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Posts by Jeremy Scahill
Hillary Clinton Gives "Shameless Pitch" for Crooked Corporation in Russia
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on October 19, 2009 at 9:50 AM.
On a recent visit to Moscow, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was there to deliver a "shameless pitch" to the start-up Russian airline Rosavia to sign a major contract with Boeing to purchase a new fleet of aircraft from the U.S. aerospace giant. "This has been a consistent commitment on the part of the United States Government here in Moscow to promote this, because it really does illustrate very powerfully what we can do together," Clinton said during an October 13 visit to Boeing Design Center Moscow. She said the Export-Import Bank of the United States "would welcome an application for financing from Rosavia to support its purchase of Boeing Aircraft, and I hope that on a future visit I'll see a lot of new Rosavia-Boeing planes when I land in Moscow."
Boeing is the leading aerospace company in the world and a major U.S. defense contractor. Overall, it is the third largest U.S. government contractor with some $24 billion in annual federal contracts. The company does more than $60 billion in annual sales.
Boeing is also a major recidivist corporate crook.
Since 1995, Boeing has paid $1.5 billion in fines to settle more than 30 instances of misconduct, according to the non-partisan Project on Government Oversight. According to POGO, these include multiple violations of the Arms Export Control Act, including selling defense technology to Russia and China showing "blatant disregard" for State Department directives. According to POGO, Boeing settled cases with the U.S. government for:
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Cindy McCain Bankrolled Conference That Called for Ban on Mercenaries
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on October 16, 2009 at 8:30 PM.
A little-publicized U.S. Naval Academy conference named after Senator John McCain and bankrolled by his wealthy wife, Cindy, issued a call earlier this year for the U.S. government to ban the use of armed private security contractors like Blackwater in U.S. war zones, stating bluntly, "contractors should not be deployed as security guards, sentries, or even prison guards within combat areas."
"[T]he use of deadly force must be entrusted only to those whose training, character and accountability are most worthy of the nation's trust: the military," reads the executive summary of the U.S. Naval Academy’s 9th Annual McCain Conference on Ethics and Military Leadership, which was held in April at the Annapolis Naval Station. "The military profession carefully cultivates an ethic of 'selfless service,' and develops the virtues that can best withstand combat pressures and thus achieve the nation's objectives in an honorable way. By contrast, most corporate ethical standards and available regulatory schemes are ill-suited for this environment."
In 2001, Cindy McCain, who may be worth as much as $100 million, first endowed the McCain conference "in honor of her husband" with a $210,000 gift that was specifically intended to fund conferences that would "bring together key military officers and civilian academics responsible for ethics education and character developments."
According to the Fall 2009 newsletter, "Taking Stock," published by the U.S. Naval Academy's Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership -- the host of the McCain Conference -- among the speakers at the 2009 event was none other than Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater. Prince’s company is the most infamous of those engaged in the type of armed activity explicitly condemned by the conference's leadership.
The executive summary released by the McCain conference was recently highlighted in a report completed on September 29 by the Congressional Research Service on the use of private contractors. That report said that the U.S. is "relying heavily" on armed contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and suggests their use could continue to rise. The report also states that misconduct and the killing of civilians by armed security contractors "may have undermined U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Despite the fact that the McCain conference, which publicly advocated against the use of armed contractors in combat areas bears Sen. McCain's name and was bankrolled by his wife, when it has come to making this a major issue on Capitol Hill, the Arizona Senator has been largely silent. In 2007, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Jan Schakowsky introduced the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which sought to do precisely what the McCain conference called for two years later: to ban the use of mercenaries in U.S. war zones. McCain did not endorse or co-sponsor that legislation, which would certainly have benefited from his support (neither did then-Senator Barack Obama). Responding to a reporter's question on the campaign trail in July 2008 about whether he believed that U.S. troops and not private guards should protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq, McCain said, "I'd like it, but we don't have enough. Yes, and I'd love to see pigs fly, but it ain’t gonna happen.”
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Greenwald Film on Afghanistan Destroys the Logic of the War, Leading the New York Times to Whine
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on October 5, 2009 at 3:00 PM.
Perhaps more than any other major corporate news outlet, The New York Times played a central role in promoting the Bush administration's fraudulent case for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The "reporting" of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon basically served as a front-page fiction laundering factory for Dick Cheney’s fantasy of a “mushroom cloud” threat from Saddam Hussein looming on the immediate horizon, topped off with a celebratory slice of yellowcake. More recently, the paper’s propagandists, William Broad and David Sanger, have aimed their sights on reporting dubious claims about Iran’s nuclear program.
Readers of the Times, therefore, should take with a huge grain of weaponized salt the paper’s “review” of Robert Greenwald’s new documentary, Rethink Afghanistan. With no sense of the painful irony of writing such jibberish in the Times, reviewer Andy Webster declares that the film could "use balance, something in short supply here:"
At an almost breathless pace that leaves little room for reflection, Mr. Greenwald presents a flurry of sights, voices and figures, many of them compelling but all reflecting his point of view. A historical summary is fleeting. What appears, again and again, are terrifying images of children: dead, hideously maimed or, in one instance, almost put up for sale by a frantic civilian in a refugee camp. Military engagements, it seems, are messy and claim innocent lives.
If it takes Greenwald's "point of view" to see the human costs of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in the form of deformed, maimed and dead civilians, then his film should be required viewing for anyone purporting to support the war.
Anyone who has actually seen the film knows that a string of former top intelligence officials, perhaps most significant among them the former head of the CIA's Counter-terrorism Center, Robert Grenier, are heard meticulously deconstructing the dominant justifications for the continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. What does Grenier know? Oh, he was just the CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he was one of the Agency’s top officials planning the U.S. invasion. Grenier, along with former CIA operative Robert Baer and other former intelligence officials, rebut in detail the claim that the war in Afghanistan is about fighting al Qaeda or making America safer, which Baer says bluntly in the film is “just complete bullshit.” The film also features Graham Fuller, the former CIA station chief in Kabul. (Click here to watch this part of the film)
I guess the Times would have been satisfied if the film did not also include extensive analysis from Anand Gopal, the Afghanistan correspondent of that famed leftist, anti-war rag, The Wall Street Journal. "Al Qaeda and the Taliban are groups with completely distinct ideologies and goals," Gopal says in the film. The Taliban, he says, has as its central goal "to kick out the Americans." Greenwald's film would presumably have been more “objective” in the Times’s eyes if it had included the analysis of, say, Steve Coll, whose definitive book on al Qaeda, Ghost Wars, won the Pulitzer. Oh, right, Coll is a major voice in Greenwald's film.
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
[Video] Is the Hypocritical War Against ACORN Unconstitutional?
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on September 28, 2009 at 9:00 AM.
In the ever-evolving story of the witch-hunt against the community organization, ACORN, Florida Democrat Rep. Alan Grayson and others, have been hammering away on an interesting point about the Defund ACORN Act, which recently passed the House and Senate, and seeks to ban the organization from receiving federal funds: This GOP-led initiative, as written, may actually apply the federal-funding ban to massive defense contractors and other big corporations. There should be no doubt that this was not the intent of Rep. Darrell Issa, the far right Republican who sponsored the legislation, and his cronies who are on a major league witch-hunt of an organization whose real crime is registering poor people and people of color to vote. But since they put this legislation out there, it is a worthwhile discussion of what this would look like.
The Republican sponsors of this bill are, of course, among the most vocal Congressional lobbyists for massive government contracts to scandalous corporations such as Blackwater, KBR/Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, as part of the bloated war budget. The list of their crimes far overshadows the allegations -- and more importantly, the evidence -- against ACORN. "De-fund the crooks," Grayson said. "The numbers of those who have filed fraudulent forms with the government -- it's like a who's who of government contracting." In an interview on Salon Radio, Grayson put out this important statistic: "The amount of money that ACORN has received in the past 20 years altogether is roughly equal to what the taxpayer paid to Halliburton each day during the war in Iraq." For a list of the massive government contractors who would technically be banned from receiving federal funds under this legislation, see the Project on Oversight and Government Reform’s Contractor Misconduct list. Check out both the fraud category and the revenue one as well and then put that up against ACORN.
What’s more, the Republicans -- and, unfortunately their friends on the other side of the aisle -- are advocating punishing ACORN for the -- as yet legally unresolved-- allegations against a small number of ACORN employees or affiliates. What is painfully ironic about this is that this standard should actually be applied to senior Bush administration officials who authorized, tried to legalize, and oversaw torture and war crimes. It should have applied to the commanders at Abu Ghraib. It should apply to Blackwater’s Erik Prince. They had actual knowledge and complicity at the highest levels. But all of their crimes have been covered up by the tired "bad apple" narrative over and over again. It is never the system that is the problem in the eyes of its powerful beneficiaries. In the case of ACORN, if you really care about facts, then you know that -- at best -- we are talking about the misconduct of a few people (who were fired) and not some top-down criminal enterprise, which is precisely what the Bush administration was and massive war contractors are.
The Defund ACORN Act states that an organization should be banned from receiving federal funding if it "employs any applicable individual, in a permanent or temporary capacity" or "has under contract or retains any applicable individual" who has "been indicted for a violation under any Federal or State law governing the financing of a campaign for election for public office or any law governing the administration of an election for public office, including a law relating to voter registration." Beyond the fact that Karl Rove and other powerful Republicans orchestrated the firing of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias for refusing to cook up a story of voter fraud, which he called a "boogeyman" and conduct a prosecution based on lies and propaganda (remember, ACORN itself reported the registration irregularities that were used against it), this is priceless hypocrisy. Again, take the case of Blackwater, which has had five of its operatives indicted on manslaughter charges for gunning down unarmed civilians while on an official U.S. government contract. A sixth Blackwater operative already pled guilty to killing an unarmed female doctor in Iraq. Blackwater didn’t fire these men, as ACORN did its workers who were set up in a potentially illegal sting operation. No, Blackwater defends this senseless killing by its men.
Or how about the fact that two Blackwater operatives plead guilty to illegal weapons smuggling charges and former employees say the company's owner Erik Prince has smuggled unauthorized weapons into Iraq in dog food bags on his private planes?
The GOP smear machine tries to link ACORN to prostitution. Beyond the hypocrisy of Republicans denouncing prostitutes (long history of using them), do they really want talk of prostitution? One former Blackwater employee recently stated in a sworn declaration that Blackwater owner Erik Prince "failed to stop the ongoing use of prostitutes, including child prostitutes, by his men." Another former employee described "having young girls provide oral sex to Enterprise members in the 'Blackwater Man Camp' [in Iraq] in exchange for one American dollar." [PDF links to these affidavits are here] Even if ACORN did provide inappropriate tax advice to a prostitute, is that really on the same level as this conduct being conducted on a huge U.S. government contract? If you think these are just the allegations of disgruntled employees, read the Justice Department’s perspective on Blackwater’s crimes and how its men "specifically intended to kill" Iraqi civilians as "payback for 9/11."
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Blackwater Offers Training to 'Faith Based Organizations'
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on September 21, 2009 at 11:40 AM.
In its ever-evolving re-branding campaign, Blackwater has created a new alter-ego for part of the company’s business. Meet the "Personal Security Awareness" program, which appears to be an off-shoot of Erik Prince's Greystone, Ltd., a classic mercenary operation registered offshore in Barbados. On its website, which was registered on February 20, 2009 and went live recently, the "program" is described as "a multi-phase course which is designed to assist Non-Government Organizations, Faith Based Organizations and Commercial Businesses by providing individual personal awareness and driver training for their personnel when deployed to unfamiliar environments." It adds: "Greystone recognizes the importance of 'preparation by doing' and looks forward to you joining us for this exciting training!"
Blackwater, of course, works for such organizations as the International Republican Institute, but “Faith Based Organizations?” Are they serious? I’m sure there are just scores of Islamic aid groups just lining up to take courses from Blackwater, Xe, U.S. Training Center, Greystone, Personal Security Awareness. Moreover, any legitimate “faith based organization” that wants harmony with other faiths would be insane to work with this company. One of the courses offered is described as teaching “persons traveling to foreign environments how to remain safe during their travels in a vehicle.” This truly is surreal. What would seem more appropriate would be a company offering courses on how to “remain safe” in a vehicle when going anywhere near Blackwater forces. Remember how those unarmed Iraqi civilians were blown up in their car by Blackwater operatives at Nisour Square? Or the Afghan civilians allegedly killed in their car by Blackwater operatives in Afghanistan in May?
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
NYT Reports on Justice Dept. Charge That Blackwater Saw Killing Iraqis as "Payback for 9/11"
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on September 14, 2009 at 8:19 AM.
Last week, I wrote about the U.S. Justice Department’s allegations about Blackwater, which were filed in the criminal case against the men alleged to be responsible for the Nisour Square massacre. Blackwater forces "fired at innocent Iraqis not because they actually believed that they were in imminent danger of serious bodily injury and actually believed that they had no alternative to the use of deadly force, but rather that they fired at innocent Iraqi civilians because of their hostility toward Iraqis and their grave indifference to the harm that their actions would cause," the acting U.S. Attorney in DC, Channing Phillips, alleged in court papers submitted by Kenneth C. Kohl, the lead prosecutor on this case. "[T]he defendants specifically intended to kill or seriously injure the Iraqi civilians that they fired upon at Nisur Square." Prosecutors also allege that "defendant Nicholas Slatten made statements that he wanted to kill as many Iraqis as he could as 'payback for 9/11,' and he repeatedly boasted about the number of Iraqis he had shot."
The New York Times reporter Jim Risen reports on these charges today. His report is here. The dramatic understatement of the piece is this line: "The new allegations also seem to raise questions about whether there was adequate oversight of the security details by either Blackwater or the State Department." No comment.
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Rep. Mike Pence, Who Led Witch Hunt Against Van Jones, Took $1,000s From Extremist Erik Prince
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on September 7, 2009 at 10:00 AM.
Rep. Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican whose name has been mentioned as a potential GOP presidential candidate (and who is not sure if he believes in evolution), led the witch-hunt to force the resignation of White House Green Jobs advisor, Van Jones, over comments Jones made years ago and a 9/11 "truth" petition Jones signed which he said he did not read in its entirety. Jones apologized for some of his comments, which were made before he took his job with the Obama administration and said the petition "certainly does not reflect my views now or ever."
Late Saturday, Jones resigned. "On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones said in a statement released Sunday. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide." (For a very good analysis of this story, read this).
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
No U.S. Interference in Afghan Elections ... Except James Carville and the U.S. Occupation
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on August 20, 2009 at 9:45 AM.
[On Monday], Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just released a statement on the Afghan elections, which will be held [today]. Key section:
"The United States of America remains impartial in this election. We do not support or oppose any particular candidate. Like the Afghan people we want to see credible, secure and inclusive elections that all will judge legitimate. We hope that, from top to bottom, every effort will be taken to make election day secure, to eliminate fraud, and to address any complaints fairly and quickly."
Hmm. Well, let’s see. How is it not just a wee bit of interference to have James Carville, one of the Clintons’ top consiglieri, acting as a campaign advisor to one of the leading candidates? Carville, who says he is working as a “private citizen” for candidate Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official, was an advisor to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 election and has deep ties to Obama’s current Afghanistan/Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke. Ghani and former Unocal executive turned U.S.-puppet, Hamid Karzai, would both be acceptable to Washington, but Carville’s involvement certainly raises some questions. Carville, according to NPR, "won't say whether he's being paid to advise Ghani."
Hamid Karzai's office has offered some fairly muted criticism of this arrangement. "Let's leave the decision to the Afghan people if it is better to have the advice of Afghans without the interference from the foreigners or to have foreigners advising us?" said Humayun Hamidzada, Karzai’s spokesperson.
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett: Trust Obama on Blackwater
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on August 17, 2009 at 9:19 AM.
President Obama’s senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, was confronted over the weekend with the fact that the administration continues contracting with the scandal-plagued mercenary firm Blackwater (which now does business as Xe Services and US Training Center). “He has to balance national security with transparency and I bet with him. I bet with him and I’m asking you to trust him,” Jarrett told a raucous crowd Saturday at the NetRoots Nation conference in Pittsburgh.
Jarrett was directly asked why Obama keeps paying millions of dollars to Blackwater -- a question which received substantial applause and which Jarrett failed to directly answer. Instead, she appealed to a commitment of faith in Obama by activists and bloggers. “I think the point of the matter is that you also have to say we are six months in. I think you have to accept the fact that some things are going to take a little bit of time and that you have to follow a process where you’re going to get some buy-in from the people who you are counting on,” Jarrett said.
The moderator of the event, Baratunde Thurston, asked Jarrett about Blackwater’s ongoing contracts with the U.S. government after a member of the audience shouted an off-mic question about Blackwater.
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Wall Street Journal Cheers on Obama's Drone War on Pakistan: "Unmanned Bombs Away"
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on July 14, 2009 at 5:00 AM.
The Wall Street Journal is officially in love with President Obama’s undeclared air war inside of Pakistan’s borders. In an unsigned editorial, the paper enthusiastically endorses Obama’s use of predator drones to bomb areas throughout Pakistan. The WSJ editors praises the administration, saying “to its credit, [the White House] has stepped up the use of Predators.” The editors declare: “When Pakistan’s government can exercise sovereignty over all its territory, there will be no need for Predator strikes. In the meantime, unmanned bombs away.”
The paper accurately notes some of the reasons for opposing drone strikes: “the belief that the attacks cause wide-scale casualties among noncombatants, thereby embittering local populations and losing hearts and minds.” The WSJ also accurately reports:
Lord Bingham, until recently Britain’s senior law lord, has recently said UAV strikes may be “beyond the pale” and potentially on a par with cluster bombs and landmines. Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen says “the Predator [drone] strikes have an entirely negative effect on Pakistani stability.” He adds, “We should be cutting strikes back pretty substantially.”
But Bingham and Kilcullen are naive fools, according to the WSJ editors. Moreover, they are fools who have been suckered by evil un-embedded reporters. “If you glean your information from wire reports -- which depend on stringers who are rarely eyewitnesses,” the editors quip, “the argument [against drone attacks] seems almost plausible.” Right, these “stringers” who often risk their lives to reveal the human toll of U.S. bombings are far less credible than the fat cat editors of the WSJ (some of whom are probably in the Hamptons having servants clip their toe nails or mix their Martinis as I write this).
The WSJ editors descend from their thrones to mingle among the mortals and teach us the error of our ways:
Yet anyone familiar with Predator technology knows how misleading those reports can be. Unlike fighter jets or cruise missiles, Predators can loiter over their targets for more than 20 hours, take photos in which men, women and children can be clearly distinguished (burqas can be visible from 20,000 feet) and deliver laser-guided munitions with low explosive yields. This minimizes the risks of the “collateral damage” that often comes from 500-pound bombs. Far from being “beyond the pale,” drones have made war-fighting more humane.
Ah, yes, that famous humane war we have all been waiting for. Finally!
The WSJ editors then reveal the highly independent, impeccable source for their information: “A U.S. intelligence summary we’ve seen corrects the record of various media reports claiming high casualties from the Predator strikes.” Wow. Remember when the Bush administration was correcting all those errors about Saddam’s WMDs? Not surprisingly, the WSJ states that “In each of the strikes in 2009 that are described by the intelligence summary, the report says no women or children were killed. Moreover, we know of planned drone attacks that were aborted when Predator cameras spied their presence.”
The WSJ wants this U.S. “intelligence” shared with the American public and the world, arguing, “We understand there will always be issues concerning sources and methods. But critics of the drone attacks, especially Pakistani critics, have become increasingly vocal in their opposition. They deserve to know about the terrorist calamities they’ve been spared thanks to these unmanned flights over their territory.”
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Did Washington Turn a Blind Eye to the Coup in Honduras?
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on June 29, 2009 at 1:30 PM.
There is a lot of great analysis circulating on the military coup against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. I do not see a need to re-invent the wheel. (See here here here and here). However, a few key things jump out at me. First, we know that the coup was led by Gen. Romeo Vasquez, a graduate of the U.S. Army School of the Americas. As we know very well from history, these “graduates” maintain ties to the U.S. military as they climb the military career ladders in their respective countries. That is a major reason why the U.S. trains these individuals.
Secondly, the U.S. has a fairly significant military presence in Honduras. Joint Task Force-Bravo is located at Soto Cano Air Base, Honduras. The base is home to some 550 U.S. military personnel and more than 650 U.S. and Honduran civilians:
They work in six different areas including the Joint Staff, Air Force Forces (612th Air Base Squadron), Army Forces, Joint Security Forces and the Medical Element. 1st Battalion, 228th Aviation Regiment, a U.S. Army South asset, is a tenant unit also based at Soto Cano. The J-Staff provides command and control for JTF-B.
The New York Times reports that “The unit focuses on training Honduran military forces, counternarcotics operations, search and rescue, and disaster relief missions throughout Central America.”
Significantly, according to GlobalSecurity, “Soto Cano is a Honduran military installation and home of the Honduran Air Force.”
This connection to the Air Force is particularly significant given this report in NarcoNews:
The head of the Air Force, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, studied in the School of the Americas in 1996. The Air Force has been a central protagonist in the Honduran crisis. When the military refused to distribute the ballot boxes for the opinion poll, the ballot boxes were stored on an Air Force base until citizens accompanied by Zelaya rescued them. Zelaya reports that after soldiers kidnapped him, they took him to an Air Force base, where he was put on a plane and sent to Costa Rica.
It is impossible to imagine that the U.S. was not aware that the coup was in the works. In fact, this was basically confirmed by The New York Times in Mondays paper:
As the crisis escalated, American officials began in the last few days to talk with Honduran government and military officials in an effort to head off a possible coup. A senior administration official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, said the military broke off those discussions on Sunday.
While the U.S. has issued heavily-qualified statements critical of the coup -- in the aftermath of the events in Honduras -- the U.S. could have flexed its tremendous economic muscle before the coup and told the military coup plotters to stand down. The U.S. ties to the Honduran military and political establishment run far too deep for all of this to have gone down without at least tacit support or the turning of a blind eye by some U.S. political or military official(s).
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
U.S. Has Spies On the Ground in Iran: Former National Security Advisor
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on June 24, 2009 at 3:55 PM.
As violence continues on the streets of Tehran, RebelReports has learned that former U.S. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft has confirmed that the U.S. government has spies on the ground in Iran. Scowcroft made the assertion in an interview to be broadcast on the Al Jazeera program “Fault Lines.” When asked by journalist Josh Rushing if the U.S. has "intelligence operatives on the ground in Iran," Scowcroft replied, "Of course we do."
While it is hardly surprising that the U.S. has its operatives in Iran, it is unusual to see a figure in a position to know state this on the record. New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh and Former Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter both have claimed for years that the U.S. has regularly engaged in covert operations inside of Iran aimed at destabilizing the government. In July 2008, Hersh reported, "the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded."
In the Al Jazeera interview, Scowcroft defended President Obama's position on Iran, which has been roundly criticized by Republicans as weak and ineffective with some characterizing Obama as a “de facto ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.”
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Obama's Undeclared War On Pakistan Continues, Despite Attempts to Downplay It
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on June 22, 2009 at 8:25 AM.
Three days after his inauguration, on January 23, 2009, President Barack Obama ordered U.S. predator drones to attack sites inside of Pakistan, reportedly killing 15 people. It was the first documented attack ordered by the new U.S. Commander in Chief inside of Pakistan. Since that first Obama-authorized attack, the U.S. has regularly bombed Pakistan, killing scores of civilians. The New York Times reported that the attacks were clear evidence Obama "is continuing, and in some cases extending, Bush administration policy." In the first 99 days of 2009, more than 150 people were reportedly killed in these drone attacks. The most recent documented attack was reportedly last Thursday in Waziristan. Since 2006, the U.S. drone strikes have killed 687 people (as of April). That amounts to about 38 deaths a month just from drone attacks.
The use of these attack drones by Obama should not come as a surprise to anyone who followed his presidential campaign closely. As a candidate, Obama made clear that Pakistan’s sovereignty was subservient to U.S. interests, saying he would attack with or without the approval of the Pakistani government. Obama said if the U.S. had "actionable intelligence" that "high value" targets were in Pakistan, the U.S. would attack. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, echoed those sentiments on the campaign trail and "did not rule out U.S. attacks inside Pakistan, citing the missile attacks her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, ordered against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. ‘If we had actionable intelligence that Osama bin Laden or other high-value targets were in Pakistan I would ensure that they were targeted and killed or captured,’ she said."
Last weekend, Obama granted his first extended interview with a Pakistani media outlet, the newspaper Dawn:
Responding to a question about drone attacks inside Pakistan’s tribal zone, Mr Obama said he did not comment on specific operations.
'But I will tell you that we have no intention of sending U.S. troops into Pakistan. Pakistan and its military are dealing with their security issues.'
There are a number of issues raised by this brief response offered by Obama. First, the only difference between using these attack drones and using actual U.S. soldiers on the ground is that the soldiers are living beings. These drones sanitize war and reduce the U.S. death toll while still unleashing military hell disproportionately on civilians. The bottom line is that the use of drones inside the borders of Pakistan amounts to the same violation of sovereignty that would result from sending U.S. soldiers inside the country. Obama defended the attacks in the Dawn interview, saying:
"Our primary goal is to be a partner and a friend to Pakistan and to allow Pakistan to thrive on its own terms, respecting its own traditions, respecting its own culture. We simply want to make sure that our common enemies, which are extremists who would kill innocent civilians, that that kind of activity is stopped, and we believe that it has to be stopped whether it’s in the United States or in Pakistan or anywhere in the world."
Despite Obama's comments about respecting Pakistan “on its own terms,” this is how Reuters recently described the arrangement between Pakistan and the U.S. regarding drone attacks:
U.S. ally Pakistan objects to the U.S. missile strikes, saying they violate its sovereignty and undermine efforts to deal with militancy because they inflame public anger and bolster support for the militants.
Washington says the missile strikes are carried out under an agreement with Islamabad that allows Pakistani leaders to publicly criticize the attacks. Pakistan denies any such agreement.
Pakistan is now the biggest recipient of U.S. aid with the House of Representatives recently approving a tripling of money to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for five years. Moreover, U.S. special forces are already operating inside of Pakistan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in Baluchistan. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Special Forces are:
training Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force responsible for battling the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, who cross freely between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said. The U.S. trainers aren’t meant to fight alongside the Pakistanis or accompany them into battle, in part because there will be so few Special Forces personnel in the two training camps.
A senior American military officer said he hoped Islamabad would gradually allow the U.S. to expand its training footprint inside Pakistan’s borders.
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
So-Called Members of the 'Responsible Left' Try to Justify Their $100 Billion Pro-War Vote
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on June 18, 2009 at 8:00 AM.
Over the past few days, we reported on how the White House and Democratic Congressional Leadership waged a dirty campaign to scare up votes to support another $106 billion in funds for their wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now, several of the so-called anti-war Democrats who left their principles at the House coat check on their way in to vote Tuesday are trying to explain away their hypocritical votes.
New York Democrat Anthony Weiner, who voted against the war funding in May -- when it didn’t matter -- only to vote Tuesday with the pro-war Dems, sounded like an imbecile when he made this statement after the vote: “We are in the process of wrapping up the wars. The president needed our support.” What planet is Weiner living on? “Wrapping up the wars?” Last time I checked, there are 21,000 more U.S. troops heading to Afghanistan alongside a surge in contractors there, including a 29% increase in armed contractors. Does Weiner think the $106 billion in war funding he voted for is going to pay for one way tickets home for the troops? What he voted for was certainly not the “Demolition of the 80 Football-field-size U.S. Embassy in Baghdad Act of 2009.” To cap off this idiocy, Weiner basically admitted he is a fraud when he said the bill he voted in favor of “still sucks.”
Jan Schakowsky, who has done some incredibly important work on Blackwater and the privatized war machine, also voted against the supplemental in May, but switched her vote on Tuesday. “I do believe my president is a peacemaker,” Schakowsky said. “I’m going to give him what he wants.” A peacemaker who is expanding war? Moreover, what happened to the system of “checks and balances?” If Congressmembers, especially anti-war ones like Schakowsky, start just giving the president “what he wants,” then where is the peoples’ voice?
How are these people sleeping at night?
Obviously these folks are partisans or else they wouldn’t be Democrats, but this “Dear Leader knows best” mentality is cultish. Republican Rep. Ron Paul, who, whatever one thinks of him, has been consistently opposed to these wars, put it best when he rose on the floor Tuesday to speak against the war funding: “I wonder what happened to all of my colleagues who said they were opposed to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder what happened to my colleagues who voted with me as I opposed every war supplemental request under the previous administration. It seems, with very few exceptions, they have changed their position on the war now that the White House has changed hands.”
One anonymous Massachusetts lawmaker told Politico that those Democrats who voted for the war funding and IMF credits are “what we call the responsible left.” Barney Frank, another flip-flopper on war funding, compared the anti-war left to the Rush Limbaugh right-wing, saying, “They have no sense of reality.” Perhaps Rep. Frank should ask the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who lobbied intensely against the war funding he supported if they have “no sense of reality.”
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A 'Perfect Storm for Disaster' Brewing With Washington's 'Unprecedented' Shadow Army
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on June 15, 2009 at 7:00 AM.
I’ve been reading through the hot-off-the-presses, exciting 100+ page report from the Commission on Wartime Contracting: “At What Cost? Contingency Contracting In Iraq and Afghanistan.” There have been several good pieces that covered the Congressional hearings related to this report, so I thought I would just post some of the more important excerpts from the report. One general note: The Commission, which was created due to the diligent efforts of Senators Jim Webb and Claire McCaskill, has been doing some incredibly important work digging deep into the corruption, waste, abuse, fraud, etc of the U.S. war contracting system. The statute that created the commission “requires the Commission to assess a number of factors related to wartime contracting, including the extent of waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement of wartime contracts. The Commission has the authority to hold hearings and to refer to the Attorney General any violation or potential violation of law it identifies in carrying out its duties.”
While the new report reveals some critical details about issues of waste and abuse, the general tone is very pro-contractor, which is not surprising. However, I find it disturbing that one of the members of the Commission, Dov Zakheim, is, according to his Commission bio, a current vice-president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a major defense, homeland security and intelligence contractor with a direct stake in US policy on contractors.
Booze is now majority owned by The Carlyle Group, which has deep political connections. In an Op-ed in The Washington Post last year, Zakheim campaigned against “more regulations and bureaucratic restrictions on contractors” and advocated for “a larger, more diversified base of prime contractors and suppliers.” Zakheim, who was a foreign policy advisor to Bush and part of the circle of the Vulcans, is now a key member of the primary body that is responsible for investigating the industry and making formal recommendations on U.S. policy. While the Commission is made up of appointees from both political parties, (Zakheim was appointed by President Bush) Zakheim’s corporate stake on these matters should be cause for a review of his position on the Commission.
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One fact that jumped out at me in the report is that, at present, according to the Commission, “contracting oversight” in Afghanistan is being done remotely from Iraq. And remember, there are 70,000 contractors (and growing) in Afghanistan.
Here are some excerpts from the report, which I have categorized and in some cases highlighted or analyzed:
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