Right-wing mad militarist and his mindless murdering drones

By Laura Flanders Online Journal Guest Writer Online Journal, Aug 27, 2009,

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A US drone firing missiles into a village in northern Pakistan killed at least 19 people over the weekend. The targets were militants, said the US military. The victims included six dead children, said a local tribal elder.

“Suspected US Drone Kills Suspected Taliban Commander.” That’s becoming the stuff of very suspect news stories. The reporting is so weak there’s almost nothing confirmed except that the killer operator is far away in front of a computer screen.

Suspected killing of suspected people covered by unsuspicious media? It would be sci-fi if it weren’t so here-now, and it’s only going to get more so.

The Democratic administration just made a big deal of cutting the cumbersome F-22 fighter jet. “We don’t need it anymore,” said the president. What he didn’t say is that the defense department is seeking $3.5 billion for unmanned aerial vehicles, a.k.a., “drones.” Funding is expected to increase to $55 billion by 2020. The air force is currently training more drone operators than fighter and bomber pilots.

Drones have been around since the US-led NATO war on the former Yugoslavia. Since ’06, drones have launched hundred of missiles along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border killing as many as 700 civilians, according to Pakistani officials.

Forbes magazine’s “king of the armed drone makers” is a little known company called General Atomics, whose founder, James Neal Blue, came up with the drone as a way of defeating Soviet-backed Sandinistas by blowing up oil pipelines in Nicaragua. He’s a fervent anti-communist and quite possibly the next Erik Prince — only his mercenaries aren’t Blackwater’s flesh and blood killers, but conveniently bloodless machines.

General Atomics is small by defense industry standards, but it has a lot of friends in Washington. Between 2000 and 2005, GA was the top corporate sponsor of privately funded congressional travel. So perhaps it’s no surprise, there’s little resistance to more drones in the US arsenal.

Drones are not cheap — between $10 million and $12 million apiece per GA “Reaper.” Their success rate is widely disputed. They kill civilians and even General David Petraeus admits, they make people hate us. But cynical political calculus is on General Atomics’ side.

President Obama has a problem. Every American military commander wants more troops, but resistance among foot soldiers is growing and maybe, someday — someday — the president’s antiwar base will make itself heard.

How to heed the commanders and quiet the critics simultaneously? Welcome to the super drone bonanza. The pilotless drone is the military’s version of cash for very clunky policy.

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GritLaura on Twitter.com.

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Afghanistan’s election debacle

Lee Sustar reports on the fraud and violence that swept Afghanistan during the August 20 presidential elections.

Socialist Worker, August 26, 2009

NATO soldiers on the scene of a bomb attack before elections in Afghanistan (Shah Marai | AFP)

AN ELECTION intended to showcase Afghanistan’s “emerging democracy” has instead exposed astonishing corruption, fraud and violence on the part of the U.S.-backed government.

Incumbent President Hamid Karzai and challenger Abdullah Abdullah are each claming victory amid allegations of vote-rigging and fraud on both sides, with Abdullah’s supporters even hinting that his forces will take up arms if the election is stolen by Karzai.

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Cleric calls Iran leaders despotic

Al Jazeera, Aug 27, 2009

Montazeri has criticised the ruling system under Ayatollah Khamenei, pictured, as ‘despotic’ [AFP] A senior Iranian religious cleric has sharply criticised the country’s supreme leader, saying the country is being ruled by a dictatorship following the disputed June presidential election. Grand Ayatollah Hossein Montazeri said on Wednesday that the ruling system under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has misused Islam in its crackdown against opposition supporters. He said Iranian authorities also showed their true nature with the violent suppression of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who filled the streets of the capital, Tehran, to protest against the results of the June 12 vote. Continues >>

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Why Israel will thwart Obama on settlements

For the Jewish state, the settlements are eminently sensible and their growth is almost certain to continue, either openly or stealthily.

By Walter Rodgers | The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 25, 2009 edition

The idea that the Obama administration can advance the Middle East peace process by having Israel freeze its construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank stretches credulity.

Does any serious observer of the region believe that Israel’s appetite for land – owned and occupied for generations by Palestinians – is going to abate?

The Israeli land grab has continued for four decades, in defiance of international law and most US presidents. US Middle East envoy George Mitchell has been trying to secure a halt, but his efforts follow a well-worn path that typically ends in charade.

Just weeks ago, the Israeli government evicted two extended Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem, clearing the way for more houses for Jews in traditionally Palestinian neighborhoods.

Israeli settlements have become a kind of concrete kudzu to Palestinians. The Fatah party recently renewed its commitment to resisting them, holding that “the Palestinians have the right to resist the Israeli occupation by all possible means.”

But for the Jewish state, the settlements are eminently sensible and their growth is almost certain to continue, either openly or stealthily. As Interior Minister Eli Yishai put it Aug. 10, expanding settlements near Jerusalem is vital for “security, national interests, and is just and necessary.”

Every new Jewish apartment complex enlarges and deepens the Jewish footprint on occupied land. The California-style townhouses atop the hills of ancient Samaria and Judea are seen as security buffers for an Israeli island in a hostile Islamic sea. Israel’s feeling of vulnerability is intensified by the growing Arab population already within its borders.

The settlements have become affordable suburbs for Israelis otherwise priced out of the metropolitan markets. More than 300,000 Jewish settlers now call the West Bank home.

Further, religious and ultrareligious Jewish settlers insist they have divinely bestowed title to the land. Few passages in the Bible are more frightening to Arabs than Deuteronomy 11:24:

“Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours: from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates, even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be.”

Palestinian Arabs are too weak to legally or militarily challenge the Jewish state’s internal expansion. An Israeli court recently ruled that Israel can now confiscate land belonging to Palestinians who once resided in an area but are now refugees pending final settlement.

Having lived in Jerusalem for five years during the salad days of the peace process in the 1990s, I watched settlement builders nibble away at what were once Palestinian homes, villages, and pastures.

From Jerusalem southward, the construction of the Har Homa settlement crabs outward to the doorsteps of Palestinian Bethlehem. From the air, these settlements appear a terrestrial octopus, extending out to ultimately link up with the more militant Jewish settlements farther south in Hebron, another city with a large Palestinian majority.

Settlement building resembles military flanking and encirclement maneuvers, isolating Palestinian population centers. In Jerusalem, there are at least half a dozen Arab neighborhoods, including the Mount of Olives, threatened by Israel’s voracious hunger for land. Quoted in the newspaper Haaretz, Sarah Kreimer of Ir Amim, a group specializing in Israeli-Palestinian relations, says, “In each of these places, plans are being advanced for construction whose ultimate purpose is to disconnect the Old City from Palestinian Jerusalem.”

Israelis have brilliantly created a sense of inevitability to all this. Yet, the moral difficulties of moving indigenous peoples off the land by subterfuge or force are obvious. When in the past I’ve raised the ethical implications of these land appropriations, Israelis have dismissed me, saying, “Hey, you Americans did it to the Indians.”

American presidents have often quietly nudged Israel to freeze the settlements, but their actual leverage has been minimal. Israelis have elected both doves and hawks as prime minister, but virtually all Israeli governments supported settlement expansion in varying degrees.

Jewish political clout in America ought not be underestimated. A former chairman of the American Israel Political Action Committee once boasted to me, “We got [Sen.] Chuck Percy [an Illinois Republican who was narrowly defeated in 1984] when he crossed us on the Palestinians.” President Obama will face a similar threat at election time if he defies Israel’s expansionist instincts.

US presidents have so frequently pledged unshakable support for Israel that it’s created the illusion that US and Israeli interests are identical. It might be useful for Mr. Obama and his Middle East team to publicly point to serious differences with Israel when they arise. If the US can have public disagreements with its allies, including Britain, why should Israel be exempted from what could be a healthy debate?

Jewish settlement construction may temporarily downshift into neutral. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton may hail “a building freeze.” But if the past is prologue, the first time Obama is distracted by another domestic or international crisis, and Washington isn’t looking, the Israeli bulldozers will be back at work.

Walter Rodgers served as the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem for 5-1/2 years. He writes a biweekly column for the Monitor’s weekly edition.

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Feingold to Obama: Announce Withdrawal Timetable from Afghanistan

ABC News, August 24, 2009

ABC News’ David Chalian Reports:

The Obama administration has been keenly aware of discontent among many in its liberal base with regard to its Afghanistan policy and an expected request for additional troops following General McChrystal’s upcoming assessment of the situation there.

That liberal base just got a high-profile voice to lead its charge.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-WI, called on President Obama to announce a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. “This is a strategy that is not likely to succeed,” Sen. Feingold said about the troop buildup in Afghanistan.

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Ex-CIA official John Helgerson says agents lost control after torture go-ahead

Times Online/UK, August 26, 2009

Tim Reid in Washington

The author of a scathing report on CIA interrogations during the Bush era has claimed that certain operatives lost control once they had been authorised to use “enhanced” interrogation techniques such as waterboarding.

John Helgerson, the former inspector-general of the CIA, also told The Times that the Obama Administration had cut key passages of his report out of the released version, a decision he found “puzzling”.

Mr Helgerson told The Times that the CIA had given assurances to the Justice Department that although the techniques would be used more than once, repetition would “not be substantial”.

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Wave of protest greets Israeli PM

Morning Star Online, Tuesday 25 August 2009

by Daniel Coysh

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Gordon Brown meets Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu for talks

Hundreds of peace and solidarity campaigners have gathered at Downing Street to protest at Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cosy meeting with far-right Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu.

Protesters from the Stop the War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the British Muslim Initiative converged on Downing Street at lunchtime, demanding an end to Israel’s violations of international law, with its refusal to dismantle the illegal settlements on the West Bank, the “ethnic cleansing” of east Jerusalem and its ongoing siege of Gaza.

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