most certainly not at the wedding. Other sources who spoke to the human rights organization claimed an entirely different AQAP member – Nasr al-Hotami – was in the truck that was fired upon. Again, relatives denied the claim. Some Yemeni officials suggested AQAP “had joined the procession, possibly as ‘camouflage.’” More

 

“Bride and Boom!”

We’re Number One... In Obliterating Wedding Parties By Tom Engelhardt

The headline -- “Bride and Boom!” -- was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a U.S. drone via one of those “surgical” strikes of which Washington is so proud. As one report put it, “Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.”

It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners -- “terror” or “al-Qaeda suspects” -- in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them. Try to imagine the equivalent for the Newtown massacre the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers. Since even the New York Post wouldn’t do such a thing, let’s posit that the Yemen Post did, that playing off the phrase “head of the class,” their headline was: “Dead of the Class!” (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege. The media would descend. The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House. You’d hear about the callousness of foreigners for days.

And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that.

But a bunch of Arabs in a country few in the U.S. had ever heard of before we started sending in the drones? No such luck, so if you’re a Murdoch tabloid, it’s open season, no consequences guaranteed. As it happens, “Bride and Boom!” isn’t even an original. It turns out to be a stock Post headline. Google it and you’ll find that, since 9/11, the paper has used it at least twice before last week, and never for the good guys: once in 2005, for “the first bomb-making husband and wife,” two Palestinian newlyweds arrested by the Israelis; and once in 2007, for a story about a “bride,” decked out in a “princess-style wedding gown,” with her “groom.” Their car was stopped at a checkpoint in Iraq by our Iraqis, and both of them turned out to be male “terrorists” in a “nutty nuptial party.” Ba-boom!

As it happened, the article by Andy Soltis accompanying the Post headline last week began quite inaccurately. “A U.S. drone strike targeting al-Qaeda militants in Yemen,” went the first line, “took out an unlikely target on Thursday -- a wedding party heading to the festivities.”

Soltis can, however, be forgiven his ignorance. In this country, no one bothers to count up wedding parties wiped out by U.S. air power. If they did, Soltis would have known that the accurate line, given the history of U.S. war-making since December 2001 when the first party of Afghan wedding revelers was wiped out (only two women surviving), would have been: “A U.S. drone... took out a likely target.”

After all, by the count of TomDispatch, this is at least the eighth wedding party reported wiped out, totally or in part, since the Afghan War began and it extends the extermination of wedding celebrants from the air to a third country -- six destroyed in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, and now the first in Yemen. And in all those years, reporters covering these “incidents” never seem to notice that similar events had occurred previously. Sometimes whole wedding parties were slaughtered, sometimes just the bride or groom’s parties were hit. Estimated total dead from the eight incidents: almost 300 Afghans, Iraqis, and Yemenis. And keep in mind that, in these years, weddings haven’t been the only rites hit. U.S. air power has struck gatherings ranging from funerals to a baby-naming ceremony. More

 

Child Casualties As A Result Of U.S. Drone Strikes

U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen have caused the death of 178 children. Accompanying report: http://www.scribd.com/doc/115147268/Youth-Disrupted-Effects-of-U-S-Drone-Strikes-on-Children-in-Targeted-Areas

 

Is a 'surgical strike' in Afghanistan any more palatable than a surgical hacking in Woolwich?

A man, a soldier, is brutally murdered on a Woolwich street. Politicians rush to emergency meetings. Reporters survey the scene, run 'terror warning' front pages and ask how such an atrocity 'could ever happen here'.

Yet, beyond the standard political condemnation and media 'examination', what more humanitarianthoughts and questions might be invoked over this horrific death?

The first compassionate thought should always be with the immediate victim, the person or persons killed, the life taken. That means all persons killed, all life taken, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or on 'our' streets.

The next thought, equally human, but of more compassionate purpose, should be to ask ourselves why these kind of violent attacks are happening.

Is it enough, or even useful, just to feel appalled by such violence? Is it remotely helpful just to condemn? Or is it more productive and humanitarian to ask what compels or encourages it?

An ITN report on the killing noted: "A British soldier killed not in war, but at home" - war, presumably for such journalists, being something that can be visited upon others, in their countries, but not here in 'ours'.

Yet, are we really to believe that lands can be illegally invaded, their resources stolen, their people slaughtered, and that others, 'homegrown' or otherwise, will not react, often violently, to those appalling situations?

Ex-soldier turned anti-war campaigner Joe Glenton is in no doubt:

"So at the very outset, and before the rising tide of prejudice and pseudo-patriotism fully encloses us, let us be clear: while nothing can justify the savage killing in Woolwich yesterday of a man since confirmed to have been a serving British soldier, it should not be hard to explain why the murder happened. [...] It should by now be self-evident that by attacking Muslims overseas, you will occasionally spawn twisted and, as we saw yesterday, even murderous hatred at home. We need to recognise that, given the continued role our government has chosen to play in the US imperial project in the Middle East, we are lucky that these attacks are so few and far between."

As we advance that line of enquiry, further humanitarian questions occur: why was this killing announced, particularly, as a "terrorist" attack? What makes an attack on a soldier or a civilian here different from a soldier attacking and killing either a combatant or a civilian in Afghanistan?

As Glenn Greenwald asks:

How can one create a definition of "terrorism" that includes Wednesday's London attack on this British soldier without including many acts of violence undertaken by the US, the UK and its allies and partners? Can that be done? [...]The reason it's so crucial to ask this question is that there are few terms - if there are any - that pack the political, cultural and emotional punch that "terrorism" provides. When it comes to the actions of western governments, it is a conversation-stopper, justifying virtually anything those governments want to do. It's a term that is used to start wars, engage in sustained military action, send people to prison for decades or life, to target suspects for due-process-free execution, shield government actions behind a wall of secrecy, and instantly shape public perceptions around the world.

In essence, is state killing not terrorism? Are people not terrorised, terrified, by helicopter gunships? Is the killing of a person in this way any more or less gruesome than the obliteration of an Afghan child with an M16 missile? Is a 'surgical strike' any more palatable than a surgical hacking? Would the bloody outcomes of Nato strikes ever appear so graphically on front pages the way they have for the Woolwich killing?

Having dutifully repeated what official sources had briefed as a 'terrorist' attack, the BBC's Nick Robinson later tweeted: "To those offended by my describing the attacker as of "Muslim appearance" - I was directly quoting a Whitehall source quoting the police."

Robinson later apologised for the remark. Yet, alongside the insistence on a 'terrorist' crime, here, unwittingly revealed, was a consensually-loaded interpretation from police, government and the BBC.

What, does a Muslim supposedly 'look like'? Is it conceivable that any of these institutions would ever speak of an alleged attacker as being of 'Christian appearance' or 'Jewish appearance'?

Besides the 'incriminating look', various suggestions have been made about the questionable sanity of those who carried out this attack. Yet, why is this question confined to such assailants?

As Arundhati Roy notes, while Obama goes about his family life, he is ordering drone strikes that terminate other families' very existence.

Noting the public appearance of leaders like Blair and Obama, Roy describes their acts of war and violence as "psychopathic", observations that invite us to think about what separates 'respectable' appearance from true and disturbing intent.

Watching the fawning media treatment still enjoyed by Blair, the issue is not just whether his actions may be psychopathic. It's that the very suggestion of such a question is not even up for reasonable discussion, even in the liberal media.

While the precise psychiatry of people like Obama and Blair may be open to conjecture, what's certainly evident is their willingness to execute decisions that would in any other set of circumstances, like Woolwich, be deemed criminally psychotic in their ruthless disregard for other human beings.

The killers at Woolwich had visible blood on their hands. But Blair, Obama, Cameron and others have much, much more of it on theirs, even if it's unseen.

And so, a deeper question arises: watching Obama with his wife and kids, seeing him at the ball game, visiting victims of gun crime or natural disasters, how can we find it in ourselves to castigate such 'just like us' people?

Why do we so readily condemn one act of terrible killing, but not those who perpetrate horrific multiple others? Is it simply because the latter don't actually pull the trigger, fire the missile or release the bomb?

Besides the actual absence of balanced news and information exposing our governments' crimes, the psychology of mass propaganda plays upon a very basic emotionalism, encouraging a deep human reluctance to see those 'close' to us as murderous or clinically suspect.

Even now, ten years on from the decision that led to mass slaughter in Iraq, how readily might we really imagine, or wish to see, Blair jailed for high war crimes? Why is that possibility still beyond much of the public's comprehension? And why, with all their mass criminality, are leaders like Cameron still permitted to claim such 'moral authority', from calling for 'more benign intervention' in Syria to denouncing the Woolwich killers?

And remember too that those Western leaders of 'benign appearance' are the very same ones ready to support and fund those of 'Muslim appearance' and jihadi intent in Syria, just as they once expediently backed the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan.

The public may readily rationalise all this by saying 'well, politicians have a job to do, often an unenviable one'. But the basic question remains: why are those like the Woolwich killers denounced as evil and insane, terrorist and extremist, fanatical and deranged, while powerful mass killers are treated with blanket deference and respect?

As that most salient book title asks: Why Are We the Good Guys?

It's of considerable significance why power and a service media will always pose the easiest questions, while evading the most difficult.

The easiest question to answer here is why those men at Woolwich and others have committed such crimes. However mistaken in their response, and however personally responsible, it's because they see violence as way of expressing political grievances and just retribution against oppressor forces.

The harder and more useful question to pose, yet the one consistently avoided, is why those like Obama and Cameron continue to kill so criminally and mercilessly around the globe.

One may assume that such figures see killing as part of their 'office duty', caught up as they are in a world of profit-driven economies, neoliberal demands and insatiable militarism. That, by any decent moral compass, all seems pathological. Yet none of their violence or the forces behind all that are up for serious political or media discussion.

 

If the Government Does It, It's Legal

Indefinite detention of the innocent and guilty alike, without any hope of charges, trial, or release: this is now the American way. Most Americans, however, may not care to take that in, not even when the indefinitely detained go on a hunger strike.

That act has certainly gotten Washington’s and the media’s collective attention. After all, could there be anything more extreme than striking against your own body to make a point? Suicide by strike? It’s the ultimate statement of protest and despair. Certainly, the strikers have succeeded in pushing Guantanamo out of the netherworld of non-news and onto front pages, into presidential news conferences, and to the top of the TV newscasts. That, in a word, is extraordinary. But what exactly do those prisoners, many now being force-fed, want to highlight? Here’s one thing: despite the promise he made on entering the Oval office, President Obama has obviously not made much of an effort to close the prison, which, as he said recently, “hurts us, in terms of our international standing... [and] is a recruitment tool for extremists.”

If Congress has been thoroughly recalcitrant when it comes to closing Guantanamo, the president’s idea of what shutting down that prison meant proved curious indeed. His plan involved transferring many of the prisoners from Cuba, that crown jewel of the offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice that the Bush administration set up in January 2002, to a super-max-style prison in Illinois (“Gitmo North”). That would mean, of course, transferring indefinite detention from the offshore world of extraordinary rendition, black sites, and torture directly into the heart of the American justice system. Obama himself has indicated that at least 50 of the prisoners can, in his view, never be released or tried (in part because confessions were tortured out of some of them). They would be kept in what he, in the past, politely termed “prolonged detention.”

Here’s a second thing the strikers undoubtedly wanted to highlight and it's even harder to take in: Guantanamo now holds 86 prisoners (out of the 166 caged there) who have been carefully vetted by the U.S. military, the FBI, the CIA, and so on, and found to have done nothing for which they could be charged or should be imprisoned. All 86 have been cleared for release -- years late, often after brutal interrogation experiences sometimes involving torture. The problem: there is nowhere to release them to, especially since the majority of them are Yemenis and President Obama has imposed a moratorium on transferring any prisoner to Yemen.

Then there are the prisoners who may indeed have done something criminal in regard to the U.S., but had confessions tortured out of them which won't hold up in court. They are among the ones who will never be brought to trial, but never cleared for release either. In other words, indefinite detention, something anathema to the American justice system, will for the conceivable future be us. The fact that relatively few Americans seem fazed by this should be startling. No charges, no trials, but never getting out of prison: that would once have been associated with the practices of a totalitarian state.

We know one thing: no one, not George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, or other top officials involved in setting up such a global system of injustice, sweeping up the innocent with the guilty, and subjecting them to horrors without end (including now force-feeding) will ever be brought to justice in an American court, nor will anyone involved in the system of rendition, torture, or abuse. In the Obama years, while indefinite detention remained a grim American reality, the government, as TomDispatch regular and former State Department officer Peter Van Buren himself experienced, honed other methods for punishing those it was unhappy with, especially whistleblowers of all sorts.

One of those methods might be called “indefinite suspension.” Instead of not being charged, you are charged repeatedly and dragged endlessly -- your life in a state of suspension -- through various bureaucratic judicial processes, the actual courts, and endless appeals thereof, so that even if sooner or later you come out the other side exonerated, you will still have been punished for your “crimes.” Let Peter Van Buren explain this mockery of "justice."

Homeland Insecurity: Seven Years, Untold Dollars to Silence One Man By Peter Van Buren

Read More

 

The Hijacking of Human Rights By Chris Hedges

April 08, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire.

Nossel’s appointment led me to resign from PEN as well as withdraw from speaking at the PEN World Voices Festival in May. But Nossel is only symptomatic of the widespread hijacking of human rights organizations to demonize those—especially Muslims—branded by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial assassinations.

Nossel, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under Hillary Clinton in a State Department that was little more than a subsidiary of the Pentagon, is part of the new wave of “humanitarian interventionists,” such as Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff and Susan Rice, who naively see in the U.S. military a vehicle to create a better world. They know little of the reality of war or the actual inner workings of empire. They harbor a childish belief in the innate goodness and ultimate beneficence of American power. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the horrendous suffering and violent terror inflicted in the name of their utopian goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, barely register on their moral calculus. This makes them at once oblivious and dangerous. “Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Graham Greene wrote in his novel “The Quiet American,” and those who destroy to build are “impregnably armored by … good intentions and … ignorance.”

There are no good wars. There are no just wars. As Erasmus wrote, “there is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome” than war. “Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?” Erasmus asked. But war, he knew, was very useful to the power elite. War permitted the powerful, in the name of national security and by fostering a culture of fear, to effortlessly strip the citizen of his or her rights. A declaration of war ensures that “all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few,” Erasmus wrote.

Nossel, they noted, “sees no conflict between her current role and having been a member of the executive staff whilst her President and Secretary of State bosses were carrying out war crimes such as drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and shielding torturers and their enablers in the Bush administration from prosecution.”

There are cases, and Bosnia in the 1990s was one, when force should be employed to halt an active campaign of genocide. This is the lesson of the Holocaust: When you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. For this reason, we are culpable in the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. But the “humanitarian interventionists” have twisted this moral imperative to intercede against genocide to justify the calls for pre-emptive war and imperial expansion. Saddam Hussein did carry out campaigns of genocide against the Kurds and the Shiites, but the dirty fact is that while these campaigns were under way we provided support to Baghdad or looked the other way. It was only when Washington wanted war, and the bodies of tens of thousands of Kurds and Shiites had long decomposed in mass graves, that we suddenly began to speak in the exalted language of human rights.

These “humanitarian interventionists” studiously ignore our own acts of genocide, first unleashed against Native Americans and then exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. They do not acknowledge, even in light of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our own capacity for evil. They do not discuss in their books and articles the genocides we backed in Guatemala and East Timor or the crime of pre-emptive war. They minimize the horror and suffering we have delivered to Iraqis and Afghans and exaggerate or fabricate the benefits. The long string of atrocities carried out in our name mocks the idea of the United States as a force for good with a right to impose its values on others. The ugly truth shatters their deification of U.S. power.

Nossel, in the contentious year she headed Amnesty International USA before leaving in January, oversaw a public campaign by the organization to support NATO’s war in Afghanistan. She was running Amnesty International USA when the organization posted billboards at bus stops that read, “Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan—NATO: Keep the Progress Going.” Madeleine Albright, along with senior State Department officials and politicians, were invited to speak at Amnesty International’s women’s forum during Nossel’s tenure. Nossel has urged Democrats to stay the course in Iraq, warning that a failure in Iraq could unleash “a kind of post-Vietnam, post-Mogadishu hangover” that would lamentably “herald an era of deep reservations among the U.S. public regarding the use of force.” She worked as a State Department official to discredit the Goldstone Report, which charged Israel with war crimes against the Palestinians. As a representative on the U.N. Human Rights Council she said that “the top of our list is our defense of Israel, and Israel’s right to fair treatment at the Human Rights Council.” Not a word about the Palestinians. She has advocated for expanded armed intervention in countries such as Syria and Libya. She has called for a military strike against Iran if it does not halt its nuclear enrichment program. In an article in The Washington Quarterly titled “Battle Hymn of the Democrats,” she wrote: “Democrats must be seen to be every bit as tough-minded as their opponents. Democratic reinvention as a ‘peace party’ is a political dead end.” “In a milieu of war or near-war, the public will look for leadership that is bold and strident—more forceful, resolute, and pugnacious than would otherwise be tolerated,” she went on. In a 2004 Foreign Affairs article, “Smart Power: Reclaiming Liberal Internationalism,” she wrote: “We need to deploy our power in ways that make us stronger, not weaker,” not a stunning thought but one that should be an anathema to human rights campaigners. She added, “U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting others on behalf of U.S. goals,” which, of course, is what she promptly did at Amnesty International. Her “smart power” theory calls on the U.S. to exert its will around the globe by employing a variety of means and tactics, using the United Nations and human rights groups, for example, to promote the nation’s agenda as well as the more naked and raw coercion of military force. This is not a new or original idea, but when held up to George W. Bush’s idiocy I guess it looked thoughtful. The plight of our own dissidents—including Bradley Manning—is of no concern to Nossel and apparently of no concern now to PEN.

Coleen Rowley and Ann Wright first brought Nossel’s past and hawkish ideology to light when she became the executive director of Amnesty International USA a year ago. Rowley and Wright have written correctly that “humanitarian interventionists,” in or out of government, see no distinction between human rights work and the furtherance of U.S. imperial power. Nossel, they noted, “sees no conflict between her current role and having been a member of the executive staff whilst her President and Secretary of State bosses were carrying out war crimes such as drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and shielding torturers and their enablers in the Bush administration from prosecution.” (For more on this see Rowley’s article “Selling War as ‘Smart Power.’ ”) More