Harry Targ : Global Challenges to the International Order

Women protest in Cairo during Arab Spring. Image from Organizing Upgrade.

The empire in disarray:
Global challenges to the international order

Latin American and African dependency theorists and “bottom-up” historians have argued for a long time that resistance must be part of the understanding of any theory of imperialism.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / April 10, 2013

A whole generation of activists has “grown up” conversant with the central place of empire in human history. Children of the Cold War and the “Sixties” generation realized that the United States was the latest of a multiplicity of imperial powers which sought to dominate and control human beings, physical space, natural resources, and human labor power.

We learned from the Marxist tradition, radical historians, scholar/activists with historical roots in Africa, and revolutionaries from the Philippines and Vietnam to Southern Africa, to Latin America. But we often concluded that imperialism was hegemonic; that is it was all powerful, beyond challenge.

A “theory of imperialism” for the 21st century should include four interconnected variables that explain empire building as well as responses to it.

First, as an original motivation for empire, economic interests are primary. The most recent imperial power, the United States, needed to secure customers for its products, outlets for manufacturing investment opportunities, an open door for financial speculation, and vital natural resources such as oil.

Second, the pursuit of military control parallels and supports the pursuit of economic domination. The United States, beginning in the 1890s, built a two-ocean navy to become a Pacific power, as well as institutionalizing its control of the Western Hemisphere. It crushed revolutionary ferment in the Philippines during the Spanish, Cuban, American War and began a program of military intervention in Central American and the Caribbean. The “Asian pivot” of the 21st century and continued opposition to the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions reflect the 100-year extension of the convergence of economics and militarism in U.S. foreign policy.

Third, as imperial nations flex their muscles on the world stage they need to rationalize exploitation and military brutality to convince others and their own citizens of the humanistic goals they wish to achieve. In short, ideology matters. In the U.S. case, “manifest destiny” and the “city on the hill,” that is the dogma that the United States has a special mission as a beacon of hope for the world, have been embedded in the dominant national narrative of the country for 150 years.

However, what has often been missing from the left-wing theoretical calculus is an understanding of resistance. Latin American and African dependency theorists and “bottom-up” historians have argued for a long time that resistance must be part of the understanding of any theory of imperialism. In fact, the imperial system is directly related to the level of resistance the imperial power encounters.

Resistance generates more attempts at economic hegemony, political subversion, the application of military power, and patterns of “humanitarian interventionism” and diplomatic techniques, called “soft power,” to defuse it. But as recent events sugge, resistance of various kinds is spreading throughout global society.

The impetus for adding resistance to any understanding of imperialism has many sources including Howard Zinn’s seminal history of popular movements in the United States, The People’s History of the United States. Zinn argued convincingly that in each period of American history ruling classes were challenged, shaped, weakened, and in a few cases defeated because of movements of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, middle class progressives, and others who stood up to challenge the status quo.

More recently, Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations, compiled a narrative of post-World War II international relations that privileged the resistance from the Global South. World history was as much shaped by anti-colonial movements, the construction of the non-aligned movement, conferences and programs supporting liberation struggles and women’s rights, as it was by big power contestation. The Prashad book was subtitled A People’s History of the Third World.

The 21st century has witnessed a variety of forms of resistance to global hegemony and the perpetuation of neoliberal globalization all across the face of the globe. First, various forms of systemic resistance have emerged. These often emphasize the reconfiguration of nation-states and their relationships that have long been ignored.

The two largest economies in the world, China and India, have experienced economic growth rates well in excess of the industrial capitalist countries. China has developed a global export and investment program in Latin America and Africa that exceeds that of the United States and Europe.

In addition, the rising economic powers have begun a process of global institution building to rework the international economic institutions and rules of decision-making on the world stage. On March 26-27, 2013, the BRICS met in Durban, South Africa. While critical of BRICS shortcomings Patrick Bond, Senior Professor of Development Studies and Director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, in a collection of readings on the subject, introduces BRICS with an emphasis on its potential:

In Durban, five heads of state meet to assure the rest of Africa that their countries’ corporations are better investors in infrastructure, mining, oil and agriculture than the traditional European and U.S. multinationals. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-SA summit also includes 16 heads of state from Africa, including notorious tyrants. A new "BRICS bank" will probably be launched. There will be more talk about monetary alternatives to the U.S. dollar.

On the Latin American continent, most residents of the region are mourning the death of Hugo Chavez, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution. Under Chavez’s leadership, inspiration, and support from oil revenues, Venezuela launched the latest round of state resistance to the colossus of the north, the United States.

Along with the world’s third largest trade bloc MERCOSUR (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela and associate memberships including Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru), Latin Americans have participated in the construction of financial institutions and economic assistance programs to challenge the traditional hegemony of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

The Bolivarian Revolution also has stimulated political change based on various degrees of grassroots democratization, the construction of workers’ cooperatives, and a shift from neoliberal economic policy to economic populism. With a growing web of participants, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and, of course, Cuba, the tragic loss of Chavez will not mean the end to the Bolivarian Revolution. It might lead to its deepening.

But the story of 21st century resistance is not just about countries, alliances, new economic institutions that mimic the old. Grassroots social movements have been spreading like wildfire all across the face of the globe. The story can begin in many places and at various times: the new social movements of the 1980s; the Zapatistas of the 1990s; the anti-globalization/anti-IMF campaigns going back to the 1960s and continuing off and on until the new century; or repeated mass mobilizations against a Free Trade Agreement for the Americas.

Since 2011, the world has been inspired by Arab Spring, workers’ mobilizations all across the industrial heartland of the United States, student strikes in Quebec, the state of California, and in Santiago, Chile. Beginning in 2001 mass organizations from around the world began to assemble in Porto Alegre, Brazil, billing their meeting of some 10,000 strong, the World Social Forum.

They did not wish to create a common political program. They wished to launch a global social movement where ideas could be shared, issues and demands from the base of societies could be raised, and in general the neoliberal global agenda reinforced at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland could be challenged.

The World Social Forum has been meeting annually ever since in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the United States. Most recently, the last week in March, 2013, 50,000 people from 5,000 organizations in 127 countries from five continents met in Tunis, the site of the protest that sparked Arab Spring two years ago. Planners wanted to bring mass movements from the Middle East and North Africa into the collective narrative of this global mobilization.

Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, reported that a Tunisian student, when asked whether the Social Forum movement should continue, answered in the affirmative. The student paid homage to the Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who committed suicide and launched Arab Spring. He declared that “for all those who have died struggling for justice, we must continue to learn from each other how to build a world that does not respond to the greed of dictators, bankers or corporations, but to the needs of simple people like Mohamed Bouazizi.”

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Justin Hart and William Blum on Exporting Democracy

Spreading the word:
'Democracy, we deliver'

In his inimitable style, Blum rips into the lie of U.S. propaganda and takes Hart’s academic discussion into the streets.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / March 26, 2013

Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy by Justin Hart (2013: Oxford University Press); Hardcover; 296 pp.; $34.95.

America's Deadliest Export: Democracy - The Truth About U.S. Foreign Policy and Everything Else by William Blum (2013: Zed Books); Paperback; 304 pp.; $19.95.

A frequent target of antiwar protests when I lived in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, was the local Amerika Haus. These buildings existed in several European cities and were essentially outposts of the United States Information Agency, which was part of the propaganda wing of the United States government and under the aegis of the CIA.

As the U.S. war in Vietnam grew in intensity and scope, their presence became a sore point among leftists and other war opponents in the countries that hosted them. At the same time, the Frankfurt Amerika Haus was where I heard Kurt Vonnegut give a lecture that did not support the war in Vietnam.

In Justin Hart’s new book Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U. S. Foreign Policy, Amerika Haus and many other aspects of Washington’s propaganda machine are addressed. This history of the origins of the current government propaganda machine in Washington covers the years 1936-1953 and presents the debates, uncertainties, and ultimate use of that machine as an important tool in the proliferation and maintenance of U.S. markets overseas.

After watching Michelle Obama’s presentation of the award for Best Picture to a film praising the CIA from the White House, it’s somewhat difficult to believe that there was a time when politicians and government officials questioned the usefulness of propaganda in the battle for U.S. hegemony. Yet, that is exactly where Hart’s story begins.

In a rather interesting tale, he presents the beginnings of what is euphemistically called public diplomacy in Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy towards Latin America. It represented a new understanding that spreading U.S. culture helped open markets overseas while simultaneously justifying the growing U.S. Empire to the domestic audience, an audience which to that point was mostly isolationist in its outlook.

This new approach was not without its detractors. Most of them came from the extreme right, who saw propaganda as communist-inspired, given its use by the new Soviet government in Russia. This concern was also related to the fact that cultural diplomacy (another euphemism for propaganda) was championed primarily by liberals and progressives with Henry Wallace leading the charge.

The presence of liberal elements at the forefront of this movement lends further credence to the argument that it was liberals and progressives who were at the forefront of the U.S. hegemonic endeavor. It’s obvious from Hart’s telling that the inclusion and acceptance of propaganda as a useful tool for those interested in building the U.S. Empire (pretty much every official in Washington) was not without its ups and downs. However, by the time Harry Truman was president, it was clear that its role was accepted and certain to expand.

Of course, when propaganda failed, the iron fist became ungloved. By 1950, the U.S. military was engaged in a brutal war in Korea whose aim was similar to the efforts of the cultural propaganda committee. In other words, to keep the Soviets from expanding into markets Washington had defined as its own. Meanwhile, the Marshall Plan, hyped as bringing democracy, was underway in Europe and part of the same process.

As William Blum makes clear in his latest collection, America's Deadliest Export: Democracy - The Truth About U.S. Foreign Policy and Everything Else, the folks that truly benefited from the Marshall Plan were the U.S. corporations that rebuilt Europe. Just like the so-called reconstruction funds apportioned to Kosovo after its “liberation” and Iraq after the U.S. invasion, the truth about those reconstructions is that they were primarily a means to move taxpayer dollars from the U.S. treasury into the coffers of a few giant corporations.

Blum’s new book is a collection of commentary exposing the true nature of Washington’s ongoing campaign to spread its democracy around the world. While reading it I was reminded of the t-shirt that shows a photograph of a U.S. bomber plane dropping bombs on some city somewhere on planet earth. Inscribed above the photograph are the words “Democracy, We Deliver.”

America’s Deadliest Export explores the lies involved in this campaign and exposes the brutality and associated arrogance. In his inimitable style, Blum rips into the lie of U.S. propaganda and takes Hart’s academic discussion into the streets, simultaneously pointing out the hypocrisy of U.S. democracy and indicting it for the fraud it is, not only abroad but at home, as well.

While Hart’s text looks primarily at the role of U.S. propaganda overseas, Blum’s tends to focus on how it is utilized to manipulate domestic public opinion. He takes the concept that Washington and its military act only for the good of the world and traces its history from the “Good War” to the “humanitarian” intervention in Libya, and the “liberation” of Iraq.

Along the way, he not only shows the lie behind the concept but how that concept is accepted by most U.S. citizens in the same way Christians accept the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary.

These two books provide a complementary narrative on U.S. foreign policy. While Hart’s book examines the development of the U.S. imperial propaganda machine, Blum’s looks at its growth and also the brutality of the military about whose operations the propaganda seeks to misinform.

As we move into an age where the only victims of U.S. wars are those whom our propaganda claims to be freeing and the assumption of our national goodness is enforced and reinforced to the point of overkill, the understanding these two books provide is more crucial than ever.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up will be republished by Fomite in April 2013 along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Jim Turpin : Is the Imperial Presidency the 'New Normal'? / 2

Photo by Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images./ Foreign Policy.

The 'new normal'?
The Imperial Presidency / 2

“You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”
-- Talking Heads ("Once in a Lifetime")

By Jim Turpin / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2013

Second in a two-part series.

In my previous installment of this article, I discussed how the codification of the Executive’s imperial power and America's one party political system have contributed to a deeply emboldened presidential authority.

But recent executive branch overreach is also propped up with a troubling combination of additional factors including:

• Assassination by star chamber
• Subjugated and 'craven' media

Assassination by star chamber

Star Chamber (n):

1. A 15th-century to 17th-century English court consisting of judges who were appointed by the Crown and sat in closed session on cases involving state security.
2. star chamber: A court or group that engages in secret, harsh, or arbitrary procedures.

The Department of Justice (DOJ), in an effort to codify extrajudicial killings in the “War on Terror” by the Executive branch had a “white paper” leaked earlier this week.

The contents and justification for killing U.S. citizens or foreign nationals are chilling and this was laid out by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with U.S. citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki's 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.

Since then, senior Obama officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and John Brennan, Obama's top terrorism adviser and his current nominee to lead the CIA, have explicitly argued that the president is and should be vested with this power. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article from October reported that the administration is formally institutionalizing this president's power to decide who dies under the Orwellian title "disposition matrix."

This “disposition matrix” -- more commonly referred to as a “kill list” -- is done in complete secrecy by this administration with the aid of the CIA, the National Counterterrorism Center (NTC), and others in a “star chamber." This unaccountable and unmonitored group metes out justice that is death from above, without a shred of “due process” which has been the center of western legal principles and law since the Magna Carta.

More from Greenwald in The Guardian:

The president's underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the President -- at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as "Terror Tuesday" -- then chooses from "baseball cards" and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those powers are exercised in the dark. In fact, The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ has been so fixated on secrecy that they have refused even to disclose the legal memoranda prepared by Obama lawyers setting forth their legal rationale for why the president has this power.

With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), also known as “drones” and having names like “Predator” and “Reaper," the destruction for those on the ground is both horrific and widespread.

Code Pink, a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end U.S.-funded wars and occupations and to challenge militarism globally, recently traveled to the tribal area in Pakistan to both discuss the impact with civilians and protest the use of drones.

Medea Benjamin, one of the founders of Code Pink, recently released her book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, an “extensive analysis of who is producing the drones, where they are being used, who are ‘piloting’ these unmanned planes, who are the victims and what are the legal and moral implications.”

Code Pink also, as one of the few activist groups still holding the Obama administration accountable for the use of drones, disrupted the confirmation hearing of new CIA director James Brennan. Professed liberal Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein quickly removed Code Pink at the beginning of the proceedings.

Just as important, Stanford and NYU released a report last year, titled “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from U.S. Drone Practices in Pakistan." This report lays out evidence of terrorized populations living in fear 24 hours a day:

• “Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.
• “The U.S. practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims.”
• “Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school.”

The efficacy of the entire drone program is highly suspect. The following is from the same report:

The number of "high-level" targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low -- estimated at just 2%.Furthermore, evidence suggests that U.S. strikes have facilitated recruitment to violent non-state armed groups, and motivated further violent attacks.

Subjugated and 'craven' media

The subject of waterboarding, remarkably, has been a topic in U.S. newspapers since the Phillipine Insurrection at the beginning of the 20th century, when U.S. soldiers were accused of torturing Filipino prisoners with the “water cure”:

A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and others called the “water cure.” “Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.

The Kennedy School of Government published a study by a group of Harvard students in 2010, titled, “Torture at the Times: Waterboarding in the Media." The remarkable results of this study show evidence of no longer using the term “torture” in U.S. newspapers post 9/11, when these horrific acts are committed by U.S. armed forces.

Ironically, when these acts are committed by other countries, the term “torture” is used much more frequently.

One of the worst offenders was The New York Times:

The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture, while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.”

Furthermore, it was revealed this week that The New York Times and other newspapers bowed to this administration’s request to keep drone bases in Saudia Arabia secret and then later decided to publish the story on the eve of the Brennan-CIA confirmation hearings:

According to a reporter on the national security beat, The New York Times participated in an “informal arrangement” to keep secret a Saudi Arabian base for U.S. interests -- and then suddenly withdrew from that arrangement. A story posted on the paper’s Web site last night -- titled “Drone Strikes’ Dangers to Get Rare Moment in Public Eye“ -- summarizes the leak of a white paper on the Obama administration’s targeted killing program and tees up the Senate confirmation hearing of White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Maybe The New York Times' slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” should now be “All the News That’s Fit to Print…When It Makes Us More Money”

The nexus of all these contributing factors to empowering the executive branch is deeply troubling and seems insurmountable. It is rare that when power is given to those in authority, that it is later put aside.

“You may say to yourself, my God, what have I done?" -- Talking Heads ("Once in a Lifetime")

[Rag Blog contributor Jim Turpin is an Austin activist and writer who works with CodePink Austin. He also volunteers for the GI coffeehouse Under the Hood Café at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas. Read more articles by Tim Turpin on The Rag Blog.]

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Jim Turpin : Is the Imperial Presidency the 'New Normal'?

The Imperial Obama? Image from The Express Tribune.

The 'new normal'?
The Imperial Presidency

"Same as it ever was..."
-- Talking Heads ("Once in a Lifetime")

By Jim Turpin / The Rag Blog / February 27, 2013

First of a two-part series.

Many presidents throughout our history, from revered to despised, have ignored the Constitution and taken on the mantle of imperial power. From Lincoln to FDR to Nixon, the examples are easily found.

In the ancient Roman world, the term imperium refers to the amount of power given to individuals of authority such as dictators or consuls and was frequently applied to generals with military power. The term “imperial” usually is linked to an empire or the concept of imperialism.

But how have we gotten to where we are today, where the president of the United States can detain or assassinate an American citizen without due process? Where American citizens are constantly monitored and personal information is subject to review? Where whistleblowers are now detained and prosecuted for exposing war crimes and corruption?

The development of the executive branch’s imperial power has its gnarled roots deep in American history. Frequently presidents have used it as an excuse during times of war, but this has not always been the case.

Abraham Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War on April 27, 1861, in response to riots, local militia actions, and the threat that the border slave state of Maryland would secede from the Union. Habeas corpus (literally in Latin “you shall have the body [in court]”) is specifically detailed in the U.S. Constitution in Article I, Section 9: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

A writ of habeas corpus is used to bring a prisoner or other detainee before the court to determine if the person's imprisonment or detention is lawful.

Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 over 70 years ago on February 19, 1942, which led to the forced internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans that lived on the west coast.

The U.S., citing national security interests, demanded that Japanese-Americans be interned without due process or, it would eventually turn out, any factual basis. Whole communities were rounded up and sent to camps, sometimes just clapboard shelters or converted horse stables, in arid deserts and barren fields in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Arkansas.

Nixon's paranoid presidency..

Richard M. Nixon’s deep paranoia over the civil rights and peace movement led to the continued use of the secret FBI program Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), as a means to monitor, sabotage, and neutralize legitimate dissent across the country. COINTELPRO infiltrated the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the NAACP, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the National Lawyer Guild, and many other groups and organizations.

But what drives today’s constitutional overreach by the Executive Office? Recent history points to a number of factors, including:

• Codification of the Executive’s Imperial Power
• America’s One Party System

Codification of the Executive Imperial Power

Within days of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Congress responded by ramroding a number of open-ended laws that gave the Executive branch a blank check to wage war world-wide and indefinitely detain civilians at home and abroad.

Joanne Mariner of Justia.com neatly fits together the convoluted pieces of the Patriot Act, the Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF), and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which, though initiated by George W. Bush, is now fully promulgated by Barack Obama:

During the Bush years, despite massive public and press attention to the administration’s detention policies, Congress remained largely out of the picture. While the USA PATRIOT Act contained some provisions on detention, they were never put to use; the Bush administration preferred to create a detention system that was, it assumed, largely free of legal constraints and judicial oversight.

The military prison at Guantanamo and the CIA’s secret prison system were therefore created by executive fiat, without congressional input or restriction. When cases challenging Guantanamo and the military detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil got to court, however, the administration claimed that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a joint resolution passed by Congress in September 2001, gave congressional approval for those detentions.

The AUMF, which authorizes the president to use “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored such persons or groups, is silent on the issue of detention. A plurality of the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the administration, nonetheless, that the power to detain is necessarily implied by the power to use military force.

The NDAA, which is renewed every year, also contains sections, according to Mariner, that are deeply troubling to human rights activists:

What is now known as Subtitle D of the NDAA -- the section on detention -- made its first appearance in March of this year (2011). Called the Detainee Security Act in the House, and the Military Detainee Procedures Improvement Act in the Senate, the bills, introduced by Representative Buck McKeon and Senator John McCain, respectively, were meant to shift counterterrorism responsibilities from law enforcement to the military.

The clear goal of the two bills was to require that suspected terrorists either be tried before military commissions or be held in indefinite detention without charge... every provision in subtitle D is objectionable from the standpoint of human rights and civil liberties. Among the controversial provisions are sections 1026, 1027 and 1028 of the bill, which restrict detainee transfers and releases from Guantanamo. But while human rights organizations are worried about these limitations, their gravest concerns pertain to sections 1021 and 1022.

Glenn Greenwald, while still at Salon, addresses Sections 1021 and 1022:

There are two separate indefinite military detention provisions in this bill. The first, Section 1021, authorizes indefinite detention for the broad definition of “covered persons” discussed above in the prior point. And that section does provide that “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.” So that section contains a disclaimer regarding an intention to expand detention powers for U.S. citizens, but does so only for the powers vested by that specific section.

More important, the exclusion appears to extend only to U.S. citizens “captured or arrested in the United States” -- meaning that the powers of indefinite detention vested by that section apply to U.S. citizens captured anywhere abroad (there is some grammatical vagueness on this point, but at the very least, there is a viable argument that the detention power in this section applies to U.S. citizens captured abroad).

But the next section, Section 1022, is a different story. That section specifically deals with a smaller category of people than the broad group covered by 1021: namely, anyone whom the President determines is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaeda or an associated force” and “participated in the course of planning or carrying out an attack or attempted attack against the United States or its coalition partners.”

For those persons, section (a) not only authorizes, but requires (absent a Presidential waiver), that they be held “in military custody pending disposition under the law of war.” The section title is “Military Custody for Foreign Al Qaeda Terrorists,” but the definition of who it covers does not exclude U.S. citizens or include any requirement of foreignness.

That section -- 1022 -- does not contain the broad disclaimer regarding U.S. citizens that 1021 contains. Instead, it simply says that the requirement of military detention does not apply to U.S. citizens, but it does not exclude U.S. citizens from the authority, the option, to hold them in military custody.

The annual renewal of the NDAA by the Congress of the United States is a sad and deeply troubling testimony to how we empower an Executive branch that is ironically supposed to have their overreach limited by the very branch voting for this law.


America’s One Party System

John Kerry, Winter Soldier.

During the presidential election last fall, if I closed my eyes and listened to speeches on national security, there was basically no policy difference. Both parties called us the “Greatest nation on Earth” and tried to outdo the other with patriotic and nationalistic proclamations and slogans.

As pointed out by Mother Jones during coverage of the election for both party’s conventions, John Kerry (who coincidentally became our new Secretary of State in 2013) spouted, “Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago."

The story went on:

...Democrats have adopted the kind of language that might have been derided as "cowboy rhetoric" four years ago. And Kerry wasn't the first or last speaker to invoke Bin Laden in Charlotte last week [in 2012]. Asking for four more years of Obama, Vice President Joe Biden intoned that "Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!" Eight years ago, Democrats trying to act tough on national security sounded like kids playing pretend; at times, this year's convention sounded like a Roman triumph.

Let’s remember, this is the same Lieutenant John Kerry who as a member of Vietnam Veteran’s Against the War (VVAW) spoke at Winter Soldier in 1971 in Washington, D.C., decrying militarism and war:

We are here in Washington also to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country, the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions also, the use of weapons, the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage in the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions, in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.

I would be curious to know if Kerry as the new Secretary of State remembers the importance of his testimony in 1971 and what his brothers at VVAW think of him now.

The same Mother Jones article deftly points out that:

Barack Obama has a plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, but neither candidate [Democratic or Republican] actually has a plan to end the war that started on September 11, 2001. Both parties accept that conflict as a permanent feature of American life. An American citizen in the U.S. is as likely to be killed by their own furniture as a Muslim terrorist, but fear of violent Islamic extremism has changed this country almost irrevocably.

But let’s compare... are the Democratic and Republican Party really just the same party on issues like national security?

ProPublica recently did a side-by-side comparison of Bush and Obama policies on the use of torture, surveillance, and detention and the results are not very surprising.

To Obama’s credit, CIA “black sites” (outsourced torture sites to foreign countries) and “enhanced interrogation techniques” (also known in the vernacular as “torture”) have been, as far as the American public is aware, discontinued and stopped by this administration.

But... Obama has continued the following policies started by Bush and ramped them up dramatically under his administration:

• Continued renewal of the Patriot Act;
• Wiretaps and data collection of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals;
• Continuation of Guantanamo prison as an indefinite detention center;
• Targeted killings (also known as “assassinations”) of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals without legal oversight;
• Significant increase of drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and possibly now in Mali, that have killed thousands of civilians;
• The use of military commissions to nullify the rights of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in civilian court.

On issues of national security, America really remains a one-party system that use the “War on Terror” as an excuse to abrogate civil liberties of its’ citizenry.

“You may ask yourself, where does that highway lead to?” -- Talking Heads ("Once in a Lifetime")

In the second installment of this article, I will investigate the use of assassination by "Star Chamber” and how a subjugated and cravenly media has led us down the highway of a fearful nation with fewer and fewer civil liberties.

[Rag Blog contributor Jim Turpin is an Austin activist and writer who works with CodePink Austin. He also volunteers for the GI coffeehouse Under the Hood Café at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas. Read more articles by Tim Turpin on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Celebrate the 'Historical Revisionists' / 1

Historian William Appleman Wiliams circa 1986. Image from Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections / Daily Barameter / The Nation.
Celebrate the 'Historical Revisionists' / 1

William Appleman Williams’ classic text, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, broke new ground in the early 1960s as opponents of the Cold War and the escalating Vietnam War policy began to challenge reigning orthodoxy.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog/ February 12, 2013

First of a two-part series.

The first modern organized opposition to U.S. global expansion began with the war on the Philippines in 1898. The Anti-Imperialist League, with such distinguished spokespersons as Mark Twain, decried United States expansion to Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. Later, critics of U.S. foreign policy, such as Eugene V. Debs, opposed President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I in 1917. In the 1930s journalists and activists raised concerns about the United States role in world affairs, particularly its seeming indifference to the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany.

After World War II, skeptics about a U.S. policy that was leading to Cold War with the Soviet Union arose, coalescing around the third party presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace. After President Truman won election in 1948, opposition to the direction the United States was taking in the world was steadily silenced. A virulent anti-communist repressive environment in academia, the media, and electoral politics ensued. By the 1950s analyses of United States foreign policy that focused on the U.S. as an imperial power virtually disappeared.

The Wallace candidacy which was soundly defeated was followed by the 1949 purge of 11 unions from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for their left-wing politics and during the 1950s anti-communist purges in radio, television, the movies and educational institutions. Labor organizers, cultural performers, educators, government employees and others tarnished with the charge of being “communists” lost jobs, livelihoods, and access to broad publics.

Academic fields were transformed to provide training grounds and ideological support for America’s mission in the world. In history and social science new scholarly works emphasized consensus versus class struggle, pluralist democracy rather than political elitism, and groups and political activity rather than class and class interests. Few remaining critical analysts of United States foreign policy highlighted economic interest, the pursuit of empire, or over-reaction to a Soviet threat.

However, some academic programs, such as the Department of History, University of Wisconsin, began to educate young scholars to examine the economic taproots of United States foreign policy. William Appleman Williams’ classic text, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, broke new ground in the early 1960s as opponents of the Cold War and the escalating Vietnam War policy began to challenge reigning orthodoxy.

Williams, for many budding anti-war activists, provided information about an American empire that had grown ever since the end of the civil war. He and his students connected U.S. empire building with the conquest of the North American continent, the slaughter of millions of Native people, the taking of large amounts of the land mass from Mexico, and global expansion from the Philippines to the Caribbean and Central America.

In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, The Contours of American History, and The Roots of the Modern American Empire, Williams elaborated on the rise of agricultural production and the need for the American economy to find markets overseas. In addition, domestic outlets for U.S. productivity had been capped with the end of the “frontier.” Drawing upon Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” U.S. leaders, he wrote, believed that a new global American empire was needed to sell products, secure natural resources, and find investment opportunities.

Williams claimed that the so-called “open door” policy toward China proclaimed in the 1890s signified what the U.S. imperial vision was to be. This policy resulted from the disintegration of and civil war in China which was used as an opportunity by European powers and Japan to establish their own spheres of influence on the Asian mainland.

In response to the nations that were carving up Chinese territory, the U.S. Secretary of State, John Hay, issued a warning to Europe demanding the right to have open access to markets in China. By implication the closing of such markets to U.S. goods might lead to confrontation.

For revisionists, such as Williams, the Open Door Notes illustrated the emerging U.S. global imperial vision. The demands that the world respect the U.S. right to penetrate economies everywhere would become the standard for the U.S. role in the world ever since.

Again, the driving force behind the image of the Open Door was economics. Some of Williams’ writings seemed to emphasize material reality, the needs of capitalism. Other of his writings implied that United States behavior was motivated by elite beliefs that markets were a necessity.

In the 1960s several newer scholars began publishing their research emphasizing the connections between the necessities of U.S. capitalism and expansion or the belief foreign policy elites had that such expansion was necessary for economic survival.

Gabriel Kolko who authored The Politics of War, and co-authored with Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power: United States Foreign Policy From 1945 to 1954, presented in compelling, graphic, and precise terms the material underpinnings of United States Cold War policy. The Kolkos emphasized the threat to the West that international communism, particularly the example of the Soviet Union and popular Communist parties in Europe, represented to the reconstruction of a global capitalist empire after World War II.

According to the Kolkos and other revisionists, the expansion of socialism constituted a threat to capital accumulation. After World War II, wartime demand for U.S. products might decline, leaving in its wake economic stagnation and a return to the economic depression of the 1930s. The Marshall Plan, applauded as a humanitarian economic assistance program for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe, was really a program to increase demand for U.S. products.

With an engineered international communist threat, military spending, another source of demand, would help maintain customers, including the government itself, for U.S. products. The idea of empire, stressed in Williams’ work, was underscored by the materiality of capitalist dynamics.

The Kolkos described the motivations of the Soviet Union and the United States. The former was not driven by a demonic ideology to dominate the world, they said. In addition, United States foreign policy was not driven by principle. As to the former: “The Soviets played an essentially opportunistic, non-ideological role in Eastern Europe’s initial postwar development. They cared little about the previous policies or the ideology of the men in power in the coalition governments so long as they were not anti-Soviet in the post war period.”

And the United States made "a sincere effort to secure the area for its framework of multilateral trade and an open door for American investment.” When this failed the Kolkos said, the United States “chose instead a policy of harassment and employed the image of an iron curtain to blur, for strictly political purposes, the variations in an area whose political experiences at the time ranged from pluralist Czechoslovakia to Bolshevik Yugoslavia.”

To expand the reach of post-war U.S. capitalism and oppose any resistance to it, the East-West conflict “became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“Celebrate the Historical Revisionists: Part 2” will discuss the enduring significance of their findings for understanding the United State' role in the world today.  

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Robert Jensen : Torture is Trivial

Zero Dark Thirty reinforces the story of American innocence.
Torture is trivial

Zero Dark Thirty tells the story most Americans want to hear, not the story that needs to be told.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / January 24, 2013

The great American torture debate has been rekindled by the nationwide release of Zero Dark Thirty, the hot new movie about the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden.

But all the fussing over whether or not the movie condones, glorifies, and/or misrepresents torture is trivial, because the United States’ use of torture after 9/11 is trivial in the context of larger U.S. crimes.

Let me be clear: I don’t support torture. I think torture is immoral. I think government officials who ordered or condoned torture should be held accountable. Torture crosses a line that should not be crossed.

But when I look at the decade since 9/11, torture is hardly the greatest crime of the U.S. war machine. Since 9/11, the United States has helped destroy two countries with, at best, sketchy moral and legal justification. The invasion of Afghanistan was connected to the crimes of 9/11, at least at first, but quickly devolved into a nonsensical occupation. The invasion of Iraq, which was clearly illegal, was a scandal of unprecedented scale, even by the standards of past U.S. invasions and covert operations.

While the Iraq war is over (sort of) and the Afghanistan war is coming to an end (sort of) the United States is also at war in Pakistan and Iran. The U.S. routinely unleashes murderous drone strikes in Pakistani territory, and we can assume that covert operations against Iran, such as the cyber-attack with a powerful computer virus, continue even though Iran poses no serious threat to the United States.

All of this was, or is, clearly illegal or of dubious legal status. None of it makes us more secure in the long run. And if one considers human beings who aren’t U.S. citizens to be fully human, there is no moral justification for any of it.

The problem with Zero Dark Thirty is that it ignores all of that, as do most of the movies, television shows, and journalism about the past decade. It tells the story that Americans want to hear: We are an innocent nation that has earned its extraordinary wealth fair and square. Now we want nothing more than to protect the fruits of our honest labor while, when possible, extending our superior system to others.

Despite our moral virtue and benevolence, there are irrational ideologues around the world who want to kill Americans. This forces our warriors into unpleasant situations dealing with unpleasant people, regrettable but necessary to restore the rightful order.

A less self-indulgent look at the reality of the post-World War II era suggests a different story. Whether in Latin America, southern Africa, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, the central goal of U.S. foreign policy has been consistent: to make sure that an independent course of development did not succeed anywhere, out of a fear that it might spread to the rest of the developing world and threaten U.S. economic domination. In the Middle East, the specific task has been to make sure that the flow of oil and oil profits continues in a fashion conducive to U.S. interests.

This is not a defense of terrorism but rather a consistent critique of terrorism, whether committed by nation-states or non-state actors. The solution to the problem is not more terrorism by one side to counter the terrorism of the other. The solution is not torture. At this point, there are no easy and obvious “solutions” available, given the hole into which we’ve dug ourselves.

But there are things we can do that would help create the conditions under which solutions may emerge, ways to support real democracy around the world and a just distribution of resources. The first step is for those with more wealth and power to tell the truth about how that wealth was accumulated and how that power has been used.

The real problem with Zero Dark Thirty is not that it takes artistic license with some of the facts about torture. The film’s more profound failure is that by reinforcing the same old story about American innocence, it helps obscure the larger truths we don’t want to face about ourselves.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of Arguing for Our Lives: Critical Thinking in Crisis Times (City Lights, coming in April 2013). His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Ron Jacobs : Vietnam Was Not a 'Mistake'

John Kerry, who parted ways with the VVAW, has served well in the halls of empire. Here he salutes the delegates at the Democratic Convention in Boston, 2004. Photo by Stephen Savoia / AP.
It was not a mistake:
Vietnam and U.S. policy

Kerry considered the U.S. policy in Vietnam a mistake. Much of the antiwar movement saw it as standard operating procedure. Obviously, each understanding depended on one’s interpretation of history.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / January 22, 2013

On January 15, 1973, Richard Nixon announced a halt to offensive operations by U.S. forces in Vietnam. Twelve days later a peace agreement was signed in Paris between the United States, North Vietnam, the U.S. client regime in Saigon, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam. This agreement called for an immediate ceasefire and called for the Vietnamese to negotiate a political settlement regarding the fate of southern Vietnam.

The January 27th agreement was the same as one that Saigon had refused to sign three months earlier. The interlude between the two dates saw some of the heaviest bombing of the entire conflict by the United States Air Force (USAF). I vividly recall listening to the news broadcasts on Armed Forces Radio and watching the German telecasts reporting the bombing.

In typical fashion, Nixon named the operation after a position in U.S. football: Operation Linebacker II. It is estimated that this particular round of carpet bombing killed more than 1,600 northern Vietnamese civilians, including over 200 at Hanoi's Bach Mai hospital alone. I personally attended two protests in Frankfurt am Main against the so-called Christmas bombings. Similar protests occurred around the world.

The peace agreement did not stop the war. It did provide Nixon and Kissinger with a way to complete their policy of Vietnamization. U.S. troops began to be withdrawn at a greater pace and South Vietnamese troops (ARVN) began to replace the withdrawing forces. U.S. forces on the ground were officially only serving as advisors. Anecdotal evidence suggests that USAF planes continued to bomb, although the missions were now officially led by South Vietnamese flyers.

As many a GI, sailor, or Marine who was stationed in (or off the coast of) Vietnam after the peace agreement was signed can tell you, the war did not end. However, the will to fight among South Vietnamese forces was rapidly fading. Since 1971, friends of mine returning from battle had been telling stories of outright refusal of orders by entire units of ARVN and U.S. forces. Others told me that their bosses told them to "just stay out of sight and stay alive."

The official word was that no U.S. combat soldiers remained in Vietnam after March 1973. Reflecting the mood among U.S. voters, Congress cut off all official military aid to the Saigon government in 1974.

I returned to the United States in August 1973 and began college in the Bronx. Although there were some meetings and even a small protest or two regarding the continued funding of the war against the Vietnamese (and the unofficial presence of thousands of troops), most of the political activity was focused on the CIA/ITT assisted coup in Chile and the growing calls for Nixon’s impeachment.

One memorable protest against the U.S. funding of the failing Saigon endeavor to survive the will of the Vietnamese people was a takeover of the Statue of Liberty by a small band of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and members of the Attica Brigades. Both of these groups were left anti-imperialist in nature and allies of the post-SDS formation known as the Revolutionary Unions.

John Kerry and the VVAW had parted ways many months before; Kerry had always represented the less-radical (some would say right-wing) elements of the VVAW and the antiwar movement in general. His departure from the VVAW was not a surprise, especially considering the growing radicalization of the organization’s membership.

Kerry considered the U.S. policy in Vietnam a mistake. Much of the antiwar movement saw it as standard operating procedure. Obviously, each understanding depended on one’s interpretation of history.

True to form, John Kerry’s understanding of history has served him well in the halls of empire. Indeed, he may very well become the next Secretary of State; successor to another of the anti-Vietnam war movement’s imperial apologists, Hilary Clinton.

Neither Kerry nor Clinton ever considered the argument that the U.S. war in Vietnam was part and parcel of a policy with economic and political domination of the world as its goal. Instead, they preferred to believe that the slaughter of millions of Vietnamese, the creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the destruction of a land, was just a mistake. The overall policy was a good one, merely desiring to bring democracy and freedom to those same people being murdered and maimed.

Since that day in 1973, the United States has been involved in some kind of military conflict almost without a let up. Democrat and Republican, right wing and liberal, the battle for world hegemony continues unabated.

Low-intensity conflicts that included the massacre of Salvadoran farmers by U.S.-funded death squads and militaries; the murderous subversion of a popular government by CIA-contra forces in Nicaragua; the arming of religious extremists in Afghanistan to fight a secular and progressive government in Kabul; the imposition of sanctions against the Iraqi people causing the deaths of over a half-million people (leading Democratic Secretary of State Albright to state the deaths were “worth the price”); and the never-ending support for Israel’s brutal and Orwellian occupation of Palestine.

All of these elements and hundreds more are what describe US.. foreign policy. They are not mistakes any more than the U.S. war on the Vietnamese people was a mistake. Indeed, they are the price the world must pay.

In the weeks to come, there will be a parade of powerful men and women from the nation’s elites appearing before committees of the Senate. These individuals will be auditioning for their roles in the new White House administration. Some, like John Kerry, will face some loud opposition from the ultra-right members of that legislative body.

Don’t be fooled by the bombast. The proof that the individual being questioned and the individuals doing the questioning agree is in the history briefly noted above. As long as those in both seats believe in the ideology of empire, Washington’s march will never fall and only rarely stumble.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Obama Continues Immoral Bush Policies

Four more years. Image from NewsOne.
Obama embraces five
immoral Bush policies

“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period... was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / January 14, 2013

Looking back over the last four years, it has become clear that President Barack Obama has enthusiastically continued (and expanded in at least one case) five troubling policies of George W. Bush: foreign interventionism, the use of armed drones, extraordinary rendition, torture, and incarcerating alleged terrorists in Guantanamo.

Foreign adventurism encompasses the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the continued and expanded use of armed drones to kill people President Obama and his staff (including especially Obama’s new nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan) believe should die for their actions. Reportedly, Brennan maintains a “kill list” approved by President Obama. These drone killings occur throughout the Middle East, but particularly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

Killing in a war zone is relatively easier to justify under international legal principles to which the United States subscribes, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, than are killings elsewhere. But under Bush’s view, which relies on the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by the Congress seven days after 9/11, the “international war on terror” justifies killing anyone who the President and his agents believe is a terrorist, wherever they may be. Obama has accepted that view.

Under the International Covenant, lethal force by our military against enemy fighters in an armed conflict is permitted if done for military necessity, and if impact on civilian lives and property will not be disproportionate to the military objective. Currently, that limits such actions to Afghanistan, which we attacked because of its relationship to al Queda, the group responsible for the terrorist attack on 9/11.

Self-defense is also permitted by the International Covenant against another state that is responsible for an attack against the U.S. Drone attacks other than in Afghanistan appear to violate the International Covenant, no matter what the Congress may have authorized in 2001.

CNN reports that 4,400 people have been killed in U.S. drone attacks since 2002, most in Pakistan. Obama has ordered six times more drone attacks than Bush ordered. Of those 4,400 deaths, about 25% have been civilians, including over 200 children. Because the CIA is responsible for most of these attacks, confirming these data through the government is impossible.

John Brennan has denied that there have been any civilian deaths. According to his reasoning, any male of combat age is a terrorist, yet drone attacks have killed those attending funerals and weddings, as well as 16-year-old Tariq Aziz and his 12-year-old cousin who had been learning how to take video of drones that constantly circled their village in Pakistan, and at least two American citizens in Yemen who were not in a war zone.

In 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki, described as an al Qaeda propagandist, was killed in a drone attack in Yemen. Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son was killed in a separate drone attack.

Esquire's Tom Junod described the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki this way:

He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him.

He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

Before the drone attacks began and before 9/11, during the Clinton administration, the U.S. government began the practice, in a limited way, of extraordinary rendition, which has been described as “the apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another.” After 9/11, the practice increased dramatically as a way to engage in torture away from the eyes of Americans and the media.

The CIA, along with other U.S. government agencies, has attempted to gather intelligence from foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism by taking them to countries where U.S. and international legal safeguards do not apply, at least so far as the CIA is concerned.

These suspects are detained and interrogated by U.S. personnel at U.S.-run detention facilities outside U.S. territory or are handed over to foreign agents for interrogation. Such people are subjected to torture as that is defined by U.S. and international law.

While President Obama promised to end such practices, what his administration has done is put lipstick on the proverbial pig. Obama now assures us that the U.S. will not render a person to another country for detention and interrogation unless that country promises not to torture the suspect. While his administration has ceased using the worst practitioners of torture used by Bush (Syria, Egypt, and Libya), it has instead engaged the services of other countries to directly take such suspects into custody so that the U.S. will not be tainted by how the suspects are treated.

In spite of the evidence we now have of the wrongness of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, those Americans who spoke out from the beginning, as well as those who quickly realized the sham of the Iraq war, continue to be ridiculed. The most recent public example of the latter group is former senator Chuck Hagel, who has been named to become Obama’s next Secretary of Defense.

The interventionism recognized and opposed by Hagel and others is not evidence of an exceptional nation, but of one that has long ago forgotten the vision of its founders that we would not have a standing army, nor would we intervene in the affairs of other nations.

Finally, the interventions we have engaged in since 9/11 have led to the creation of a special prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, at the southeastern end of Cuba, which has been widely condemned around the world, by both allies and enemies.

The deathly and desolate place known simply as Guantanamo should sicken every American of good will and normal sensibilities. Many of the people incarcerated and tortured there were turned over to the U.S. in return for the payment of bounties, and many were not involved with terrorism. Right now, the Obama administration has determined that 86 men incarcerated at Guantanamo are guilty of nothing and should be repatriated to their home countries. But actions of the administration and Congress have worked together to ensure that the 86 will remain incarcerated indefinitely.

Four years ago, President Obama pledged to close the prison. Yet, he recently signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for 2013, which will prevent any of the 166 men now incarcerated at Guantanamo from leaving for at least another year, including 56 men the government has listed as having been “cleared for transfer,” a process that requires the approval of many U.S. agencies and foreign governments. No one knows when these wrongfully incarcerated men will be allowed to return to their homes.

One of the most egregious human rights violations involving Guantanamo occurred to Al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj, who was taken into custody at the Pakistani border after unknown individuals were paid a bounty by the U.S. for anyone they claimed to be a terrorist, but he was guilty of nothing related to terrorism.

The credentials of Sami al-Hajj as a journalist could not have been clearer when he was taken into custody. Amy Goodman, the primary host of Democracy Now!, recently summarized what Sami al-Hajj, now the head of Al Jazeera’s human rights and public liberties desk, endured at Guantanamo for six years:

The Al Jazeera cameraman was arrested in Pakistan in December of 2001 while traveling to Afghanistan on a work assignment. Held for six years without charge, al-Hajj was repeatedly tortured, hooded, attacked by dogs and hung from a ceiling. Interrogators questioned him over 100 times about whether Al Jazeera was a front for al-Qaeda. In January 2007, he began a hunger strike that lasted 438 days until his release in May 2008.

Recently, one innocent prisoner from Yemen -- Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif -- died in Guantanamo after nearly 11 years in captivity, leaving a wife and 14-year old son to mourn. He should never have been sent to America’s special prison, but someone was paid a $5,000 bounty to turn him in. He, too, was guilty of nothing related to terrorism. Mystery surrounds the circumstances of his death. U.S. authorities have told different stories about how he died, which should remind us all of the absolute truth of journalist I. F. Stone’s admonition that “All governments lie!”

When it comes to foreign adventurism, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, the U.S. is well-positioned to take military action from its wide-spread collection of cruisers, submarines, dock landing ships, amphibious transport docks, amphibious assault ships, and aircraft carriers, which together number around 135, with others under construction.

In addition and of equal importance, the U.S. maintains over 1,000 overseas military bases according to David Vine, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC, who has published one book on such facilities and nearly completed another on the subject.

While the Iraq war is over for the U.S. military, around 15,000 military contractors reportedly still operate there on behalf of U.S. interests, and perhaps as many as 300 troops train Iraqi security forces. Plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan include provisions to leave several thousand troops to continue training, provide support for the Afghan military, and perform counterinsurgency tasks.

Right now over 117,000 military contractors are in Afghanistan. No one outside of the government knows how many will be left in place once most U.S. troops have left, nor do we know how many CIA operatives will remain engaged there.

Mentioning the CIA inevitably brings up the question of torture. The evidence of torture by agents of the United States should be well-known by anyone who has read the newspapers since 9/11. That evidence spreads from Abu Ghraib, to extraordinary rendition sites, to Guantanamo, to our own military prisons in the U.S., where Bradley Manning was held for over a year in conditions and under treatments that violate the standards of decency which we claim to uphold.

Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn wrote recently:

Torture is illegal in all circumstances. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty the United States ratified which makes it part of U.S. law, states unequivocally: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

The prohibition of torture is absolute and unequivocal. Torture is never lawful. ... Yet despite copious evidence of widespread torture and abuse during the Bush administration, and the Constitution’s mandate that the President enforce the laws, Obama refuses to hold the Bush officials and lawyers accountable for their law breaking.

For nearly 60 years, at least since President Eisenhower authorized a coup in 1953 that brought the Shah of Iran (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) into power in place of the democratically-elected Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, the role the United States has played in the Middle East has been a tragedy.

What Martin Luther King, Jr. said about another tragedy is equally appropriate about our role not only in the Middle East, but in most of the world, where we have tried to control events and people with the armaments of war: “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period... was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

Deadly drones, foreign interventionism, extraordinary rendition, torture, and the legacy of Guantanamo require that more Americans speak out against the policies and practices of our government, hold officials accountable for their misdeeds, and find new ways to live in the only world we know. To do otherwise would allow both the bad people and the silent good people together to squander the promise of our great nation.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : 'The Untold History of the United States'

It's not untold...
The 'Untold History of the United States'

Stone and Kuznick's 10-part series is a brilliant and entertaining narrative of the United States' role in the world since the onset of World War II.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2013

Oliver Stone has made an enormous contribution to discussions of the United States role in the world. His films have described the horrific consequences of United States foreign policy for the people of El Salvador and Vietnam, the American political system, and the U.S. soldiers victimized by wars not of their making. While his films, such as JFK, raise controversial claims, they have stimulated important public conversations.

This television season, Showtime, a cable channel, is showing a 10-part series written and produced by Stone and his academic collaborator, historian Peter Kuznick. The series, The Untold History of the United States, is a brilliant and entertaining narrative of the United States' role in the world since the onset of World War II.

It warrants broad distribution within educational institutions and among communities of political activists. Because of our ahistorical culture people do not have a sense of the critical decisions that were made 50 or 100 years ago which have structured the political and economic life of the country ever since.

Critical moments in United States history have channeled the prospects for progressive social change today and tomorrow. From the arrival of colonial armies to the “new world,” to the introduction of slavery to the Western Hemisphere, to revolution against British imperialism, to the civil war and the defeat of post-war reconstruction, the American experience has been shaped by class and race in the context of burgeoning industrial and financial capitalism. The Spanish/Cuban/American war stimulated the rise of the United States as the preeminent empire from the Philippines to the Western Hemisphere.

Most of us have received a sanitized history of these earlier historical moments. In addition, our understanding of the rise of socialist movements in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression and the global fascist threat, the realities of World War II, and the emerging U.S. hegemony after the war which led to the “Cold War” between global capitalism and socialism have been limited as well.

Oliver Stone’s 10-part “untold history,” in collaboration with Professor Kuznick, fills in some of the void. Several themes about the onset of the Cold War are particularly important:

First, while the series overemphasizes the role of elites in shaping U.S. history Stone and Kuznick do point out that these elites always perceived the threat workers, radicals, and other rank-and-file activists meant to ruling class dominance. Much of foreign policy was designed to crush revolutionary ferment overseas and at home.

Second, in the first two episodes emphasis is placed on the lost opportunity for the left that resulted from the successful efforts of political elites, particularly in the Democratic Party, to force Henry Wallace, President Roosevelt’s third term vice president, and 1948 candidate for president on the Progressive Party ticket, from power. Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture during the New Deal was an economic populist, anti-racist, and pro-union sympathizer and after World War II an advocate for United States/Soviet Union collaboration.

Stone and Kuznick probably exaggerate Wallace as an alternative to the imperial, counter-revolutionary, and racist path the United States took after the war but correctly make it clear that CEOs from massive corporations and banks and political elites from both political parties were committed to crushing those left forces that flowered in the United States in the 1930s and grew in popularity all across the globe.

The Soviet Union was one manifestation of global resistance to capitalism that paralleled the spread of massive anti-colonial ferment in the Global South.

Third, the filmmakers provide overwhelming evidence to show that the defeat of fascism in Europe was largely the result of the massive Soviet military machine. Americans suffered about 290,000 wartime dead and the Soviet Union 27 million. And Stone, who narrated the documentary, suggests that while Joseph Stalin was a cruel dictator, his policies must be understood in the context of the rise of fascism in Europe and the refusal of western powers, particularly Great Britain, France, and the United State, to stand up against it.

He correctly portrays Stalin as a nationalist who was prepared to sacrifice all principles, in this case Communist ones, to prepare for and to defend the Soviet Union. This overriding commitment, Stone implies, carried over into Soviet diplomatic interaction with the rest of Europe and the United States after the war.

Fourth, in great detail Stone and Kuznick make it clear that the United States did not have to use two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force the Japanese to surrender in the summer of 1945. The Japanese leadership knew they were soon to be defeated. Many had advocated for surrender by the time of the Potsdam Conference of July, 1945 and American policymakers were aware of it.

President Truman’s advisors knew that if the Soviet Union declared war on Japan which the Soviets promised to do by August 8, the enemy would give up. But despite this, the filmmakers suggest, President Truman tried to use the powerful new weapon against the Japanese before the Soviet Union had a chance to enter the war, and thus be a diplomatic player in Asia after the war.

Also, and this was critical, the bomb was designed to send a message to the Soviet Union as well as Japan. The United States in the years ahead would be the dominant military power in the world.

Stone and Kuznick point out that the decisions to drop two atomic bombs on Japan signaled the dawn of a new age. Now weapons of mass destruction would be used to pursue global hegemony. There no longer would be any limits on the possibility of death and destruction derived from world affairs.

In other words, Stone and Kuznick are making the case that at least from the onset of the Cold War to today, U.S. foreign policy has been driven by economic and political interests to dominate the world and has responded violently to a multiplicity of forms of resistance. The locales of struggle changed as would the forms of resistance. But the structure that was put in place after World War II remains the albatross around the necks of those who seek change today and tomorrow.

The series is an indispensable lesson for peace and justice activists today. However, it should be added that the “untold” story has been told before. As a result of the threats of nuclear war in the 1950s, United States policies toward Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s, and patterns of U.S. covert interventions and violence against peoples on every continent, progressive scholars began to use their methods to uncover this history 50 years ago.

Historians and activists were inspired by the classic text by William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Williams’ work, then called “historical revisionism,” inspired other groundbreaking studies of the onset and perpetuation of the Cold War by Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperovitz, Diane Clemens, Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, Thomas Patterson, and many more. The works on McCarthyism, repression of labor militancy, and mystification in popular culture could fill libraries.

While it is true that documentary films cannot provide footnotes, it is important for viewers to realize that progressive scholars during the depths of the Cold War used their skills to research, teach, and for some, engage in political activism based on their findings.

And finally, if the “untold” story has in fact been told many times, a question that becomes important is why we as a people, even the political activists among us, are not apprised of it. And this leads to analyses of how knowledge has been appropriated in the service of United States foreign and domestic policy.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his book from Changemaker Press which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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