Al Qaeda

President Obama: Don't Lecture China on Censorship

dlindorff — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:22:53 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of
non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of
strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president
himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US
troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk
about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian
style control over information.

Let’s just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000
tons of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of it
in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive
dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic
in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the
effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs and bullets
because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and
concrete bunker walls. It has refused to disclose where the weapons
were fired, and has denied US troops the tests that would show if they
have been contaminated. It has even resorted to having paid Pentagon
hacks surreptitiously libel, slander and otherwise undermine those
military sources and journalists who have tried to expose this scourge
(this reporter has been the target of such disinformation attacks).

But censorship in the US goes beyond these crude efforts at
government-directed control of information. In America, some of the
most potent censorship is done by the privately owned media—supposedly
a bastion of freedom of expression.

There is no reason why the US media cannot report on depleted
uranium and its deadly legacy in places where it has been used, such as
Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Kosovo, or on and around American
military bases from Maryland to Hawaii. And yet it does not. Just
recently, stories have appeared both on Britain’s SkyTV and in the Guardian newspaper,
reporting on an alarming rise in unusual birth defects and infant
cancers in Fallujah as well as in other Iraqi cities like Basra, Najaf,
Baghdad and Samara—all urban areas where there were major assaults by
US forces both in the initial invasion, when most of the DU weapons
were used, and later during fights against holed-up insurgent groups.

In Fallujah, the Guardian reports that birth defects are up by a
staggering 15 times normal—an increase of 1400%! While the article
doesn’t mention depleted uranium specifically, and says that doctors in
Fallujah have been "reluctant to attribute" the astonishing number of
birth defects to the massive assault on that city by US forces in late
2004, they do say those doctors cite “radiation and chemicals” which
were dumped on the city.

There is no such report about this in the US media.

Is that censorship? Of course it is.

The American government doesn’t tell CBS News or CNN not to report
this story, which amounts to a US war crime. It does not (at least
generally), contact the editors at the New York Times or the Washington
Post and say, “Don’t report on the infant mortality crisis in Iraq, or
on the possible connection to US weaponry” (Though the government did
ask and successfully get the Times to hold a story about the National
Security Agency's massive electronic spying program for a year, and
managed to pressure the Times' editors to kill a Times reporter's story
about President Bush's likely use of a hidden cueing device during the
2004 presidential debates). The editors of those news organizations
themselves most of the time simply decide that either the story is of
no importance to readers or they worry that they may be criticized
either by the government or by other media organizations for being
unpatriotic, or biased.

The end result of such a process of self-censorship, however, is
that the American public is as ignorant about certain things as someone
in China.

More ignorant in fact.

One thing I learned from living and working as a journalist and
journalism teacher in China back in the 1990s is that the Chinese
people, with their long experience of living in a totalitarian
dictatorship in which all media are owned and tightly controlled by the
state and the ruling Communist Party, are acutely aware that they are
being lied to and that the truth is being hidden from them.
Accordingly, they have learned to read between the lines, to pick up
subtle hints in news articles which honest journalists have learned how
to slip into their carefully controlled reports. They have also
developed a sophisticated private system of person-to-person reporting
called xiaodao xiaoxi or, literally, “back-alley news.” This
system used to be word-of-mouth between neighbors and friends. As
telephones became ubiquitous, it was done by phone, allowing
transmission over long distances quickly. Now there is the internet,
which, while it is systematically controlled via what has become known
as China’s “Great Firewall”—effectively all of China is like a vast
corporate “intranet” which blocks access to outside websites—still
allows the flow of email. This is nearly impossible to monitor,
particularly when the messages are not bulk mailed to large numbers of
addressees.

So in China, reports of corruption, of local rebellions or strikes,
of internal struggles within the government or party, or of important
news about the outside world that the government wants to keep at bay,
manage to circulate widely inside China despite a huge state censorship
apparatus.

This alternative highly-personal news network works because the
Chinese people know they are being lied to and kept in the dark, and
they want to break through that official shroud of secrecy and control.

In the US, in contrast, we have a public that for the most part is
blissfully unaware of the extent to which our news is being censored,
filtered and controlled. Like the President (who knows better), we
boast of our “free press,” and our open society, and indeed, as a
journalist, I am free to write what I want to write.

But given that most people get their news either from corporately
owned newspapers or from corporate radio and TV stations, it doesn’t
really matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment
write because it won’t appear in the corporate media. Since most
Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live in a
society with a free press and no censorship or control of information,
they don’t even bother to look beyond the information that is spoon-fed
to them by corporate media sources.

The result is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural
Jiangsu or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about
their own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites.
Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information she
or he could want is available, but one has to be first of all aware
that one isn't getting certain information via the obvious sources, and
then one has to want to get it, and make the effort to find it. For
most Americans, all three of these elements are missing.

The list of censored stories and issues in the US, about which the
American public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond
just the use of nasty weapons.

Do Americans know, for instance, that all the other modern western
Democracies in the world have some form of national health care—either
a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like
that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or
Switzerland—and that in all those countries, the systems are so popular
that they have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our
corporate media instead report on the crank critics of those systems
and allow us to believe they are hated by their citizens.

Do Americans know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of
living in the world—or even close? No. Because the American media
continue to portray the US as “number one.”

Do Americans know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA?
No. This important bit of information doesn’t get mentioned in the US
media, which always starts the organization’s history at 1988, when it
got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the arming of
the mujahadeen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani intelligence
service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and support resistance to the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

And of course, we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and
children that our beloved soldier “heroes” are conducting in Iraq and
Afghanistan in our name.

No censorship in America?

Mr. President, please. You may fool us, but at least don’t insult the intelligence of your Chinese audience.
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He spent seven
years in China and Hong Kong and Taiwan as a Fulbright journalism
professor and a correspondent for Businessweek magazine. He is author,
most recently, of "The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006)
and is the winner of a Project Censored award. His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Country Joe, Kenny Rogers and Obama

dlindorff — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:26:02 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Country Joe McDonald
said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two,
three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In
fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that
started out because the US didn't want the Commies to win a battle in
the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of
the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been
struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become
the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious--we had no
business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

Afghanistan is the same thing all over again. We "got in"
surreptitiously for the same reason. Russia had helped organize a coup
to take over what passed for a "central government" and had found
itself mired in a brutal war of occuptation, and the US had begun, back
in the '70s, organizing and providing arms to the forces fighting the
Russians, not because Afghanistan--a country even more remote and
meaningless in terms of US interests or security than Vietnam--had any
importance but because it was a way to "stick it to" the Russians in
the waning days of the Cold War. But things have a way of coming back
to bite you, and the folks we armed turned out not to like us very much
either. So when we helped set up the foreign fighters--mostly Arab
volunteers--in Afghanistan, we set up a force of people who saw us, in
their home countries, as the oppressor and backer of vile and corrupt
regimes back home. It was only a matter of time before they began
turning their attentions to us. When 9-11 happened, we went after these
people in Afghanistan, and the government of the Taliban, which we had
formerly helped to power. In short order, what we managed to do was
substitute ourselves for the Russians.

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Don't ask me. I don't give
a damn. And neither do most Americans. For a while, Afghanistan was the
"good war" in many Americans' minds, because they bought the lie that
conquering Afghanistan was necessary to defend the US from terrorism.
Of course that was silly. Terrorists don't need countries. They are as
mobile as a nuclear submarine or a flu virus. But once you put large
numbers of troops in a foreign country and have them storming around
shooting up the place, and once you start bombing the crap out of
villages and killing people indiscriminately, you create a new
situation where you become the occupier. So here we are, fighting
another war that makes no sense, has no purpose, and has no end. Good
war? Necessary war? What a joke!

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Don't ask us. We don't
give a damn. And yet President Obama is now on track to add more
troops--maybe 20,000, maybe 40,000. Hell his general on the ground,
Gen. Stanley McCrystal, is asking for as much as 80,000, which would
put the total up to what it is in Iraq, where we're still bogged down
in an occupation quagmire.

That's where Kenny Rogers song "The Gambler" comes in. "You've got
to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk
away, know when to run."

We had a chance to walk away from Afghanistan back in 2001. The Al
Qaeda forces had been routed, the Taliban government had collapsed, and
people in much of the country of Afghanistan, who had been largely
spared any violence during the American attacks, were largely grateful
at having the yoke of fundamentalism lifted off their backs. But the US
didn't leave. A low-level war continued. More and more innocent people
were killed, or arrested and stuffed into a concentration camp and
torture hell-hole at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul, or shipped off to
the other hell-holes in Guantanamo Bay or other CIA secret sites. And
the Taliban were able to regroup and reposition themselves as saviors
of the nation. Now the US is cast as the occupier. We can't just "walk
away" anymore. We have to "fold 'em" and "run."

Will Obama have the sense of a gambler with a bad hand? So far the
signs are not good that he will. We are now in the position of having
70,000 US troops, soon to be closer to 100,000 troops, fighting,
killing and dying in a country run by a corrupt, vote-stealing leader
whose brother has long been known to be a leading profiteer in the
global opium/heroin trade, in which Afghanistan has become the world
leader (80-90 percent of the market) and, according to the New York Times,
for eight years and counting a paid CIA asset in charge of a
nation-wide death squad that is working on contract for The Agency.
Polls show that most Afghanis, understandably, want the US out of their
country. Wouldn't you?

A hand doesn't get much worse than that.

It's time to fold and run.

If we don't get the hell out of Afghanistan, then we'll all be
singing Country Joe's song, but with modified lyrics (which I just
premiered at a solo performance at a fund-raising dinner last week in
Philadelphia for the local chapter of Veterans for Peace):

Come on all you young women and men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He's got himself into a terrible jam,
Way off yonder in Afghanistan.
You ain't got a job, so pick up a gun!
We're gonna have a whole lotta fun!

All you folks in the National Guard,
You won't be protecting your back yard.
We may have floods and hurricanes here,
But you'll be dodging bullets in the desert there.
But if that's not what you signed up for,
We'll send you there a few times more!

General McCrystal, jump right in!
Your big chance has come again.
The VC whupped us back in '74,
But now you can show some Muslims what-for,
And maybe even earn you a medal or three,
Sittin' at your desk in DC.

Chorus:
Oh it's one, two, three what are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn.
Next stop's Afghanistan.
And it's five, six, seven, open up the Pearly Gates.
Ain't no time to wonder why.
Whoopee! We're all bound to die!

Come on mothers, here's the plan,
Send your son off to Afghanistan.
Come on fathers, it's all cool,
Send a daughter off to Ka-Bool.
And if they die, they come home free,
And nobody has to see.

chorus

Okay Wall Street, here's the deal:
Middle East oil is yours to steal.
Afghani blood, American too, is being shed now
Just for you!
And you can charge whatever you dare,
Cuz Washington don't care.

chorus

Bush and Obama, you've done your best,
You've made the Middle East into one sweet mess!
But that's okay, there's still a plan:
To divert attention just bomb Iran!
And if that seems a bit unwise,
Well hell, you've got the Nobel Prize!

Chorus:
And it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop's...
Pakistan?

_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and folksinger.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama's War: Afghanistan Is Spelled V-I-E-T-N-A-M

dlindorff — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:24:57 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his “necessary” war in Afghanistan. Coming into office, one of his first acts, on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing the total number of soldiers and Marines in the country to about 57,000, to which one must also add 74,000 private contractors who are doing jobs normally done by uniformed military, and about 33,000 other soldiers from NATO countries and Australia. That’s 164,000 foreign soldiers fighting against Taliban fighters.

Ominously, even with the new US troops, US military commander Admiral Mike Mullen this month has described the situation in Afghanistan as being “serious and deteriorating.” The Afghani national government—if an organization that is basically confined to the capital city of Kabul and a few other cities can be called a national government, is hopelessly corrupt and ineffective, and a current national election, which US forces sought to “protect” by sending troops to election districts, appears to have been a disaster, plagued by vote rigging and with low turnout.

The US war in Afghanistan, billed as part of a war on terror begun by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in September 2001, is now eight years old, and while the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan at that time has been ousted from Kabul, its insurgency grows by the day in strength and popular support.

The US, meanwhile, is identified as an occupier and as the sole support of a corrupt regime of drug lords, thieves and charlatans.

Does this sound familiar? It should. It is a replay of what America did in Vietnam.

The roots of the current Afghanistan War lie in the period when the Soviet Union was occupying the country and backing a Communist-led government in the 1970s, and the US was conducting a proxy war against the Soviets, with the CIA training and funding both the Taliban and foreign fighters, mostly Arab, led by the likes of Osama Bin Laden. In the end, the Taliban, with the help of groups like Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, triumphed, pushing the Russians out. But over time, as the Soviet Union crumbled and the US became more focused on the Middle East, successive US administrations became less and less happy with the power arrangement in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, following the US Gulf War in 1990-91, Bin Laden and other Arab fighters in Afghanistan and elsewhere began to see the US as an enemy, and the US began to shift its military focus from being based upon anti-Communism to being anti-Arab, or at least anti Arabist, as defined as being opposed to those Arabs who wanted to overthrow the corrupt dictatorial leaderships in the oil states of the Middle East.

When the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked in 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration, which had already planned to overthrow the government in Iraq, launched an attack on Afghanistan, claiming that its Taliban government was harboring Al Qaeda, which was blamed for the attacks. The Afghanistan War was on. The Taliban was quickly ousted from Kabul, and Al Qaeda was largely driven into the remote tribal areas of Pakistan, but the war was not won. Indeed, since then, it has gone from bad to worse for the US, as the Taliban has clawed back territory and recovered much of its prior power.

The background of the war in Vietnam dates from 1954, when Vietnam, after a long struggle, won its independence from its colonial ruler, France. Two years later, the US blocked a UN-supervised national referendum, effectively splitting the country into two parts, a Communist north led by the hero of Vietnam’s independence struggle, Ho Chi Minh, and the south, led by the corrupt former French colonial stooge Ngo Dinh Diem.

With elections off, a small group of partisans, the Viet Cong, began an insurrection against the government in the South in early 1959, which the US became committed to opposing, initially sending in “advisers” to train and direct the South Vietnamese army. That war went from bad to worse, and when, in 1964, it became clear to US police-makers, that the Viet Cong were likely to win, President Lyndon Johnson made a decision to send in massive numbers of US troops and to begin a major bombing campaign against the North Vietnam. From 2000 US troops in Vietnam in 1961, there were 16,500 in 1964, and by mid 1965, 100,000. That number continued to rise, reaching 200,000 by 1966, and ultimately, at the height of the war, over 500,000. But the Viet Cong, and later, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese troops sent down from the north, were never defeated. Indeed, they continued to grow in number and in their control of the countryside. While they suffered horrific losses because of the superior firepower of US forces, and an American scorched-earth policy in the countryside, the Vietnamese forces continued to gain more and more support from the Vietnamese people. In the end, after suffering over 58,000 dead, the US cried uncle and left Vietnam. By 1975, the puppet regime in Saigon fell, and Vietnam was finally unified again, under Communist rule.

From the beginning of America’s involvement in Vietnam, the country, a poor nation of peasant farmers, was presented to the American public as a critical threat to the security of the United States. If Vietnam were to “fall,” Americans were told, the rest of Southeast Asia, like a chain of dominos, would fall—first Cambodia and Laos, then Thailand and Malaysia, then Indonesia, and finally, even Australia would be at risk. Of course, no such thing happened. The Vietnamese Communists were always, and remained, a nationalist movement, and after winning their multi-generational struggle for independence, focused on developing their country (though they did step in and overthrow a genocidal Communist regime that had taken over in Cambodia, installing a saner government).

It had been a giant scam on the American people from the beginning, and it ended up costing several million Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives, and 58,000 American lives, though that scarcely tells the toll, in terms of those crippled mentally and physically, those poisoned by the widespread spraying of toxic defoliants, and the laying of millions of anti-personnel mines that are still killing and maiming people in Indochina today.

Now a new president, Obama, like Johnson before him, is telling Americans that a war half a world away is “necessary for American security.” This is a ludicrous assertion on its face. If Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, and really hardly a country at all, is a threat to US national security, so is Malawi, Burundi and Fiji.

Let’s be rational for a moment. The Taliban, whatever their irrational Islamic fanaticism and their misogyny, have no interest in America, other than to drive our troops out of their country. When they were in charge in Kabul back in 2001, they had their hands full just trying to hang on in the face of the war lords and drug kingpins who held (and still hold) sway in various parts of the country, and when they eventually win and drive the US and its NATO allies out of Afghanistan, they will have their hands full again, just clinging to power.

American national security is not to the slightest degree threatened by the Taliban.

Okay, so back in 2001 there was a gang of Arabs in Afghanistan which had since 1990, at least, expressed some hostility towards the US, but that crew, after all, had been set up by the CIA in the first place, and anyway, by 2002 it had been largely shattered and driven out of Afghanistan, and into Pakistan and parts unknown.

The current Afghanistan War, which President Obama claims is so necessary to American security, is not against Al Qaeda though; it is against the Taliban, and it simply cannot be won, anymore than the US war against the Vietnamese could be won.

Today, as in the late 1960s, the Pentagon is telling the president that it needs more troops. There is a military imperative not to lose a war. No general or admiral wants to be the guy in charge when the jig is declared up, and the troops have to be brought home as losers. And so they are asking for more and more troops and weapons, in hopes of hanging on until they get get cashiered out.

Obama, like Johnson before him, will buy into this criminal policy, because he too doesn’t want to “lose” a war before he leaves office.

That should be pretty scary, since I’m sure Obama is hoping that he will be in office not just through 2012, but through 2016. That’s a long time to keep escalating a hopeless and pointless conflict, just to avoid having to say it was a mistake in the first place.

But lest you say that it cannot happen, recall that the first US advisers went to Vietnam in 1959, the big escalation began in 1964, and the US didn’t leave until 1974. That’s 15 years of war and ten years of major warfare.

Because the Bush/Cheney administration was always more interested in invading Iraq than in invading Afghanistan, and pulled out many troops from the latter country in late 2002 to ship them to Iraq, the Afghan War has escalated more slowly than the Vietnam War did. But I’d say that today we are about where we were in Vietnam at the start of 1965. That is, the big lie, and the big escalation in the fighting, are both just getting going.

If the American people don’t rise up and demand an end to this thing right now, we could be in for another 8-10 years of brutal and bloody warfare, and in the end, the United States is, once again, going to lose.
____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Caught in a Lie: US Uses Phosphorus Weapons in Afghanistan

dlindorff — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:41:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

When doctors started reporting that some of the victims of the US bombing of several villages in Farah Province last week—an attack that left between 117 and 147 civilians dead, most of them women and children—were turning up with deep, sharp burns on their body that “looked like” they’d been caused by white phosphorus, the US military was quick to deny responsibility.

US officials—who initially denied that the US had even bombed any civilians in Farah despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including massive craters where houses had once stood—insisted that “no white phosphorus” was used in the attacks on several villages in Farah.

Official military policy on the use of white phosphorus is to only use the high-intensity, self-igniting material as a smoke screen during battles or to illuminate targets, not as a weapon against human beings—even enemy troops.

Now that policy, and the military’s blanket denial that phosphorus was used in Farah, have to be challenged, thanks to a recent report filed from a remote area of Afghanistan by a New York Times reporter.

C.J. Chivers, writing in the May 14 edition of the NY Times, in an article headlined “Korangal Memo: In Bleak Afghan Outpost, Troops Slog On,” wrote of how an embattled US Army unit in the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan, had come under attack following a morning memorial service for one of its members, Pfc. Richard Demeter, who had been killed the day before by a mine.

Chivers wrote:

“After the ceremony, the violence resumed. The soldiers detected a Taliban spotter on a ridge, which was pounded by mortars and then white phosphorus rounds from a 155 millimeter howitzer.

“What did the insurgents do? When the smoldering subsided, they attacked from exactly the same spot, shelling the outpost with 30-millimeter grenades and putting the soldiers on notice that the last display of firepower had little effect. The Americans escalated. An A-10 aircraft made several gun runs, then dropped a 500-pound bomb.”

It is clear from this passage that the military’s use of the phosphorus shells had not been for the officially sanctioned purpose of providing cover. The soldiers had no intention of climbing that hill to attack the spotter on the ridge themselves. They were trying to destroy him with shells and bombs. In fact, the last thing they would have wanted to do was provide the enemy spotter with a smoke cover, which would have helped him escape, and which also would have hidden him from the A-10 ground attack planes which had been called in to make gun runs at his position. Nor was this a case of illuminating the target. The incident, as Chivers reports, took place in broad daylight.

Clearly then, this article demonstrates that it is routine for US soldiers to call in phosphorus rounds to attack enemy soldiers, which is supposed to be against US military policy for this material. Whoever was manning the howitzer had a stock of the weapons on hand, and was ready to fire them.

The US initially flatly denied using white phosphorus weapons in Iraq, when reports first began to come out, including from US troops themselves, that they had been used extensively against insurgents defending the city of Fallujah against US Marines in November 2004. Under mounting pressure, the Pentagon first admitted that it had used the chemical in Fallujah but only “for illumination.” Later, the Pentagon added that it had used phosphorus as a “screen” to hide troops. But finally, in 2005, the Pentagon was forced to admit that it had also used white phosphorus directly as a weapon against enemy Iraqi troops in the assault on Fallujah, a city of 300,000 that still held many civilians.

The same pattern of denial and eventual admission regarding the use of this controversial and deadly weapon by US forces now seems to be repeating itself in Afghanistan.

It is odd that given the controversy over the use of white phosphorus weapons, which result in terrible wounds and eventual death as phosphorus particles burn their way down through flesh to the bone and sometimes straight onward through a body, leaving a charred channel of destruction, the New York Times’ Chivers—or more likely his editors back in New York?—ignored any mention of the issue while reporting on the use of the chemical rounds to attack a lone spotter on the ridge.

Given the current controversy over whether the US used white phosphorus shells or bombs in Falah Province only days before, it is hard to understand why the issue wasn’t mentioned in this particular article. Indeed, in the online version of the story, the word phosphorus is set as a hotlink to an article on the controversy over the battlefield use of phosphorus, indicating that at least someone at the Times has integrity and a good news sense.

As for the US government and the Pentagon, it is clear that they know the weapon is a vicious and controversial one, and that besides causing horrific and painful wounds, it is profoundly dangerous for innocent civilians, particularly when used in town or village settings.

It is bad enough that the US is using this weapon. It is even worse that it is forced to lie about it.

Surely if the goal of US policy is to win the hearts and minds of Afghanistan’s people, it shouldn’t be using a weapon that causes such terrible and indiscriminate wounds. Then again, maybe winning those hearts and minds isn’t really the goal. Maybe, as in the so-called “Pacification Program” applied by US forces in rural South Vietnam, the goal is to terrorize Afghan villagers in Taliban-dominated regions into rejecting the Taliban in their midst.

Requests for answers from the press office at the Pentagon, and at military headquarters in Afghanistan, regarding US policy on the use of white phosphorus, and on the specific use of the shells mentioned in the New York Times article were ignored.

__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia journalist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

On Torture and War, Obama Sounds Increasingly, and Disturbingly, Like Bush

dlindorff — Thu, 14 May 2009 10:46:31 -0400

by Dave Lindorff

In reversing himself and declaring that the US government will not release further photos in its possession of torture being practiced on captives held by the US military and the CIA, President Obama is sounding increasingly like the Bush/Cheney administration before him.

It may well be that, as Obama says, release of those photos could lead to anger in the Islamic world and perhaps to recruitment gains among groups like Al Qaeda that are attacking American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, but this is only true because at the same time, the Obama administration is opposing taking any legal action against the people who authorized and promoted that torture.

If the Obama administration were to open a full-scale legal investigation into torture, with an independent prosecutor assigned to go after anyone who violated the Geneva Conventions and the US Criminal Code outlawing torture and the authorization, condoning or covering-up of torture, quite the opposite would happen: people in the Islamic world would see that this nation was coming to terms with those who abused the law.

As things stand, we have a only few people at the very bottom of the chain of command who are doing jail time or suffering administrative punishments for committing acts of torture and abuse which they believed had been ordered and authorized by leaders in the military, the Secretary of Defense's office, and the White House, but not one of those in authority who set the torture of captives in motion has been called to justice. Obama has endorsed that situation by again referring to the torture as just the actions of "a few people."

It was hardly that, however, and he knows it. Torture was a major part of the Bush/Cheney so-called "War" on Terror, and was being conducted on an industrial scale, with White House lawyers providing legal cover, the Secretary of Defense sending memos urging every more aggressive techniques, and government doctors and psychologists working assiduously to make them more "effective."

The illogic of Obama's position on these photos is stunning. Since we know the photos exist, the refusal to make them public can only feed a sense that they must be worse than the horrific photos of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison which were already released. Nobody is going to assume that the photos in the White House's possession are less offensive than what has already been discovered and made public--for why would the administration be worried about that?

The truth is always better than a cover-up, and what we now have the president advocating is a cover-up of American torture.

But that's only part of the president's slide into Cheneyism. We have the president now calling for the possible indefinite detention of terror suspects--an idea that only insures that there will always be an incentive for recruiting more terrorists (to avenge those in captivity)--and that makes a joke of our own Constitution, which guarantees everyone--not just citizens--the right to a trial, the right to a presumption of innocence, and protection from "cruel and unusual punishment," which indefinite detention certainly is.

The war in Afghanistan, which now must be called Obama's War, thanks to his policy of escalation, is also becoming Cheneyesque, with the firing of Gen. David McKiernan, and his replacement as head of the Afghanistan War by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Gen. McChrystal hails from the Special Forces, and played a role in the torture that was integral to the US war and occupation in Iraq. Far from being put in charge of operations in Afghanistan, where public backing for the US military is virtually non-existent at this point, McChrystal should be facing investigation and possible prosecution here at home for his role in torture of captives.

It has never made sense to initiate a war in Afghanistan in order to go after a band of criminal terrorists hidiing out in the mountains. Bush and Cheney turned what should have been a focused hunt for Al Qaeda terrorists into a war on the Taliban government and ultimately the people of Afghanistan. Obama has continued that error, and now blithely hyphenates the terms Al Qaeda and Taliban in defining the "enemy" of American forces in that country.

Such a war can never be won, and can only lead to tragedy, not just for the people of Afghanistan, for whom it is already that, but for American troops and ultimately for America itself.

It is a war that never should have been fought, and which now should be ended as rapidly as possible.

Obama at this point, by covering up for official torture, and by signing on to and expanding the war in Afghanistan, is dooming his presidency, further staining the reputation of the United States, and ultimately furthering the decline of the country that was set in motion by his predecessors.

____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

1, 2, 3 What Are We Fighting For? The War Crimes Song-and-Dance Routine

dlindorff — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:41:52 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

We’re been here before, many times.

The US causes massive civilian deaths through its indiscriminate use of heavy air power, and then tries to claim it’s the enemy’s fault for “hiding” among the civilians and “using them as shields.”

In Vietnam, where the US was fighting against a local revolutionary movement that was seeking to overthrow the puppet regime backed by America, American planes routinely bombed and napalmed villages, claiming that the Viet Cong were hiding amongst the peasants. Women, old men and children would die in droves—several million of them by the time that war was over--and we’d be told it was all the fault of the Communists, who, we were told, had no regard for innocent life.

In Iraq, we took a city of 300,000, Fallujah, and effectively leveled it. Anyone who died there was presumed to be an insurgent, though the truth was, the Marines encircling the city before the onslaught only allowed fleeing women, girls and male children who were under the age 12 to flee, sending older boys and men seeking to get out back into the city to meet their fate.

Just this week, the brave Marines in Iraq blew away a 12-year-old boy after someone tossed a grenade their way. Local people said the grenade had been tossed by an older man standing near the boy, who fled. The unlucky boy, who was just a kid who sold gum for a living, had not done anything, local people said.

Now it’s Afghanistan, where upwards of 120 people, including babies and small children, were slaughtered during a battle in a remote part of the country in the latest example of mass deaths at the hands of American forces. Local people say that several villages in the Bala Baluk district of Farah Province of were intensely bombarded by US planes, causing most if not all of the deaths. The US response to the initial charges of a mass slaughter of civilians was to blame the deaths on the Taliban. When it became clear that the victims had died of burns and shrapnel, not from bullets, the US came out with a new explanation: The Taliban had tossed grenades at the locals. But reporters at the scene reported seeing huge craters and leveled buildings—not what you get from hand grenades. Then came reports of unusually deep and localized burns—the type caused by white phosphorus—a weapon that the US has used widely in Iraq--including in densely populated Fallujah—and in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon immediately said it did not use white phosphorus bombs in the battle in question, and suggested instead that perhaps the Taliban had used phosphorus grenades. This again was an absurd argument. The purpose of phosphorus weapons, primarily, is to light up a battlefield, but Taliban fighters don’t want lit up battlefields. They prefer operating the dark. It is the US that wants to light up targets.

Besides, there are those craters to explain.

So the next dance step was to say that the Taliban had caused the deaths, because during their retreat they had fled to the town, miles from the scene of the battle that led to the calling in of air support by US advisers to embattled government forces, and in so doing, had brought the attack upon the villagers.

Well, assuming that is true, there is still the problem that under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to attack an enemy where the risk of harming large numbers of civilians is too great. The extreme example would the bombing of a school full of children on the grounds that a few enemy soldiers were hiding in the school (something that the Israeli military did in Gaza during the recent invasion, causing the deaths of dozens of children). But bombing a town full of people in order to hit a few retreating enemy fighters is equally criminal—a point that the Pentagon, and the compliant US media, are ignoring.

Barack Obama’s war in Afghanistan—for it is indeed his war now—is turning into the same kind of bloody imperial slaughter that Iraq was earlier under President Bush. The stated objective—eliminating Al Qaeda—has been lost. The enemy of all this fighting isn’t Al Qaeda at all; it is the indigenous Taliban—the former governing power in Afghanistan until the US invasion in 2001, and a political organization that never was an enemy of the US.

Whatever one might think of the religious fanatics and misogynists who go under the name Taliban, they are not seeking to overthrow the West. They are simply seeking to return to power in Afghanistan, one of the poorest, remotest, and economically and politically least important countries in the world.

And to defeat that movement, if that can even be done, the US is going to have to kill Afghani civilians by the truckload, as it has been doing.

And then there has to be the inevitable dancing around to hide the criminality of what the US is doing.

The blame-the-victim dance goes on.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Free John Walker Lindh, Bush's and Cheney's First Torture Victim!

dlindorff — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:47:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy
for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s “War on Terror,”
and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for “carrying a
weapon” in Afghanistan and for “providing assistance” to an enemy of
the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all,
it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is
actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies
that trade with proscribed countries on a government “no trade” list
like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for
the executives involved.

As I wrote in an article in the Nation back in 2005 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050214/lindorff),
Lindh was put away for so long on these minor charges not because he
was a traitor or terrorist, but because he was living proof, back at
the time of his trial in 2002, that the US had begun a program of
brutal torture in the so-called “War on Terror.”

Lindh, in fact, was never really an enemy of the US. Son of
middle-class white parents in suburban San Francisco, he had developed
an interest in Islam which, following his graduation from high school,
he decided to pursue by traveling to Pakistan. In 2001, still just 18,
he began studying at a madrassa, or religious school. There he learned
about the struggle of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan to free
that nation of the influence of warlords who had collaborated with a
brutal Soviet occupation. Attracted by what he saw as the nobility of
that struggle, and with a youthful sense of adventure, Lindh
volunteered. In August of 2001, at a time that Bush administration
officials were negotiating about a possible oil pipeline deal with
Afghanistan’s Taliban government, and talking about providing funds for
a program to get farmers to shift away from opium cultivation to more
useful cash crops—a time, that is, when the Taliban were not considered
America’s enemy—Lindh crossed the border and started training to be a
fighter.

A month later, of course, the World Trade Center in New York, and
the Pentagon in Washington, were struck, and the US launched a war
against both Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lindh, who was
still just in training, found himself suddenly in the wilds of the
Hindu Kush, with American planes bombing and with US Special Forces
troops firing at him and his companions. Whether he wanted to be there
or not, he was in no position at that point to change sides. You don’t
just walk away from a group like the Taliban—especially if you are an
American to begin with, and you’re deep in the bush.

Eventually, a malnourished, dehydrated, and wounded (in the leg)
Lindh was taken prisoner along with a group of Taliban fighters by
American forces.

At that point, when the Americans discovered they had an American
amont their captives, Lindh’s situation worsened dramatically. Stripped
naked and duct-taped, blindfolded, to a gurney, he was then placed
inside an unheated metal shipping container. Left there for days in the
cold and dark, Lindh was removed once daily and interrogated. His
interrogators allegedly tortured him, as well as threatening him
repeatedly with death. His pleas to see an attorney were mocked, and
word that his parents had already arranged for representation was
withheld from him (a situation that led a government lawyer involved in
his case to protest and ultimately resign).

At some point during this abuse, Lindh caved in to his fears of
death at the hands of his captors and signed a “confession” to being a
traitor to America. At that point he was flown back to the US, where
Attorney General Ashcroft touted him as the “American Taliban,”
initially vowing to try him for treason (which carries a death
sentence).

What changed things dramatically, as I reported in 2005, was a
decision by Federal District Judge T.S.Ellis to permit Lindh and his
defense team—over strenuous government objections--to challenge that
confession letter by introducing evidence that Lindh had signed it will
being subjected to torture at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. The judge
ruled that Lindh would be able to call witnesses from Guantanamo and
from among the soldiers where he had been held in Afghanistan.
Suddenly, the Justice Department, in the person of Michael Chertoff,
then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division and in charge
of terrorism prosecutions, offered a one-day-only, take-it-or-leave-it
a plea deal. Chertoff (acting with an alacrity that stands in marked
contrast to his sluggish response time several years later when faced,
as secretary of homeland security, with the Katrina disaster in New
Orleans) offered to drop the serious charges in return to a guilty plea
to the two minor charges, but only if—and this is the key—Lindh would
cancel the scheduled evidentiary hearing into torture. Under the
offered deal, Lindh would also have to sign a letter stating that he
had “not been intentionally mistreated” by his American captors, and
waiving any right to claim such mistreatment or torture any time in the
future. Lindh agreed, but following sentencing, Chertoff also added a
gag order, technically a “special administrative measure,” barring
Lindh from even talking about his experience for the duration of his
sentence.

It is now clear why Chertoff went to such hurried great lengths to
completely silence Lindh. His wasn’t just the first trial in the “War
on Terror.” Lindh was the first victim of the secret Bush/Cheney
torture program.

Now that we have the trail of memoranda that set that wretched
torture campaign in motion, it’s time for the Obama Justice Department
to free Lindh. If President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder
think Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens suffered from malicious prosecution and
were willing to drop charges against him, they certainly should toss
out the case against Lindh, who besides being innocent of the original
serious charges leveled against him, was a victim of war crimes
perpetrated by his own fellow Americans, and authorized by his own
government. His arrest, conviction and sentencing are a travesty of
justice, and perhaps, given that torture is a criminal offense in the
US Code, even constitute a crime of cover-up. He should be the first
witness in any official investigation by Congress or the attorney
general’s office into the origins of the Bush/Cheney torture campaign.

Free John Walker Lindh!
_______________
(Note: This article was offered to the Nation magazine, and
rejected. It was also offered to Salon magazine, which never responded.)
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

This Nation Needs a Fighter in the White House, not a Gabber and Glad-Hander

dlindorff — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:04:24 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

If the disaster of the so-called "stimulus" bill just passed by the
Senate doesn't convince President Obama and his advisers that the
strategy of "bipartisanship" that he has been espousing is a political
suicide, nothing will.

The Republican Party, with the willing help of conservative
Democrats like Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Democratic turncoats like
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), has forced Obama to agree to a joke of a
stimulus package that is nearly half composed of tax breaks which will
do nothing to bolster the economy (since most of the money will end up
either paying down credit card debt or buying Chinese and Sri Lankan
imports) and that is stripped of $40 billion to help struggling state
and local governments.

Fresh from its rout in November, the GOP is, in fact, openly trying
to sabotage Obama's economic stimulus plan, because the last thing
Republicans want to see is an economy on the upturn in 2010 or 2012.

Meanwhile, Obama, who had the chance to add 2-4 Democratic senators
to the Senate by naming Republicans to his cabinet or to other key
administration positions, and having Democratic governors replace them
with progressive Democrats, has wasted several opportunities. When he
did name a Republican senator from a state with a Democratic
governor--Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, named to be Commerce Dept.
Secretary--he instead cut a pathetic deal to have the state's
Democratic governor name another Republican Senator to replace Judd.
Almost as bad, in New York, when he named Sen. Hillary Clinton to be
Secretary of State, he allowed New York's Democratic governor, David
Patterson, to name a conservative Democrat to replace her.

What is this guy trying to do? Obama is from Chicago, a town where
politics is a blood sport, and where as a young politician, he played
that game with brass knuckles himself. Now he's trying to be
everybody's best friend?

The result is he's being steamrollered.

So what should he do? Tell conservative Democrats in
Congress that if they want any of their pet bills or projects passed in
the next four years, they will pass a stimulus bill as he wants it
written, with limited tax breaks and with all the money he proposed for
states and localities. Republicans, meanwhile, should be told bluntly
that if they vote against the measure once it is reconciled in a
House-Senate conference, they get shorted on stimulus money in their
districts. Let them explain it to their constituents.

Hard ball.

That's how Republicans have played for the past eight years, and how
they've turned Congressional Democrats into a quivering mass of
gelatinous goop.

Obama won a landslide electoral victory and a big popular vote
majority. It wasn't his promise to be bi-partisan that gave him that
win. It was his promise to be a real leader.

Leaders have to be respected, and they get respect from the
opposition not by being courteous and by bending over, but by carrying
a big stick and using it occasionally. Those who fail to use that stick
end up getting whacked by one themselves, which is what happened to
Obama's two Democratic predecessors, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

The other thing Obama is going to have to recognize, and recognize
fast, is that his strength lies his progressive base. He has been
dissing that base since the minute he won the election. Progressives
have cut him a lot of slack--far more than he deserves--as he appointed
(mostly white male) Clinton hack after Clinton hack to his cabinet,
held over key (all white male) Bush appointees like Robert Gates as
Secretary of Defense and Gen. David Petraeus as head of Central Command
(CentCom), and backpedaled on key campaign promises like ending the war
in Iraq and winning passage of the Employee Free Choice labor rights
restoration bill.

With this odious betrayal of his base, he is losing support from the
very people who can sustain his presidency through four tough years of
struggle. Without them, he is doomed to a one-term failure of a
presidency.

Obama now faces three key tests. If he fails on any of them, I would argue that his presidency is finished before it starts.

* The first is the stimulus bill. If it passes largely in the Senate
version, it will be a waste of $820 billion, because so much of the
money will be blown on tax breaks and so little on real stimulus
spending that it won't do anything to break the fall of the collapsing
economy. Obama needs to get Democrats to report out of conference a
bill that is close to what the House passed last week, and then he
needs to use his "bully pulpit" and his power to punish those who vote
against the measure to win passage in both houses. If conservative
Democrats are worried about the costs, he should revoke Bush's tax cuts
and raise taxes on the rich immediately (he should do that anyhow and
call it a retroactive and long-overdue Bush war tax).

* The second test is ending the Iraq War. The latest reports are
that Obama is being sucker-punched by the war's leading generals,
primarily Gen. Petraeus and Iraq theater commander Gen. Ray Odierno,
into considering a longer pullout than 16 months, with both a 19-month
and a 23-month pullout being proposed for his consideration. Given that
there are also credible reports that these generals and lower-ranking
supporters are actively lobbying against a pullout--an act of
insubordination against a commander in chief that borders on treason
during wartime--Obama should fire these guys immediately and order a
prompt pullout. Even 16 months is far too long to maintain the
occupation. I'd suggest three months to get everyone home.

* Finally, Obama should recognize that the Afghanistan War is an
unwinnable disaster that long ago morphed from a police action
attempting to capture and destroy Al Qaeda's organization in that
country into a war against the country's indigenous political/military
force, the Taliban, which was never a threat to the US, and which
cannot be defeated, no matter how many resources the US throws into the
fight. He should call a halt to this fiasco before he owns it, order
UN-sponsored regional peace talks among the conflicting parties within
and around Afghanistan, and pull all US forces out of that nation as
fast as the planes can carry them.

At that point, Obama will have won the passionate support of his
base, and the grudging respect of conservatives in Congress. The
remaining years of his presidency will inevitably be full of conflict,
but he will be fighting his political battles from a position of
strength. This will allow him to campaign forcefully for progressive
House and Senate candidates in the 2010 off-year congressional
elections, when he could win more seats and stronger control in the
Senate.

Meanwhile, he should replace Gates at Defense, ideally with some
liberal Republican senator from a Democratic state (I'd suggest one of
the two women, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, who represent the state
of Maine--a woman Secretary of Defense would be a great move), so that
another Democrat could be appointed to the Senate. He could do the same
thing with the Department of Health (another good place for a woman
senator from Maine!). That would give the Democrats 61 seats in the
Senate, assuming Al Franken finally gets named the winner in Minnesota.

The key thing is, no more nice guy. Obama needs to return to his
roots and start acting like the Chicago pol that he began as. It's what
his base wants, it's what the broad mass of the electorate wanted when
they voted for him, and it's what the country needs.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama Wake-Up Call: Afghanistan is No Threat to US

dlindorff — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:15:12 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

American foreign policy is moving from the absurd to the ludicrous.

Back in 2002, President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney
managed to snooker the people of the United States, or at least a large
number of us, into believing that Iraq, a pathetic Third World country
ruled by a corrupt tin-pot dictator, was a grave danger to America,
akin to Hitler and Nazi Germany in 1940. We learned how absurd that
claim was when two hundred thousand American troops backed by the
mightiest air force the world has ever seen, slammed into the country
in March, 2003, and the Iraqi military simply folded up, and the Saddam
regime along with it.

Now, President Obama appears ready to make an even more absurd
claim, namely that the gravest threat facing this nation is posed by
the country of Afghanistan. Now I’ll grant that Afghanistan, with a
population of 33 million, is at third bigger than Iraq, which had a
population of 24 million, at least until the US invasion and occupation
led to the death of over a million of Iraqis. But aside from that,
Afghanistan, a land-locked nation that lies between Iran and Pakistan,
is far weaker and more primitive even than Iraq.

By any measure except population, Afghanistan suffers in comparison
to Iraq. It has no air force at all. It barely has an army. Most of its
people are illiterate and live in rural areas. Its people are extremely
poor—among the poorest in the world. In many ways, Afghanistan is
actually less a country than a region populated by a variety of feuding
tribes—tribes that have different languages and cultures and even
different racial backgrounds.

Do we really believe that this desperately poor and war-torn nation poses an existential threat—or any threat at all—to the US?

Oh please.

Okay, we know that there is a gang of mostly Arab terrorists going
by the name of Al Qaeda that is hiding out in eastern Afghanistan, and
that its leaders have allied this organization with the Taliban—the
ousted rulers of Afghanistan who were pushed out of the capital of
Kabul by US forces in 2001 following the 9-11 attacks. But since that
relatively easy military incursion, all the US and its 34,000 troops in
Afghanistan have managed to accomplish, besides installing a crooked
puppet regime in the capital city, has been to create more and more
hatred for the US as an occupying power, by killing large numbers of
Afghan civilians through brutal raids on villages and by use of
overwhelming and inherently indiscriminate airpower and
remote-controlled missile-equipped drone aircraft.

Based upon the ludicrous premise that Afghanistan is the biggest
military threat facing the US today, our new president, Barack Obama,
is preparing to send another 30,000 US troops to that country,
effectively doubling the number of American soldiers already there.
Inevitably, this will mean more killing and more anger towards America
among the local population.

Al Qaeda members, meanwhile, have largely moved away from the battle
to Pakistan, a much larger nation to the east of Afghanistan, which
raises the question: What the hell are we trying to do in Afghanistan?

Let’s get it straight. No Afghan has ever, to my knowledge, harmed
the United States. I’m not sure most Afghanis, if they could scrape
together the money to go to the US, would even know where this country
is. (Okay, most Americans probably couldn’t tell you where Afghanistan
is, either, but at least we have libraries, and computers, which the
geographically challenged can turn to in order to locate the place.
That’s not true for the people of Afghanistan, who have neither.)

For eight years, America has been attacking and destroying a country
that is about as dangerous a threat to America as is Mali, or Haiti, or
the Comoros Islands. If Obama follows through and doubles the number of
troops fighting over there, it will just make this whole policy twice
as stupid.

I’m sorry. I know Al Qaeda is a nasty gang, well funded by sources
in Saudi Arabia, and well trained in the fine arts of terrorism by the
CIA, which back in the day saw the group as a good proxy for harassing
Soviet troops that were occupying Afghanistan. But if eight years of
constant war by US troops in Afghanistan has been unable to stop or
even seriously undermine Al Qaeda, I cannot understand the logic of
doubling down on the bad bet.

If the US wants to defeat Al Qaeda, it needs to enlist the support
of the governments of the countries where Al Qaeda is operating, and it
needs to eliminate the outside financial support for Al Qaeda. The
first prong of this strategy would require convincing the governments
of Afghanistan and Pakistan to get serious about driving out Al Qaeda.
That should not be difficult. If we stopped killing Afghanis, and if we
stopped firing rockets into the sovereign nation of Pakistan, killing
innocent Pakistanis in the process, and massively insulting the
government of Pakistan, and if we instead offered aid to both
countries, contingent upon their taking serious action to eliminate Al
Qaeda, we would quickly see these foreign intruders in both countries
driven out. As to the second prong, why is the US continuing to treat
Saudi Arabia as a valued ally if it continues to allow wealthy Saudis
to sent financial support to Al Qaeda? Yes Saudi Arabia is a major
provider of oil to the US, but the US is the major supplier of arms to
the government of Saudi Arabia. It’s easy to see where the US could
tighten the screws to end the flow of money to terrorists.

And then there is this: The Vietnam War destroyed the presidencies
of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. The Iraq War destroyed the
presidency of George Bush. Obama, if he orders an expansion of the war
in Afghanistan, and thus takes ownership of that conflict, will be well
on the way to destroying his own presidency.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Campaign Endorsements: Obama Gets Colin Powell and McCain Gets Al Qaeda

Chip — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 05:53:57 -0400

Campaign Endorsements: Obama Gets Colin Powell and McCain Gets Al Qaeda
Ivan Eland | Independent Institute | October 27, 2008

In the battle for endorsements in the presidential campaign, Barack Obama snared a strong nod from former Secretary of State Colin Powell and John McCain received an equally strong recommendation from al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda? Yes, you heard right, al-Qaeda! This endorsement indicates what has long been known: al-Qaeda is fairly sophisticated politically. And this doesn’t mean McCain is the more accomplished candidate—in fact, apparently the group believes he is the more gullible of the two men.

Quite bluntly, al-Qaeda says it wants McCain to win essentially because it thinks he is most likely to continue Bush’s macho “bull in the China shop” war on terror. There has been a lot of bull in the China shop, and al-Qaeda wants to make sure it continues.

According to al-Hesbah website, which has close ties to the group, “Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election.” The website was confident that McCain would continue the “failing march of his predecessor.” The site argued that a terrorist attack could push the election into McCain’s column, and thus lead to an expansion of U.S. military commitments in the Islamic world in an attempt take revenge on al-Qaeda. The website already brags about having lured the Bush administration and the U.S. into a trap that has “exhausted its resources and bankrupted its economy” and expects that to accelerate if the even more hawkish McCain gets elected.

Most terrorism analysts would agree that al-Qaeda has successfully duped the Bush administration. Whether McCain, if elected, would fall into a similar trap is unknowable before the election. Sometimes politicians turn 180 degrees from their campaign rhetoric after being elected—after all, during the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush promised to give us a “more humble foreign policy” compared to the Clinton years of profligate small scale military interventions in the developing world. During the 2008 campaign, McCain has been a bigger hawk than even the president on Iraq, but I suppose it is at least possible that he could wise up after taking office.

Both Bush and McCain have macho tendencies and that’s what al-Qaeda brutally exploits. It is standard practice for weak actors, such as terrorist groups and guerillas, to bait the stronger party by attacking and then hope for excessive retaliation. Such overreaction makes it easier for such groups to garner more money and recruits for their causes and also to overextend the giant. Instead of trying to go after the al-Qaeda leadership using intelligence, law enforcement, and surgical Special Forces strikes in the shadows, Bush launched a high profile invasion and occupation of the Muslim land of Afghanistan—the very thing that drives radical Islamists to morph into terrorists. He then compounded the error by unnecessarily blundering into a second invasion and occupation of a Muslim land—Iraq—that had nothing at all to do with neutralizing the 9/11 attackers. Al-Qaeda is betting that McCain is an even bigger stumbling cowboy than Bush.

But al-Qaeda also may have lost sight of its original objective. Originally, the major goal of its attacks against the United States was to get “infidels” off Islamic lands. Now al-Qaeda seems to hope to provoke the United States into invading and occupying ever more Muslim lands—in order to exhaust the U.S. beyond being mired in its two existing quagmires and to drum up even more recruits and money for its cause. As with most maturing organizations, organizational survival and expansion become goals in themselves.

The Obama campaign, seemingly much more sophisticated than McCain’s effort, must be smirking as it holds its tongue about the endorsement of its rival by what is probably the most famous terrorist group in history, especially after McCain has ham-handedly attacked Obama’s association with Bill Ayers, a washed up domestic terrorist turned community activist, who hasn’t committed terrorism in decades. But the Obama campaign probably just wants to let al-Qaeda’s endorsement speak for itself. Ironically, in spite of getting an endorsement from the most heinous terrorist group in world history, McCain will probably try to continue to beat Obama over the head with Bill Ayers rap—much like the draft-evading Bush questioned the war heroism of John Kerry during the 2004 campaign.

If Bush fell into al-Qaeda’s trap from the right, however, Obama, if elected, could very well fall into it from the left. Muscular liberals often think that their foreign policy is very different from Bush’s neo-conservative fare, but it often gets us to the same place—in al-Qaeda’s crosshairs. Such liberals tend to use military power for “humanitarian” reasons. Even when such interventions don’t have ulterior motives—which, as in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti, they almost always do—they often make somebody very mad. For example, in the Muslim land of Somalia during the Clinton administration, bin Laden helped Somalis with the attack that killed 18 American troops and caused the U.S. to withdraw its forces from that country. Also, Obama has talked about getting more involved in the Muslim-inhabited region of Darfur in Sudan.

With talk of terrorist strikes this close to the election, it is possible that al-Qaeda could be once again trying to influence the outcome. In late October 2004, bin Laden released a video tape several days before the U.S. presidential election that warned of an attack, which John Kerry’s campaign believed tipped the electoral balance against them. According to Richard Clarke, the chief counter-terrorism advisor in the Clinton and Bush White Houses, U.S. intelligence analysts believe that that is exactly what bin Laden wanted to do. Similarly, in March 2004, al-Qaeda bombed a Spanish train in a likely attempt to throw the election against then-Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who had been one of the few major U.S allies sending troops to help out in Iraq. It worked, Aznar lost, and Spanish troops were withdrawn from Iraq.

Let’s hope that the rhetoric on al-Qaeda’s website is just bluster, as in October 2004, rather than turning into an attack, as it did in Spain in March 2004. We want a fair election with no outside interference from evildoers.

Ivan Eland

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Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. He is author of the books, The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.

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