Good Morning!
Longwood Gardens. February, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Paul McCartney Blackbird 12.12.12. Sandy relief concert
News and Opinion
Best news I've seen in a long time. NYT calling for repeal of AUMF.
Repeal the Military Force Law
Three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force. It was enacted with good intentions — to give President George W. Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan and go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban rulers who sheltered and aided the terrorists who had attacked the United States.
But over time, that resolution became warped into something else: the basis for a vast overreaching of power by one president, Mr. Bush, and less outrageous but still dangerous policies by another, Barack Obama.
Mr. Bush used the authorization law as an excuse to kidnap hundreds of people — guilty and blameless people alike — and throw them into secret prisons where many were tortured. He used it as a pretext to open the Guantánamo Bay camp and to eavesdrop on Americans without bothering to obtain a warrant. He claimed it as justification for the invasion of Iraq, twisting intelligence to fabricate a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks.
Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama does not go as far as to claim that the Constitution gives him the inherent power to do all those things. But he has relied on the 2001 authorization to use drones to kill terrorists far from the Afghan battlefield, and to claim an unconstitutional power to kill American citizens in other countries based only on suspicion that they are or might become terrorist threats, without judicial review.
IMHO, the madness continues.
Why the Invasion of Iraq Was the Single Worst Foreign Policy Decision in American History
I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness—and oh yes, it was madness—not filtered through a complacent and sleepy media that made Washington’s war policy seem, if not sensible, at least sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of what was intended to be the new centerpiece for aPax Americanain the Greater Middle East.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the ha-ha sort of joke either. And here’s the saddest truth of all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion from hell, we still don’t get it. In case you want to jump to the punch line, though, it’s this: by invading Iraq, the US did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could possibly have imagined at the time. And we—and so many others—will pay the price for it for a long, long time.
The Madness of King George
It’s easy to forget just how normal the madness looked back then. By 2009, when I arrived in Iraq, we were already at the last-gasp moment when it came to salvaging something from what may yet be seen as the single worst foreign policy decision in American history. It was then that, as a State Department officer assigned to lead two provincial reconstruction teams in eastern Iraq, I first walked into the chicken processing plant in the middle of nowhere.
Chief of Iraq Torture Commandos: “The Americans knew about everything I did”
The Guardian also describes how military authorities commanded US soldiers on the scene, witness to such atrocities, not to intervene when present at such crimes. The order was first issued as FRAGO (Fragmentary Order) 242. The film interviews one of these brave soldiers, a military medic, who describes what he saw when the torture commandos were unleashed in Samarra.
Others interviewed for the film include Adnan Thabit, the chief of the Iraqi Special Police Commandos from 2004-06. The Guardian has excerpted his interview for a short video highlighing Thabit explaining, “The Americans knew about everything I did.”
Threat Inflation and Deflation, Cont.
For the rest of this month, I think I'll roll out a home-made logo, at right, to mark a range of discussion on what we've learned, forgotten, misconstrued, and never understood about the combat commitments that began when American forces invaded Iraq ten years ago. This proceeds from a post one week ago on the necessary reckoning from the Iraq years, plus reader followups.
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Today's theme: threat inflation and its many ramifications. [...]
On what I said was a specific current instance of threat-inflation: the drumbeat of warnings about the menace from Iran, a reader who asks that he not be named writes:
I am a graduate student studying the proliferation of nuclear technology (especially centrifuges for uranium enrichment) in the Engineering School at [distinguished East Coast university.] [...] For the record: I believe that military action in Iran is completely unwarranted at this point and will remain so for (at very least) the near future.
While I am thankful for the growing body of scientific experts willing to speak out and counterbalance our nation's penchant for "threat inflation," I worry that a number of anti-war scientist/activists are guilty of the same fundamental offense as their Bush-era nemeses: allowing their political agendas to shape their technical assessments. Technical experts who maintain an a priori commitment to nonintervention can frequently do more harm than good. By softening the facts, downplaying suspicious activity, and gratuitously applying the "alarmist" label to any and all who oppose them, these analysts weaken the public discourse and undermine the ability of the IAEA to insist on transparency from nations like Iran.
Iraq War stories: Sergeant Major Doug Beattie: 'It wasn't mission accomplished, it was barely beginning'
Captain Doug Beattie, who was a Regimental Sergeant Major in the Royal Irish Regiment, tells Josie Ensor of the chaos of early days of the invasion.
“To say our first 24 hours in Iraq was manic would be an understatement. As soon as my unit and I crossed over into Iraq from Kuwait we were handed nearly 500 enemy prisoners of war to look after, and as the sergeant major, I was effectively in charge of them all.
They were Iraqi soldiers who had been working as guards at the Rumaila oil field who had been picked up by US Marines.
I remember their faces. These weren’t the tough soldiers we had been sent there to fight, they were poor, pathetic wretches, desperately hungry with their clothes in tatters. I couldn’t think of these people as the enemy at all, no matter what we had been told.
Iraq war: General Sir Mike Jackson recalls the lead-up to the conflict
General Sir Mike Jackson, Chief of the General Staff during the Iraq war, recalls the lead-up to the conflict and some of the shortcomings that emerged.
It is almost 10 years since Coalition forces, including a very significant British contingent, crossed the border into Iraq.
At that time in late March 2003 opinion polls indicated some two-thirds of the British people were in favour of this military action against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; such support rapidly waned, not least because early conventional military success was not borne out by what followed.
We need, however, to go further back in time to establish the full context. Over a decade before, in August 1990, Saddam sent his armed forces to occupy Kuwait in an act of outright aggression against that neighbouring small country.
In response to this blatant breach of international law, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 687 which gave a final demand for the withdrawal of Iraqi forces; should there not be compliance, international military action would follow.
Want to know what Iraq is like now? Check out 'Henry VI', parts I, II and III
World View: Ten years after the invasion, Shakespeare's depiction of the War of the Roses echoes the fight for supremacy in Baghdad
I stayed for much of the five years after the invasion in the al-Hamra Hotel which stands in a loop in the Tigris river in the Jadriyah district of Baghdad. It was never a homely place. The owners appeared to have taken a pledge early on not to spend a dollar of their substantial revenues from guests – mostly journalists but a few businessmen – on refurbishing the hotel. It was made up of two buildings separated by a swimming pool. One block became uninhabitable in 2005 after two suicide bombers driving vehicles packed with explosives blew themselves up trying to penetrate the perimeter wall. They killed 11 people, mostly hotel staff or their relatives. I moved to the other building which was served by two lifts, one of which had ceased to work before I arrived, and a second which crawled up and down with extreme slowness and stopped only on the floor above mine.
h/t to Glenn Greenwald: "Excellent/important NYT Op-Ed by Law Professor Ryan Goodman on why Holder's answers to Paul were meaningless".
The Drone Question Obama Hasn’t Answered
[...] Mr. Holder’s letter raises more questions than it answers — and, indeed, more important and more serious questions than the senator posed.
What, exactly, does the Obama administration mean by “engaged in combat”? The extraordinary secrecy of this White House makes the answer difficult to know. We have some clues, and they are troubling.
[...]
The report went on to say that there were about 50 major traffickers “who contribute funds to the insurgency on the target list.” The Pentagon later said that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with links to terrorism.”
That statement, however, was not very clarifying, and did not seem to appease NATO allies who raised serious legal concerns about the American targeting program. The explanation soon gave way to more clues, and this time it was not simply a question of who had been placed on a list.
[...]
It also raises anew questions about the standards the administration has used in deciding to use drone strikes to kill Americans suspected of terrorist involvement overseas — notably Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.
State’s ‘Environmentally Sound’ Keystone Assessment Done By Firms Linked To TransCanada, Exxon Mobil, BP And Kochs
Yesterday, we found out via Inside Climate News and Brad Johnson over at Grist that the environmental impact statement the State Department just released on the Keystone XL pipeline was written by a private consulting firm being paid by the pipeline’s owner.
This obviously raises concerns about conflicts of interest with the report itself, but it also highlights the problems with turning government work and analysis over to private firms with possible financial ties to other private entities who may be affected by that work and analysis — a phenomenon that’s been underway since the 1990s.
Parts of ‘State Dept.’ Keystone XL Report Actually Written by TransCanada Contractor
The State Department’s “don’t worry” environmental impact statement for the proposed Keystone XL tarsands pipeline, released late Friday afternoon, was written not by government officials but by a private company in the pay of the pipeline’s owner. The “sustainability consultancy” Environmental Resources Management (ERM) was paid an undisclosed amount under contract to TransCanada to write the statement, which is now an official government document. The statement estimates, and then dismisses, the pipeline’s massive carbon footprint and other environmental impacts, because, it asserts, the mining and burning of the tar sands is unstoppable.
[...]
An investigation by Inside Climate News finds that ERM’s report draws from work done by other oil industry contractors, Ensys Energy and ICF International.
Action
Blogathon and Twitterfest coming soon to DailyKos, starting March 25th.
You will recognize a lot of the names writing posts for it -- names you know from What's Happenin' and some nationally recognized names like Howard Dean and Dean Baker.
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"Hands Off My Social Security"
"Social Security...is not a dole or a device for giving everybody something for nothing. True Social Security must consist of rights which are earned rights -- guaranteed by the law of the land."
-- Harry S. Truman, August 13, 1945
Link - feel free to post on your Facebook pages.
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Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Evening Blues
One Graph to Rule Them All & in a Jedi Mind Meld Bind Them
Admiral calls Climate Change top security issue ...
Sandy Hook Ride on Washington: Day 1 Wrap-up
Greece is for Greeks. Neo-Nazis: We will turn immigrants into soap
He's Not Even Pretending Anymore
Alicia Keys - Empire State of Mind live at 12.12.12 The Concert for Sandy Relief - New York