LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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US Support For White Phosphorous In Gaza
Eileen Fleming in Op-Ed News:
“The Ileana Ros-Lehtinen/AIPAC driven House Resolution 867 boiled down to a call for censorship of the Goldstone Report without “any endorsement or further consideration” from the Obama Administration, rife with inaccuracies and undermines support for the universality of human rights.
“It is no surprise that Congress is trying to cover their culpable asses for during the 23 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, “Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault were decided upon in June 2008, and the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39) were approved by Congress in September. The GBU 39 bombs were delivered to Israel in November (prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation!) for use in the initial air raids on Gaza. [1]
One of the few who have been to Gaza, Congressman Baird D-WA, wrote, “H.Res. 867 is very serious business. If, as Goldstone asserts and the evidence I have seen supports, there were in fact gross violations of international law and human rights on all sides, we cannot in good conscience support H.Res. 867.
“This is about much more than just another imposed political litmus test that we are all too often asked to perform. This is about whether we as individuals and this Congress as an institution find it acceptable to drop white phosphorous on civilian targets, to rocket civilian communities, to destroy hospitals and schools, to use civilians as human shields, and to deliberately destroy nonmilitary factories, industries and basic water, electrical and sanitation infrastructure. This is about whether it is acceptable to restrict the movement, opportunities and hopes of more than a million people every single day.
“At the end of the day, this is also about our own domestic security. If we are seen internationally as condoning violations of human rights and international law, if our money and our weaponry play a leading role in those violations, and if we reflexively obstruct the findings of someone with the credentials, history and integrity of Justice Goldstone, it can only diminish our international standing and our own security.“-Rep. Brian Baird (D) represents Washington’s 3rd district.” [2]
Executive Order 12425: Interpol Brings Global Police State to US
John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute (via Lew Rockwell) sounds the alarm over executive order 12425, which places the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) beyond the reach of domestic laws, freedom of information act requests and constitutional checks.
“It’s hard to know exactly what the fallout from this executive order will be, but the ramifications for the American people could be ominous. For instance, if Interpol engages in illegal and/or unconstitutional activities against American citizens, it will be impossible for U.S. citizens to obtain information – via subpoena or other commonly used legal methods – regarding its records or activities.
Doug Valentine: CIA Killings Spell Defeat In Afghanistan (Updated)
Update (January 12): In response to criticism (in the Comments) by a US military historian, I’ve posted a review of Avatar here at MBP, on January 11.
Update (January 12): Since this piece is so topical and sensitive, I´m taking the liberty of adding links to it, so that readers can do further reading on their own.Original Post:
“Douglas Valentine, author of the recently released account of the DEA, “The Strength of the Pack,” contributes this piece to The Mind Body Politic:
Disrupting the Accommodation: The CIA Killings Spell Defeat In Afghanistan
Why?
“Why?” The grieving family members ask. “Why did the terrorists kill our loved ones?” (more…)
War Without End, Amen..
“Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was spurious. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and the U.S. gave him safe haven. If the new Iranian government had demanded that the U.S. turn over the Shah and we refused, would it have been lawful for Iran to invade the United States? Of course not.
When he announced his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, Obama invoked the 9/11 attacks. By continuing and escalating Bush’s war in Afghanistan, Obama, too, is violating the UN Charter. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama declared that he has the “right” to wage wars “unilaterally.” The unilateral use of military force, however, is illegal unless undertaken in self-defense…….
…In his declaration that he would send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Obama made scant reference to Pakistan. But his CIA has used more unmanned Predator drones against Pakistan than Bush. There are estimates that these robots have killed several hundred civilians. Most Pakistanis oppose them. A Gallup poll conducted in Pakistan last summer found 67% opposed and only 9% in favor. Notably, a majority of Pakistanis ranked the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than the Taliban or Pakistan’s arch-rival India.
Many countries use drones for surveillance, but only the United States and Israel have used them for strikes. Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times, “For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for targeted killings in a country where the United States is not officially at war.“
Progressives Seeing the Light On Obama
Believers waking up to the fact that they drank the kool-aid on Obama…
Torture Pictures You Can See and Torture Pictures You Can’t…
In the news last month, was a torture tape that implicates a UAE royal sheikh (who isn’t in the government) in acts of sadism. In it a uniformed policeman watches as the victim (who shortchanged the Sheikh in a grain deal) is whipped, beaten, electrocuted, and run over by an SUV). From an ABC report on the tape:
“The Sheikh begins by stuffing sand down the man’s mouth, as the police officers restrains the victim. Then he fires bullets from an automatic rifle around him as the man howls incomprehensibly…..
He uses an electric cattle prod against the man’s testicles and inserts it in his anus. At another point, as the man wails in pain, the Sheikh pours lighter fluid on the man’s testicles and sets them aflame…….
The Sheikh then pulls down the pants of the victim and repeatedly strikes him with board and its protruding nail. At one point, he puts the nail next to the man’s buttocks and bangs it through the flesh.
“Where’s the salt,” asks the Sheikh as he pours a large container of salt on to the man’s bleeding wounds. The victim pleads for mercy, to no avail.
The final scene on the tape shows the Sheikh positioning his victim on the desert sand and then driving over him repeatedly. A sound of breaking bones can be heard on the tape.”
This is all pretty gruesome and horrific. The Sheikh is clearly a monster. But that torture exists in Arab countries is not new. Can there be more to explain the media highlighting of this tape? Remember, it took CBS several years before it got around to the Iraq torture story (it was first reported in the US in 2001. The CBS expose of Abu Ghraib was in 2004).
Could it have anything to do with a recent piece of legislation?
Barack Obama, is throwing his weight behind The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009, passed on June 1, 2009. What this does is make the Secretary of Defense certify whether any images of prisoner treatment between September 11, 2009 and January 22, 2009 would endanger military personnel or US citizens, and at his discretion and without any possible review, prevent their disclosure. The certification lasts for three years and can be renewed indefinitely.
Here’s Glenn Greenwald on the subject:
“For decades, we had laws in place authorizing citizens to sue their telecommunication carriers if the telecoms allowed government spying on their communications in violation of the law, but when it was revealed that the telecoms did exactly this, the Congress simply changed the law retroactively so that it no longer applied. For decades, we had laws imposing civil and criminal liability on government officials who engaged in or authorized torture, but when it was revealed that our government did that, the Congress just retroactively changed the law to protect the torturers. And now that courts have ruled that our decades-old transparency law compels disclosure of this torture evidence, the Congress is just going to retroactively change the law — again — this time to empower the President to suppress that evidence anyway.”
Greenwald acts surprised, which is a bit funny. What did he think? That Obama was going to change things?
It makes you wonder if the Abu Dhabi tape was given airtime simply to provide enough impetus (as in, See, they do it too - and so much worse ) to pass this horrible bill.
Team Obama Turns Up Heat on NY Journalist
Michelle Malkin, writing in The Pittsburgh Tribune Online:
“As I’ve reported before, the Obama campaign’s “Vote for Change” registration drive, run simultaneously with ACORN/Project Vote, was an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama’s big-government vision.
In an e-mail message to whistle-blower MonCrief last summer, New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom told the truth: “The real story to all this is how these myriad entities allow them to shuffle money around so much that no one really knows what’s getting spent on what.” By Oct. 6, 2008, Strom had thrown in the towel in the wake of blistering phone conversations with the Obama campaign. She wrote:
“I’m calling a halt to my efforts. I just had two unpleasant calls with the Obama campaign, wherein the spokesman was screaming and yelling and cursing me, calling me a right-wing nut and a conspiracy theorist and everything else. I’d still like to get that file from you when you have a chance to send it. One of these days, the truth is going to come out.”
It’s only just begun.”
My Comment
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t consider Michelle Malkin anything but a very partisan source. I find her incredibly abrasive and limited. But this story really needs attention, not so much for the revelations about ACORN and the Obama campaign (what else would you expect?), but for the insight into how the government handles the “free” press when it gets out of line.
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