FBI no-fly list strands Mississippi man Wade Hicks in Hawaii

Clarion Ledger

Wade Hicks, Jr. poses for a photograph outside the
 pass office at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.
The 34-year-old from Gulfport, Miss. was
stranded in Hawaii for five days after he found
out he was on the no-fly list and wouldn't
be allowed on an airplane until he was abruptly
removed from the list with no explanation.

JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, HAWAII — Hawaii is a paradise for most visitors. But it was Wade Hicks Jr.'s prison for five days.

The 34-year-old from Gulfport, Miss., was stranded in the islands this week after being told he was on the FBI's no-fly list during a layover for a military flight from California to Japan.

The episode left Hicks scrambling to figure out how he'd get home from Hawaii without being able to fly. Then he was abruptly removed from the list on Thursday with no explanation.

It also raised questions beyond how he landed on the list: How could someone on a list intelligence officials use to inform counterterrorism investigations successfully fly standby on an Air Force flight?

Hicks said he was traveling to visit his wife, a U.S. Navy lieutenant who's deployed in Japan. He hitched a ride on the military flight as is common for military dependents, who are allowed to fly on scheduled routes when there's room.

Hicks said that during his layover at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent told him he was on the no-fly list and wouldn't be allowed on a plane.

"I said, 'How am I supposed to get off this island and go see my wife or go home?' And her explanation was: 'I don't know,'" Hicks said.

Hicks said he was shocked and thought they must have had the wrong person because he doesn't have a criminal record and recently passed an extensive background check in Mississippi to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

But the agent said his name, Social Security number and date of birth matched the person prohibited from flying, Hicks said. He wasn't told why and wondered whether his controversial views on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks played a role. Hicks said he disagrees with the 9/11 Commission's conclusions about the attacks.

A Homeland Security spokesman referred questions to the FBI Terrorist Screening Center, which maintains the report. A spokesman for the center declined to comment on Hicks' case. The government doesn't disclose who's on the list or why someone might have been placed on it.


The list of roughly 20,000 people and about 500 to 600 Americans includes names and classified evidence against suspected terrorists who are not allowed to fly in U.S. airspace.

The list can be updated within minutes, so it's possible Hicks was added to the list while in midair from Travis Air Force Base in California to Hawaii.

A spokesman for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's office said passengers who fly standby on military flights are screened against the FBI's list only on international flights. Domestic passengers are screened only through an internal military system, not the Advanced Passenger Information System run by Customs and Border Protection.

"It's scary to know that something like this can happen in a free country. You're not accused of any crime. You haven't been contacted by anyone. No investigation has been done. No due process has taken place," he said.

He got a hotel room at the Pearl Harbor naval base while he worked things out. Being on the list didn't stop him from staying on a base that's home to submarines, cruisers and destroyers.

Hicks said he called politicians in Mississippi and Hawaii and brainstormed ways to get home with friends, speculating on taking a private plane, a cruise ship or even a fishing boat from Alaska. He then got a call on Thursday that he had been removed from the no-fly list.

Hicks planned to take a military flight back to California on Friday to meet his wife, who will be coming from Japan, and said he plans to seek to recoup his added travel costs from the government.

U.S. to Help Create an Elite Libyan Force to Combat Islamic Extremists

New York Times
Eric Schmidt

The Pentagon and State Department are speeding up efforts to help the Libyan government create a commando force to combat Islamic extremists like the ones who killed the American ambassador in Libya last month and to help counter the country’s fractious militias, according to internal government documents.

The Obama administration quietly won Congress’s approval last month to shift about $8 million from Pentagon operations and counterterrorism aid budgeted for Pakistan to begin building an elite Libyan force over the next year that could ultimately number about 500 troops. American Special Operations forces could conduct much of the training, as they have with counterterrorism forces in Pakistan and Yemen, American officials said.

The effort to establish the new unit was already under way before the assault that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at the United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya. But the plan has taken on new urgency as the new government in Tripoli tries to assert control over the country’s militant factions.

According to an unclassified internal State Department memo sent to Congress on Sept. 4, the plan’s goal is to enhance “Libya’s ability to combat and defend against threats from Al Qaeda and its affiliates.” A companion Pentagon document envisions that the Libyan commando force will “counter and defeat terrorist and violent extremist organizations.” Right now, Libya has no such capability, American officials said.

A final decision on the program has not been made, and many details, like the size, composition and mission of the force, are still to be determined. But American government officials say they have discussed the plan’s broad outlines with senior Libyan military and civilian officials as part of a broader package of American security assistance.

“The proposal reflects the security environment and the uncertainty coming out of the government transition in Libya,” said a senior Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the program has not been officially announced. “The multimilitia fabric that’s providing security there needs to be brought into a more integrated national security system.”

A spokesman for Libya’s new president, Mohamed Magariaf, did not respond to detailed inquiries by e-mail, and other Libyan military officials did not return phone calls. Its transitional government continues to be in a state of flux as a newly chosen prime minister prepares to appoint defense and interior ministers.

Libyan commentators have expressed hope that a Western power would help train the country’s fledgling national army, so the proposal might be well received. But it still faces many challenges, including how to get the powerful militias to buy into it while taming their influence, and vetting a force to weed out Islamic extremists.

“Over all, it’s a sound strategy, but my concern is that in the vetting they make sure this doesn’t become a Trojan horse for the militias to come in,” said Frederic Wehrey, a senior policy analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who visited Libya recently and wrote a paper last month on security in the country, “The Struggle for Security in Eastern Libya.”

Our Pitilessly Intoxicating Drones

Project Censored
Andy Lee Roth

The initial US response to the deadly attack on the nation’s Libyan embassy includes deploying spies, Marines, and drones. Currentreports indicate that US drones operating in Libyan airspace will be limited to surveillance. But the decision to deploy them in this highly volatile situation ought to force American citizens to reflect on a somber anniversary. It warns against believing that drones provide a costless way to curb our terrorist enemies.

Americans should remember September 30, 2011, the day that drones unleashed by the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) targeted American citizen Anwar Al-Aulaqi, killing him and at least three other people, including a second US citizen, Samir Khan. Al-Aulaqi had been on CIA and JSOC “kill lists” since late 2009 or early 2010, and the target of previous drone strikes. Although US officials alleged that Khan was not a target in the September 2011 strike, they contended that he too played an active role in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A subsequent US drone strike in Yemen on October 14, 2011, killed seven people, including Al-Aulaqi’s 16-year old son, Abdulrahman, also an American citizen.

Their deaths were part of an ongoing, systematic program of US drone strikesagainst suspected terrorists in countries outside the context of armed conflict. The US has conducted targeted killings in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia since 2002, though this campaign intensified dramatically in 2009 after President Obama took office.

The anniversary of Anwar Al-Aulaqi’s death underscores two interrelated and intractable problems with our reliance on drones. Internationally, drones intensify our enemies’ resolve because drones, no less than the suicide bombers and roadside devices that Americans have come to dread, are instruments of terror and lawless death. Domestically, drone strikes against US citizens on foreign soil usurp even the pretense of legal due process.

Force, Simone Weil once observed, is pitilessly intoxicating to those who possess it. So it is not surprising that neither the American public nor their leaders have sought an informed public debate about the use of drones for targeted killings. Does their deployment makegood sense in terms of national security? Is the nation’s drone-based response to terrorism even legal under the US constitution and international law?

By invoking vague, shifting legal standards and asserting secrecy in the name of national security, government officials, including President Obama himself, have effectively situated the drone campaign on the periphery of public concern. With few exceptions, the corporate media have followed officials’ leads.

Government officials seldom provide the public with evidence that targeted individuals posed specific and imminent threats, except for the assertion that they were “on the list.” This was true in Al-Aulaqi’s case. Government officials, including Obama’s counterterrorism chief Michael Leiter, compared al-Aulaqi to Osama bin Laden. Just as exaggerated descriptions of bin Laden as a “terrorist mastermind” oversimplified the complexity of Islamist terrorist networks, so comparisons of Al-Aulaqi to bin Laden overemphasized al-Aulaqi’s importance to Al Qaeda and his threat to US security. The corporate media dutifully conveyed these official views while describing Al-Aulaqi as an “alleged” or “suspected” terrorist.

By and large, the American public seems to have accepted the government’s argument of guilt by assertion and rhetorical association: A February 2012opinion poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News found that 83 percent of Americans approved of drone strikes against terrorists overseas, including 65 percent who approved even when “those suspected terrorists are American citizens living in other countries.”

Neither President Obama nor Republican challenger Mitt Romney has shown any inclination to make targeted killings a campaign issue. Overshadowed by the hoopla of the Democratic National Convention, President Obama conducted a brief, formal interview with CNN’s Jessica Yellin in which he acknowledged that drones are “one tool we use” in order “to keep the American people safe.” Obama affirmed that targets must be “authorized by our laws” and pose threats that are “serious and not speculative.” In response to Yellin’s question, “Are the standards different when the target is an American?” Obama avowed that American citizens “are subject to the protections of the constitution and due process.” Neither Yellin nor Obama mentioned Al-Aulaqi, and Yellin chose not pursue the contradiction between the President’s claim and the facts regarding September 30, 2011.

A combination of divided oversight and economic conflicts of interest have kept Congress from effectively holding the White House, the CIA, or JSOC accountable. As theWashington Post’s Greg Miller has reported, congressional lawmakers “receive scant information about the administration’s drone program,” and executive claims of secrecy typically muzzle them from discussing the little information they do receive. Meanwhile, drone manufacturers—including Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Atomics—lobby Congress for increasingly lucrative federal contracts through industry organizations such as AUVSI, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. AUVSI lobbyists and similar industry groups meet willing sponsors in Congress: The House of Representatives has its own drone caucus with over fifty bipartisan members. Divided oversight and corporate lobbying combine to render Congress ineffective in challenging the White House, CIA, and JSOC on drones.

In June 2012, a sharply worded letter to President Obama from Rep. Dennis Kucinich and 25 additional members of Congress questioned the authority for so-called “signature” strikes, characterizing drones as “faceless ambassadors” that cause both civilian deaths and “powerful and enduring anti-American sentiment.” Corporate media all but ignored this congressional rebuke, thus contributing to a counter-democratic dynamic in which the American public is unaware of developing Congressional opposition, while a majority in Congress will not take a position against targeted killing until their constituents demand that they do so.

Due to the persistence of civil rights groups, the courts may be the first branch of government to hold the illegal drone campaign’s commanders accountable. A July 2012 lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union names Defense Secretary and former CIA Director Leon Panetta, Commander of US Special Operations Command William McRaven, JSOC Commander Joseph Votel, and CIA Director David Petraeus as defendants in the deaths of Anwar Al-Aulaqi, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi. Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta argues that the targeted killing of Anwar Al-Aulaqi was not “a last resort to protect against a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury” and is therefore a violation of both the US Constitution and international human rights law. It also charges that the defendants failed in their obligations, under the Constitution and international law, “to take measures to prevent harm to Samir Khan, Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, and other bystanders.”

As present, the government’s global drone campaign operates with minimal transparency, accountability, or oversight. The lawsuit could force the defendants to reveal the process used to determine that Al-Aulaqi must die and the evidence for that decision. If Rep. Kucinich is right—drone strikes pose significant threats to national security because they promote widespread, powerful anti-American sentiment—then the court’s decision in Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta could do more to protect the US and its citizens than was accomplished by the targeted killing of Al-Aulaqi and other alleged terrorists. The case could sober the American public enough to reckon with the reality that, although drones seem a costless substitute for boots on the ground, our intoxication with them threatens our national security and our most cherished values.

Andy Lee Roth, PhD, is associate director of Project Censored and co-editor of Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution, which includes the study on which this analysis is based.

The Tender Tyranny of American Liberalism Redux

Global Research
Prof. James F. Tracy

Liberalism itself is a synthetic creation of the power structure, a humanitarian facade behind which the dirty work of policing the world can go on uninterrupted by idealistic spasms in the body politic.[1]

Journalist Eric Norden’s perceptive critique, “The Tender Tyranny of American Liberalism,” appeared in the early years of the Vietnam era, accurately identifying how a predominantly liberal worldview projected by the ruling technocracy and its intellectual adherents acted to subordinate genuinely Left-progressive ideas and social movements at home while ensuring the furtherance of US imperial designs abroad. Today Norden’s insights are worthy of reconsideration in light of how the Left remains largely devoid of its own voice or vision and more than ever liberalism provides ideological cover for aggressive Anglo-American militarism, the prerogatives of transnational corporations, and an ever-expanding police state.

Since the 1800s liberalism and its utilitarian philosophical bearings have been a central intellectual and popular means by which gunboat and “free trade” diplomacies alike are justified to the public at large.[2] It is also a foremost rationale through which aggressive social control is exerted on the population at home, more recently by political leaders who symbolize and embody real social struggles in American history and thereby may exercise a more valid claim to “feeling their constituents’ pain.”

The modern-day liberal handily anticipates and deflects criticism of her policies through a trumpeted alarm for a variety of social and political issues—student performance, public health, environmental degradation and the alleged atrocities of foreign enemies, waving about an array of solutions, from “educational initiatives” and “carbon credits,” to “humanitarian” military actions.

Norden argues how the era of American liberalism that began with Franklin Roosevelt’s election established a combined cult of personality and Keynesian welfare state that has diminished the possibilities for a more radical and participatory politics. A few short years following the establishment of Students for a Democratic Society, many in the Left continued to be hoodwinked and sidetracked by an oppressive militarized state effusing liberal bromides. For example, the Great Society’s ambitions obscured the reality that the American-orchestrated “genocide in Vietnam [was] a liberal genocide,” SDS President Carl Oglesby asserted.

[T]he menacing coalition of industrial and military power, the brutality of the blitzkrieg we are waging against Vietnam, the ominous signs around us that heresy may no longer be permitted … [are] creatures, all of them, of a government that since 1932 has considered itself to be fundamentally liberal.[3]

In light of this, a miracle of social engineering and propaganda is manifest in a population that readily identifies despotism with Hitler’s Nazism or Mussolini’s fascism, while the exploits of authoritarian social controllers carried out under the cloak of liberalism remain almost entirely unexamined. “Think of the men who now engineer” Vietnam, Oglesby writes.

[T]hose who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: [National Security Adviser McGeorge] Bundy, [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara, [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk, [Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot] Lodge, [Ambassador to the United Nations Arthur] Goldberg, the President himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.”[4]

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Susan Rice, Samantha Powers and John Brennan are the ideological heirs of America’s holocaust in Indochina. Their warm and caring humanitarian patina allows the monstrous US-NATO war machine to proceed without question or incident. They plan the drone kill lists and oversee the accelerated tours of duty for US servicepersons. Their associates decide which branches of Al Qaeda mercenaries will be armed and dispatched into civilian areas to maim, kill and destroy. The wars and dislocation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria are now undeniably liberal wars, carried out by our moral, liberal leaders.

Closer to home Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, strong advocates and practitioners of Keynesian fiscal alchemy, at once monetize the war debt while disenfranchising the working class, retirees and poor by creating billions of dollars, most of which are then forked over to corrupt bankers and hedge fund managers who proceed to sit on the money or further inflate the markets through speculation. Bernanke, Geithner, and their technocratic peers at the Fed and Treasury are cultured and thoughtful liberals, professing heartfelt concern for “jobs” and social uplift.

Until recently, Cass Sunstein was Obama’s Information Czar. The law scholar professed an appreciation for “rational” public discourse and exchange. Yet in his academic writings Sunstein exhibited unbridled disdain for unconventional speculation and critique of government activities and policies (“rumors” and “conspiracy theories” in liberal parlance) to the extent of advocating COINTELPRO-style “cognitive infiltration” of groups discussing and circulating such ideas. Sunstein’s liberal credentials are indisputable.

Over the past several decades America’s chief war mongers and advocates of technocratic social control exude the aura of kind and caring masters who have been unwillingly forced into war due to humanitarian concerns; a “responsibility to protect” foreign peoples from the alleged oppression of their leaders, many of which are modern, pro-western US allies. The fruits of the violent Arab Spring color revolutions are a case in point.

“Things are Growing Better“

Today the world is told by the Nobel Peace Prize president how a new era of humanitarian interventionism has arrived through the establishment of the Susan Brown and Samantha Powers-inspired Atrocities Prevention Board. According to Presidential Study Directive 10 of August 4, 2011 laying the groundwork for the APB, and completed during the ultra-violent US and NATO-orchestrated guerrilla war and air bombardment of Libya, Obama identifies the prevention of mass atrocities and genocide as “a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.”[5] Almost as if on cue, the administration’s liberal backers applaud such maneuvers.

Much like Vietnam, R2P military ventures are carried out under the aegis of liberalism and would be roundly condemned by liberals as so much subterfuge were they meted out by a professed “conservative” administration. In reality, had Obama been in office and embarked on the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq while uttering the appropriate humanitarian-sounding shibboleths he would have succeeded with nary a peep from most if not all of the Left-liberal intelligentsia.

In the 1950s and 60s liberalism constituted the ideological armature of the Cold War consensus which provided for the massive Keynesian military buildup and the eventual recolonization of the Third World under brutal IMF and World Bank auspices. At the same time, however, social programs such as Medicare and the expansion of public higher education were in their infancy, thus providing concrete appeasement for the US population. Norden points to the Great Society as liberalism’s “giant con, designed to assure the American people that, whatever horrors we perpetrate abroad, our hearts are still in the right places; whatever injustices persist at home, things are growing better.“[6]

In the absence of such compensation the American public today is afforded a simulacra of 1960s social struggle while similar imperial wars are waged abroad and barely a finger is lifted as America’s infrastructure crumbles, industrial jobs are continually outsourced, and the earth sustains what are likely her greatest environmental catastrophes in the Gulf of Mexico oil “spill” and the dire Fukushima nuclear meltdowns. In fact, the American liberal establishment overlooks such trifling events, content in the notion that it has “overcome” racism with an African American in the highest office, even as he busies himself dutifully enacting the policies of zombie banks, insurance and pharmaceutical conglomerates, and the military-industrial-surveillance complex.

Liberalism’s Enduring Quest for Ideological Conformity

[D]espite their protestations of moderation, liberals are the most ruthless of ideological fanatics. If challenged on this point, the average lib will ooze the milk of human kindness from every pore, his eyes melting over to the consistency of hot butterscotch sauce. Is he not against “extremism” in every shape and form? But those who really cross liberalism are pursued with cold implacable fury, up to and even beyond the grave.[7]

ACLU: CIA refusal to explain targeted killings 'unlawful'

PressTV

The Central Intelligence Agency should be ordered to say whether it has documents explaining the use of unmanned drones to kill individuals in Pakistan and Yemen, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) told a federal appeals court in Washington.

The ACLU, in arguments on Thursday in Washington, said the CIA’s refusal to confirm or deny that it has records on the drone program is unlawful because President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have publicly acknowledged the program’s existence in public interviews.

“We think it’s clear -- and the government now acknowledges -- that there is a drone program run by the U.S. government,” Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU lawyer told a three-judge panel today. “The hard question is what is the CIA’s role and whether the CIA is actively using drones to carry out targeted killings.”

The dispute involves a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU seeking records on the legal basis for using unmanned aerial vehicles to kill human targets, the number of strikes, the selection of targets, whether the program involves cooperation with foreign countries, the determination of civilian casualties and the evaluation of completed strikes.

The use of American drones has provoked anger abroad, particularly in Pakistan, where human rights groups say innocent people have been victims. Bloomberg

FACTS and FIGURES

The CIA and the U.S. military have used unmanned aerial vehicles known as drones to target and kill those Washington calls “suspected militants” in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.

In 2008, after Barack Obama won the presidency in the U.S., the drone strikes escalated and soon began occurring almost weekly, later nearly daily, and so became a permanent feature of life for those living in the tribal borderlands of northern Pakistan. CBS News

A report released by the United Nations in June 2010 called the drone attacks part of a "strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability". CNN

Sourcing on civilian deaths is weak and the numbers are often exaggerated, but numbers suggest that for every militant killed, 10 or so civilians also died. Brookings

Pakistani local sources say more than 2,800 civilians have died in the drone attacks since

This 21-Year-Old Marine Predicted He Would Die At The Hands Of Afghan Security Forces

Business Insider
Michael Kelley

Lance Corporal Greg Buckley, Jr.

A 21-year-old Marine who was killed by an Afghan trainee had previously told his father that he would be killed inside his base, David Ariosto of CNN reports.

Lance Corporal Greg Buckley Jr. trained Afghan security forces in the restive Helmand Province before he and two other Marines were killed on Aug. 10 by one of the Afghans he was training.

Buckley knew something was wrong after a tormenting encounter with an Afghan trainee earlier in the year.

From CNN: 

"The guy turned around and said to Greg, 'We don't want you here. We don't need you here,'" his dad said.

"Greg turned around again and said, 'Why would you say that?'" according to Greg Buckley Sr.

But the trainee apparently wouldn't relent, repeating the phrases for hours over the course of a night in which the young Marine was on guard watch.

"Greg said, 'I thought I was going to lose my mind,'" his father said. "Pitch black out, and all he kept saying over and over again is, 'We don't want you. We don't need you. We don't want you.'"

Buckley's father said Buckley informed his superior officers that "one day they are going to turn around and turn those weapons on us," and asked his father to prepare to tell his mother and two younger brothers that he'd been killed.

This year there have been more than 51 NATO killed by allied security forces in Afghanistan, compared to 35 so-called green-on-blue attacks last year. The attacks have forced troops to carry loaded guns everywhere.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called the attacks the Taliban's "last gasp" while Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the U.S. military's top officer, called them "a very serious threat" to the war effort, according to BBC.

The Helmand Province is where Taliban dressed in U.S. Army uniforms infiltrated Camp Bastion, killed two U.S. Marines and caused more than $200 million in damage last week.

US suspends joint military operations with Afghanistan after attacks

Joint US-Afghan missions halted after US and other Nato soldiers killed in an 'insider attack' on the weekend

Guardian

Chis McGreal

The US military has suspended joint operations with Afghan forces because of a collapse in trust after a surge in the number of Americans and other Nato soldiers killed by the men they are fighting alongside or training.

The chief US military officer, General Martin Dempsey, described the sharp rise in "insider attacks" by rogue Afghan soldiers and policemen, which saw four American and two British soldiers killed at the weekend, as "a very serious threat to the campaign" against the Taliban.

American commanders said that joint operations on the ground will be suspended "until further notice" in a dramatic admission that the strategy to shift responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces has been deeply compromised by Afghan government soldiers and policemen killing 51 Nato soldiers in 36 attacks this year. At least 12 attacks were carried out last month alone, leaving 15 dead.

The US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, described the attacks as the "last gasp" of a weakened Taliban. But the admission that Nato troops are no longer safe from the forces they are relying on to keep the Taliban at bay after the final US pullout in 2014 is a severe blow to Washington's military plans.

Under the strategy, members of the soon to be 350,000 strong Afghan security forces gain experience patrolling and fighting alongside American and other foreign soldiers. But the killings have led to a collapse in trust.

The US army said it is "not walking away" from Afghan military units and will continue to advise them. But Nato troops will patrol with them only when specific approval is given by a regional commander.

American officials say the insider attacks are carried out by a mix of Taliban infiltrators dressed as soldiers, by insurgents who have got themselves recruited and Afghan soldiers angry about their treatment because of personal insults or cultural differences.

US commanders had already assigned soldiers to guard their comrades as they slept, ate or interacted with Afghan forces because of the increasing number of "insider killings". American troops were also ordered to carry loaded weapons at all times, even inside their own bases.

Nato attacks on Afghan civilians have added to the strain. In the latest, an air strike killed eight women and girls collecting firewood.

The loss of trust in the force the US is relying on to prevent the Taliban taking control of Afghanistan again, compounds other concerns about Washington's strategy. The additional 33,000 soldiers Barack Obama despatched two years ago as part of the "surge" are expected to complete their withdrawal this week. The remaining 68,000 US troops are supposed to gradually shift responsibility to Afghan forces which, under the American strategy, are to take the lead in combat as early as next year.

But despite gains on the battlefield, questions persist about whether the Afghan forces will have the ability and will to keep an undefeated Taliban at bay once Nato forces have left.

U.S. sends aircraft carrier back to Gulf to face Iran, Syria

Reuters
Daniel Fineren

(Reuters) - The U.S. Navy is cutting short home leave for the crew of one of its aircraft carriers and sending them back to the Middle East next week to counter any threat from Iran, according to the official Navy News Service.

Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told sailors aboard the USS Stennis in their home port of Seattle on Wednesday they were needed back in the Middle East soon, after approving calls from the U.S. Central Command for Stennis to return to the region.

"Obviously, Iran is one of those threats," the U.S. military news service quoted Panetta as saying during a send-off event at a military base on the U.S. West Coast.

"Secondly, it is the turmoil in Syria," he said. "We're obviously following that closely as well."

The Stennis' departure in January from the Bahrain-based U.S. Fifth Fleet area of operations prompted Iranian army chief Ataollah Salehi to threaten action if it returned, saying Iran was "not in the habit of warning more than once".

The threats started a war of words between Iran and the United States that spooked oil markets, and fears over possible military confrontation remain high.

Panetta cited Iran's nuclear program and its threats to oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz as two concerns the Stennis strike group could counter in the U.S. Central Command's area of responsibility, which also includes Syria and Afghanistan.

U.S. attention on Syria is focused on providing humanitarian aid, monitoring chemical and biological weapon stockpiles, and offering non-lethal assistance to forces opposing President Bashar al-Assad, he said.

A spokesman for the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain said the redeployment was not a build-up in the Gulf because the USS Enterprise is due to leave the region on its final voyage back to the United States before being decommissioned after over 50 years of service.

"The presence of two aircraft carriers changes based on needs and requirements," Lieutenant Greg Raelson said.

Iranian threats to block the waterway through which about 17 million barrels a day sailed in 2011 have grown in the past year as U.S. and European sanctions aimed at starving Tehran of funds for its nuclear program have tightened.

A heavy western naval presence in the Gulf is a big deterrent to Tehran actually trying to block the shipping route through which most of the crude exported from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Iraq sails.

The Stennis had been due to deploy next to the Pacific towards the end of 2012 but its return to active duty has been brought forward by four months because of tension in the Gulf.

(Reporting by Daniel Fineren; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

What makes our NDAA lawsuit a struggle to save the US constitution

The Guardian
Tangerine Bolen

Time after time, Obama's lawyers defending the NDAA's section 1021 affirm our worst fears about its threat to our liberty

I am one of the lead plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit against the National Defense Authorization Act, which gives the president the power to hold any US citizen anywhere for as long as he wants, without charge or trial.

In a May hearing, Judge Katherine Forrest issued an injunction against it; this week, in a final hearing in New York City, US government lawyers asserted even more extreme powers – the right to disregard entirely the judge and the law. On Monday 6 August, Obama's lawyers filed an appeal to the injunction – a profoundly important development that, as of this writing, has been scarcely reported.

In the earlier March hearing, US government lawyers had confirmed that, yes, the NDAA does give the president the power to lock up people like journalist Chris Hedges and peaceful activists like myself and other plaintiffs. Government attorneys stated on record that even war correspondents could be locked up indefinitely under the NDAA.

Judge Forrest had ruled for a temporary injunction against an unconstitutional provision in this law, after government attorneys refused to provide assurances to the court that plaintiffs and others would not be indefinitely detained for engaging in first amendment activities. At that time, twice the government has refused to define what it means to be an "associated force", and it claimed the right to refrain from offering any clear definition of this term, or clear boundaries of power under this law.

This past week's hearing was even more terrifying. Government attorneys again, in this hearing, presented no evidence to support their position and brought forth no witnesses. Most incredibly, Obama's attorneys refused to assure the court, when questioned, that the NDAA's section 1021 – the provision that permits reporters and others who have not committed crimes to be detained without trial – has not been applied by the US government anywhere in the world after Judge Forrest's injunction. In other words, they were telling a US federal judge that they could not, or would not, state whether Obama's government had complied with the legal injunction that she had laid down before them.

To this, Judge Forrest responded that if the provision had indeed been applied, the United States government would be in contempt of court.

I have mixed feelings about suing my government, and in particular, my president, over the National Defense Authorization Act. I voted for Obama.

But the US public often ignores how, when it comes to the "war on terror", the US government as a whole has been deceitful, reckless, even murderous. We lost nearly 3,000 people on 9/11. Then we allowed the Bush administration to lie and force us into war with a country that had nothing to do with that terrible day. Presidents Bush and Obama, and the US Congress, appear more interested in enacting misguided "war on terror" policies that distract citizens from investigating the truth about what we've done, and what we've become, since 9/11.

Pentagon, CIA Sued for Lethal Drone Attacks on U.S. Citizens

Wired
David Kravets

Survivors of three Americans killed by targeted drone attacks in Yemen last year sued top-ranking members of the United States government, alleging Wednesday they illegally killed the three, including a 16-year-old boy, in violation of international human rights law and the U.S. Constitution.

“The government has killed three Americans. It should account for its actions. This case gives us an opportunity to do that,” Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a press call.

The suit, (.pdf) is being litigated by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU. It seeks unspecified damages and highlights the government’s so-called unmanned “targeted killing” program. The ACLU and the Center maintain the drone attacks have killed thousands, including hundreds of innocent bystanders overseas. (Other estimates of the campaign come to widely different conclusions.)

The suit, the first of its kind, alleges the United States was not engaged in an armed conflict with or within Yemen, prohibiting the use of lethal force unless “at the time it is applied, lethal force is a last resort to protect against a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury.” The case directly challenges the government’s decision to kill Americans without judicial scrutiny.

At bottom, Jaffer said, “the question is whether the government is justified in killing without charging them or trying them for anything.”

The suit is brought on behalf of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a radical cleric and a native of New Mexico. He was originally known for his incendiary blog and YouTube videos. But according to the Obama administration, Awlaki’s role morphed from marketer to operational planner and recruiter for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. U.S. authorities claim he had contacts with the 9/11 hijackers, the underwear bomber and others.

He was killed Sept. 30 last year. Also killed was Samir Khan, the editor of the English magazine Inspire, which allegedly was published by Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Two weeks later, the cleric’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, was killed in a separate Yemen attack.

The defendants include Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeus, U.S. Navy Adm. William H. McRaven and U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Votel.

Citing U.S. officials, the Washington Post has reported that the son and Khan were not intended targets.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond for comment. The administration refuses to release the Justice Department memo that legally justifies targeting Americans, and according to the New York Times, President Obama approves or denies who gets added to the “kill list.”

But Attorney General Eric Holder said in a March speech at Northwestern University Law School that “Our legal authority is not limited to the battlefields in Afghanistan.” He said the legal authority Congress passed following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks covers Yemen and Somalia, where other unmanned drone attacks have been carried out.

Holder said the administration takes action with “the consent of the nation involved or after a determination that the nation is unable or unwilling to deal effectively with a threat to the United States.”

In another suit, the ACLU is invoking the Freedom of Information Act seeking details of the government’s drone program. In that case, the CIA refuses to confirm or deny the covert military use of drones to kill suspected terrorists overseas.

The Destabilization of Pakistan

GRTV
Eric Draitzer
Nile Bowie

As relations between Islamabad and Washington reach an all-time low, the ongoing debate of reopening US/NATO supply routes that traverse through Pakistani territory remains in question. US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently acknowledged the fact that America is waging war in Pakistan's northwestern tribal region, stating that Washington is "losing patience" with Islamabad, and that Pakistan should do more to combat terrorist entities such as the Haqqani Network. As civilians are indiscriminately killed under heavy drone assaults from the United States, a separatist movement in Balochistan, a province encompassing western Pakistan, eastern Iran, areas of southern Afghanistan, directly threatens China's commercial shipping activities in the Indian Ocean. As President Asif Zardari calls for Islamabad's full membership into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Pakistan's response to its issues of internal insurgency and separatism may shape its foreign policy for years to come. Eric Draitser of StopImperialism.com provides analysis on a wide variety of issues facing the nation of Pakistan. Interview by Nile Bowie - independent writer and photojournalist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Regular Contributor to Global Research.

Why is Obama winking at the military coup in Egypt?

MondoWiess
James North

U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and
Egyptian Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi

A first sign that the Obama administration will accept the military coup in Egypt was a mealy-mouthed statement from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last Friday, June 16. Panetta said he had called Egypt’s real ruler, Field Marshall Tantawi, and “highlighted the need to move forward expeditiously with Egypt’s political transition, including conducting new legislative elections as soon as possible.”

Panetta did not even make a veiled warning about cutting off the $1.3 billion the U.S. gives the Egyptian military every year. What’s more, Egypt does not need “new legislative elections;” it already has a working parliament – I watched lines of Egyptians voting for it in Cairo last December – which was doing just fine until the Supreme Court, a military tool, dissolved it.

The Obama administration could have demanded that this already-elected Parliament be restored. But, no. Once the military saw it could get away with this first stage of its coup, it seized even more power. So even though Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, almost certainly won the just-completed presidential balloting, the Egyptian journalist Sara Khorshad writes in today’s New York Times that, “Mr. Morsi will be a toothless figurehead under the thumb of an authoritarian military council that doesn’t seem likely to relinquish power anytime soon.”

The U.S. government had already gone along with earlier anti-democratic moves to keep the Muslim Brotherhood from power. The Brotherhood’s first candidate for the presidency, Khairat El-Shater, was a prominent businessman with recognized broad appeal. But back in April, the ruling armed forces council barred El-Shater on the grounds that election rules require that candidates must be released from prison for 6 years before they can run.

How do you say Catch-22 in Arabic? The Mubarak regime had imprisoned El-Shater for 4 years, until 2011, even though he, like the Brotherhood itself, had never used or advocated violence. So his reward for being a nonviolent political prisoner under the old regime --  in all, he was jailed for 12 years -- was that he was disqualified from running, and the Brotherhood had to replace him with the colorless Morsi. Washington made no noise about this injustice. Contrast this non-reaction with, say, how the State Department would pipe up if someone it doesn’t like, such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, used a similar maneuver to sideline a popular potential opponent.

What’s ironic here is that the Muslim Brotherhood is no threat to American interests at all. The movement is a conservative advocate of capitalism. What’s more, the Brotherhood is on the front line in the battle against Al-Qaeda and other violent extremists.

The Brotherhood has suggested that it would review the Mubarak regime’s close collaboration with Israel, even though it says it will maintain the peace treaty. Could the Israel lobby explain why the Obama administration is letting the Egyptian generals overturn a peaceful, democratic revolution?

Panetta: Obama Has Authority to Override Congress to Declare War

While In Afghanistan Obama Quietly Signed An Important Foreign Policy Deal

Business Insider
Eloise Lee

During President Obama's "surprise visit" to Afghanistan yesterday, he met with President Karzai to sign off on a deal outlining U.S. commitment to Afghanistan beyond 2014.

At the center of the agreement is U.S. funding, year after year, to equip and sustain Afghan security forces. After American troops withdraw, the U.S. will still be bound to the counterinsurgency. The war goes on.

But on page 4, the deal also affirms the U.S. will not set up a permanent military base in Afghanistan and will not use Afghan territory or facilities "as a launching point for attacks against other countries."

Aside from defense commitments and enhanced intelligence sharing, the two countries will strengthen relations with cultural efforts, including cooperation between their universities, and opportunities for Afghan youth and women. This could help ingrain more Western ideals in Afghanistan, or at least bolster some much needed cultural awareness between the two countries. The fight against Islamic extremism, while winning the hearts and minds of the local population, is a delicate and difficult mission that has been handled, at times, roughly over the last decade — causing protests and attacks on U.S. personnel by their own allies.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a statement following the signing, "It is a further expression of our shared goal of defeating al Qaeda and its extremist affiliates. It is a tangible sign of the strength and the resilience of the partnership that has been built between the United States and the Afghan people."
There's more outlined in the US Afghan Agreement, so check it out here, complete with Obama's and Karzai's signatures below:

US Afghan Pact

Joe Lieberman, and liberal hero Elizabeth Warren, peddle propaganda on Iran

MondoWeiss
Alex Kane

Danny Ayalon (left), the deputy foreign minister of Israel, with
Senator Joseph Lieberman and Henry Kissinger

Two more examples of the relentless, and successful, misinformation campaign about Iran's nuclear program were seen over the weekend. The principal component of this campaign has been to get people to believe that Iran has a nuclear weapon or is close to obtaining one and poses an imminent threat to Israel and the United States.

The culprits: Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut senator with neoconservative foreign policy views, and progressive darling Elizabeth Warren, who is running for a Senate seat in Massachusetts.

Lieberman's contribution was the more prominent. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Lieberman was asked what he thought about reports that Iran claims to have "reverse-engineered" the US drone they captured last year. His response (emphasis mine):

Look, it was not good for the U.S. when the drone went down in Iran, and not good when the Iranians grabbed it. I don't have confidence at this point that they are really able to make a copy of it. It's a very sophisticated piece of machinery and has served our national security well, including I would guess being used to look all over Iran; particularly, at areas where we have reason to believe that they are working on a nuclear weapon.

The New York Times quoted Lieberman in a piece on Iran's drone claims, but the paper of record didn't bother to question Lieberman's falsehood about Iran "working on a nuclear weapon."

Warren, the liberal hero who swallows the AIPAC line on foreign policy (as Max Blumenthal showed), was also asked about Iran yesterday by the blogger who runs the site "Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy" (h/t Glenn Greenwald). Here's the blogger's account of the chance encounter with Warren:

Yesterday morning, I was in line outside a Somerville, MA breakfast joint, and who should come around introducing herself to the queued patrons but Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, Elizabeth Warren?

When she worked her way to where I was standing, I asked about her hawkish policies toward Iran, which are described thusly on her website...

I asked why her stand is that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, when even the Obama administration admits there is no evidence Iran is building nuclear bombs or has decided it wants to.

Warren said she thinks the data says they are working on nuclear weapons.
I repeated that, no, even the administration says there's no evidence of that.
She said she'd look into it, saying it's important that political statements not to add fuel to the fire

The big lie here, as the blogger above noted, is that Iran already has a nuclear weapon, or is working on one. From Leon Panetta to US intelligence to Israeli intelligence, everyone agrees that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon--nor are they on the cusp of developing one.

The fact that Warren, the subject of a large and favorable profile in The Nation recently, peddles the lie about Iran is more troubling. Lieberman's propaganda is, at this point, expected.

But the last time there was little partisan debate over a war, with the Democratic Party aiding and abetting the push to invade Iraq, the US destroyed a country that still lives with the searing consequences. Warren, who calls for getting out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible, should remember that, or be tarred with the brush of having helped push another disastrous war in the Middle East.