HACKED STRATFOR EMAILS: DEA Told To Back Off From The Brother Of Afghan President Hamid Karzai

Ahmed Wali Karzai

Πηγή: Business Insider
By Michael Kelley
Sept 19 2012

Newly released internal emails from the U.S. private security firm Stratfor state that in 2007 the Bush Administration and CIA ordered the Drug Enforcement Agency to back off a major drug trafficking investigation of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's half brother.

Ahmed Wali Karzai was an influential power broker in Afghanistan before he was assassinated in July 2011.

In June 6, 2007 email, titled "RE: Humint - Afghanistan - Karzai (Strictly Protect - Confidential," Stratfor vice president of intelligence Fred Burton wrote:

The brother of President Karzai of Afghanistan is under investigation by DEA as a major narcotics trafficker. For political reasons, DEA has been told to backoff [sic] by the White House and CIA. DEA is seeing a direct nexus between terrorism and narcotics in Afghanistan with narcotics sales being used to fund jihadist operations.

After a Stratfor analyst asks "how close is karzai to this brother?" Burton replies:

Was described to me as close. Karzai will end up being another Noreiga.
Off the record --
DEA will proceed and take 'em (both?) down anyway, once this White House disappears.
As I've said before, every country we have touched, turns to shit.

The crackdown on narcotics in Afghanistan has not yet occurred as opium production rose by about 61 percent from 2010 to 2011 and continued to rise in 2012 as U.S. troops have patrolled the poppy fields during this time.

WikiLeaks has published 2,694 out of what it says is a cache of 5 million internal Stratfor emails (dated between July 2004 and December 2011) obtained by the hacker collective Anonymous around Christmas.

UPDATE: As redditor WhoShotJR notes, current and former American officials told the New York Times in 2009 that Ahmed Karzai received regular payments from the CIA since 2001.

The Lies that Led to the Iraq War and the Persistent Myth of ‘Intelligence Failure’

Secretary of State Colin Powell presents the Bush administration’s case for war on Iraq at the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003

Πηγή: Jeremy R. Hammond
Sept 8 2012

The George Washington University National Security Archive recently published a newly released CIA document from January 2006 titled “Misreading Intentions: Iraq’s Reaction to Inspection Created Picture of Deception”. The document, the Archive notes, “blames ‘analyst liabilities’ such as neglecting to examine Iraq’s deceptive behavior ‘through an Iraqi prism,’ for the failure to correctly assess the country’s virtually non-existent WMD capabilities.” Foreign Policy magazine describes it as a “remarkable CIA mea culpa”. But nothing could be further from the truth. Far from acknowledging the CIA’s true role, the document does not present any kind of serious analysis, but only politicized statements rehashing well-worn official claims designed to further the myth that there was an “intelligence failure” leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March of 2003.

There was no such “intelligence failure”. On the contrary, there was an extremely successfuldisinformation campaign coordinated by the CIA in furtherance of the government’s policy of seeking regime change in Iraq. The language of the document itself reveals a persistent dishonesty. It speaks of “deepened suspicions” that Iraq “had ongoing WMD programs” and “suspicions that Iraq continued to hide WMD.” Needless to say, however, the Iraq war was not sold to the public on the grounds that government officials and intelligence agencies had “suspicions” that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It was sold to the public with declarations that it was a known fact that Iraq had ongoing programs and stockpiles of WMD. The tacit acknowledgment that the actual evidence only supported “suspicions” that this was so by itself is proof of that the narrative of an “intelligence failure” is a fiction.

The report relies heavily upon the 1995 defection of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamal (respectively spelled “Saddam Husayn” and “Husayn Kamil” in the document), arguing that the information he revealed bolstered suspicions that Iraq was concealing ongoing WMD programs and continued to possess stockpiles of WMD. It argues further that the regime’s behavior indicated he was hiding such weapons. Kamal, who returned to Iraq and was killed there in 1996, was the same individual Vice President Dick Cheney referred to in selling the administration’s case for war on August 26, 2002, when he said that “we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we’ve gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors—including Saddam’s own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam’s direction.” But the fact is that Cheney was lying, and the CIA’s persistent adherence to essentially the same false narrative renders ridiculous the suggestion that this document is some kind of “mea culpa”.

The document states, “Analysts interpreted Iraq’s intransigence and ongoing deceptive practices as indicators of continued WMD programs or an intent to preserve WMD capabilities, reinforcing intelligence we were receiving at the time that Saddam Husayn continued to pursue WMD.” Yet the examples it lists of Iraq’s “intransigence” and deception do not support the CIA’s earlier judgments that Iraq had ongoing programs and WMD stockpiles. “In April 1991, for example,” the document says, “Iraq declared that it had neither a nuclear weapons program nor an enrichment program. Inspections in June and September 1991 proved that Iraq had lied on both counts, had explored multiple enrichment paths, and had a well-developed nuclear weapons program.” This is true. However, the document makes no mention of the fact that it was public knowledge that Iraq’s nuclear program was subsequently completely dismantled. As former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohammed ElBaradei, pointed out, the Agency had “destroyed, removed or rendered harmless all Iraqi facilities and equipment component of Iraq’s nuclear programme” by 1992. The IAEA reported in 1998 that it was “confident that we had not missed any significant component of Iraq’s nuclear programme”.

The document states that in “March 1992, Iraq decided to declare the unilateral destruction of certain prohibited items to the Security Council, while continuing to conceal its biological warfare (BW) program and important aspects of the nuclear, chemical, and missile programs”. As worded, this implies that Iraq in 1992 was continuing these programs. This is disingenuous, because in fact Iraq was at that time trying conceal past programs that it had ended following the 1991 Gulf War. Iraq did not continue these programs, but dismantled them and unilaterally destroyed its WMD in order to hide the fact that it had had such programs in the past. As the document acknowledges in its “Key Findings” section, “in 1991, Iraq secretly destroyed or dismantled most undeclared items and records”. Yet the very next paragraph contradictorily and disingenuously states, “We now judge that the 1995 defection of Saddam’s son-in-law Husayn Kamil—a critical figure in Iraq’s WMD and denial and deception (D&D) activities—promoted Iraq to change strategic direction and cease efforts to retain WMD programs.” This again implies that Iraq had ongoing WMD programs at least until 1995, which is false, as the CIA knew perfectly well at the time this report was written.

Even more importantly, that the programs had been dismantled and the weapons destroyed is in fact precisely what Hussein Kamal actually told U.N. inspectors when he defected in 1995. The newly released document in fact points out, “He said that Saddam destroyed all WMD in secret” in 1991. Yet apart from that single buried admission, the document is full of statements implying that weapons programs continued. For example, it states that “Iraqi officials did not admit to weaponized BW agent after the defection of Husayn Kamil”, but fails to clarify that this was an admission of past and not ongoing activity. The document acknowledges that Kamal’s defection was “the key turning point in Iraq’s decision to cooperate more with inspections”, but then adds that his debriefing with U.N. inspectors “strengthened the West’s perception of Iraq as a successful and efficient deceiver.” Following Kamal’s defection, the document states, “the West”, meaning the U.S., judged that Iraq “was determined to retain WMD capabilities.” In other words, the U.S. continued to claim that Iraq had ongoing WMD programs and stockpiles, and supposedly based that assessment on Kamal’s information, even though Kamal in fact had confirmed that Iraq’s WMD had been destroyed and its programs dismantled in 1991.

The document similarly states, “We now judge that the Iraqis feared that Kamil … would reveal additional undisclosed information. Iraq decided that further widespread deception and attempts to hold onto extensive WMD programs while under UN sanctions was untenable and changed strategic direction by adopting a policy of disclosure and improved cooperation.” The wording here that Iraq was attempting in 1995 “to hold onto” such programs does not merely imply a falsehood, but is an outright lie. Once again, the CIA was perfectly well aware that until 1995, Iraq was attempting to conceal the existence of its past WMD programs, which it was not attempting “to hold onto” but had dismantled in 1991. This kind of dishonest use of language to suggest Iraq continued to have ongoing WMD programs, even while contradictorily acknowledging elsewhere in the report that this was not true, is illustrative not of a willingness by the CIA to come clean, but to continue to obfuscate the truth and to persist in the false narrative of “intelligence failure”. The CIA in the document even tries to spin its acknowledgment that Iraq’s programs were dismantled and its WMD destroyed in 1991 by saying that this unilateral action left Iraq “unable to provide convincing proof when it later tried to demonstrate compliance”—thus shifting the burden onto Iraq to prove that it didn’t have WMD and attempting to obfuscate the fact that U.S. government officials repeatedly lied by claiming that the intelligence community had proof that Iraq did have WMD.

In October 1991, Iraq admitted to the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) that its Al Atheer site had been built in order to conduct research into enriching uranium to build a nuclear weapon. On August 22, 1995, when Hussein Kamal was asked about the work that went on there, and whether it was continuing somewhere else, he replied, “yes, but not now, before the Gulf War.” That is to say, there were other sites involved in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, but this program was ended by 1991. He also pointed out that the work done on enrichment “were only studies.” He noted that Iraq already “had highly enriched uranium from France but it was under the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] safeguards.” Iraq thus had worked on building its own centrifuges to enrich uranium, “but had never reached a point close to testing.”

The CIA document nevertheless states that Kamal’s defection “exposed the previously unknown 1991 crash program to develop nuclear weapons.” The program referred to would have entailed using enriched uranium from Iraq’s French-built reactor and enriching additional uranium obtained from Russia to weapons-grade in order to produce material for a bomb. The remarkable dishonesty of this statement is on full display when one compares it with the fact that, when this “crash program” was brought up in his UNSCOM debriefing, Kamal’s actual response was, “no, not true.” He acknowledged that “the decision was already there to use French uranium, but they were not ready with centrifuges.” In other words, the “crash program” was nothing more than a hypothetical contingency plan involving a scenario in which Iraq would make a final desperate effort to produce a nuclear weapon by kicking out U.N. and IAEA inspectors and enriching its own uranium to weapons-grade—a capability Iraq did not possess.

Libyan Alleges Waterboarding by C.I.A., Report Says

A member of the Libyan Islamic Fighters Group in Tripoli in 2011. Members were detained in Afghanistan and sent back.

Πηγή: New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and SCOTT SHANE
Sept 6 2012

WASHINGTON — Days after the Justice Department closed out its criminal investigation of the deaths of two detainees while in the custody of the C.I.A., new information has surfaced calling into question official accounts of the extent of waterboarding by American interrogators.

A new report by the nonprofit group Human Rights Watch, based on documents and interviews in Libya after the fall of its dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, includes a detailed description of what appears to be a previously unknown instance of waterboarding by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan nine years ago.

That claim clashes with repeated assertions by current and former agency officials that only three high-level terrorism suspects — none of them Libyans — were waterboarded.

The account documented by Human Rights Watch could not be independently corroborated. But the report’s description of interrogation methods, based on individual interviews with former prisoners who had not sought out the human rights workers, match up with official documents on C.I.A. techniques. It underscores how much is still not known about the United States’ treatment of terrorist suspects during the early years of the Bush administration.

When President Obama took office in 2009, members of Congress and human rights advocates called for a “truth commission” to establish a definitive account of interrogation and detention. But the calls faded after Mr. Obama said he wanted to look forward and not backward.

Last week, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that a three-year criminal investigation of the C.I.A. interrogation program was concluding without any charges being filed. The only remaining inquiry into the program, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, is nearing completion, but its report is classified and it is unclear how much will become public.

The investigation by Human Rights Watch had its origins in a trove of documents related to detainees transferred to Colonel Qaddafi’s prisons, including several by the United States. The papers became available last year as a result of the uprising against the Libyan leader, which was supported by the United States and other NATO allies.

Researchers used the names on the files as part of their broader efforts to track down former prisoners transferred to Libyan custody and interview them, opening an unusual window into American detention, interrogation and rendition operations nearly a decade ago. Many of the former detainees are now living freely in Libya, and some are active in politics or have positions in the new government.

The 156-page report, “Delivered Into Enemy Hands: U.S.-led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya,” written by Laura Pitter, recounts interviews with 14 Libyans who it says are former detainees who were sent back to Libya around 2004, after Colonel Qaddafi agreed to renounce his nuclear ambitions and help fight Islamist terrorism. At least five, Ms. Pitter writes, had been held by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan before their rendition.

Most of the former detainees were members of the Libyan Islamic Fighters Group, who were dedicated to the overthrow of the Qaddafi government. Many had gone to Afghanistan before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and some had come into contact with Al Qaeda. In December 2004, the State Department designated the Libyan group a terrorist organization, but the former detainees denied being allied with Al Qaeda against the Western nations that had largely considered Colonel Qaddafi a pariah.

A particular focus of the report is the account of Mohammed Shoroeiya, who was reportedly detained in Pakistan in April 2003 and held in American custody in Afghanistan before being transferred to Libya. Mr. Shoroeiya gave Ms. Pitter detailed sketches of what he said were prison facilities and techniques.

Mr. Shoroeiya told Human Rights Watch that at one point in Afghanistan, his American captors had put a hood on his head and strapped him to a wooden board, then poured water over his face until he felt as if he was asphyxiating. An American man who appeared to be a doctor was present during the sessions, he said. While he did not use the term “waterboarding,” the description matches that technique.

“They start to pour water to the point where you feel like you are suffocating,” Mr. Shoroeiya said. He was asked questions between sessions, he added, and “they wouldn’t stop until they got some kind of answer from me.”

C.I.A. officials have publicly stated that waterboarding was used only on three prisoners: Abu Zubaydah, who helped run a terrorist training camp; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of plotting the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the organizer of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Ms. Pitter said Mr. Shoroeiya first mentioned a board being used in water torture in 2009 to a Human Rights Watch researcher who spoke with him in a Libyan prison. She said she tracked him down this year hoping to learn more about his treatment in Libya. “All these guys are grateful for the intervention,” she said, referring to the NATO assistance to Libyan rebels. “But they just feel like somebody needs to acknowledge that this happened to them and that it was wrong.”

Asked about the reported fourth case of waterboarding, a C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Youngblood, said, “The agency has been on the record that there are three substantiated cases in which detainees were subjected to the waterboarding technique under the program.” She said she could not comment on the “specific allegations” in the Human Rights Watch report but noted that the Justice Department had reviewed the treatment of more than 100 detainees held by the agency and “declined prosecution in every case.”

Justice Department officials have declined to discuss which cases they examined or why charges were not brought, referring in general terms to problems with evidence, statutes of limitations and jurisdiction. But it is possible that the treatment of the Libyans, which has not been previously reported, was not part of the investigation.

Mr. Shoroeiya and another detainee imprisoned in Pakistan and held by the Americans in Afghanistan, Khalid al-Sharif, reported other mistreatment, too.

They described being stripped naked and chained to walls; being left in diapers in dark cells for weeks or months at a time without being allowed to bathe; being forced into painful stress positions; being slammed into walls while their necks were protected by a foam collar; being forced into a small box; and being subjected to continuous, loud music.

Many of those techniques match the descriptions of techniques that the Bush administration approved as lawful, despite anti-torture laws. The techniques have been discussed for years and were detailed in Justice Department memorandums that were declassified in 2009.

Several details were new, however. Mr. Shoroeiya said the board to which he was strapped for the suffocation sessions could also be spun around, disorienting him. Mr. Shoroeiya also described being forced to stand, with one leg broken, naked and without food for over a day in a tall, narrow box while music blared from speakers on either side of his head. And both he and Mr. Sharif said interrogators forced them to lie in icy water in a sort of tub improvised from a tarp, with more water poured over their faces.

Obama's justice department grants final immunity to Bush's CIA torturers

Anti-torture activists, wearing Guantánamo-style orange jumpsuits, demonstrate outside the White House in June 2011

Πηγή: The Guardian
By Glenn Greenwald

August 31 2012

(updated below)

The Obama administration's aggressive, full-scale whitewashing of the "war on terror" crimes committed by Bush officials is now complete. Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the closing without charges of the only two cases under investigation relating to the US torture program: one that resulted in the 2002 death of an Afghan detainee at a secret CIA prison near Kabul, and the other the 2003 death of an Iraqi citizen while in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib. This decision, says the New York Times Friday, "eliminat[es] the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA".

To see what a farce this is, it is worthwhile briefly to review the timeline of how Obama officials acted to shield Bush torturers from all accountability. During his 2008 campaign for president, Obama repeatedly vowed that, while he opposed "partisan witch-hunts", he would instruct his attorney general to "immediately review" the evidence of criminality in these torture programs because "nobody is above the law." Yet, almost immediately after winning the 2008 election, Obama, before he was even inaugurated, made clear that he was opposed to any such investigations, citing what he called "a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards".

Throughout the first several months of his presidency, his top political aides, such as the chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, publicly – and inappropriately – pressured the justice department to refrain from any criminal investigations. Over and over, they repeated the Orwellian mantra that such investigations were objectionable because "we must look forward, not backward". As Gibbs put it in April 2009, when asked to explain Obama's opposition, "the president is focused on looking forward. That's why."

On 16 April 2009, Obama himself took the first step in formalizing the full-scale immunity he intended to bestow on all government officials involved even in the most heinous and lethal torture. On that date, he decreedabsolute immunity for any official involved in torture provided that it comported with the permission slips produced by Bush department of justice (DOJ) lawyers which authorized certain techniques. "This is a time for reflection, not retribution," the new president so movingly observed in his statement announcing this immunity. Obama added:

"[N]othing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past … we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future."

Note how, in Obama's new formulation, those who believed that Bush officials should be held criminally accountable for their torture crimes – should be subjected to the rule of law on equal terms with ordinary citizens – were now scorned as "the forces that divide us". On the same day, Holder issued his own statement arguing that "it would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the justice department."

But at least this limited immunity left open the possibility of prosecuting those agents who went beyond the limits of the DOJ memos in how they tortured: in other words, those "rogue" torturers who used brutality and savagery beyond even what was permitted by Bush lawyers. On several occasions, Holder had flamboyantly leaked that he was horrified by what he read in certain case files about detainees who were severely injured by torture or even killed by it – there were more than 100 detainees who died while in US custody – and that he could not, in good conscience, simply sweep all of that under the rug.

As a result, in August 2009, Holder announced a formal investigation to determine whether criminal charges should be brought in over 100 cases of severe detainee abuse involving "off-the-books methods" such as "mock execution and threatening a prisoner with a gun and a power drill", as well as threats that "prisoners [would be] made to witness the sexual abuse of their relatives." But less than two years later, on 30 June 2011, Holder announced that of the more than 100 cases the justice department had reviewed, there would be no charges brought in any of them – except two.

The only exceptions were two particularly brutal cases, both of which resulted in the death of the detainee. One involved the 2002 abuse of Gul Rahman, who froze to death in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistanknown as the "Salt Pit", after he was beaten, stripped, and then shackled to a cement wall in freezing temperatures.

The other was the 2003 death of Manadel al-Jamadi at Abu Ghraib, whodied in CIA custody after he was beaten, stripped, had cold water poured on him, and then shackled to the wall. It was al-Jamadi's ice-packed body which was infamously photographed with a smiling US Army Sgt Charles Granier standing over it giving the thumbs-up sign.

A US military autopsy declared al-Jamadi's death a homicide due to "blunt force trauma to the torso complicated by compromised respiration". Autopsy photos showed "lacerations and multiple bruises on Jamadi's feet, thighs and arms", though "his most significant injuries – five broken ribs – are not visible in the photos." A physician told NPR back in 2005:

"'How Jamadi was shackled 'makes it very difficult to breathe because you are suspended in a very awkward position. When you combine it with having the hood over your head and having broken ribs, it's fairly clear that this death was caused by asphyxia because he couldn't breathe properly.'"

So, those are the two cases which the DOJ this week announced it was closing without any charges of any kind being brought. Because the Obama administration has systematically blocked all other cases besides these two from any possibility of criminal charges, yesterday's decision means that nobody in the US government will pay any price for the systematic worldwide torture regime which that nation implemented and maintained for close to a decade.

This is so despite the findings of General Antonio Taguba, who investigated the torture regime and said that "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes" and "the only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account." And it is done even in the face of General Barry McCaffrey's extraordinary observation that:

"We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA."

The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer yesterday said:

"That the justice department will hold no one accountable for the killing of prisoners in CIA custody is nothing short of a scandal … the decision not to file charges against individuals who tortured prisoners to death is yet another entry in what is already a shameful record."

Beyond the disgust that these events, on their own, should invoke in any decent person, there are two points worth making about all of this which really highlight just how odious all of it is.

First, Obama has shielded Bush torture crimes not only from criminal prosecution, but any and all forms of accountability. Obama himselfvigorously opposed and succeeded in killing even a congressional investigation into the torture regime at a time when his party controlled both houses of Congress.

Moreover, Obama's top officials, as WikiLeaks cables revealed, secretly worked with GOP operatives to coerce other countries, such as Spainand Germany, to quash their investigations into the US torture of their citizens, and issued extraordinary threats to prevent British courts from disclosing any of what was done. And probably worst of all, the Obama administration aggressively shielded Bush officials even from being held accountable in civil cases brought by torture victims, by invoking radical secrecy powers and immunity doctrines to prevent courts even from hearing those claims.

In sum, the Obama administration has been desperate to ensure that there will be no accountability or even that meaningful investigations ever take place. That is almost certainly due to the fact that numerous high-level members of Obama's own party were so complicit in these crimes. But at least equally important is this remarkable – and, it turns out, prescient – observation from a New York Times article by Charlie Savage in December 2008, on the prospect of torture investigations aimed at Bush officials:

"Because every president eventually leaves office, incoming chief executives have an incentive to quash investigations into their predecessor's tenure."

In other words, Obama is motivated to shield Bush officials from accountability for their crimes in the hope that once Obama leaves office, he, too, will be gifted identical immunity from the rule of law.

Second, although government torturers have now been fully protected by Obama from any accountability, those who blow the whistle on such crimes continue to be pursued by the same administration with unprecedented aggression. As Friday's Times article on Holder's announcement pointedly notes:

"While no one has been prosecuted for the harsh interrogations, a former CIA officer who helped hunt members of al-Qaida in Pakistan and later spoke publicly about waterboarding, John C Kiriakou, is awaiting trial on criminal charges that he disclosed to journalists the identity of other CIA officers who participated in the interrogations."

Here, again, we see one of the prime precepts of American justice: high-level official who commit even the most egregious crimes are shielded from all accountability; the only real "criminals" are those who speak publicly about those crimes.

When Obama first announced his intent to run for president, he vowed that "the era of Scooter Libby justice … will be over" – meaning high-level officials will no longer be able to break the law with impunity. In mid 2008, Holder denounced Bush's illegal torture and surveillance programs as showing "disrespect for the rule of law", and he vowed:

"We owe the American people a reckoning."

To say those pledges have been radically violated is to understate the case. Far worse, though, is that Obama officials have bolstered the warped precept at the root of so many of America's disasters: that crimes committed by and at the behest of the powerful reside above and beyond the rule of law. In so doing, they have ensured that Bush officials who authorized torture continue to command mainstream respectability, while future leaders tempted to torture again have no reason whatsoever to refrain from doing so.

This final act in the sorry spectacle has long been predictable, even inevitable. But that does not make it any less repellent.

* * * * *

UPDATE: I was on Democracy Now this morning with Amy Goodman discussing Holder's announcement. The seven-minute segment (which also included a discussion of Clint Eastwood's spectacular stream-of-consciousness outburst at the GOP convention last night), can be seen on the player below; a transcript will be posted here a bit later in the day:

Bush Tax Widened US Wealth Gap, Says Study

Πηγή: LowTax
Jan 18 2012

A recently-released report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), on the changes in the distribution of income among individual filers of tax returns between 1996 and 2006, has concluded that the tax cuts that were first enacted under the presidency of George W. Bush have contributed to a widening of the United States wealth gap.

The CRS report examines changes in income inequality among US tax filers between 1996 and 2006. In particular, it points out that Congress will soon need to address issues affecting the distribution of taxpayers’ income in the US.

For example, the Administration has stated that one of its principles for tax reform is to observe the “Buffett rule” that “no household making over USD1m annually should pay a smaller share of its income in taxes than middle-class families pay,” while Congress will need, later this year, to debate the scheduled expiration (at the end of 2012) of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts.

The CRS found that inflation-adjusted average after-tax income grew by 25% between 1996 and 2006 (the last year for which individual income tax data is publicly available). However, the average increase obscures a great deal of variation; in that “the poorest 20% of tax filers experienced a 6% reduction in income, while the top 0.1% of tax filers saw their income almost double.”

In addition, the CRS also found that “tax filers in the middle of the income distribution experienced about a 10% increase in income, and the proportion of income from capital increased for the top 0.1% from 64% to 70%.”

It has been ascertained that capital gains and dividends were a larger share of total income in 2006 than in 1996 (especially for high-income taxpayers) and were more unequally distributed in 2006 than in 1996, and that changes in capital gains and dividends were the largest contributor to the increase in the overall income inequality.

However, total taxes (individual income tax, payroll tax and the corporate income tax) also contributed to the increase in income inequality between 1996 and 2006. Taxes reduced income inequality by 5% in 1996, but by less than 4% in 2006. Taxes were therefore more progressive and had a greater equalizing effect in 1996 than in 2006.

The major tax change between 1996 and 2006 was enactment of the Bush tax cuts, which reduced taxes especially for higher-income tax filers. Those tax cuts involved reduced tax rates, the introduction of the 10% tax bracket (which reduced taxes for all taxpayers), and reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends.

Furthermore, in 1996, long-term capital gains were taxed at 28% (15% for lower-income taxpayers) and all dividends were taxed as ordinary income. By 2006, long-term capital gains and qualified dividends were taxed at 15% (5% for lower-income taxpayers).

Has Obama taken Bush’s ‘preemption’ strategy to another level?

U.S. President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush in the Rose Garden of the White House on Jan. 16, 2010. Pincus says Obama has taken notion of “preemption” as a defense strategy even further than Bush did.

Πηγή: Washington Post
By Walter Pincus
Jan 10 2012

Has President Obama adopted George W. Bush’s “policeman of the world” approach to the fight against terrorism?

A troubling element of Bush’s defense strategy was the perceived need for the United States to prevent ungoverned areas of the world from becoming breeding grounds for terrorists, on the assumption that all terrorists are a threat to U.S. interests. That approach apparently has been expanded and given more prominence in Obama’s revised strategic guidance, which was released Thursday.

Under the subtitle “A Challenging Global Security Environment,” the first pages discuss the success in killing Osama bin Laden and rendering al-Qaeda “far less capable,” then say that extremist groups in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere “will continue to threaten U.S. interests, allies, partners and the homeland.”

The paper says, “For the foreseeable future, the United States will continue to take an active approach to countering these threats by monitoring the activities of non-state threats worldwide, working with allies and partners to establish control over ungoverned territories, and directly striking the most dangerous groups and individuals when necessary” — emphasis added.

The United States has a long history of launching major military interventions when national security interests appear to be at stake. But Bush’s adoption, after Sept. 11, 2001, of a policy of preemptive action took American intervention to a new, questionable level.

With the country still reeling from the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush justified that approach in a September 2002 National Security Strategy paper, saying, “Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today’s threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.”

Its first implementation was the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, allegedly to prevent Saddam Hussein from giving weapons of mass destruction, if he had them, to terrorists who would then attack the United States. The final results of that “preemptive” war are not yet in, but almost 4,500 U.S. troops were killed, an additional 32,200 seriously wounded and nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer money spent. To make matters worse, Bush, and now Obama, along with Congress, have used a credit card rather than paying for the war with a tax.

In December 2005, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took the preemption doctrine to a new level. She wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that weak and failing states — not countries like Iraq — pose an “unparalleled” danger to the United States because they permit the growth and movement of criminals and terrorists. “Absent responsible state authority, threats that would and should be contained within a country’s borders can now melt into the world and wreak untold havoc,” Rice wrote.

The Bush State Department’s Strategic Plan for fiscal years 2007-2012 aimed to “directly confront threats to national and international security from . . . failed or failing states.” It called on the U.S. military to provide training to weak states’ security forces so they could combat internal terrorist threats and insurgencies.

The National Security Strategy added: “Military involvement may be necessary to stop a bloody conflict, but peace and stability will last only if follow-on efforts to restore order and rebuild are successful.”

Among the steps proposed: “Expanding Special Operations Forces and investing in advanced conventional capabilities.”

Does that sound familiar? It’s also contained in Obama’s strategy paper, along with the Bush concerns about ungoverned territories.

But what particularly caught my eye was that phrase — the United States will consider “directly striking the most dangerous groups and individuals when necessary.”

What exactly does that mean?

Who are the “dangerous groups and individuals”?

Who puts them on the list, and what are the criteria?

And who makes the decision that direct U.S. strikes are needed, and on what basis?

These questions need to be asked and answered, at least by congressional committees that have a responsibility to do so on behalf of the American people.

All of this has a “policeman of the world” quality, to use a phrase employed 45 years ago by Sen. J.W. Fulbright (D-Ark.), who was questioning U.S. military and intelligence operations worldwide to counter communism, particularly in former colonial nations such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. We have since learned that many of those called “communists” back then were really nationalists opposing harsh, undemocratic rulers in their countries.

How many such rulers today are being given U.S. security assistance by labeling their opponents “terrorists”?

Obama Returns to Bush Plan for Cutting U.S. Troops in Europe

Πηγή: Bloomberg
By Viola Gienger
Jan 8 2012

The Obama administration plans to revert to a Bush-era plan to cut the number of U.S. Army combat brigades in Europe in half as part of the Pentagon budget cuts to be announced within weeks, U.K. Defense Secretary Philip Hammond said.

The decision is a retreat from the administration’s previous determination, announced last April, to leave in place three of the four brigade combat teams now stationed in Europe, three in Germany and one airborne brigade in Italy. A brigade combat team usually has 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers.

“My understanding is that there will remain two brigades,” Hammond said in an interview yesterday in Washington after meeting U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for their first talks at the Pentagon since they each took office. “But in addition to that, there will be some rotating presence” for training and exercises, he said.

The Obama administration’s April announcement had reversed a 2004 decision by the administration of President George W. Bush to cut the number of brigades in Europe from from four to two, or by 6,000 to 10,000 troops.

As of December 2010, the U.S. had almost 80,000 military personnel stationed in Europe, more than 54,000 of them in Germany, according to the Defense Department’s website.

Panetta and other Pentagon officials who unveiled a revised U.S. defense strategy yesterday refused to give specifics about future force size or weapons systems.

“We’re not going to discuss details of any specific programmatic or force-structure decisions right now,” Navy Captain John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said in response to Hammond’s comment.

‘Adapt and Evolve’

Panetta told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday that the U.S. military’s force posture in Europe “will of necessity continue to adapt and evolve,” citing “emerging strategic priorities that we face elsewhere.”

A reduction of forces in Europe may limit the ability of the U.S. to deploy combat troops rapidly to hot spots in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. Many of the Americans sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past 10 years have come from bases in Western Europe.

“The reason why they’re still in Germany has less to do with Europe than it has to do with the fact that it’s a lot easier to get to the Middle East from Europe” than from the U.S., said Gary Schmitt, director of advanced strategic studies at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Senate Intelligence Committee staff member.

Air Force Capability

The U.S. still plans to keep facilities available and maintain “significant Air Force capability in Europe,” Hammond said. That element may protect the U.K. from too much impact of American cuts because it hosts mostly U.S. Air Force units.

Returning the soldiers to the U.S. may not save much money because they’ll require facilities at home, and deploying them for meaningful exercises abroad is costly, Schmitt said.

European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will need to “respond in a mature way” to the U.S. plans, Hammond told an audience at the Atlantic Council policy group earlier yesterday, before his meetings.

“Reductions in U.S. troop numbers are not going to be welcomed by European allies in the alliance,” Hammond said. “But I think we all understand the budget pressure the U.S., like all of us, are under.”

Germany Not Surprised

The German Defense Ministry said it doesn’t have information on possible U.S. base closings and isn’t surprised by Pentagon force-reduction plans.

“It’s understandable, and we’re following it with interest,” Stefan Paris, a ministry spokesman, said in an interview in Berlin today. “We are engaged in a similar process in Germany.”

Hammond said in the interview that he felt reassured by his meetings at the Pentagon that the U.S. is sensitive to allies’ concerns about weapons systems. The U.K. is among the partner nations in Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which the country intends to use on two new aircraft carriers it is building.

Joint Strike Fighter

“What I’ve heard today is reassuring on that score,” Hammond said. “We’ve had a confirmation of an in-service date for the carrier variant.”

He said he doesn’t see anything that would “drive a significant increase in unit cost either.”

Pentagon officials also expressed recognition that such programs are crucial to their allies, he said.

“If we’re going to have more programs in the future where we’re working collaboratively across a number of nations, then it’s very important that people can be confident that things that happen domestically politically or budgetarily won’t undermine those programs or undermine the position of the allies,” he said.

Panetta and his staff also gave “very clear assurance” that “nothing that’s being proposed by the Pentagon or the Navy is going to impact” the completion dates for a new class of American nuclear ballistic missile submarines, Hammond said.

The U.K. also is building a new submarine, and the two nations are collaborating on a missile compartment for their vessels. Falls Church, Virginia-based General Dynamics Corp. and Newport News, Virginia-based Huntington-Ingalls Industries, Inc. are building the new U.S. submarines, while BAE Systems Plc., based in London, is building the British version.

“There will be no slippage in the design program” for the compartment, he said, adding that it’s too soon to say whether the compartment would be built in the U.S. or in the U.K.

"Iran-Contra affair": Reagan Briefed In Advance on Each Group of Missiles Sold to Iran.

President Reagan motioning to Ed Meese at the White House Press Briefing announcing the Iran-Contra connection. 11/25/86.Source credit: Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library

Πηγή: ionglobaltrends

Nov 26 2011

Bush Chaired Secret Committee that Recommended Mining Harbors of Nicaragua

Washington D.C., November 25, 2011 – President Ronald Reagan was briefed in advance about every weapons shipment in the Iran arms-for-hostages deals in 1985-86, and Vice President George H. W. Bush chaired a committee that recommended the mining of the harbors of Nicaragua in 1983, according to previously secret Independent Counsel assessments of "criminal liability" on the part of the two former leaders posted today by the National Security Archive.

Twenty-Five years after the advent of the "Iran-Contra affair," the two comprehensive "Memoranda on Criminal Liability of Former President Reagan and of President Bush" provide a roadmap of historical, though not legal, culpability of the nation's two top elected officials during the scandal from the perspective of a senior attorney in the Office of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. The documents were obtained pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the National Security Archive for the files compiled during Walsh's six-year investigation from 1987-1993.

The posting comes on the anniversary of the November 25, 1986, press conference during which Ronald Reagan and his attorney general, Edwin Meese, informed the American public that they had discovered a "diversion" of funds from the sale of arms to Iran to fund the contra war, thus tying together the two strands of the scandal which until that point had been separate in the public eye. The focus on the diversion, as Oliver North, the NSC staffer who supervised the two operations wrote in his memoirs, was itself a diversion. "This particular detail was so dramatic, so sexy, that it might actually-welldivert public attention from other, even more important aspects of the story," North wrote, "such as what the President and his top advisors had known about and approved."

The criminal liability studies were drafted in March 1991 by a lawyer on Walsh's staff, Christian J. Mixter (now a partner in the Washington law firm of Morgan Lewis), and represented preliminary conclusions on whether to prosecute both Reagan and Bush for various crimes ranging from conspiracy to perjury.

On Reagan, Mixter reported that the President was "briefed in advance" on each of the illicit sales of missiles to Iran. The criminality of the arms sales to Iran "involves a number of close legal calls," Mixter wrote. He found that it would be difficult to prosecute Reagan for violating the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) which mandates advising Congress about arms transfers through a third country-the U.S. missiles were transferred to Iran from Israel during the first phase of the operation in 1985-because Attorney General Meese had told the president the 1947 National Security Act could be invoked to supersede the AECA.

As the Iran operations went forward, some of Reagan's own top officials certainly believed that the violation of the AECA as well as the failure to notify Congress of these covert operations were illegal-and prosecutable. In a dramatic meeting on December 7, 1985, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger told the President that "washing [the] transaction thru Israel wouldn't make it legal." When Reagan responded that "he could answer charges of illegality but he couldn't answer charge that 'big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages," Weinberger suggested they might all end up in jail. "Visiting hours are on Thursdays," Weinberger stated. As the scandal unfolded a year later, Reagan and his top aides gathered in the White House Situation Room the day before the November 25 press conference to work out a way to protect the president from impeachment proceedings.

On the Contra operations, Mixter determined that Reagan had, in effect, authorized the illegal effort to keep the contra war going after Congress terminated funding by ordering his staff to sustain the contras "body and soul." But he was not briefed on the resupply efforts in enough detail to make him criminally part of the conspiracy to violate the Boland Amendment that had cut off aid to the Contras in October 1984.

Mixter also found that Reagan's public misrepresentations of his role in Iran-Contra operations could not be prosecuted because deceiving the press and the American public was not a crime.On the role of George Herbert Walker Bush, Mixter reported that the Vice President's "knowledge of the Iran Initiative appears generally to have been coterminous with that of President Reagan." Indeed, on the Iran-Contra operations overall, "it is quite clear that Mr. Bush attended most (although not quite all) of the key briefings and meetings in which Mr. Reagan participated, and therefore can be presumed to have known many of the Iran/Contra facts that the former President knew." But since Bush was subordinate to Reagan, his role as a "secondary officer" made it more difficult to hold him criminally liable.

Mixter's detailed report on Bush's involvement does, however, shed considerable light on his role in both the Iran and Contra sides of the scandal. The memorandum on criminal liability noted that Bush had a long involvement in the Contra war, chairing the secret "Special Situation Group" in 1983 which "recommended specific covert operations" including "the mining of Nicaragua's rivers and harbors." Mixter also cited no less than a dozen meetings that Bush attended between 1984 and 1986 in which illicit aid to the Contras was discussed.

Despite the Mixter evaluations, Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh continued to consider filing criminal indictments against both Reagan and Bush. In a final effort to determine Reagan's criminal liability and give him "one last chance to tell the truth," Walsh traveled to Los Angeles to depose Reagan in July 1992. "He was cordial and offered everybody licorice jelly beans but he remembered almost nothing," Walsh wrote in his memoir, Firewall, The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up. The former president was "disabled," and already showing clear signs of Althzeimers disease. "By the time the meeting had ended," Walsh remembered, "it was as obvious to the former president's counsel as it was to us that we were not going to prosecute Reagan."

The Special Prosecutor also seriously considered indicting Bush for covering up his relevant diaries, which Walsh had requested in 1987. Only in December 1992, after he had lost the election to Bill Clinton, did Bush turn over the transcribed diaries. During the independent counsel's investigation of why the diaries had not been turned over sooner, Lee Liberman, an Associate Counsel in the White House Counsel's office, was deposed. In the deposition, Liberman stated that one of the reasons the diaries were withheld until after the election was that "it would have been impossible to deal with in the election campaign because of all the political ramifications, especially since the President's polling numbers were low."

In 1993, Walsh advised now former President Bush that the Independent Counsel's office wanted to take his deposition on Iran-Contra. But Bush essentially refused. In one of his last acts as Independent Counsel, Walsh considered taking the cover-up case against Bush to a Grand Jury to obtain a subpoena. On the advice of his staff, however, he decided not to pursue an indictment of Bush.

Among the first entries Bush had recorded in his diary (begun in late 1986) was his reaction to reports from a Lebanese newspaper that a U.S. team had secretly gone to Iran to trade arms for hostages. "On the news at this time is the question of the hostages," he noted on November 5, 1986. "I'm one of the few people that know fully the details. This is one operation that has been held very, very tight, and I hope it will not leak."

Read the Documents:

Document 1, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Office of the Independent Counsel, C.J. Mixter to Judge Walsh, "Criminal Liability of Former President Reagan," March 21, 1991, 198 pages.

In this lengthy evaluation, Christian Mixter, a lawyer on the staff of the Independent Counsel, provides Lawrence Walsh with a comprehensive evaluation of the legal liability of President Ronald Reagan in the Iran-Contra operations. The memorandum reviews, in great detail, not only the evolution of the operations, but Reagan's central role in them. It includes "a summary of facts" on both the sale of arms to Iran, in order to free American hostages held in Lebanon, and the evolution of the illicit contra resupply operations in Central America, as well as the connection between these two seemingly separate covert efforts. The report traces Reagan's knowledge and authorization of the arms sales, as well as his tacit authorization of the illegal contra resupply activities; it also details his role in obtaining third country funding for the Contras after Congress terminated U.S. support in 1984. The document further evaluates Reagan's responses in two official inquiries to determine whether they rise to the level of perjury. For a variety of reasons, Mixter's opinion is that "there is no basis for a criminal prosecution" of Reagan in each of the areas under scrutiny, although he notes that it is a "close legal call" on the issue of arms sales to Iran.

Document 2

Office of the Independent Counsel, C.J. Mixter to Judge Walsh, "Criminal Liability of President Bush," March 21, 1991, 89 pages.

In this assessment, Mixter traces then-Vice President Bush's involvement in both sides of the Iran-Contra operations, including his meeting with a high Israeli official on the sales of arms to Iran in July 1986, and his presence at no fewer than a dozen meetings during which illicit assistance to the Contras was discussed. The legal evaluation also contains a detailed overview of Bush's role in arranging a quid pro quo deal with two Presidents of Honduras in order to garner Honduran support for allowing the Contras to use that country as a base of operations against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. "It is quite clear that Mr. Bush attended most (although not quite all) of the key briefings and meetings in which Mr. Reagan participated, and therefore can be presumed to have known many of the Iran/Contra facts that the former President knew." But since Bush was subordinate to Reagan, his role as a "secondary officer" rendered him less likely to be criminally liable for the actions he took.

The Mixter memo on Bush was written before the existence and cover-up of the Vice President's diaries became known in late 1992. The Independent Counsel's office did launch an investigation into why the diaries were not previously turned over and considered bringing charges against the former Vice President for illegally withholding them.
More – The Top 5 Declassified Iran-Contra Historical Documents:

Document 1

NSC, National Security Planning Group Minutes, "Subject: Central America," SECRET, June 25, 1984

At a pivotal meeting of the highest officials in the Reagan Administration, the President and Vice President and their top aides discuss how to sustain the Contra war in the face of mounting Congressional opposition. The discussion focuses on asking third countries to fund and maintain the effort, circumventing Congressional power to curtail the CIA's paramilitary operations. In a remarkable passage, Secretary of State George P. Shultz warns the president that White House adviser James Baker has said that "if we go out and try to get money from third countries, it is an impeachable offense." But Vice President George Bush argues the contrary: "How can anyone object to the US encouraging third parties to provide help to the anti-Sandinistas…? The only problem that might come up is if the United States were to promise to give these third parties something in return so that some people could interpret this as some kind of exchange." Later, Bush participated in arranging a quid pro quo deal with Honduras in which the U.S. did provide substantial overt and covert aid to the Honduran military in return for Honduran support of the Contra war effort.

Document 2

White House, Draft National Security Decision Directive (NSDD), "U.S. Policy Toward Iran," TOP SECRET, (with cover memo from Robert C. McFarlane to George P. Shultz and Caspar W. Weinberger), June 17, 1985

The secret deals with Iran were mainly aimed at freeing American hostages who were being held in Lebanon by forces linked to the Tehran regime. But there was another, subsidiary motivation on the part of some officials, which was to press for renewed ties with the Islamic Republic. One of the proponents of this controversial idea was National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, who eventually took the lead on the U.S. side in the arms-for-hostages deals until his resignation in December 1985. This draft of a National Security Decision Directive, prepared at his behest by NSC and CIA staff, puts forward the argument for developing ties with Iran based on the traditional Cold War concern that isolating the Khomeini regime could open the way for Moscow to assert its influence in a strategically vital part of the world. To counter that possibility, the document proposes allowing limited amounts of arms to be supplied to the Iranians. The idea did not get far, as the next document testifies.

Document 3

Defense Department, Handwritten Notes, Caspar W. Weinberger Reaction to Draft NSDD on Iran (with attached note and transcription by Colin Powell), June 18, 1985

While CIA Director William J. Casey, for one, supported McFarlane's idea of reaching out to Iran through limited supplies of arms, among other approaches, President Reagan's two senior foreign policy advisers strongly opposed the notion. In this scrawled note to his military assistant, Colin Powell, Weinberger belittles the proposal as "almost too absurd to comment on ... It's like asking Qadhafi to Washington for a cozy chat." Richard Armitage, who is mentioned in Powell's note to his boss, was an assistant secretary of defense at the time and later became deputy secretary of state under Powell.

Document 4

Diary, Caspar W. Weinberger, December 7, 1985

The disastrous November HAWK shipment prompted U.S. officials to take direct control of the arms deals with Iran. Until then, Israel had been responsible for making the deliveries, for which the U.S. agreed to replenish their stocks of American weapons. Before making this important decision, President Reagan convened an extraordinary meeting of several top advisers in the White House family quarters on December 7, 1985, to discuss the issue. Among those attending were Secretary of State Shultz and Secretary of Defense Weinberger. Both men objected vehemently to the idea of shipping arms to Iran, which the U.S. had declared a sponsor of international terrorism. But in this remarkable set of notes, Weinberger captures the president's determination to move ahead regardless of the obstacles, legal or otherwise: "President sd. he could answer charges of illegality but he couldn't answer charge that 'big strong President Reagan passed up chance to free hostages.'"

Document 5

NSC, Oliver L. North Memorandum, "Release of American Hostages in Beirut," (so-called "Diversion Memo"), TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE, April 4, 1986

At the center of the public's perception of the scandal was the revelation that the two previously unconnected covert activities -- trading arms for hostages with Iran and backing the Nicaraguan Contras against congressional prohibitions -- had become joined. This memo from Oliver North is the main piece of evidence to survive which spells out the plan to use "residuals" from the arms deals to fund the rebels. Justice Department investigators discovered it in North's NSC files in late November 1986. For unknown reasons it escaped North's notorious document "shredding party" which took place after the scandal became public.

Obama is Rambo of drone warfare

Πηγή: The Nation
By: Peter D Feaver

Oct 3 2011

The news that US forces have killed radical cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi marks an important threshold in the war on terror.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether this will constitute a demoralising blow to the global terrorist network - aside from bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Awlaki was probably the most prominent Al-Qaeda linked figure at large - or whether it will simply inspire more "martyrs" to AQ's cause. And they can disagree about whether it was legal/ethical for Obama to target an American citizen who was not convicted in court, or whether the Obama administration is over-relying on targeted drone strikes and is insufficiently attentive to the downsides. My own sense is that this dramatic event will intensify the international debate about the drone strikes and that the clamour could come to resemble similar complaints about Gitmo and the interrogation of detainees in the first decade of the war.

But I don't think reasonable people can disagree about two other things: first, whether the Obama administration is treating this struggle as a war and second, whether the Obama administration is across-the-board too soft on terrorists. I should say, they can't disagree about this any longer since I understand why there were doubts before. Those doubts are hard to sustain now.

First, it is clear that the administration views this struggle as a war, whatever silly spin they tried out before regarding "overseas contingency operations" against "man-made disasters." This latest drone strike is only lawful under the laws of armed conflict (i.e. the laws of war), and even then only under the particular (expansive) interpretation of the legal regime that Bush invoked when he declared this a war. President Obama may be squeamish about being explicit and clear in his rhetoric, and he is certainly ambivalent about his role as wartime commander-in-chief and all of the associated responsibilities that entails, but he has repeatedly ordered kinetic action that can only be justified if one understands that America is at war with an adversary that does not resemble the adversaries we used to fight in so-called traditional wars. You can claim Obama should not be treating this as a war, and you can claim that Obama has not applied the war-frame consistently across the range of his policies. But there can be no doubt that, at least in this one area, Obama views this as a war: He has to, otherwise he has ordered unlawful actions.

Second, it is beyond dispute that in one important area Obama is tough on terrorists, arguably tougher in this one respect than Bush. Bush inaugurated the use of drone strikes in the war, but Obama dramatically ramped up the pace, has been willing to sustain this pace despite the corrosive effect it has had on our crucial partnership with Pakistan, and now has been willing to cross another symbolic threshold with this strike. And as was the case with the bin Laden raid, this strike reflects a military unilateralism that rivals anything done in the Bush era.

Obama is, in short, the Rambo of drone warfare and so it is not fair to accuse him of being soft on terrorists. This is a heavily caveated assessment, for one of the differences between Obama and Bush is that Bush developed a more coherent and systematic strategy and embedded the kinetic dimension within that larger strategy (reasonable people can debate how effective the Bush administration was in implementing that strategy). Obama's overall strategy is not as coherent and systematic (cf. Iraq policy, artificial and arbitrary timelines, inattention to mobilising support, etc.). And on some of his terror policies, the incoherence does seem tied in part to what critics could consider "softness." But there is no doubt that Obama, as he promised during the 2008 campaign, has shown a vigour in deploying one important weapon in his arsenal: drone strikes.

This strike doesn't mean that Obama is invulnerable to campaign critiques about his handling of the war on terrorism, let alone critiques about his handling of national security more broadly. But it does mean that his Republican challenger will have to develop a sophisticated critique, and can't rely on the kinds of caricatures that were so effective against, say, Dukakis, or even Carter. There are plenty of areas where one could argue that Obama has been too "soft," but when it comes to kinetic military action, Obama presents a more complex picture and so will warrant a more nuanced critique.

How the War on Terrorism Did Russia a Favor

Russian troops patrol in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in April 2002

Πηγή: Time
By SIMON SHUSTER

Sep. 19 2011

Ten years ago, on Sept. 20, 2001, President George W. Bush announced for the first time that in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 the U.S. was starting a "war on terror," and he asked every nation to help. Four days later, against the advice of many of his generals, Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed, creating a bond unlike any the U.S. and Russia had built since World War II. But as with many of the unlikely relationships the U.S. formed after 9/11, the reasoning behind this one was not just solidarity or common cause. Countries around the world realized the practical appeal of a war on terrorism. Over the past ten years, it has become a seemingly permanent call to arms, a kind of incantation used to dodge questions, build alliances and justify the use of force. No one, not even Bush, grasped this as quickly as Putin.

Even before Putin became Russia's President in early 2000, and long before the Twin Towers fell, he had invoked the idea of a war against global terrorism to justify Russia's war in Chechnya. The terrorism aspect, at least, was true. Chechen separatists, who renewed their centuries-old struggle for independence soon after the Soviet Union fell, had resorted to terrorism as early as 1995, when they seized a hospital in the Russian town of Budyonnovsk and held more than 1,500 people hostage. Then in 1999, a series of apartment bombings, also blamed on the Chechens, killed hundreds of people in Moscow and other Russian cities. Putin responded by launching Russia's second full-scale invasion of Chechnya in less than a decade. "He received carte blanche from the citizens of Russia," says Mikhail Kasyanov, who was Russia's Finance Minister at the time. "They simply closed their eyes and let him do whatever he wanted as long as he saved them from this threat."

There was scant evidence, however, that the Chechen rebels were part of some global Islamist terrorist network, as Putin and his government repeatedly claimed. The leader of the separatists at the time was Aslan Maskhadov, a former Red Army colonel who was closer to communism than Islamism, and there was no proof that he received much help from abroad. "Still, all official statements said that we are fighting a war against international terror," says Andrei Illarionov, who served as Putin's senior economic adviser between 2000 and '05. "Of course, nobody outside Russia bought it." In the West, Putin's war in Chechnya thus enjoyed little sympathy. The Chechen conflict was seen as part of a rebellion that Moscow was trying to crush, and the atrocities allegedly committed by both sides earned widespread condemnation.

In late 1999, when Bush was campaigning for the presidency, he vowed to start urging an end to the war. "Even as we support Russian reforms, we cannot support Russian brutality," he said during a speech at the Reagan Library in California. "When the Russian government attacks civilians, leaving orphans and refugees, it can no longer expect aid from international lending institutions." Some days later, Condoleezza Rice, who later became Bush's National Security Adviser after his election, reiterated the need for financial pressure against "what is really a quite brutal campaign against innocent women and children in Chechnya." And in the fall of 2000, then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the U.N. that the Chechen war "has greatly damaged Russia's international standing and is isolating Russia from the international community."

But when Bush announced his own war on terrorism, all this rhetoric quickly evaporated. Putin, who had been the first to call Bush with his sympathy after learning of the 9/11 attacks, graciously offered to help with the invasion of Afghanistan. He let the U.S. ship supplies through Russian territory and did not object to the U.S. setting up bases in Central Asia, where the local despots quickly caught on to the opportunity. Uzbek President Islam Karimov, for instance, allowed the U.S. to build a permanent base, perhaps hoping that his new alliance with the war on terrorism would help reduce U.S. scrutiny of alleged human-rights abuses in Uzbekistan. "It all flowed naturally into the picture of a global war on terror," says Kasyanov, who by that time had been promoted to serve as Putin's Prime Minister. "There was no more criticism ... It just ceased to be a thorny issue."

By the summer of 2000, Russia had defeated the Chechen separatists and installed a puppet government led by the Kadyrov family, a Chechen clan loyal to the Kremlin. But claims of wholesale violations of human rights, including torture and extrajudicial killings, continued to surface as the Kadyrovs consolidated power in Chechnya. The need to remind the world that Russia was still fighting the war on terrorism remained, and Putin began to claim ever stronger links between Chechen rebels and the global jihad.

"Exaggeration of these links was one of the goals," Kasyanov recalls. During and after the 2004 terrorists siege of a school in the town of Beslan, where hundreds of hostages died, the Russian government claimed firm links between the Chechen terrorists and Islamist networks such as al-Qaeda. Soon after the siege, Putin said that nine of the hostage-takers were from the "Arab world," a claim that was never substantiated. Asked why he had decided to storm the building instead of trying to resolve the crisis through negotiations, Putin fumed: "I don't tell you to meet Osama bin Laden and invite him to Brussels or the White House for talks."

But the very idea of a war on terrorism had unnerved some officials inside Putin's own government. "Terrorism is a method of waging conflict," says Illarionov, Putin's former adviser. "How can you fight a war against a method? The very idea is nonsense. It's like announcing a war against tanks." In early 2005, Illarionov resigned from his post in the Kremlin, citing the rollback in democracy that followed the Beslan siege. Kasyanov had resigned in early 2004 for similar reasons, going on to join the opposition.

Yet the idea of a global war on terrorism remains one of Putin's key political narratives. It is trotted out to this day after every terrorist attack in the Russian heartland and during most discussions with Western leaders, who see it as a firm bond in their alliances with Moscow. Since Bush left office, President Barack Obama has let the term fade from White House rhetoric, usually preferring to name a specific enemy of the U.S. But the use of the phrase has spread far and wide. During this year's Arab Spring revolts, besieged dictators from Egypt to Libya and Syria have claimed that the revolutionaries trying to overthrow them are in fact foreign terrorists with links to the global jihad. Few Western governments have taken these claims seriously. But 10 years on, Bush's idea of a global war on terrorism is still more often used for propaganda than to prevent more attacks like 9/11. Changing that could take many more years.

A Dictator's Handbook for the President

Πηγή: Foreign Policy

By BRUCE BUENO DE MESQUITA, ALASTAIR SMITH

Sep. 14 2011

Barack Obama can't get away from talking about dictators. Four years ago, candidate Obama controversially asserted that his administration would be open to negotiations with autocratic governments like Syria, Iran, and North Korea. Today, responding to Republican criticisms that he has been weak or hesitant on foreign policy, the U.S. president's supporters are more likely to trot out the fact that three longtime dictatorships have fallen under his watch.

How much credit the president deserves for this is certainly open to debate. And in any case, the 2012 election is more likely to hinge on the high U.S. unemployment rate and the United States' sluggish economic growth than the state of Arab democracy or whether such democracy is advantageous for Americans. But it might still benefit the president to take a closer look at the factors that brought down Middle Eastern autocrats this year. And because "leading from behind" is no way to win an election, Obama might want to learn from their mistakes to help him in his own bid to retain power.

The logic of politics -- in both democracies and dictatorships -- is not nearly as complex as many think. Forget the intricacies of individual states, grand strategy, and the national interest. And for now, let's forget about right and wrong. Indeed, the real, universal lessons of political life can be gleaned from how leaders survive and thrive when in power.

At this point, you may be saying, "Hold on! If the U.S. president tried to act like a dictator he'd be out of a job in no time flat." You're right -- almost. Democratic leaders are constrained by the laws of the land, which also determine, through election procedures, the size of the coalition that they need in order to come to and hold power. Nearly everything leaders -- of all kinds -- do while in power comes down to knowing how many backers they absolutely need and how big a pool these supporters are drawn from. An American president, for example, doesn't need a majority of voters to choose him even in a two-party race. As Al Gore learned the hard way in 2000, the Electoral College is the determinant of how large a coalition is needed to be president. Placed just right, it is possible to win the presidency with just 25 percent or even less of the popular vote. While no candidate has yet achieved that minimum, a few have managed to win with just 30-something percent, and several have won even though another candidate got more votes.

Those voters who are truly essential get rewarded for their support; but how big their rewards are depends on how many substitutes there are for them. Think about it: Is your vote really worth the same as a Wall Street hedge fund manager or someone in a key swing state? The more substitutes -- we call them the selectorate -- the more cheaply comes the loyalty of essential supporters. The combination of coalition and selectorate size shapes a surprisingly large number of domestic and foreign-policy choices, choices that often can be said to deviate from what the majority of Americans want.

Coalition and selectorate size shape taxing and spending decisions; they determine the extent to which leaders follow corrupt policies or those aimed at enhancing the welfare of the general populace; and they explain variations in the limits on freedom and prosperity. Don't be fooled: Democrats and dictators alike do what best secures their hold on power. Although their methods may differ, just five rules shape how they govern. These rules identify the incentives driving survival-oriented leaders, whether of the Qaddafi or Obama variety.

Rule 1: Keep the winning coalition as small as possible.

Leaders should rely on as few people as possible to stay in power. Fewer "essentials" mean more control and greater discretion over how money is spent.

Take North Korea's Kim Jong Il, a contemporary master at ensuring dependence on a small coalition. He doesn't lose sleep over his starving population, and he doesn't hesitate to take provocative foreign-policy actions, like sinking the Cheonan, a South Korean naval vessel, or attacking South Korea's Yeonpyeong Island, both in 2010. These acts weren't merely to unsettle his rivals down south; they helped him discover fissures in his own coalition, sorting out who was truly loyal to him. Indeed, Kim, preparing for a transition of power to his son, purged senior members of his government right after the Cheonan incident and just before attacking Yeonpyeong. His policies are certainly bad for North Korea's neighbors and North Korea's starving people, but they work great for him and for his small cadre of crony loyalists.

In the U.S. context, the president needs a vast coalition (though well short of a majority) to hold office. That is presumably why Obama, who ran with great appeal to the Democratic Party's liberal base, has continually shifted toward the center, trying to capture and hold independent voters. Of course, he would love to need a smaller coalition, but that's hard to control given the electoral rules in the United States.

Still, members of Congress, with the help of their fellow party members in state legislatures, are pretty good at manipulating the rules to keep their respective coalitions small and loyal. Congressional leaders love gerrymandered electoral districts -- which ensure that they pick their voters instead of the voters picking them. Gerrymandering is so effective that incumbents have a 95 percent chance of reelection. It's all about keeping the pool of essentials small and loyal.

Rule 2: Keep the selectorate as large as possible.

Maintain a large selectorate -- the pool of potential supporters from which your winning coalition is drawn -- to make it easy to replace any troublemakers in the coalition. A large selectorate pool permits a big supply of substitute supporters to put the essentials on notice that they should be loyal and well-behaved or else face replacement.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, has mastered this rigged coterie system. Khamenei depends on a small coalition of Revolutionary Guard leaders (especially Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari), the Bonyads (who were originally created by the Shah, manage the coalition's money equal to approximately 20-25 percent of Iran's GDP, and are exempt from taxation or prosecution for corruption), the Basij (the thugs, led by Khamenei's son, who violently quell any hint of unrest), ayatollahs from outside the holy city of Qom, and some key business leaders. They are drawn from a large pool of prospective backers, including many aspiring junior clerics and a massive electorate of would-be supporters if the price is right. When he doesn't like the policies pursued by one of his erstwhile supporters, like former President Mohammad Khatami, he can simply get rid of him and find someone else -- like current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for instance -- to take his place. Luckily for Khamenei, many people are willing to do his bidding in exchange for power and the riches that come with it. That is a critical reminder to Ahmadinejad that he should not wander too far from the policies Khamenei (and Jafari) favor.

Of course, U.S. Democrats would also like to enlarge the selectorate and hold the coalition's size constant, but they can't as long as checks and balances are in place. When elections are meaningful, electoral rules make enlarging the selectorate difficult without violating Rule 1. Still, the Democratic Party works hard to register new voters who happen to be in income brackets, age groups, and locales likely to vote in their favor. Republicans work equally hard to try to impede those newly registered voters from actually voting, even as they do everything they can to mobilize their own electoral base. Competition is all about shrinking the winning coalition relative to the actual selectorate.

Who, after all, can forget that in 1970, President Richard Nixon expanded the selectorate by lowering the voting age from 21 to 18? The impact of this expansion was, over the long term, to give Republican presidential candidates far more votes than the pundits expected from among young, newly enfranchised voters.