Paul Craig Roberts : The Assault on Trump

May 18, 2017

The Assault on Trump

Paul Craig Roberts

We are witnessing an assault by the national security state and its liberal media on a President of the United States that is unprecedented.

Wild and unsupported accusations of treasonous or illegal Russian connections have been the mainstay of the news since Trump’s campaign for president. These accusations have reached the point that there is an impeachment movement driven by the national security state and its liberal media and endorsed by Democrats, the American leftwing which has turned against the working class as “Trump deplorables,” and luminaries such as Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe. The Washington Post, which was not present at the meeting of President Trump with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, purports to know that Trump gave Lavrov US national security information.

The Russian government has offered the presstitute media a transcript of the meeting, but, of course, the pressitutes are not interested.

The latest story is that Trump tried to bribe FBI Director Comey, before he fired him, not to investigate Trump as part of the “Russian investigation.” Clearly there is no intelligence left in the American media. The President doesn’t need to bribe someone he can fire.

What we are witnessing is the determination of the national security state to keep their prized “Russian Threat” in its assigned role as the Number One Threat to the US. The liberal media, owned by the CIA since the 1950s is in accord with this goal.
The American media is so accustomed to its enslavement by the national security state that it does not think of the consequences. But Professor Stephen Cohen does. I agree with him that the greatest threat to national security “is this assault on President Trump.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47076.htm
Cohen said that there is a 4th branch of government, the intelligence community, which obstruts the management of American foreign affairs by the executive branch and Congress.

As an example, he reminded us that “In 2016, President Obama worked out a deal with Russian President Putin for military cooperation in Syria. He said he was going to share intelligence with Russia, just like Trump and the Russians were supposed to do the other day. Our department of defense said it wouldn’t share intelligence. And a few days later, they killed Syrian soldiers, violating the agreement, and that was the end of that. So, we can ask, who is making our foreign policy in Washington today?”

In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy thought he was in charge, and he was assassinated for his belief. JFK blocked an invasion of Cuba, the Northwoods project, a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, and spoke of ending the Cold War.

In the 1970s President Nixon was driven from office, because he thought he was in charge of foreign policy. Like Kennedy, Nixon was a threat to the national security state. Nixon pushed through SALT 1 and the anti-ABM Treaty, and he opened to China, defusing those tensions as well. The military/security complex saw its budget dwindling as the threat dwindled. Nixon also determined to withdraw from Vietnam, but was constrained by the national security state. Nixon, the most knowledgeable president about foreign affairs, was forced from office, because his efforts in behalf of peace constituted a threat to the power and profit of the military/security complex.

It is important to understand that there is no evidence whatsoever against Nixon in the Washington Post “investigation.” The Post’s reporters simply put together a collection of inuendoes that cast aspersion on Nixon, whose “crime” was to say that he learned of the Watergate buglary at a later date than he actually did. Nixon kept the burglary quiet until after his reelection, because he knew that the CIA’s Washington Post would use it in an effort to prevent his reelection.
The “crime” for which Nixon was really removed was his success in establishing more peaceful and stable relations with Russia and China.

Trump, being in real estate and entertainment, was unaware of the landmines on which he was stepping when he said it was time to normalize relations with Russia and to rethink the purpose of NATO.

The US military/security complex sits on a budget extracted from very hard-pressed American taxpayers of $1,000 billion dollars annually. By threatening to normalize relations with the enemy which was created in order to justify this vast budget, Trump presented as the major threat to the American National Security State’s power and profit.

This is why Trump will be broken and/or removed as President of the United States.
Once again democracy in American is proving to be powerless. There is no one in Washington who can help Trump. Those who could help him, such as myself, cannot be confirmed by the US Senate, which is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military/security complex, Wall Street, and the Israel Lobby.

Trump tried to connect the suffering American people to their government, an act of treason against the oligarchy, who are making an example of Trump that will dissuade politicians in the future from making populist appeals to the people.

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/05/18/the-assault-on-trump/
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Patrick J. Buchanan : The Rise of the Generals

The Rise of the Generals

Friday - April 28, 2017 at 2:10 am

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Has President Donald Trump outsourced foreign policy to the generals?
So it would seem. Candidate Trump held out his hand to Vladimir Putin. He rejected further U.S. intervention in Syria other than to smash ISIS.
He spoke of getting out and staying out of the misbegotten Middle East wars into which Presidents Bush II and Obama had plunged the country.
President Trump’s seeming renunciation of an anti-interventionist foreign policy is the great surprise of the first 100 days, and the most ominous. For any new war could vitiate the Trump mandate and consume his presidency.
Trump no longer calls NATO “obsolete,” but moves U.S. troops toward Russia in the Baltic and eastern Balkans. Rex Tillerson, holder of Russia’s Order of Friendship, now warns that the U.S. will not lift sanctions on Russia until she gets out of Ukraine.
If Tillerson is not bluffing, that would rule out any rapprochement in the Trump presidency. For neither Putin, nor any successor, could surrender Crimea and survive.

What happened to the Trump of 2016?
When did Kiev’s claim to Crimea become more crucial to us than a cooperative relationship with a nuclear-armed Russia? In 1991, Bush I and Secretary of State James Baker thought the very idea of Ukraine’s independence was the product of a “suicidal nationalism.”
Where do we think this demonization of Putin and ostracism of Russia is going to lead?
To get Xi Jinping to help with our Pyongyang problem, Trump has dropped all talk of befriending Taiwan, backed off Tillerson’s warning to Beijing to vacate its fortified reefs in the South China Sea, and held out promises of major concessions to Beijing in future trade deals.
“I like (Xi Jinping) and I believe he likes me a lot,” Trump said this week. One recalls FDR admonishing Churchill, “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than … your Foreign Office … Stalin hates the guts of all your people. He thinks he likes me better.”
FDR did not live to see what a fool Stalin had made of him.

Among the achievements celebrated in Trump’s first 100 days are the 59 cruise missiles launched at the Syrian airfield from which the gas attack on civilians allegedly came, and the dropping of the 22,000-pound MOAB bomb in Afghanistan.

But what did these bombings accomplish?
The War Party seems again ascendant. John McCain and Lindsey Graham are happy campers. In Afghanistan, the U.S. commander is calling for thousands more U.S. troops to assist the 8,500 still there, to stabilize an Afghan regime and army that is steadily losing ground to the Taliban.

Iran is back on the front burner. While Tillerson concedes that Tehran is in compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, Trump says it is violating “the spirit of the agreement.”

How so? Says Tillerson, Iran is “destabilizing” the region, and threatening U.S. interests in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon.

But Iran is an ally of Syria and was invited in to help the U.N.-recognized government put down an insurrection that contains elements of al-Qaida and ISIS. It is we, the Turks, Saudis and Gulf Arabs who have been backing the rebels seeking to overthrow the regime.

In Yemen, Houthi rebels overthrew and expelled a Saudi satrap. The bombing, blockading and intervention with troops is being done by Saudi and Sunni Arabs, assisted by the U.S. Navy and Air Force.

It is we and the Saudis who are talking of closing the Yemeni port of Hodeida, which could bring on widespread starvation.

It was not Iran, but the U.S. that invaded Iraq, overthrew the Baghdad regime and occupied the country. It was not Iran that overthrew Col. Gadhafi and created the current disaster in Libya.

Monday, the USS Mahan fired a flare to warn off an Iranian patrol boat, 1,000 meters away. Supposedly, this was a provocation. But Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif had a point when he tweeted:
“Breaking: Our Navy operates in — yes, correct — the Persian Gulf, not the Gulf of Mexico. Question is what US Navy doing 7,500 miles from home.”

Who is behind the seeming conversion of Trump to hawk?
The generals, Bibi Netanyahu and the neocons, Congressional hawks with Cold War mindsets, the Saudi royal family and the Gulf Arabs — they are winning the battle for the president’s mind.

And their agenda for America?
We are to recognize that our true enemy in the Mideast is not al-Qaida or ISIS, but Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, Assad’s Syria and his patron, Putin. And until Hezbollah is eviscerated, Assad is gone, and Iran is smashed the way we did Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, the flowering of Middle East democracy that we all seek cannot truly begin.
But before President Trump proceeds along the path laid out for him by his generals, brave and patriotic men that they are, he should discover if any of them opposed any of the idiotic wars of the last 15 years, beginning with that greatest of strategic blunders — George Bush’s invasion of Iraq.


 http://buchanan.org/blog/the-rise-of-the-generals-126882
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Alan M. Dershowitz : What North Korea Should Teach Us about Iran

What North Korea Should Teach Us about Iran

by Alan M. Dershowitz
April 18, 2017 at 10:30 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10233/north-korea-iran

We failed to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. As a result, our options to stop them from developing a delivery system capable of reaching our shores are severely limited.
The hard lesson from our failure to stop North Korea before they became a nuclear power is that we MUST stop Iran from ever developing or acquiring a nuclear arsenal. A nuclear Iran would be far more dangerous to American interests than a nuclear North Korea. Iran already has missiles capable of reaching numerous American allies. They are in the process of upgrading them and making them capable of delivering a nuclear payload to our shores. Its fundamentalist religious leaders would be willing to sacrifice millions of Iranians to destroy the "Big Satan" (United States) or the "Little Satan" (Israel). The late "moderate" leader Hashemi Rafsanjani once told an American journalist that if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, they "would kill as many as five million Jews," and that if Israel retaliated, they would kill fifteen million Iranians, which would be "a small sacrifice from among the billion Muslims in the world." He concluded that "it is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality." Recall that the Iranian mullahs were willing to sacrifice thousands of "child-soldiers" in their futile war with Iraq. There is nothing more dangerous than a "suicide regime" armed with nuclear weapons.
The deal signed by Iran in 2015 postpones Iran's quest for a nuclear arsenal, but it doesn't prevent it, despite Iran's unequivocal statement in the preamble to the agreement that "Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire nuclear weapons." (Emphasis added). Recall that North Korea provided similar assurances to the Clinton Administration back in 1994, only to break them several years later -- with no real consequences. The Iranian mullahs apparently regard their reaffirmation as merely hortatory and not legally binding. The body of the agreement itself -- the portion Iran believes is legally binding -- does not preclude Iran from developing nuclear weapons after a certain time, variously estimated as between 10 to 15 years from the signing of the agreement. Nor does it prevent Iran from perfecting its delivery systems, including nuclear tipped inter-continental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States.

If we are not to make the same mistake with Iran that we made with North Korea, we must do something now – before Iran secures a weapon – to deter the mullahs from becoming a nuclear power, over which we would have little or no leverage.
Congress should now enact legislation declaring that Iran's reaffirmation that it will never "develop or acquire nuclear weapons" is an integral part of the agreement and represents the policy of the United States. It is too late to change the words of the deal, but it is not too late for Congress to insist that Iran comply fully with all of its provisions, even those in the preamble.
In order to ensure that the entirety of the agreement is carried out, including that reaffirmation, Congress should adopt the proposal made by Thomas L. Friedman on 22 July 2015 and by myself on 5 September 2013. To quote Friedman:

"Congress should pass a resolution authorizing this and future presidents to use force to prevent Iran from ever becoming a nuclear weapons state ... Iran must know now that the U.S. president is authorized to destroy – without warning or negotiation – any attempt by Tehran to build a bomb."

I put it similarly: Congress should authorize the President "to take military action against Iran's nuclear weapon's program if it were to cross the red lines...."
The benefits of enacting such legislation are clear: the law would underline the centrality to the deal of Iran's reaffirmation never to acquire nuclear weapons, and would provide both a deterrent against Iran violating its reaffirmation and an enforcement authorization in the event it does.
A law based on these two elements -- adopting Iran's reaffirmation as the official American policy and authorizing a preventive military strike if Iran tried to obtain nuclear weapons -- may be an alternative we can live with. But without such an alternative, the deal as currently interpreted by Iran will not prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. In all probability, it would merely postpone that catastrophe for about a decade while legitimating its occurrence. This is not an outcome we can live with, as evidenced by the crisis we are now confronting with North Korea. So let us learn from our mistake and not repeat it with Iran.

Alan M. Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School and author of Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law and Electile Dysfunction: A Guide for the Unaroused Voter.

• Follow Alan M. Dershowitz on Twitter

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Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi endorse Trump’s attack in Syria

April 7, 2017 6:51 pm By Robert Spencer

That in itself ought to give Trump pause. They haven’t suddenly decided to become generous and bipartisan. They are, if anything, consistent. Trump is now working from the Obama playbook, aiding jihad groups as he did, and so the Democrats couldn’t be more pleased. At last he is presidential. But he is betraying the promises he made that propelled him into the White House.





“Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi endorse Trump’s attack in Syria,” by Anna Giaritelli, Washington Examiner, April 7, 2017:

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi broke with fellow Democrats who had criticized President Trump’s military action against Syria to endorse the move late Thursday.
“Making sure Assad knows that when he commits such despicable atrocities he will pay a price is the right thing to do,” Schumer said in a statement released late Thursday. “I salute the professionalism and skill of our Armed Forces who took action today.”
“Tonight’s strike in Syria appears to be a proportional response to the the regime’s use of chemical weapons,” Pelosi said in a statement.
Following the missile launch at 8:40 p.m. Thursday, some Democratic lawmakers criticized Trump for not asking Congress’ permission before choosing to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles at an airbase in west Syria where it’s believed Tuesday’s chemical weapon attack originated….

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/04/chuck-schumer-nancy-pelosi-endorse-trumps-attack-in-syria
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Why Obama Ignored Iraq

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Why Obama Ignored Iraq

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On July 7, 2014 

ISIS marching through Iraq has smashed the media’s taboo against criticizing Obama’s foreign policy. Substantive discussions are taking place about why his foreign policy is such a miserable failure.
And they mostly miss the point.
Liberal journalists still proceed from the fallacy that there was a foreign policy debate between neo-conservative interventionists and liberal non-interventionists. These are a series of digested Bush era talking points that have no relationship to reality since Bush’s foreign policy on Iraq carried over from Bill Clinton. It’s why Hillary gets so uncomfortable when she has to discuss her vote on Iraq.
The liberals weren’t non-interventionists who insisted on multilateralism and UN approval before acting. Obama, like virtually every other Democrat, disproved that myth as fast as he could. Nor were they even opponents of the Iraq War until opposing the war became politically convenient.
Obama however isn’t on this map at all. It’s not that he is an opponent of intervention. The Libyans can tell you that. It’s that his reasons for intervening fall completely outside the grid of national interests.
The anti-war activist as pacifist is largely a myth. There are a few anti-war activists who oppose all wars, but mostly they just oppose America. Obama, who got his foot up the political ladder by flirting with the anti-war movement, falls into that category. Obama isn’t opposed to wars. He’s opposed to America.
Obama is an ideological interventionist, not a nationalist interventionist. And despite his multilateralist rhetoric, he isn’t your usual globalist either. Instead he uses national and international power as platforms for pursuing ideological goals without any regard to national or international interests.
That is true of both his foreign and domestic policy.
Obama’s foreign policy is issue oriented, just like his domestic policy is. There is no national agenda, only a leftist agenda. America is just a power platform for pursuing policy goals.
Domestically, Obama does not care about fixing the economy. The economy is a vehicle for pursuing social justice, environmental justice and all the many unjust justices of the left. It has no innate value. Likewise national security and power have no value except as tools for promoting leftist policies.
Obama thinks of the ideological issue first. Then he packages it as a national interest for popular consumption. It’s a Wilsonian approach that is not only far more extreme than the policies of most White House occupants have been, but also more detached.
Wilson couldn’t understand that American power couldn’t exist without a national interest. Obama and his staffers see America as just another transnational institution that they happen to be running, not all that different than a corporation, non-profit or UN body. They don’t see it as a country, but a series of policymaking offices that reach across the country and the world.
It’s a globalized mode of thinking that is common among Eurocrats, but has never been represented in the Oval Office before.
Obama doesn’t just oppose America. He disregards it as an outmoded institution. When confronted with the border crisis or the rise of ISIS, he doesn’t see them in terms of American interests or even world interests, but in the narrow terms of leftist ideology.
He will use national and international institutions to promote LGBT rights or Green Energy. He won’t however get involved in actively using them for national security unless he absolutely has to in order to protect his own political power.
To a transnational mindset, institutions exist to promote issues. America is only of value to the extent that it can promote the left’s agenda. To the extent that it doesn’t, America is dead weight.
Once Bush was out, Iraq ceased to matter because it was no longer a packaged issue. It couldn’t be broken down into a simplistic Blame Bush policy agenda. And so Obama stopped paying attention.
Now Iraq is getting in the way of the things that he really cares about, such as illegal alien amnesty, dismantling Israel and transsexual bathrooms, because these are ideologically meaningful issues to him. And like every other obstacle, whether it was the national debt or the VA scandal, he pretends to take them seriously until a sufficient amount of time passes and he can dismiss them as “phony scandals”.
Obama didn’t just ignore Iraq because he wanted to avoid any connections to a war that he had helped make unpopular. He ignored Iraq because it had nothing to offer his ideology. If Iraq had a secular dictator, he might have been interested. If Islamists were fighting to take over from that dictator, there would have been planes and diplomats flying over Baghdad before you could shout, “Allah Akbar.”
It’s why he backed the Islamist overthrow of Arab governments, but not the popular protests against Islamist governments in Iran or Turkey.
But Iraq was a battle between Sunni and Shiite Islamists, backed by the Saudis and Iran. Even the left has trouble picking a side between two anti-American Islamic factions who are divided over theological issues, instead of practical things like dialectical materialism and the discourse of othering. In a pinch they pick the Iranian side as being more anti-American, but the prospect of American intervention on the same side as the Shiites confuses them even further and they have to go lie down in a dark room.
When there is no clear ideological guide, Obama takes meetings with generals, tunes them out, plays with his phone and delays doing something for as long as possible. That was the pattern in Afghanistan and Syria. Ideologues can’t function without an ideological orientation. When the ideological value of a problem is unclear, Obama either freezes up, like a robot whose manual was misplaced, or ignores it.
Obama’s only approach to Iraq came from Bush era opposition. Without Bush to push against, he had no idea what if anything should be done about Iraq. He still doesn’t. Instead he resorts to the antiquated attacks on Bush because it’s the last time that Iraq made any sense to him. It was the last time that the left had successfully packaged Iraq into a simple scenario in which there was only one right choice.
Ideologues are not big on independent thinking. When everything is politicized, they lose the ability to see the things that can’t be neatly assigned to one side or another.  America is being run by a blinkered ideologue who ignores issues that fall outside his ideological spectrum.
Those problems that he doesn’t cause directly and intentionally through his ideology, he causes indirectly and unintentionally by being unable to operate outside his ideology except in an emergency. Like the difference between the pilot who flies a plane deliberately into a mountain and the one who accidentally flies it into a mountain, there is a gap in motivation, but not in outcome.
History will not record why Obama screwed everything up. It will only record that he did it.

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Obama’s Secret Directive Supporting Global Islamism

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Obama’s Secret Directive Supporting Global Islamism

Posted By Raymond Ibrahim On July 4, 2014 

A recent Gulf News report sheds some light on how and why the United States helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist allies to power, followed by all the subsequent chaos and atrocities in the Mideast region.
Large portions of the report follow with my commentary interspersed for added context:

Dubai: For the past decade, two successive US administrations have maintained close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Libya, to name just the most prominent cases.
The Obama administration conducted an assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2010 and 2011, beginning even before the events known as the “Arab Spring” erupted in Tunisia and in Egypt. The President personally issued Presidential Study Directive 11 (PSD-11) in 2010, ordering an assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood and other “political Islamist” movements, including the ruling AKP in Turkey, ultimately concluding that the United States should shift from its longstanding policy of supporting “stability” in the Middle East and North Africa (that is, support for “stable regimes” even if they were authoritarian), to a policy of backing “moderate” Islamic political movements (italics added for emphasis throughout).

And we have certainly witnessed this shift.  Chaos and the Islamic ascendancy in the Middle East and North Africa never flourished as under the Obama administration—and precisely because the administration shifted from supporting stability under secular-minded autocrats.
The most significant example of this is how the Obama administration threw Hosni Mubarak—a U.S. ally for three decades—under the bus in order to support the Islamists, most specifically the Muslim Brotherhood.  And we saw how that ended—with another revolution, hailed as the largest revolution in human history, with the average Egyptian accusing Obama of being a terrorist supporter.

To this day, PSD-11 remains classified, in part because it reveals an embarrassingly naïve and uninformed view of trends in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region.

“Embarrassingly naïve and uninformed view” is synonymous with the “orthodox and mainstream view pushed forth by Mideast studies professors and academics,” especially those with political influence, such as the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies of Georgetown University, in Washington D.C.  Such programs, which I’m only too well acquainted with, begin with false—that is, “embarrassingly naïve and uninformed”—premises, namely: that the source of all the region’s woes are (formerly) U.S.-propped autocrats (reality is that dictators don’t create such societies but rather are the natural outcome of Islamic societies and are the ones most prone to keeping law and order—compare Iraq under Saddam and Iraq now, as a “democracy,” with “ISIS” proclaiming a caliphate).  Mideast academics have also long spearheaded the idea that there are “moderate” Islamists and “radical” Islamists, and that the U.S. should work with the former (in reality they are all radical—to be an Islamist is to be radical—the only difference is that the “moderate” Islamists don’t wear their radicalism on their sleeves, even as they work toward the same goals that the more open “radicals” work for, namely, a Sharia-enforcing caliphate).

The revelations were made by Al Hewar centre in Washington, DC, which obtained the documents in question.

This too is significant. As Daniel Greenfield writes: “Al-Hewar, which actually got hold of the documents, is linked to the International Institute of Islamic Thought… which is a Muslim Brotherhood front group.  Figures in the Muslim Brotherhood had threatened to leak understandings with Obama Inc. This is the next best thing. It warns Obama that if he tries to forget about them, they can prove that the relationship was official policy.”
To be sure, after the ousting of the Brotherhood in Egypt, several Brotherhood members made, sometimes not so veiled, threats to the Obama administration if it turned its back on them, including top ranking Brotherhood member, Khairat al-Shatter’s son.

Through an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, thousands of pages of documentation of the US State Department’s dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood are in the process of being declassified and released to the public.

If and when these thousands of pages are released, they should be combed through, as no doubt answers to many of the Obama administration’s hitherto inexplicable policies in the Middle East will be found—to wit:

US State Department documents obtained under the FOIA confirm that the Obama administration maintained frequent contact and ties with the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood. At one point, in April 2012, US officials arranged for the public relations director of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammad Gaair, to come to Washington to speak at a conference on “Islamists in Power” hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Indeed, despite the administration’s later insistence that it did not favor the Islamists over other parties, anecdotes implying otherwise were constantly on display.  In Egypt alone, U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson, due to her close ties not just to President Morsi, but the Muslim Brotherhood in general, became such a hated figure in the months before last year’s anti-Brotherhood revolution.

A State Department Cable classified “Confidential” report says the following: “Benghazi Meeting With Libyan Muslim Brotherhood: On April 2 [2012] Mission Benghazi met with a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood steering committee, who will speak at the April 5 Carnegie Endowment ‘Islamist in Power’ conference in Washington, D.C. He described the Muslim Brotherhood’s decision to form a political party as both an opportunity and an obligation in post-revolution Libya after years of operating underground.

These documents on the Obama administration’s connections with the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya are especially disturbing in the context of earlier revelations made in Arabic media, including that the Brotherhood’s Libyan wing was very much involved in the 9/11 Benghazi U.S. consulate attack.

Another State Department paper marked “Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU)” contained talking points for Deputy Secretary of State William Burns’ scheduled July 14, 2012 meeting with Mohammad Sawan, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was also head of the Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction Party. The document is heavily redacted, but nevertheless provides clear indication of Washington’s sympathies for the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood as a major political force in the post-Gaddafi Libya. The talking points recommended that Secretary Burns tell Sawan that the US government entities “share your party’s concerns in ensuring that a comprehensive transitional justice process is undertaken to address past violations so that they do not spark new discontent.”

“To address past violations so that they do not spark new discontent” is another way of stating another popular position among Mideast professors, namely that whenever Islamists engage in violence or terrorism, that is proof positive that they have a legitimate grievance, hence the US must “appease” lest it “spark new discontent” (perhaps the true backdrop of Benghazi).

The Burns paper described the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood: “Prior to last year’s revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood was banned for over three decades and its members were fiercely pursued by the Gaddafi regime.

In light of all the chaos the Islamists have been responsible for in Libya, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, et al—is it now obvious why Arab autocrats like Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and currently Bashar Assad have always “banned” and “fiercely pursued” the Brotherhood and its affiliates?

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Tom Engelhardt-Overwrought Empire

Overwrought Empire
The Discrediting of U.S. Military Power

by Tom Engelhardt

October 8, 2012 Americans lived in a "victory culture" for much of the twentieth century.  You could say that we experienced an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism -- think of it as the real "American Century" -- from World War I to the end of the Cold War, with time off for a destructive stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam too shocking to absorb or shake off. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it all seemed so obvious.  Fate had clearly dealt Washington a royal flush.  It was victory with a capital V.  The United States was, after all, the last standing superpower, after centuries of unceasing great power rivalries on the planet.  It had a military beyond compare and no enemy, hardly a "rogue state," on the horizon.  It was almost unnerving, such clear sailing into a dominant future, but a moment for the ages nonetheless.  Within a decade, pundits in Washington were hailing us as "the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome." And here’s the odd thing: in a sense, little has changed since then and yet everything seems different.  Think of it as the American imperial paradox: everywhere there are now "threats" against our well-being which seem to demand action and yet nowhere are there commensurate enemies to go with them.  Everywhere the U.S. military still reigns supreme by almost any measure you might care to apply; and yet -- in case the paradox has escaped you -- nowhere can it achieve its goals, however modest. At one level, the American situation should simply take your breath away.  Never before in modern history had there been an arms race of only one or a great power confrontation of only one.  And at least in military terms, just as the neoconservatives imagined in those early years of the twenty-first century, the United States remains the "sole superpower" or even "hyperpower" of planet Earth. The Planet’s Top Gun And yet the more dominant the U.S. military becomes in its ability to destroy and the more its forces are spread across the globe, the more the defeats and semi-defeats pile up, the more the missteps and mistakes grow, the more the strains show, the more the suicides rise, the more the nation’s treasure disappears down a black hole -- and in response to all of this, the more moves the Pentagon makes. A great power without a significant enemy?  You might have to go back to the Roman Empire at its height or some Chinese dynasty in full flower to find anything like it.  And yet Osama bin Laden is dead.  Al-Qaeda is reportedly a shadow of its former self.  The great regional threats of the moment, North Korea and Iran, are regimes held together by baling wire and the suffering of their populaces.  The only incipient great power rival on the planet, China, has just launched its first aircraft carrier, a refurbished Ukrainian throw away from the 1990s on whose deck the country has no planes capable of landing. The U.S. has 1,000 or more bases around the world; other countries, a handful.  The U.S. spends as much on its military as the next 14 powers (mostly allies) combined.  In fact, it’s investing an estimated $1.45 trillion to produce and operate a single future aircraft, the F-35 -- more than any country, the U.S. included, now spends on its national defense annually. The U.S. military is singular in other ways, too.  It alone has divided the globe -- the complete world -- into six "commands."  With (lest anything be left out) an added command, Stratcom, for the heavens and another, recently established, for the only space not previously occupied, cyberspace, where we’re already unofficially "at war."  No other country on the planet thinks of itself in faintly comparable military terms. When its high command plans for its future "needs," thanks to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, they repair (don’t say "retreat") to a military base south of the capital where they argue out their future and war-game various possible crises while striding across a map of the world larger than a basketball court.  What other military would come up with such a method? The president now has at his command not one, but two private armies.  The first is the CIA, which in recent years has been heavily militarized, is overseen by a former four-star general (who calls the job "living the dream"), and is running its own private assassination campaigns and drone air wars throughout the Greater Middle East.  The second is an expanding elite, the Joint Special Operations Command, cocooned inside the U.S. military, members of whom are now deployed to hot spots around the globe. The U.S. Navy, with its 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carrier task forces, is dominant on the global waves in a way that only the British Navy might once have been; and the U.S. Air Force controls the global skies in much of the world in a totally uncontested fashion. (Despite numerous wars and conflicts, the last American plane possibly downed in aerial combat was in the first Gulf War in 1991.) Across much of the global south, there is no sovereign space Washington’s drones can’t penetrate to kill those judged by the White House to be threats. In sum, the U.S. is now the sole planetary Top Gun in a way that empire-builders once undoubtedly fantasized about, but that none from Genghis Khan on have ever achieved: alone and essentially uncontested on the planet.  In fact, by every measure (except success), the likes of it has never been seen. Blindsided by Predictably Unintended Consequences By all the usual measuring sticks, the U.S. should be supreme in a historically unprecedented way.  And yet it couldn’t be more obvious that it’s not, that despite all the bases, elite forces, private armies, drones, aircraft carriers, wars, conflicts, strikes, interventions, and clandestine operations, despite a labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy that never seems to stop growing and into which we pour a minimum of $80 billion a year, nothing seems to work out in an imperially satisfying way.  It couldn’t be more obvious that this is not a glorious dream, but some kind of ever-expanding imperial nightmare. This should, of course, have been self-evident since at least early 2004, less than a year after the Bush administration invaded and occupied Iraq, when the roadside bombs started to explode and the suicide bombings to mount, while the comparisons of the United States to Rome and of a prospective Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East to the Pax Romana vanished like a morning mist on a blazing day.  Still, the wars against relatively small, ill-armed sets of insurgents dragged toward their dismally predictable ends.  (It says the world that, after almost 11 years of war, the 2,000th U.S. military death in Afghanistan occurred at the hands of an Afghan "ally" in an "insider attack.")  In those years, Washington continued to be regularly blindsided by the unintended consequences of its military moves. Surprises -- none pleasant -- became the order of the day and victories proved vanishingly rare. One thing seems obvious: a superpower military with unparalleled capabilities for one-way destruction no longer has the more basic ability to impose its will anywhere on the planet.  Quite the opposite, U.S. military power has been remarkably discredited globally by the most pitiful of forces.  From Pakistan to Honduras, just about anywhere it goes in the old colonial or neocolonial world, in those regions known in the contested Cold War era as the Third World, resistance of one unexpected sort or another arises and failure ensues in some often long-drawn-out and spectacular fashion. Given the lack of enemies -- a few thousand jihadis, a small set of minority insurgencies, a couple of feeble regional powers -- why this is so, what exactly the force is that prevents Washington’s success, remains mysterious.  Certainly, it’s in some way related to the more than half-century of decolonization movements, rebellions, and insurgencies that were a feature of the previous century. It also has something to do with the way economic heft has spread beyond the U.S., Europe, and Japan -- with the rise of the "tigers" in Asia, the explosion of the Chinese and Indian economies, the advances of Brazil and Turkey, and the movement of the planet toward some kind of genuine economic multipolarity.  It may also have something to do with the end of the Cold War, which put an end as well to several centuries of imperial or great power competition and left the sole "victor," it now seems clear, heading toward the exits wreathed in self-congratulation. Explain it as you will, it’s as if the planet itself, or humanity, had somehow been inoculated against the imposition of imperial power, as if it now rejected it whenever and wherever applied.  In the previous century, it took a half-nation, North Korea, backed by Russian supplies and Chinese troops to fight the U.S. to a draw, or a popular insurgent movement backed by a local power, North Vietnam, backed in turn by the Soviet Union and China to defeat American power.  Now, small-scale minority insurgencies, largely using roadside bombs and suicide bombers, are fighting American power to a draw (or worse) with no great power behind them at all. Think of the growing force that resists such military might as the equivalent of the "dark matter" in the universe.  The evidence is in.  We now know (or should know) that it’s there, even if we can’t see it. Washington's Wars on Autopilot After the last decade of military failures, stand-offs, and frustrations, you might think that this would be apparent in Washington.  After all, the U.S. is now visibly an overextended empire, its sway waning from the Greater Middle East to Latin America, the limits of its power increasingly evident.  And yet, here’s the curious thing: two administrations in Washington have drawn none of the obvious conclusions, and no matter how the presidential election turns out, it’s already clear that, in this regard, nothing will change. Even as military power has proven itself a bust again and again, our policymakers have come to rely ever more completely on a military-first response to global problems.  In other words, we are not just a classically overextended empire, but also an overwrought one operating on some kind of militarized autopilot.  Lacking is a learning curve.  By all evidence, it’s not just that there isn’t one, but that there can’t be one. Washington, it seems, now has only one mode of thought and action, no matter who is at the helm or what the problem may be, and it always involves, directly or indirectly, openly or clandestinely, the application of militarized force. Nor does it matter that each further application only destabilizes some region yet more or undermines further what once were known as "American interests." Take Libya, as an example.  It briefly seemed to count as a rare American military success story: a decisive intervention in support of a rebellion against a brutal dictator -- so brutal, in fact, that the CIA previously shipped "terrorist suspects," Islamic rebels fighting against the Gaddafi regime, there for torture.  No U.S. casualties resulted, while American and NATO air strikes were decisive in bringing a set of ill-armed, ill-organized rebels to power. In the world of unintended consequences, however, the fall of Gaddafi sent Tuareg mercenaries from his militias, armed with high-end weaponry, across the border into Mali.  There, when the dust settled, the whole northern part of the country had come unhinged and fallen under the sway of Islamic extremists and al-Qaeda wannabes as other parts of North Africa threatened to destabilize.  At the same time, of course, the first American casualties of the intervention occurred when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died in an attack on the Benghazi consulate and a local "safe house." With matters worsening regionally, the response couldn’t have been more predictable. As Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post recently reported, in ongoing secret meetings, the White House is planning for military operations against al-Qaeda-in-the-Magreb (North Africa), now armed with weaponry pillaged from Gaddafi’s stockpiles.  These plans evidently include the approach used in Yemen (U.S. special forces on the ground and CIA drone strikes), or a Somalia "formula" (drone strikes, special forces operations, CIA operations, and the support of African proxy armies), or even at some point "the possibility of direct U.S. intervention." In addition, Eric Schmitt and David Kilpatrick of the New York Times report that the Obama administration is "preparing retaliation" against those it believes killed the U.S. ambassador, possibly including "drone strikes, special operations raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden, and joint missions with Libyan authorities."  The near certainty that, like the previous intervention, this next set of military actions will only further destabilize the region with yet more unpleasant surprises and unintended consequences hardly seems to matter.  Nor does the fact that, in crude form, the results of such acts are known to us ahead of time have an effect on the unstoppable urge to plan and order them. Such situations are increasingly legion across the Greater Middle East and elsewhere.  Take one other tiny example: Iraq, from which, after almost a decade-long military disaster, the "last" U.S. units essentially fled in the middle of the night as 2011 ended.  Even in those last moments, the Obama administration and the Pentagon were still trying to keep significant numbers of U.S. troops there (and, in fact, did manage to leave behind possibly several hundred as trainers of elite Iraqi units).  Meanwhile, Iraq has been supportive of the embattled Syrian regime and drawn ever closer to Iran, even as its own sectarian strife has ratcheted upward.  Having watched this unsettling fallout from its last round in the country, according to the New York Times, the U.S. is now negotiating an agreement "that could result in the return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on training missions. At the request of the Iraqi government, according to General Caslen, a unit of Army Special Operations soldiers was recently deployed to Iraq to advise on counterterrorism and help with intelligence." Don’t you just want to speak to those negotiators the way you might to a child: No, don’t do that!  The urge to return to the scene of their previous disaster, however, seems unstaunchable.  You could offer various explanations for why our policymakers, military and civilian, continue in such a repetitive -- and even from an imperial point of view -- self-destructive vein in situations where unpleasant surprises are essentially guaranteed and lack of success a given.  Yes, there is the military-industrial complex to be fed.  Yes, we are interested in the control of crucial resources, especially energy, and so on. But it’s probably more reasonable to say that a deeply militarized mindset and the global maneuvers that go with it are by now just part of the way of life of a Washington eternally "at war."  They are the tics of a great power with the equivalent of Tourette's Syndrome.  They happen because they can’t help but happen, because they are engraved in the policy DNA of our national security complex, and can evidently no longer be altered.  In other words, they can’t help themselves. That’s the only logical conclusion in a world where it has become ever less imaginable to do the obvious, which is far less or nothing at all.  (Northern Chad?  When did it become crucial to our well being?) Downsizing the mission?  Inconceivable.  Thinking the unthinkable?  Don’t even give it a thought! What remains is, of course, a self-evident formula for disaster on autopilot. But don’t tell Washington. It won’t matter. Its denizens can’t take it in. Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, his history of the Cold War, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.  Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt

USA-The Debatacle: War and Thieves of the Uniparty

The Debatacle: War and Thieves of the Uniparty

Cindy Sheehan

October 6, 2012 I have a brain seizing, jaw cracking toothache right now. I prefer it to watching the debates... BUT! Jake had a chance for extra credit for his History class to watch and answer a few questions about it. I opted to watch the Democracy Now version with Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson Tivo'd in, thinking it would be mildly less painful. Not by much, not by much. The two main characters in the play both babbled a LOT about taxes. Trickle down business is better than trickle down government. Huh, one wants to make a profit off me, the other to spend my own money on me. In the end? One or the other, or both said this: "When it comes to our tax code, [my opponent] and I both agree that our corporate tax rate is too high." "We agree; we ought to bring the tax rates down, and I do, both for corporations and for individuals." Sure one exuded more confidence; by confidence I mean rude interrupting motherfucker, and the other seemed a little less so. In the end, they were both talking about the speed with which they will continue to make cuts on the things that help people, and give to the rich to create "jobs." Lemme look at my watch here, but didn't they give them a bazillion of my dollars for the last 12 years to do that, and aren't I sitting here unemployed with no health insurance to fix my tooth? Maybe the infection is in my brain already, because tweedles dee and dum looked the same to me. Education? Both support vouchers and moving our school system to the for-profit private sector. Both think loan-sharking is the price we must pay if we want a higher education. I had to laugh when one of the twins said something about 2 year trade schools. Ahh, yes, because there are so many trade jobs out there. Be a chef! Be a bookkeeper! Work for minimum wage to pay off that edumacation! Neither of them talked about technology and research, and that we should all be allowed education if we want to survive in this world - in fact one seemed downright embarrassed to support green energy. I hear pre-school was meme. Well, here's one for ya, thing one and thing two left us covered in goo said more oil and gas are good for you one said "More holes!" and one said "More coal!" well frack one and frack two! neither one has a soul! Now Stein and Anderson had good things to say; yet neither inspired me much. There are so many elephants even they leave in the room. We need to nationalize energy. Period. No ifs, ands, buts or maybe's. The d-shade bragged about more drilling, the r-shade wants it in more public land. The very biggest suck of all on our economy is our Wars, That's where all the debt comes from, that's where all the money goes, that's the Mastodon of elephants. In an economic debate, where the hell was that discussion? Stein alluded to it, Rocky dodged it some, although Rocky Anderson had a great moment when he quipped, "Certainly, our government is supposed to keep us safe, but more and more, United States citizens are worried about being safe from our government." Word. Stein expanded with, "Under the Obama White House, which basically codified the violations of George Bush, the attacks on our privacy rights, on First Amendment rights, the criminalization of the right to protest, the National Defense Authorization Act in which the President has claimed the right to incarcerate us, basically, without charge or trial, and to do that at his pleasure without having to justify that in any way." I loved both of their replies, except they weren't replies at all to the question - about the role of Government - and after both of the other guys banged the National Security drum to suck up more War Machine donations, they missed the opportunity to speak against it.. I mean, what the fuck? We spend 1.19 Trillion a year on War. I did the math, That is 3,260,273,972.60 a day on murder. Three and a quarter BILLION a DAY. And change, if you count mere millions change. We spend about 6 billion a year on welfare. Two days of war would pay for a years welfare. We spend about 550 billion a year on medicare. 5 months of war equals a year of medicare. One year of war could pay for 316 years of welfare.One year of war could pay for 3 years of of medicare. Think about that. You see, in the debacle called a debate, hard questions are outlawed. No one DARE breach the Pachyderm Parade dancing across our faces. Neither puppet will do anything but move right, serve their Predatory Capitalist masters, and answer vetted questions created to showcase how much they "care" about America and selling us our ass-raping with smiles. You see, for most of our budget to be tied up in MURDER? It is totally required that our attention to be misdirected to soundbytes and bullshit. This wasn't a debate. This was reality-tv: highly scripted kabuki theater for the masses. No 3rd party was allowed, no one answered questions, they just stayed on talking points. The Real War, the foundation of all wars - is Class War. The debates were part of that War on us, keeping the illusion we actually have a democracy alive - all while lying about how they are going to "help" us by aiding and abetting the Robber Class. I can't wait until the show is over. You know, so we can quit running around with our hair on fire about what tweedle dee and tweedle dum said and get back to fighting the real problem. Capitalism is war. Hungry children are are victims of war. People dying of simple infections are victims of war. My toothache is part of the conflict. Your job loss is collateral damage. And, while our first world problems are growing? All across the globe people are being splattered into piles of meat and gore and we are paying people to do it. We have become killing machines enabled by the very lying bastards smirking across our screens last night. I'm done with debates. I'm done with debating my peers about it too. I am tired of Lesser of the Two Evils, and tired of trying to explain to people that we MUST vote for 3rd party candidates to prove we are not hapless victims and we can take control. I am done, too, with fighting with those who somehow think that withholding their vote is noble - it merely leaves less of the population to manipulate.  Both Romney and Obama are thieves making war on us and the world.  My son's report was astute - and you have to love the guilelessness of children - their in class discussion was mostly kids saying "all politicians lie." He got a great grade.  Next time? He's on his own.

Extradited to a Future of Torture in a U.S. Supermax Prison

Extradited to a Future of Torture in a U.S. Supermax Prison

Laura Rovner

October 7, 2012 Last week, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights rejected appeals from five terror suspects challenging their extraditions from Britain to the United States. The unanimous decision from the judges affirmed the Court’s earlier ruling that "detention conditions and length of sentences of five alleged terrorists would not amount to ill-treatment" if they were extradited to the U.S. and held in solitary confinement in ADX, the U.S.’s only federal supermax prison. The decision is profoundly troubling, not only its outcome, but also the process by which the Court rendered its decision and in the public silences surrounding it. The decision stands in stark contrast to international opinion that has grown increasingly critical of the use of prolonged isolation, viewing it in some instances as a form of torture. Indeed, the week after the Court released the decision, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture resoundingly condemned it: "As we speak my office is sending a communication, dealing with the possible extradition to the US of five people who will be subjected to solitary confinement…The UN Convention Against Torture states you cannot extradite or deport someone to any place if he or she could be tortured." He concluded, "I think there [are] very good arguments that solitary confinement and SAMs ["special administrative measures," which impose severe restrictions on communication with other inmates or the outside world) would constitute torture and prevent the UK from extraditing these men." Yet in the days since the European Court issued its decision, the silence from human rights organizations and the American media has been deafening. The silence is especially striking in light of the considerable—and warranted—criticism of the use of prolonged solitary confinement in correctional facilities other than our federal prisons. This past week alone saw condemnation of California’s supermax prisons in a report by Amnesty International that criticized conditions in the strongest terms—conditions that are, in the main, nearly the same as those at ADX. Other reports have highlighted the detrimental mental health effects of prolonged solitary confinement. And at a time when the conditions of the men detained in Guantanamo still appropriately command significant attention from human rights advocates who have repeatedly decried the lack of accountability for Bush-era torture, the discussion of ongoing torture in our domestic federal prisons has received significantly less coverage. It’s hard not to wonder whether the silence from human rights groups about the European Court’s decision is born of the same mindset underlying the decision itself, namely, the resistance to believing that the U.S. could be engaging in torture in its federal prisons. Or perhaps this abuse is harder to see because it runs counter to current campaigns focused on the states, on massively overcrowded California prisons or deep South prisons that seem like holdovers from Jim Crow days—with the implicit corollary that federal penitentiaries are well run and well regulated. Maybe the reluctance to speak stems from the still-pervasive Islamophobia that makes us blind to the treatment of Muslims, especially those who are being prosecuted for terrorist crimes. Given the prioritization of advocacy urging the closure of Guantanamo and the prosecution of terror suspects in the federal courts, many human rights groups and advocates have been reluctant to scrutinize and speak out against the practices in our federal prisons for fear of complicating their message. If torture is happening at ADX, what does it mean for these groups to be calling for men to be tried in the federal system? Opened in 1994 and run by the federal government with its roster of famous prisoners, the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, or ADX, in Florence, Colorado, holds many people convicted of serious crimes. And so it becomes harder to see, and to condemn, the torture that lies there. When the prison is located in the United States, rather than China, when it is run by the federal government, not some Arizona sheriff, when the prison has state-of-the-art technology and gleaming floors, not overcrowded cells and decrepit facilities, it is harder to believe that torture happens there. In holding that ADX conditions don’t violate the European Convention on Human Rights, the Court’s highlighting of certain details is telling. The judges specifically noted, for example, that ADX prisoners "received a free, daily copy of USA Today," and "have access to fifty television channels and seven FM radio channels." The implication, of course, is that torture cannot, does not, happen in such modern places. But it’s important to entertain the idea that maybe, sometimes, this is also what torture looks like. In judging other countries’ human rights records, the State Department has regularly treated the use of prolonged solitary confinement as a human rights violation. In 2009 for instance, the State Department Human Rights report condemned countries from Indonesia to Iran to Israel to Yemen for the use of solitary confinement. And with good reason. Held alone in their cells, sometimes for years on end, the toll of isolation is unbearable and devastating. But the wreckage, though sometimes physical, is more often mental--and therefore less visible or quantifiable. What if torture is, as a former warden described ADX, a "clean version of hell"? Indeed, the European Court was presented with considerable evidence detailing the isolating conditions at ADX. An ADX cell is an 87-square-foot universe of poured concrete within which inhabitants must eat, read, write, sleep, walk, urinate and defecate 23 hours a day. The only time prisoners are regularly allowed outside of their cells is for an hour of limited exercise, which occurs either in a comparably small cell that is empty except for a pull-up bar, or in an outdoor, kennel-like cage that is smaller than the U.S. government’s space standards for farm animals. Because the warden can cancel recreation for any reason he deems appropriate, prisoners sometimes go for days without ever leaving their cells. ADX was specifically designed to limit all communication between the people it houses. Accordingly, its cells have thick concrete walls and two doors, one with bars and a second that is made of solid steel. The only "contact" ADX prisoners have with other inmates is by attempting to shout through their toilets, vents or walls. Perhaps most significant for many Muslim prisoners, religious practice at ADX is severely curtailed. Services are held on closed-circuit television and group prayer is strictly prohibited. In order to reach its "no ill treatment" conclusion, the European Court relied on misleading information and characterizations provided by the U.S. government about both the conditions at ADX and the amount of time prisoners are confined there. In their submissions to the Court, for example, the U.S./U.K. characterized the ADX solitary confinement units described above as "general population units." "Out-of-cell recreation" is used as a euphemism for solitary exercise in a cage, and the cages themselves are referred to "secure, individualized recreation areas." The US describes these cages as having "walls that do not obstruct the weather," but fails to mention that the walls prohibit a prisoner from seeing anything other than cement. Communication between staff and prisoners at ADX, described by the US as "interacting with an inmate," omits the fact that that any such "interaction" takes place through the solid steel door and/or the bars of the prisoner’s cell. And the BOP’s representation that ADX prisoners are able to "talk in moderate tones to other inmates," is belied by other evidence showing that prisoners must shout to communicate with each other between cells, or put their faces in air vents and toilets in order to speak or hear one another. Perhaps most egregious is the U.S.’s representation that "seriously mentally ill prisoners are not housed at ADX," especially given the BOP’s seemingly contrary acknowledgement that "a diagnosis of bipolar affective disorder, depression, schizophrenia, or post-traumatic stress disorder would not preclude a designation to the ADX." Taking the U.S. government’s representations of the conditions at ADX at face value, the European Court concluded that "[e]ven in the highest security units at ADX, there were opportunities for communication with other inmates, recreation, education, religious expression and engagement with the outside world. The mental and social needs of inmates were appropriately catered for and inmates could not be described as being detained in conditions that amounted to sensory isolation, still less indefinite solitary confinement, whether total or relative." Also troubling was the European Court’s reliance on the U.S.’s representations about how long prisoners are held at ADX. After the Court made a series of requests to the British government during 2011 for details about detention at ADX–requests that the U.S. government initially said would be impossible to accommodate–the U.S. finally submitted a "random sample" of 30 prisoners, which purported to demonstrate that average stay for a prisoner at ADX is 3.18 years.  Relying on this "sample" information from the U.S. government, the European Court found that there were "practical and effective" means for ADX prisoners to enter the step-down program, which could "lead to transfer at another prison." Perhaps the Court’s conclusions should not be surprising, given its refusal to consider rebuttal evidence submitted by the applicants–evidence that demonstrated that the U.S.’s representations significantly understated the amount of time the average prisoner spends in ADX. Included in the rebuttal evidence was a much larger sample of 110 ADX prisoners, which identified a significantly longer average solitary confinement length of 8.2 years. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the European Court gave short shrift to the applicants’ evidence regarding pretrial conditions of confinement. That evidence showed that others who have been prosecuted in the federal courts for terrorism-related offenses have been kept in solitary confinement for years before they are tried, sometimes under especially restrictive communication restrictions known as Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). SAMs prisoners are held virtually incommunicado in extraordinarily isolating conditions–conditions that the U.S. has intentionally imposed in Guantanamo and elsewhere to induce confessions. The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, suggested as much in his declaration in Padilla v. Rumsfeld, where he stated that José Padilla’s total isolation in a military brig for nearly a year was necessary to build the "dependency" interrogators required to exploit his intelligence value. Despite all of this, ultimately, the European Court seemed unable to entertain the possibility of U.S. torture. Instead, it accepted at face value submissions from the U.S. that failed to account honestly for the brutal conditions of confinement and isolation at ADX that regularly contribute to acute and long-term psychological damage to prisoners housed there. The U.S. whitewashed the conditions at ADX, with the European Court as a knowing complicitor.  It is incumbent on those who know better to speak out. Laura Rovner is associate professor of law and director of clinical programs at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law. She directs DU’s Civil Rights Clinic, which has challenged on Constitutional grounds the conditions of confinement at ADX Florence and the supermax Colorado State Penitentiary.

The US legacy of Bagram prison

The US legacy of Bagram prison

by Pam Bailey

The father of Hamidullah Khan, who was 14 when he was abducted and handed over to the U.S., relates his story October 8, 2012 Abdul was just 20 years old when he drove his father to the medical clinic one day for an exam. He dropped his father off, then left to run a few errands, saying nonchalantly that he would be back by the time the tests were done. But..he never showed up at the clinic. It was as if he had disappeared into thin air. His family agonized over what had happened to the young man, who – as the oldest son -- had worked as a laborer to support his parents and siblings in the wake of his father’s disability. The family fell into debt as a result, and his brother fell ill. It was more than a year later when the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) informed them that Abdul was alive, but in prison, being held indefinitely, without formal charge or trial. You're probably thinking the captor is Israel, and the victim is Palestinian, because this narrative sounds oh so familiar. But actually, this incident occurred in Pakistan. And the jailer that kidnapped Abdul Halim Saifullah off the streets of Karachi, then imprisoned him without a word to anyone, access to a lawyer or trial, was the United States. Abdul disappeared in 2005, and it wasn’t until 2007 that his family was finally told where their son was being held – the infamous Bagram prison, the largest detention facility in the world and known as "Afghanistan's Guantanamo." In January of this year, Afghan investigators accused the U.S. Army of abusing detainees at Bagram, including torture. Although the CodePink delegation is in Pakistan to publicize the disastrous effects of U.S. drone attacks in the region of Waziristan, many organizations and individuals who have suffered at the hands of Americans have sought an "audience" with us, hoping that we will take on their cause as well when we return home. One of those organizations is the "Justice Project Pakistan," modeled after and mentored by the UK’s Reprieve. JPP advocates for the most vulnerable of prisoners – primarily those facing the death penalty or who are detained beyond the rule of law in secret prisons. Included among the latter are 37 Pakistanis – one as young as 16, who was seized in circumstances similar to Abdul’s at the age of just 14. Although the U.S. handed Bagram over to the Afghan government in September, the transition did not include prisoners from other countries, such as Pakistan, of which there are 52. (A side note: It also did not include more than 600 Afghans who were detained after the agreement was signed in March; they all remain in U.S. custody.) Sarah Belal interprets for the detainees’ families. Sarah Belal, an Oxford-trained lawyer and director of JPP, interpreted for a group of men whose brothers and sons are being held in Bagram. According to the men, some of the prisoners had been visiting Afghanistan for work or education, but others were in their hometowns in Pakistan. Many Americans do not realize that for years, the United States has been running "search-and-seize" operations in Pakistan as well, detaining these nationals for years without formal charge or trial. The longest has been there since 2002. When Sarah asked the men how long they had waited, thinking their relatives were dead, before learning from the ICRC that they were in Bagram, the answers ranged from six months to as long as two years. "Some have no idea why their son or brother was taken," Sarah said. "Others say their relative was mistaken for someone else, but they haven’t been released. No formal charges are ever filed, except for a label in an Excel sheet given to the Pakistani government, such as 'suspected member of Taliban’ or 'IED (improvised explosive device) manufacturer’." Once they learn of their loved ones’ whereabouts, the families are allowed to see them only by video conference, once every two months. They must travel to Islamabad, a long distance for many who live in more distant regions of Pakistan. When they arrive, poor Internet connections often mean the trip is for naught. When they do talk, or send letters, the prisoners are not permitted to discuss how they were seized or under what conditions they are being held. "We have been told by the few detainees who have been released that when there are first interned in Bagram, the prisoners are exposed to extreme temperatures, and the floors of their cages are covered with two feet of water," Sarah told us. "It is one to two months before the ICRC is allowed to see them, and then they are moved to their 'regular’ quarters." Their lawyers are never allowed direct access. The Pakistani prisoners are held together, in one big cage divided into small cubicles with only one open toilet for all 37. Teenagers are mixed with the adults. Fazal Karim, who was abducted in 2003 when he was traveling cross country for a business trip, was held in solitary confinement for the past five years. In 2011, the Pakistani embassy in Kabul announced that Fazal had been cleared for release. However, today, he is still in Bagram, with no explanation. "The Pakistani government has been no help," the father of 16-year-old Hamidullah Khan told us through Sarah. "We are Pakistani citizens, but we totally on our own, at the mercy of the United States." JPP has filed a petition with the Pakistani government on behalf of 10 of the detainees, including Abdul Halim Saifullah and Hamidullah Khan. In October 2011, a Pakistani justice ordered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to visit its citizens in Bagram. In February of this year, the High Court in Lahore directed the government of Pakistan to negotiate with the U.S. for the return of the detainees. However, no concrete results have yet been achieved, and on Sept. 25, the JPP proposed a draft memorandum of understanding which would, once signed by the U.S. and Pakistan, order the safe return of Pakistani citizens held in Bagram. The next hearing is scheduled for Oct. 16. Prisoners’ cases are reviewed behind closed doors every six months, and even when they are told they will be released, it can take weeks or longer before it becomes reality. "What is unsettling," Sarah told us, "is that prisoners often come home very fluent in English cuss words – with an American accent." What a legacy we are leaving the world – an encyclopedic knowledge of English profanity, among individuals often so damaged they either can no longer work as productive members of society or are so filled with hate they may still grow into that terrorist label we gave them.