The whip-smart and ever-sly Gore Vidal visited “Real Time” on Friday, giving his historical and sometimes hysterically funny take on the state of the United States. He also revisited a few key moments from his personal history, illustrated by some priceless archival footage found by Bill Maher’s crack research team. Is it too soon to make an Amelia Earhart joke? It’s not too late to make one about Sarah Palin, apparently.
Continue reading “Gore Vidal: ‘The Most Interesting Man in the World’”
Amir Mir reports in The News that the 60 US drone attacks in Pakistan have killed 687 civilians for the 14 al-Qaeda suspects they were targeting. If you’ve ever wondered why so-called ‘human rights’ groups are treated with such scepticism (if not disdain) outside the US and EU, see this statement from a New York Times report on the drone attacks: “Marc Garlasco, a former military targeting official who now works for Human Rights Watch, the international advocacy group, said the drones had helped limit civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the Air Force uses them to attack people laying roadside bombs and to attack other insurgents.”
LAHORE: Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent.
Figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities show that a total of 701 people, including 14 al-Qaeda leaders, have been killed since January 2006 in 60 American predator attacks targeting the tribal areas of Pakistan. Two strikes carried out in 2006 had killed 98 civilians while three attacks conducted in 2007 had slain 66 Pakistanis, yet none of the wanted al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders could be hit by the Americans right on target. However, of the 50 drone attacks carried out between January 29, 2008 and April 8, 2009, 10 hit their targets and killed 14 wanted al-Qaeda operatives. Most of these attacks were carried out on the basis of intelligence believed to have been provided by the Pakistani and Afghan tribesmen who had been spying for the US-led allied forces stationed in Afghanistan.
The remaining 50 drone attacks went wrong due to faulty intelligence information, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, including women and children. The number of the Pakistani civilians killed in those 50 attacks stood at 537, in which 385 people lost their lives in 2008 and 152 people were slain in the first 99 days of 2009 (between January 1 and April 8).
Glenn Greenwald shows that Obama is worse than Bush on state secrets.
It was once the case under the Bush administration that the U.S. would abduct people from around the world, accuse them of being Terrorists, ship them to Guantanamo, and then keep them there for as long as we wanted without offering them any real due process to contest the accusations against them. That due-process-denying framework was legalized by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Many Democrats — including Barack Obama — claimed they were vehemently opposed to this denial of due process for detainees, and on June 12, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that the denial of habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees was unconstitutional and that all Guantanamo detainees have the right to a full hearing in which they can contest the accusations against them.
In the wake of the Boumediene ruling, the U.S. Government wanted to preserve the power to abduct people from around the world and bring them to American prisons without having to provide them any due process. So, instead of bringing them to our Guantanamo prison camp (where, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, they were entitled to habeas hearings), the Bush administration would instead simply send them to our prison camp in Bagram, Afghanistan, and then argue that because they were flown to Bagram rather than Guantanamo, they had no rights of any kind and Boudemiene didn’t apply to them. The Bush DOJ treated the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game — fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process. Put another way, you just close Guantanamo, move it to Afghanistan, and — presto — all constitutional obligations disappear.
This week marks the 5th anniversary of the First Battle of Fallujah. By the end of the second attack on the city in 
November 2004 hundreds of civilians were slaughtered and 60-70% of the city reduced to rubble. Operation Phantom Fury marked one of the darkest moments in the history of the occupation of Iraq – which explains why it has been so carefully dispatched down Orwell’s Memory Hole with the aid of the complicitous silence of the free press. “Laith Mushtaq was on of only two non-embedded cameramen working throughout the April 2004 ‘battle for Fallujah’ in which 600 civilians died. Five years on, he recounts the events he witnessed and filmed.”
“What you saw on your TV sets at home reflects only ten per cent of the reality. Also, if you watch those pictures at home, you can change the channel.
But we were in the middle. We smell. We feel, see, and touch everything. We could touch the bodies, but we couldn’t change the channel. We were the channel.
When I think of Fallujah, I think of the smell. The smell was driving me crazy. In a dead body, there is a kind of liquid. Yellow liquid. The smell is disgusting, really. It sticks in your nose. You cannot eat anymore.
The excellent Nir Rosen reports from Iraq. Where the complicit media finds an increasingly stable democracy, Rosen sees more clearly, and finds a torture state in which sect and political allegiance count for more than mere citizenship.
Six years to the day since the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad, the war that has dominated American politics for half a decade and upturned an entire regional order is being not-so-gently forced from centre stage. Iraq specialists at the National Security Council in Washington have hung signs on their office doors declaring that theirs is now “the good war”; the Obama administration is eager to declare victory in Iraq and shift its attention to the long-neglected conflict in Afghanistan.
Jane Mayer on the likely prosecution of Bush’s torture team and the role of QC Philippe Sands in making it happen. (Also see this report on the proceedings that have already started in Spain).
About a year ago, a book came out in England that made a fascinating prediction: at some point in the future, the author wrote, six top officials in the Bush Administration would get a tap on the shoulder announcing that they were being arrested on international charges of torture.
If the prediction seemed improbable, the background of the book’s author was even more so. Philippe Sands is neither a journalist nor an American but a law professor and a certified Queen’s Counsel (the kind of barrister who on occasion wears a powdered horsehair wig) who works at the same law practice as Cherie Blair. Sands’s book, “Torture Team,” offers a scathing critique of officials in the Bush Administration, accusing them of complicity in acts of torture. When the book appeared, some scoffed. Douglas Feith, a former Pentagon official, dismissed Sands as “a British lawyer” who “wrote an extremely dishonest book.”
Last week, Sands’s accusations suddenly did not seem so outlandish. A Spanish court took the first steps toward starting a criminal investigation of the same six former Bush Administration officials he had named, weighing charges that they had enabled and abetted torture by justifying the abuse of terrorism suspects. Among those whom the court singled out was Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, along with former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer; and David Addington, the chief of staff and the principal legal adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Change you cannot believe in. Obama’s Justice Department is not only defending Bush’s abuse of executive privilege, it is actually extending it. Here is a hard hitting look at it by the inimitable Keith Olbermann. I have always liked Olbermann, but I was wary of his earlier Obamamania. But as is evident in these reports, the reprieve is over and the gloves have come off. (Also check out Glenn Greenwald’s excellent post on Olbermann’s uncompromising journalism).
Second clip: Continue reading “Obama, State Secrets Privilege, and Sovereign Immunity”
And another excellent analysis of the US-Israel-Iran triangle and the machinations within the new Obama administration concerning a possible Israeli ‘pre-emptive’ strike against Iran by Jim Lobe and Gareth Porter
A recent statement by the chief of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), Gen. David Petraeus, that Israel may decide to attack Iranian nuclear sites has been followed by indications of a debate within the Barack Obama administration on whether Israel’s repeated threats to carry out such a strike should be used to gain leverage in future negotiations with Tehran.
In the latest twist, Vice President Joseph Biden, who has been put in charge of the administration’s non-proliferation agenda, appeared to reject the idea. “I don’t believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu would [launch a strike],” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Tuesday. “I think he would be ill-advised to do that.”
Continue reading “Obama Team Debates Stance on Israeli Attack Threat”
The end of impunity? Marjorie Cohn reports about criminal proceedings initiated by a Spanish court against John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith.
A Spanish court has initiated criminal proceedings against six former officials of the Bush administration. John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith may face charges in Spain for authorizing torture at Guantánamo Bay.
If arrest warrants are issued, Spain and any of the other 24 countries that are parties to European extradition conventions could arrest these six men when they travel abroad.
Continue reading “Spain Investigates What America Should”
‘Papers unearthed by the BBC reveal that British and American commanders ensured that the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 was seen as a “whites only” victory,’ writes Mike Thomson. Yes, that was the ‘good war’ that allegedly defeated institutionalized racism.
Papers unearthed by the BBC reveal that British and American commanders ensured that the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 was seen as a “whites only” victory.
Many who fought Nazi Germany during World War II did so to defeat the vicious racism that left millions of Jews dead.
Yet the BBC’s Document programme has seen evidence that black colonial soldiers – who made up around two-thirds of Free French forces – were deliberately removed from the unit that led the Allied advance into the French capital.
By the time France fell in June 1940, 17,000 of its black, mainly West African colonial troops, known as the Tirailleurs Senegalais, lay dead.
Many of them were simply shot where they stood soon after surrendering to German troops who often regarded them as sub-human savages.
Their chance for revenge came in August 1944 as Allied troops prepared to retake Paris. But despite their overwhelming numbers, they were not to get it.
P U L S E 