by Mary Pitt
June 22, 2010
After the national outpouring of support which thrust Barack Obama into the presidency in November, 2008, one would suppose that he had a solid majority of Americans behind him and would have little trouble in making the changes which he had promised. Immediately faced with an opposition minority who declared intentions to make sure that he would fail, the new President nonetheless toiled on in the effort to do what he could to make the lives of working Americans better, safer, and healthier.
First, of course, he had to deal with the collapse of the entire banking system as well as record unemployment due to a decade of outsourcing of American jobs. The "stimulus" bill for the banks had been pushed through by the Bush administration just before the close of their term and the economy staggered under the load of bailing out the very people who caused the crash and continued their old practices of gouging the public for the enrichment of their own investors.
Next, it became apparent that the unemployment was likely to worsen due to the financial condition of the American automobile manufacturers. So much borrowed money had been funneled to the banks that it required a good deal of ingenuity to be able to salvage what was almost the last industry in the nation and prevent the additional layoffs of their workers. President Obama was blasted for accepting shares of stock from General Motors as collateral for their loan but that seems to be working out.
Then came the blockbuster! Health care reform! Sure, we all wanted a program of universal health care as it exists in most of the world but, by then, it was clear that the Republicans would never allow such a measure through the Senate. Then we prayed for the "public option" so that, as taxpayers, we could pay only the true costs of health care rather than further enriching the health insurance corporations. The political wall went up again. Republicans are strange creatures who find that compulsory health insurance where we all pay into corporate profits is preferable to paying a bit more in taxes in order to save everybody more money.
Now the poor man is under fire for the way he "handled" the Gulf oil spill. He didn't go down to the Gulf soon enough or do enough about it! What did we expect him to do? Would it have helped if he had flown over on his way home from vacation and had pictures of him looking out the window at the devastation below published in all the papers? Or maybe he should have gone to New Orleans and given a rousing speech? Even the Progressives are acting as if they expected him to go out on a fishing boat and suck the crude oil up with a long straw?
Yes, that's facetious but I am angry! The people's movement moved the Democratic Party far to the left and elected a highly-intelligent, thinking man to lead the nation. Now everybody is angry because he is not doing precisely what we each imagined that he would do. He has not and cannot, with a wave of his hand, make the Bush/Cheney administration simply disappear into the mists of Avalon. Those two pesky wars are still with us and we must forgive the President for taking the time to feel his way into a decent solution to the problem of ending them. Our international relations were as strained as last year's girdle but are slowly improved in most areas, thanks to delicate diplomacy.
The situation of the United States is still precarious on all fronts. The Party of NO in partnership with the Blue Dogs seem determined that any plans or ideas proposed by the President must be stopped in their tracks. With an election facing us, any loss of Progressive Democratic support will be a death knell to what small reforms have already been accomplished. The Tea Partiers are running rampant with their campaign to return us to colonial days of "every-man-for-himself" while the Progressives whine their disappointment and look over third-party candidates.
If this is the ambition of the Progressive Democrats among you, congratulations, you are right on track. If not, we need to come back together and stay together to add to our majorities in Congress so that those reforms that have been begun can be advanced and those that have not yet been attempted will not be dead a-borning. It is time fort all of us who worked so hard to make radical changes in the governance of the country to roll up our sleeves, pull up our pants, and redouble our efforts to complete the job at hand, to get rid of the congressional obstructionists and replace them with people who truly realize that freedoms which we have enjoyed are still in mortal danger.
If we do not get behind the President whom, by our super-human efforts, we were able to elect, then we wasted our time and his and can look forward to another administration even worse than the last. We Progressives must decide whether we really want "progress" or if we prefer to become only single-issue voters without representation as a group in the halls of government. If the latter is the case we can flush our American Dreams, and join the many other nations throughout history who thought it possible to establish a lasting government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
This writer is eighty years old and has spent a half century working with handicapped and deprived people and advocating on their behalf while caring for her own working-class family. She spends her "Sunset Years" in writing and struggling with The System.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Saturday, June 05, 2010
Obama sharply increases secret military operations
By Bill Van Auken
5 June 2010
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/spec-j05.shtml
The Obama administration has sharply increased the use of US Special Operations forces in secret military interventions around the world, according to a report Thursday by the Washington Post.
The Post reports that the administration has increased to 75 the number of countries where these elements, including US Army Delta Force and Green Beret troops, Navy Seals and other secretive units, are operating, compared to 60 at the beginning of 2009.
Funding for these operations has risen accordingly. The Obama White House has requested a 5.7 percent increase in appropriations for Special Operations in fiscal 2011, amounting to a total budget of $6.3 billion. It has also sought another $3.5 billion in contingency funding for Special Ops in 2010.
Citing senior US military and administration officials, the Post presents a telling picture of the Janus-like character of the Obama administration’s foreign and military policy: “Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy, and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret US war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups,” the newspaper states.
The article continues, “The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President Obama released last week.”
In other words, while mouthing phrases about diplomacy, universal values and the rule of law, Obama has presided over a dramatic escalation in the use of killing squads that have been responsible for assassination programs, torture and the murder of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The use of these methods has been extended secretly to numerous other countries.
The Post noted that, “In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.”
“One advantage of using ‘secret’ forces for such missions,” according to the Post, “is that they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral US raids in Somalia and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.”
What is “politically useful” about these secret killing campaigns? Clearly they are not being kept secret from the populations where people are dying as a result. Those living where US Special Operations forces are operating know that these American units, referred to within the military as “manhunters,” are responsible for death and mayhem in their countries. In most cases, governments of these countries also are aware of their presence.
Those being kept in the dark through this secrecy are the American people, the majority of whom voted for Obama in 2008 based on the misapprehension that he was opposed to the policies of international military aggression and criminality that pervaded the Bush administration.
The kind of operations in which these forces are engaged has repeatedly been exposed in Afghanistan in incidents involving the massacre of civilians. In one case last February, Special Operations troops conducted a night raid in the village of night raid in the village of Khataba in eastern Afghanistan, killing an entire family, including two pregnant women and a teenage girl. Afterwards, according to Afghan investigators, the troops dug the bullets out of the bodies in an attempt to cover up their responsibility.
The US military has been forced this week to acknowledge that Special Forces troops called in air strikes against three minibuses in Afghanistan’s southern Uruzgan Province, slaughtering at least 23 men, women and children earlier this year. [US reprimands six over deadly air strike in Afghanistan]
Atrocities of a similar character are undoubtedly being carried out in Yemen, where an official told the Post that US forces are engaged in training and joint operations with Yemeni forces as well as conducting “unilateral strikes.”
And US forces are involved in a growing level of bloodshed in Somalia, where Special Operations units are arming and “advising” forces in a campaign against Al-Shabab and other Islamist militias that control much of the country. On Thursday, these US-backed forces shelled neighborhoods in Mogadishu, the capital of the impoverished country, killing at least 17 civilians and wounding scores more.
Either country could easily become the arena for a far wider US military intervention.
The Post article suggests a close affinity between the Obama White House and the Special Operations command, which, even in the US military, is viewed as somewhat of a breed apart because of its culture of assassination and terror.
“Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush’s administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the Post reports.
“We have a lot more access,” one of these commanders told the newspaper. Describing relations with the Obama White House, he added, “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.”
Another military commander told the Post that Obama has allowed these forces to do “things that the previous administration did not.”
According to the report, there are 13,000 US Special Operations forces currently deployed overseas, 9,000 of them in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Post article follows the release Wednesday of a report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, which condemns the US as the world’s number one practitioner of targeted killings, i.e., assassinations.
[http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/14session/A.HRC.14.24.Add6.pdf]
The report reserves special condemnation for the CIA’s drone attacks in Pakistan, which have claimed hundreds if not thousands of lives, the majority of them civilians. The program, the rapporteur, Philip Alston, writes, is part of a “strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability.”
[http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/06/20106325050780296.html]
He notes that, while the last three years of the Bush administration saw 45 drone attacks on Pakistan, since Obama took office a year-and-a-half ago there have been 53 strikes, 39 of them this year alone.
“Because this program remains shrouded in official secrecy, the international community does not know when and where the CIA is authorized to kill, the criteria for individuals who may be killed, how it ensures killings are legal, and what follow-up there is when civilians are illegally killed,” he writes.
The report further calls attention to the sinister character of the drone warfare, conducted from the safety of computer stations in the US. “Because operators are based thousands of miles from the battlefield…there is a risk of developing a ‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing,” it states. “A lack of disclosure gives states a virtual and impermissible license to kill.”
It further warns that the unsanctioned character of these strikes leaves CIA operatives participating in it liable to prosecution “under the domestic law of any country in which they conduct targeted drone killings.”
Alston accuses Washington of inventing a “law of 9/11” to justify its overriding of international law governing military conflict and human rights.
Indeed, as the Washington Post noted in its article Thursday, this is the sole basis invoked by the Obama administration to justify its ever wider use of military force—the authorization for the use of military force passed by Congress in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington nearly nine years ago. That resolution gave the White House authority to use military force against any nation, organization or individual who “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the 9/11 attacks.
The newspaper quoted John B. Bellinger, III, a senior legal adviser in the Bush administration, who helped craft the notion that as president and commander in chief Bush had constitutional authority to wage war at will, a position formally eschewed by the Obama White House.
“While they seem to be expanding their operations both in terms of extraterritoriality and aggressiveness, they are contracting the legal authority upon which those expanding actions are based,” Bellinger warned in relation to the new administration.
The forces being hunted by Special Operations troops in Somalia and Yemen clearly had nothing to do with September 11. This only underscores the illegality of the Obama administration’s foreign military operations, which increasingly resemble those of a state incarnation of Murder Incorporated.
5 June 2010
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/spec-j05.shtml
The Obama administration has sharply increased the use of US Special Operations forces in secret military interventions around the world, according to a report Thursday by the Washington Post.
The Post reports that the administration has increased to 75 the number of countries where these elements, including US Army Delta Force and Green Beret troops, Navy Seals and other secretive units, are operating, compared to 60 at the beginning of 2009.
Funding for these operations has risen accordingly. The Obama White House has requested a 5.7 percent increase in appropriations for Special Operations in fiscal 2011, amounting to a total budget of $6.3 billion. It has also sought another $3.5 billion in contingency funding for Special Ops in 2010.
Citing senior US military and administration officials, the Post presents a telling picture of the Janus-like character of the Obama administration’s foreign and military policy: “Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy, and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret US war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups,” the newspaper states.
The article continues, “The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President Obama released last week.”
In other words, while mouthing phrases about diplomacy, universal values and the rule of law, Obama has presided over a dramatic escalation in the use of killing squads that have been responsible for assassination programs, torture and the murder of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The use of these methods has been extended secretly to numerous other countries.
The Post noted that, “In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.”
“One advantage of using ‘secret’ forces for such missions,” according to the Post, “is that they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral US raids in Somalia and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.”
What is “politically useful” about these secret killing campaigns? Clearly they are not being kept secret from the populations where people are dying as a result. Those living where US Special Operations forces are operating know that these American units, referred to within the military as “manhunters,” are responsible for death and mayhem in their countries. In most cases, governments of these countries also are aware of their presence.
Those being kept in the dark through this secrecy are the American people, the majority of whom voted for Obama in 2008 based on the misapprehension that he was opposed to the policies of international military aggression and criminality that pervaded the Bush administration.
The kind of operations in which these forces are engaged has repeatedly been exposed in Afghanistan in incidents involving the massacre of civilians. In one case last February, Special Operations troops conducted a night raid in the village of night raid in the village of Khataba in eastern Afghanistan, killing an entire family, including two pregnant women and a teenage girl. Afterwards, according to Afghan investigators, the troops dug the bullets out of the bodies in an attempt to cover up their responsibility.
The US military has been forced this week to acknowledge that Special Forces troops called in air strikes against three minibuses in Afghanistan’s southern Uruzgan Province, slaughtering at least 23 men, women and children earlier this year. [US reprimands six over deadly air strike in Afghanistan]
Atrocities of a similar character are undoubtedly being carried out in Yemen, where an official told the Post that US forces are engaged in training and joint operations with Yemeni forces as well as conducting “unilateral strikes.”
And US forces are involved in a growing level of bloodshed in Somalia, where Special Operations units are arming and “advising” forces in a campaign against Al-Shabab and other Islamist militias that control much of the country. On Thursday, these US-backed forces shelled neighborhoods in Mogadishu, the capital of the impoverished country, killing at least 17 civilians and wounding scores more.
Either country could easily become the arena for a far wider US military intervention.
The Post article suggests a close affinity between the Obama White House and the Special Operations command, which, even in the US military, is viewed as somewhat of a breed apart because of its culture of assassination and terror.
“Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush’s administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the Post reports.
“We have a lot more access,” one of these commanders told the newspaper. Describing relations with the Obama White House, he added, “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.”
Another military commander told the Post that Obama has allowed these forces to do “things that the previous administration did not.”
According to the report, there are 13,000 US Special Operations forces currently deployed overseas, 9,000 of them in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Post article follows the release Wednesday of a report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, which condemns the US as the world’s number one practitioner of targeted killings, i.e., assassinations.
[http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/14session/A.HRC.14.24.Add6.pdf]
The report reserves special condemnation for the CIA’s drone attacks in Pakistan, which have claimed hundreds if not thousands of lives, the majority of them civilians. The program, the rapporteur, Philip Alston, writes, is part of a “strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability.”
[http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/06/20106325050780296.html]
He notes that, while the last three years of the Bush administration saw 45 drone attacks on Pakistan, since Obama took office a year-and-a-half ago there have been 53 strikes, 39 of them this year alone.
“Because this program remains shrouded in official secrecy, the international community does not know when and where the CIA is authorized to kill, the criteria for individuals who may be killed, how it ensures killings are legal, and what follow-up there is when civilians are illegally killed,” he writes.
The report further calls attention to the sinister character of the drone warfare, conducted from the safety of computer stations in the US. “Because operators are based thousands of miles from the battlefield…there is a risk of developing a ‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing,” it states. “A lack of disclosure gives states a virtual and impermissible license to kill.”
It further warns that the unsanctioned character of these strikes leaves CIA operatives participating in it liable to prosecution “under the domestic law of any country in which they conduct targeted drone killings.”
Alston accuses Washington of inventing a “law of 9/11” to justify its overriding of international law governing military conflict and human rights.
Indeed, as the Washington Post noted in its article Thursday, this is the sole basis invoked by the Obama administration to justify its ever wider use of military force—the authorization for the use of military force passed by Congress in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington nearly nine years ago. That resolution gave the White House authority to use military force against any nation, organization or individual who “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the 9/11 attacks.
The newspaper quoted John B. Bellinger, III, a senior legal adviser in the Bush administration, who helped craft the notion that as president and commander in chief Bush had constitutional authority to wage war at will, a position formally eschewed by the Obama White House.
“While they seem to be expanding their operations both in terms of extraterritoriality and aggressiveness, they are contracting the legal authority upon which those expanding actions are based,” Bellinger warned in relation to the new administration.
The forces being hunted by Special Operations troops in Somalia and Yemen clearly had nothing to do with September 11. This only underscores the illegality of the Obama administration’s foreign military operations, which increasingly resemble those of a state incarnation of Murder Incorporated.
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