The Struggle is Over, Apparently We Lost.

We learn, recently, the President Obama can now order the assassination of American citizens, wherever they may be, it they have allied themselves with terrorists and present a danger to the United States. All of this is based, it would seem, on nothing more than a determination of "guilt" by the president. What an interesting outcome. Here's the constitution on the subject:

Amendment 6 - Right to Speedy Trial, Confrontation of Witnesses. Ratified 12/15/1791.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Notice a difference? These days, one can be subject to a "hit" (extra-judicial execution) even as an American citizen should the president be convinced, by whatever means and sources, that you're a "terrorist".

In a further example, the lawyer for the "blind cleric" who was convicted for the first World Trade Center bombing, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for passing along communications between her client and others characterized by the government at "terrorists". Lynne Stewart, an attorney with a life long history of defending leftists and radicals was imprisoned for allowing her client to publicly speak. Words, now, qualify as jail sentences, and this in a nation whose first amendment reads as follows:

Amendment 1 - Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression. Ratified 12/15/1791. Note

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So this is now America. We jail attorneys because of what they let their clients say, we assasinate US citizens on no more than the say so of the president. We also listen to everyone's phone conversations, read all their emails, survey all their mail and have so for quite a while--indeed much of it before 9/11--so why did 9/11 happen?

It is terrifying to be an American in this time. We, even under Obama, have moved so far away from the principles this nation was founded under. Indeed, I fear we may already have lost our freedoms permanently.

Whatever Happened to the Neocons’ Grand Schemes to Control Iraq’s Oil?

Dick Cheney thought the US occupation would see a quadrupling of Iraq's capacity to pump oil, and a privatization of its production. Not quite.

February 2, 2010 |

Americans have largely stopped thinking about Iraq, even though we still have approximately 110,000 troops there, as well as the largest "embassy" on the planet (and still growing). We've generally chalked up our war in Iraq to the failed past, and some Americans, after the surge of 2007, even think of it as, if not a success, at least no longer a debacle. Few care to spend much time considering the catastrophe we actually brought down on the Iraqis in "liberating" them.

Remember when we used to talk about Saddam Hussein's "killing fields"? The world of mayhem and horror that followed the U.S. invasion and occupation delivered new, even larger "killing fields" that we don't care to discuss, or that we prefer to consider the responsibility of the Iraqis themselves. Even with violence far lower today, Baghdad certainly remains one of the more dangerous cities on the planet. The bombs continue to go off there regularly and devastatingly, while the killing, even if not of American troops who rarely patrol any longer and are largely confined to their mega-bases, has not ended, not by a long shot; nor has the anger, suspicion, and depression that go with all of this.

A striking recent article in the British Guardian by reporter Martin Chulov seemed to catch something of what the U.S. actually accomplished in Iraq in a nutshell. It describes a country in "environmental ruin" (and, let's not forget, taxed with an ongoing drought of monumental proportions). The headline tells the story: "Iraq littered with high levels of nuclear and dioxin contamination, study finds." The contamination from depleted uranium weapons, bombed pipelines, and other disasters of the years of war, civil war, and chaos seems centered around Iraq's population centers and, perhaps not surprisingly, coincides with a massive rise in birth defects.

Worse yet, in all those years of occupation, the U.S., despite billions of dollars spent (or rather squandered) on "reconstruction," never managed to deliver electricity, jobs, potable water, health care, or much else. And despite many attempts, as Michael Schwartz, returning TomDispatch regular and the author of War Without End, makes clear, Washington never even got the oil out of the ground in a country that is little short of a giant oil field waiting to be developed. A remarkable record when you think about it. TomDispatch editor Tom Engelhardt

The Iraqi Oil Conundrum
Energy and Power in the Middle East
By Michael Schwartz

How the mighty have fallen. Just a few years ago, an overconfident Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating U.S. presence in the Middle East. These successes were, in turn, expected to pave the way for ambitious goals, enshrined in the 2001 report of Vice President Dick Cheney's secretive task force on energy. That report focused on exploiting Iraq's monstrous, largely untapped energy reserves -- more than any country other than Saudi Arabia and Iran -- including the quadrupling of Iraq's capacity to pump oil and the privatization of the production process.

The dream in those distant days was to strip OPEC -- the cartel consisting of the planet's main petroleum exporters -- of the power to control the oil supply and its price on the world market. As a reward for vastly expanding Iraqi production and freeing its distribution from OPEC's control, key figures in the Bush administration imagined that the U.S. could skim off a small proportion of that increased oil production to offset the projected $40 billion cost of the invasion and occupation of the country.

All in a year or two.

Unremitting Ambition Tempered by Political and Military Failure

Almost seven years later, it will come as little surprise that things turned out to cost a bit more than expected in Iraq and didn't work out exactly as imagined. Though the March 2003 invasion quickly ousted Saddam Hussein, the rest of the Bush administration's ambitious agenda remains largely unfulfilled.

Instead of quickly pacifying a grateful nation and then withdrawing all but 30,000-40,000 American troops (which were to be garrisoned on giant bases far from Iraq's urban areas), the occupation triggered both Sunni and Shia insurgencies, while U.S. counterinsurgency operations led to massive carnage, a sectarian civil war, the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, and a humanitarian crisis that featured hundreds of thousands of deaths, four million internal and external refugees, and an unemployment rate that stayed consistently above 50% with all the attendant hunger, disease, and misery one would expect.

In the meantime, the government of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, fervently supported by the Bush administration and judged by Transparency International to be the fifth most corrupt in the world, has morphed into an ever less reliable client regime. Despite American diktats and desires, it has managed to establish cordial political and economic relationships with Iran, slow the economic privatization process launched by the neocon administrators sent to Baghdad in 2003, and restored itself as the country's primary employer. It even seems periodically resistant to its designated role as a possible long-term host for an American military strike force in the Middle East.

This resistance was expressed most forcefully when Maliki leveraged the Bush administration into signing a status of forces agreement (SOFA) in 2008 that included a full U.S. military withdrawal by the end of 2011. Maliki even demanded -- and received -- a promise to vacate the five massive "enduring" military bases the Pentagon had constructed -- with their elaborate facilities, populations that reach into the tens of thousands, and virtually no Iraqi presence, even among the thousands of unskilled workers who do the necessary dirty work to keep these "American towns" running.

Despite such setbacks, the Bush administration did not abandon the idea that Iraq might remain the future headquarters for a U.S. presence in the region, nor in the 2008 presidential election did candidate Barack Obama. He, in fact, repeatedly insisted that the Iraqi government should be a strong ally of the U.S. and the most likely host for a 50,000-strong military force that would "allow our troops to strike directly at al-Qaeda wherever it may exist, and demonstrate to international terrorist organizations that they have not driven us from the region."

Since entering the Oval Office, Obama has not visibly wavered in the commitment to establish Iraq as a key Middle East ally, promising in his State of the Union Address that the U.S. would "continue to partner with the Iraqi people" into the indefinite future. In the same address, however, the president promised that "all of our troops are coming home," apparently signaling the abandonment of the Bush administration's military plans. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, on the other hand, has recently voiced a contrary vision, hinting at the possibility that the Iraqis might be interested in negotiating a way around the SOFA agreement to allow U.S. forces to remain in the country after 2011.

Dynamic Paralysis Keeps Iraqi Oil Underground

Iraqi oil, too, has been a focus of Washington's unremitting ambition tempered by failure. Long before the cost of the war began to lurch toward the current Congressional estimate of $700 billion, the idea of using oil revenues to pay for the invasion had vanished, as had the idea of quadrupling production capacity within a few years. The hope of doing so someday, however, remains alive. Speculation that Iraq's production could -- in the not too distant future -- exceed that of Saudi Arabia may still represent Washington's main strategy for postponing future severe global energy shortages.

Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the secretive energy task force Vice President Cheney headed was tentatively allocating various oil fields in a future pacified Iraq to key international oil companies. Before the March 2003 invasion, the State Department actually drafted prospective legislation for a post-Hussein government, which would have transferred the control of key oil fields to foreign oil giants. Those companies were then expected to invest the necessary billions in Iraq's rickety oil industry to boost production to maximum rates.

Not so long after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, the administration's proconsul, L. Paul Bremer III, enacted the State Department legislation by fiat (and in clear violation of international law, which prohibits occupying powers from changing fundamental legislation in the conquered country). Under the banner of de-Baathification -- the dismantling of Saddam Hussein's Sunni ruling party -- he also fired oil technicians, engineers, and administrators, leaving behind a skeleton crew of Iraqis to manage existing production (and await the arrival of the oil giants with all their expertise).

Within a short time, many of these pariah professionals had fled to other countries where their skills were valued, creating a brain drain that, for a time, nearly incapacitated the Iraqi oil industry. Bremer then appointed a group of international oil consultants and business executives to a newly created (and UN-sanctioned) Development Fund of Iraq (DFI), which was to oversee all of the country's oil revenues.

The remaining Iraqi administrators, technicians, and workers soon mounted a remarkably determined and effective multi-front resistance to Bremer's effort. They were aided in this by a growing insurgency.

In one dramatic episode, Bremer announced the pending transfer of the control of the southern port of Basra (which then handled 80% of the country's oil exports) from a state-run enterprise to KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company Vice President Cheney had once headed. Anticipating that their own jobs would soon disappear in a sea of imported labor, the oil workers immediately struck. KBR quickly withdrew and Bremer abandoned the effort.

In other Bremer initiatives, foreign energy and construction firms did take charge of development, repair, and operations in Iraq's main oil fields. The results were rarely adequate and often destructive. Contracts for infrastructure repair or renewal were often botched or left incomplete, as international companies ripped out usable or repairable facilities that involved technology alien to them, only to install ultimately incompatible equipment. In one instance, a $5 million pipeline repair became an $80 million "modernization" project that foundered on intractable engineering issues and, three years later, was left incomplete. In more than a few instances, local communities sabotaged such projects, either because they employed foreign workers and technicians instead of Iraqis, or because they were designed to deprive the locals of what they considered their "fair share" of oil revenues.

In the first two years of the occupation, there were more than 200 attacks on oil and gas pipelines. By 2007, 600 acts of sabotage against pipelines and facilities had been recorded.

After an initial flurry of interest, international oil companies sized up the dangers and politely refused Bremer's invitation to risk billions of dollars on Iraqi energy investments.

After this initial failure, the Bush administration looked for a new strategy to forward its oil ambitions. In late 2004, with Bremer out of the picture, Washington brokered a deal between U.S.-sponsored Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and the International Monetary Fund. European countries promised to forgive a quarter of the debts accumulated by Saddam Hussein, and the Iraqis promised to implement the U.S. oil plan. But this worked no better than Bremer's effort. Continued sabotage by insurgents, resistance by Iraqi technicians and workers, and the corrupt ineptitude of the contracting companies made progress impossible. The international oil companies continued to stay away.

In 2007, under direct U.S. pressure, virtually the same law was reluctantly endorsed by Prime Minister Maliki and forwarded to the Iraqi parliament for legislative consideration. Instead of passing it, the parliament established itself as a new center of resistance to the U.S. plan, raising myriad familiar complaints and repeatedly refusing to bring it to a vote. It lies dormant to this day.

This stalemate continued unabated through the Obama administration's first year in office, as illustrated by a continuing conflict around the pipeline that carries oil from Iraq to Turkey, a source of about 20% of the country's oil revenues. During the Bremer administration, the U.S. had ended the Saddam-era tradition of allowing local tribes to siphon off a proportion of the oil passing through their territory. The insurgents, viewing this as an act of American theft, undertook systematic sabotage of the pipeline, and -- despite ferocious U.S. military offensives -- it remained closed for all but a few days throughout the next five years.

The pipeline was re-opened in the fall of 2009, when the Iraqi government restored the Saddam-era custom in exchange for an end to sabotage. This has been only partially successful. Shipments have been interrupted by further pipeline attacks, evidently mounted by insurgents who believe oil revenues are illegitimately funding the continuing U.S. occupation. The fragility of the pipeline's service, even today, is one small sign of ongoing resistance that could be an obstacle to any significant increase in oil production until the U.S. military presence is ended.

The entire six-year saga of American energy dreams, policies, and pressures in Iraq has so far yielded little -- no significant increase in Iraq's oil production, no increase in its future capacity to produce, and no increase in its energy exports. The grand ambition of transferring actual control of the oil industry into the hands of the international oil companies has proven no less stillborn.

Over the years since the U.S. began its energy campaign, production has actually languished, sometimes falling as much as 40% below the pre-invasion levels of an industry already held together by duct tape and ingenuity. In the Brookings Institution's latest figures for December 2009, production stood at 2.4 million barrels per day, a full 100,000 barrels lower than the pre-war daily average.

To make matters worse, the price of oil, which had hit historic peaks in early 2008, began to decline. By 2009, with the global economy in tatters, oil prices sank radically and the Iraqi government lacked the revenues to sustain its existing expenditures, let alone find money to repair its devastated infrastructure.

As a result, in early 2009, Maliki's government began actively, even desperately, seeking ways to hike oil production, even without an oil law in place. That, after all, was the only possible path for an otherwise indigent country with failing agriculture in the midst of a drought of extreme severity to increase the money available for public projects -- or, of course, even more private corruption.

The Oil Companies Make Their Move

In January 2009, the government opened a new chapter in the history of oil production in Iraq when it announced its intention to allow a roster of several dozen international oil firms to bid on development contracts for eight existing oil fields.

The proposed contracts did not, in fact, offer them the kind of control over development and production that the Cheney task force had envisioned back in 2001. Instead, they would be hired to finance, plan, and implement a vast expansion of the country's production capacity. After repaying their initial investment, the government would reward them at a rate of no more than two dollars for every additional barrel of oil extracted from the fields they worked on. With oil prices expected to remain above $70 a barrel, this meant, once initial costs were repaid, the Iraqi government could expect to take in more than $60 per barrel, which promised a resolution to the country's ongoing financial crisis.

The major international oil companies initially rejected these terms out of hand, demanding instead complete control over production and payments of approximately $25 per barrel. This initial resistance began to erode, however, when the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), a government-owned operation, induced its partner, BP, the huge British oil company, to accept government terms for expanding the Rumaila field near Basra in southern Iraq to one million barrels a day.

The Chinese company, experts believed, could afford to accept such meager returns because of Beijing's desire to establish a long-term energy relationship with Iraq. This foot-in-the-door contract, China's leaders evidently hoped, would lead to yet more contracts to explore Iraq's vast, undeveloped (and possibly as yet undiscovered) oil reserves.

Perhaps threatened by the possibility that Chinese companies might accumulate the bulk of the contracts for Iraq's richest oil fields, leaving other international firms in the dust, by December a veritable stampede had begun to bid for contracts. In the end, the major winners were state-owned firms from Russia, Japan, Norway, Turkey, South Korea, Angola, and -- of course -- China. The Malaysian national company, Petronas, set a record by participating with six different partners in four of the seven new contracts the Maliki government gave out. Shell and Exxon were the only major oil companies to participate in winning bids; the others were outbid by consortia led by state-owned firms. These results suggest that national oil companies, unlike their profit-maximizing private competitors, were more willing to forego immediate windfalls in exchange for long-term access to Iraqi oil.

On paper, these contracts hold the potential to satisfy one aspect of Washington's oil hunger, while frustrating another. If fully implemented, they could collectively boost Iraqi production from 2.5 million to 8 million barrels per day in just a few years. They would not, however, deliver control over production (or the bulk of the revenues) to foreign companies, so that Iraq and OPEC could continue, if they wished, to limit production, keep prices high, and wield power on the world stage.

Nevertheless, the centers of resistance to the original U.S. oil policies have voiced opposition to these new contracts. Members of parliament immediately demanded that all contracts be submitted for their approval, which they declared would be withheld unless ironclad protections of Iraqi workers, technicians, and management were included. Iraq's own state-owned oil companies demanded guarantees that their technicians, engineers, and administrators be trained in the new technologies the foreign companies brought with them, and given escalating operational control over the fields as their skills developed.

The powerful Iraqi oil union opposed the contracts unless they included guarantees that all workers be recruited from Iraq. Local tribal leaders voiced opposition unless they guaranteed a full complement of local workers, and subcontracts for locally based businesses during the development phase. Then there were the insurgents, who continued to oppose oil exports until the U.S. fully withdraws from the country, and expressed their opposition by the 26 bombing attacks they've launched on pipelines and oil facilities since September 2009.

Some of these same groups have successfully blocked previous oil initiatives. Unless they are satisfied, they may frustrate the government's latest bid to make oil gush in Iraq. One warning sign can be seen in the fate of a contract signed with the CNPC in early 2009 that called for the development of the relatively small (one billion barrel) Ahdab oil field near the Iranian border. The language of the original contract met conditions demanded by local leaders and workers, but the work, once begun, generated few local jobs and even fewer local business opportunities. The Chinese instead brought in foreign workers, following the pattern established by U.S. companies involved in Iraqi reconstruction. Eventually, equipment was sabotaged, work undermined, and the project's viability remains threatened.

The end is not in sight and the outcome still unclear. Will the vast Iraqi oil reserves be developed and sent into the hungry world market any time soon? If they are, who will determine the rate of flow, and so wield the power this decision-making confers? And once this ocean of oil is sold, who will receive the potentially incredible revenues? As with so much else, when it comes to Iraqi oil, the American war has generated so many problems and catastrophes -- and so few answers.

Michael Schwartz is a professor of sociology and faculty director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University.

Daniel Ellsberg on Afghanistan and More

Daniel Ellsberg published the Pentagon Papers more than 40 years ago, I'm so bummed that I remember this. This interview with the Real News Network provides compelling insights into why we're in Afghanistan today. It's an interesting video. Have a look.

Presidential Assassinations of US Citizens

By Glenn Greenwald January 27, 2010 "Salon" - - The Washington Post's Dana Priest today reports that "U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people." That's no surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional authorization. The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown. But buried in Priest's article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret "hit list" of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed: After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . . The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy." Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added. Indeed, Aulaqi was clearly one of the prime targets of the late-December missile strikes in Yemen, as anonymous officials excitedly announced -- falsely, as it turns out -- that he was killed in one of those strikes. Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy? Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens. That's just the essence of war. That's why it's permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they're captured and helplessly detained. But combat is not what we're talking about here. The people on this "hit list" are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration -- like the Bush administration before it -- defines the "battlefield" as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That's quite a power for an American President to claim for himself. As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death. What they actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing as being a Terrorist. Numerous Guantanamo detainees accused by the U.S. Government of being Terrorists have turned out to be completely innocent, and the vast majority of federal judges who provided habeas review to detainees have found an almost complete lack of evidence to justify the accusations against them, and thus ordered them released. That includes scores of detainees held while the U.S. Government insisted that only the "Worst of the Worst" remained at the camp. No evidence should be required for rational people to avoid assuming that Government accusations are inherently true, but for those do need it, there is a mountain of evidence proving that. And in this case, Anwar Aulaqi -- who, despite his name and religion, is every bit as much of an American citizen as Scott Brown and his daughters are -- has a family who vigorously denies that he is a Terrorist and is "pleading" with the U.S. Government not to murder their American son: His anguish apparent, the father of Anwar al-Awlaki told CNN that his son is not a member of al Qaeda and is not hiding out with terrorists in southern Yemen. "I am now afraid of what they will do with my son, he's not Osama Bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not," said Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. . . . "I will do my best to convince my son to do this (surrender), to come back but they are not giving me time, they want to kill my son. How can the American government kill one of their own citizens? This is a legal issue that needs to be answered," he said. "If they give me time I can have some contact with my son but the problem is they are not giving me time," he said. Who knows what the truth is here? That's why we have what are called "trials" -- or at least some process -- before we assume that government accusations are true and then mete out punishment accordingly. As Marcy Wheeler notes, the U.S. Government has not only repeatedly made false accusations of Terrorism against foreign nationals in the past, but against U.S. citizens as well. She observes: "I guess the tenuousness of those ties don't really matter, when the President can dial up the assassination of an American citizen." A 1981 Executive Order signed by Ronald Reagan provides: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." Before the Geneva Conventions were first enacted, Abraham Lincoln -- in the middle of the Civil War -- directed Francis Lieber to articulate rules of conduct for war, and those were then incorporated into General Order 100, signed by Lincoln in April, 1863. Here is part of what it provided, in Section IX, entitled "Assassinations": The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, any more than the modern law of peace allows such intentional outlawry; on the contrary, it abhors such outrage. The sternest retaliation should follow the murder committed in consequence of such proclamation, made by whatever authority. Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism. Can anyone remotely reconcile that righteous proclamation what the Obama administraiton is doing? And more generally, what legal basis exists for the President to unilaterally compile hit lists of American citizens he wants to be killed? What's most striking of all is that it was recently revealed that, in Afghanistan, the U.S. had compiled a "hit list" of Afghan citizens it suspects of being drug traffickers or somehow associated with the Taliban, in order to target them for assassination. When that hit list was revealed, Afghan officials "fiercely" objected on the ground that it violates due process and undermines the rule of law to murder people without trials: Gen. Mohammad Daud Daud, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for counternarcotics efforts, praised U.S. and British special forces for their help recently in destroying drug labs and stashes of opium. But he said he worried that foreign troops would now act on their own to kill suspected drug lords, based on secret evidence, instead of handing them over for trial. "They should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes," Daud said. "We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own" . . . . Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister, said that he had long urged the Pentagon and its NATO allies to crack down on drug smugglers and suppliers, and that he was glad that the military alliance had finally agreed to provide operational support for Afghan counternarcotics agents. But he said foreign troops needed to avoid the temptation to hunt down and kill traffickers on their own. "There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven guilty," he said. "If you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that they are really guilty in terms of legal process?" . . . So we're in Afghanistan to teach them about democracy, the rule of law, and basic precepts of Western justice. Meanwhile, Afghan officials vehemently object to the lawless, due-process-free assassination "hit list" of their citizens based on the unchecked say-so of the U.S. Government, and have to lecture us on the rule of law and Constitutional constraints. By stark contrast, our own Government, our media and our citizenry appear to find nothing wrong whatsoever with lawless assassinations aimed at our own citizens. And the most glaring question for those who critized Bush/Cheney detention policies but want to defend this: how could anyone possibly object to imprisoning foreign nationals without charges or due process at Guantanamo while approving of the assassination of U.S. citizens without any charges or due process? Glenn Greenwald: I was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. I am the author of two New York Times Bestselling books: "How Would a Patriot Act?" (May, 2006), a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, and "A Tragic Legacy" (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy. My most recent book, "Great American Hypocrites", examines the manipulative electoral tactics used by the GOP and propagated by the establishment press, and was released in April, 2008, by Random House/Crown.

Zbigniew Brzezinski On Afghanistan and Our Foreign Policy

Here are three short videos comprising an interview with Bzezinski on American foreign policy, including the war in Afghanistan and more. Considering he is a central figure in all these situations discussed, this is, to me, a very interesting series of commentaries.

Obama Confidant's Spine-Chilling Proposal to 'Cognitively Infiltrate' Conspiracy Theorist Groups

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon. Posted January 20, 2010.

Recent paper by Obama adviser Cass Sunstein proposes bizarre methods to stamp out "false conspiracy theories," including taxing the people who engage in them.

ate Accountability and WorkPlace:

Published on Friday, January 15, 2010 by Salon.com

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs." In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the government. This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists. The paper's abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.

Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups." He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called "independent" credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false "conspiracy theories," which they define to mean: "an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role." Sunstein's 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story's Daniel Tencer.

There's no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein's position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked. Regardless, Sunstein's closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote. This isn't an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein's close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees. Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class. All of that makes Sunstein's paper worth examining in greater detail.

* * * * *

Initially, note how similar Sunstein's proposal is to multiple, controversial stealth efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape our political debates. The Bush Pentagon employed teams of former Generals to pose as "independent analysts" in the media while secretly coordinating their talking points and messaging about wars and detention policies with the Pentagon. Bush officials secretly paid supposedly "independent" voices, such as Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, to advocate pro-Bush policies while failing to disclose their contracts. In Iraq, the Bush Pentagon hired a company, Lincoln Park, which paid newspapers to plant pro-U.S. articles while pretending it came from Iraqi citizens. In response to all of this, Democrats typically accused the Bush administration of engaging in government-sponsored propaganda -- and when it was done domestically, suggested this was illegal propaganda. Indeed, there is a very strong case to make that what Sunstein is advocating is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government "propaganda" within the U.S., aimed at American citizens:

As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, "publicity or propaganda" is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) "covert propaganda." By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.

Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves. His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise. Indeed, he favorably cites both the covert Lincoln Park program as well as Paul Bremer's closing of Iraqi newspapers which published stories the U.S. Government disliked, and justifies them as arguably necessary to combat "false conspiracy theories" in Iraq -- the same goal Sunstein has for the U.S.

Sunstein's response to these criticisms is easy to find in what he writes, and is as telling as the proposal itself. He acknowledges that some "conspiracy theories" previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true (his examples: the CIA really did secretly administer LSD in "mind control" experiments; the DOD really did plot the commission of terrorist acts inside the U.S. with the intent to blame Castro; the Nixon White House really did bug the DNC headquarters). Given that history, how could it possibly be justified for the U.S. Government to institute covert programs designed to undermine anti-government "conspiracy theories," discredit government critics, and increase faith and trust in government pronouncements? Because, says Sunstein, such powers are warranted only when wielded by truly well-intentioned government officials who want to spread The Truth and Do Good -- i.e., when used by people like Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama:

Throughout, we assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so.

But it's precisely because the Government is so often not "well-motivated" that such powers are so dangerous. Advocating them on the ground that "we will use them well" is every authoritarian's claim. More than anything else, this is the toxic mentality that consumes our political culture: when our side does X, X is Good, because we're Good and are working for Good outcomes. That was what led hordes of Bush followers to endorse the same large-government surveillance programs they long claimed to oppose, and what leads so many Obama supporters now to justify actions that they spent the last eight years opposing.

* * * * *

Consider the recent revelation that the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President's health care plan. With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama's health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House -- falsely -- as an "independent" or "objective" authority. Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber's analysis to support their defenses of the President's plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed. This created an infinite "feedback loop" in favor of Obama's health care plan which -- unbeknownst to the public -- was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).

In other words, this arrangement was quite similar to the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals which Democrats, in virtual lockstep, condemned. Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack "intellectual integrity"; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case. Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being "just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals." What is one key difference? Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views -- he favors health care -- and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he's defending are dismissed as a "fake scandal."

Sunstein himself -- as part of his 2008 paper -- explicitly advocates that the Government should pay what he calls "credible independent experts" to advocate on the Government's behalf, a policy he says would be more effective because people don't trust the Government itself and would only listen to people they believe are "independent." In so arguing, Sunstein cites the Armstrong Williams scandal not as something that is wrong in itself, but as a potential risk of this tactic (i.e., that it might leak out), and thus suggests that "government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes," but warns that "too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed." In other words, Sunstein wants the Government to replicate the Armstrong Williams arrangement as a means of more credibly disseminating propaganda -- i.e., pretending that someone is an "independent" expert when they're actually being "prodded" and even paid "behind the scenes" by the Government -- but he wants to be more careful about how the arrangement is described (don't make the control explicit) so that embarrassment can be avoided if it ends up being exposed.

In this 2008 paper, then, Sunstein advocated, in essence, exactly what the Obama administration has been doing all year with Gruber: covertly paying people who can be falsely held up as "independent" analysts in order to more credibly promote the Government line. Most Democrats agreed this was a deceitful and dangerous act when Bush did it, but with Obama and some of his supporters, undisclosed arrangements of this sort seem to be different. Why? Because, as Sunstein puts it: we have "a well-motivated government" doing this so that "social welfare is improved." Thus, just like state secrets, indefinite detention, military commissions and covert, unauthorized wars, what was once deemed so pernicious during the Bush years -- coordinated government/media propaganda -- is instantaneously transformed into something Good.

* * * * *

What is most odious and revealing about Sunstein's worldview is his condescending, self-loving belief that "false conspiracy theories" are largely the province of fringe, ignorant Internet masses and the Muslim world. That, he claims, is where these conspiracy theories thrive most vibrantly, and he focuses on various 9/11 theories -- both domestically and in Muslim countries -- as his prime example.

It's certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive "false conspiracy theories" have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power: namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, "crazy conspiracy theorist" has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption.

Who is it who relentlessly spread "false conspiracy theories" of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba'athist/Al-Qaeda alliance -- the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation? And who is it who demonized as "conspiracy-mongers" people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government? The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of "conspiracy theory" games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources: namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.

It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein's desire to use covert propaganda to "undermine" anti-government speech so repugnant. The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned -- rationally -- to distrust government actions and statements. Sunstein's proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is. In other words, people don't trust the Government and "conspiracy theories" are so pervasive is precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.

UPDATE: I don't want to make this primarily about the Gruber scandal -- I cited that only as an example of the type of mischief that this mindset produces -- but just to respond quickly to the typical Gruber defenses already appearing in comments: (1) Gruber's work was only for HHS and had nothing to do with the White House (false); (2) he should have disclosed his payments, but the White House did nothing wrong (false: it repeatedly described him as "independent" and "objective" and constantly cited allied media stories based in Gruber's work); (3) Gruber advocated views he would have advocated anyway in the absence of payment (probably true, but wasn't that also true for life-long conservative Armstrong Williams, life-long social conservative Maggie Gallagher, and the pro-war Pentagon Generals, all of whom mounted the same defense?); and (4) Williams/Gallagher were explicitly paid to advocate particular views while Gruber wasn't (true: that's exactly the arrangement Sunstein advocates to avoid "embarrassment" in the event of disclosure, and it's absurd to suggest that someone being paid many hundreds of thousands of dollars is unaware of what their paymasters want said; that's why disclosure is so imperative).

The point is that there are severe dangers to the Government covertly using its resources to "infiltrate" discussions and to shape political debates using undisclosed and manipulative means. It's called "covert propaganda" and it should be opposed regardless of who is in control of it or what its policy aims are.

UPDATE II: Ironically, this is the same administration that recently announced a new regulation dictating that "bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently." Without such disclosure, the administration reasoned, the public may not be aware of important hidden incentives (h/t pasquin). Yet the same administration pays an MIT analyst hundreds of thousands of dollars to advocate their most controversial proposed program while they hold him out as "objective," and selects as their Chief Regulator someone who wants government agents to covertly mold political discussions "anonymously or even with false identities."

UPDATE III: Just to get a sense for what an extremist Cass Sunstein is (which itself is ironic, given that his paper calls for "cognitive infiltration of extremist groups," as the Abstract puts it), marvel at this paragraph:

So Sunstein isn't calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) -- having Government "ban conspiracy theorizing" or "impose some kind of tax on those who" do it -- but he says "each will have a place under imaginable conditions." I'd love to know the "conditions" under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will "have a place." Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.

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Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.

Stenography 101: How the press let Palin and Cheney rig the system

January 12, 2010 5:45 am ET

Not content with its lapdog coverage of President Bush over the past decade, the Beltway press has adopted a new, super-soft way to deal with Bush's former vice president, Dick Cheney, as well as GOP media star Sarah Palin. Journalists have set aside what had been decades' worth of guidelines and embraced special new rules for how Cheney and Palin get treated.

In a word, it's stenography.

That's how too many scribes have covered Cheney and Palin in recent months, allowing them to dispense tightly controlled pieces of information, which journalists then trumpet as breaking news. And yes, the trend is unprecedented in modern day American politics.

It's actually a two-fer. First, it's unprecedented because the Beltway press has never showered attention on political losers, such as Cheney and Palin. Meaning, the press has never cared what a former VP had to say about current events right after leaving the White House (think: Dan Quayle), or what a failed VP candidate had to say just months after losing in a landslide (think: Geraldine Ferraro). Traditionally, pundits and reporters disdain political losers (think: Mike Dukakis). But for Cheney and Palin, the rules have been generously reworked.

The second oddity is that journalists now allow Cheney and Palin to completely dictate the media ground rules and afford them the chance to have one-way relationships with the press. Palin, for instance, perhaps still bruising from her woeful 2008 media performances, still hasn't allowed herself to be interviewed by a single independent political journalist since she launched her book in November. Instead, she mostly communicates with the mainstream media via Facebook. And now that she's signed on to join the Fox News staff, the chances of Palin ever speaking with the serious press seem to be less than zero. That lack of openness stacks the deck and leads to dreadful bouts of stenography; of literally recording what controversial Republicans say, and nothing more.

Of course, the Cheney brand of stenography has been trademarked by the news crew at Politico, and recently reached its unfortunate, albeit predictable, crescendo when the outlet simply reprinted Cheney's latest Obama-hating "statement" (read: press release) in the wake of the failed terrorist attack aboard the Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit on Christmas Day. What happened was that following the botched attack, either Cheney reached out and provided Politico with an exclusive statement, or Politico contacted Cheney asking for one. (It's not clear who contacted whom. And yes, journalistically, it matters.)

Then Politico, rather than incorporating some of Cheney's comments in an actual news article about the political ramifications of the attempted terror strike, and rather than contacting Cheney for an actual interview where reporters could flesh out his comments with follow-up questions, simply reproduced Cheney's wildly inaccurate, and inflammatory, Obama's-making-us-less-safe "statement," in full. All 660 words of it.

The stenography became so unseemly that MSNBC's Chris Matthews even called Politico out:

To make matters worse, when asked to defend Politico's Cheney-friendly stenography, editor John Harris mounted a completely illogical defense and refused to address the rather obvious complaints about the news outlet's outlandish practice of simply acting as a loving, unwavering conduit for Cheney. "Trying to get newsworthy people to say interesting things is part of what we do," was how, in the wake of the Cheney kerfuffle, Harris explained Politico to blogger Greg Sargent. Well, of course. Nobody objects to the pursuit of interesting quotes. That's what good journalists do. But they don't turn around and simply print the quotes as gospel, devoid of any context. Especially when the "interesting things" that "newsworthy people" actually consist of an avalanche of partisan lies.

The truth is, Politico used to at least send reporters over to Cheney's Virginia office in order to perform their stenography in person. Following a sit-down Q&A, this was the Politico lede from Feb. 9, 2009, under the doomsday headline: "Cheney warns of new attacks":

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a "high probability" that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration's policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed [emphasis added].

That's right, Obama's "policies," which at the time were two weeks old, were endangering America and making it susceptible to nuclear attack. (Cheney doesn't really do subtleties.) On its face, the fearmongering claims were preposterous. But Politico's Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei, and John Harris played it straight. Worse, they played it as big, from-his-lips-to-our-ears news.

And let's not lose sight of just how extraordinary it was for Allen/VandeHei/Harris to even care what Cheney had to say in early February of 2009, because I can't stress enough how completely unprecedented it is for any major Beltway news outlet to turn to a dislodged vice president as a partisan newsmaker less than one month after he left office. And for Cheney to be the object of Politico's newsroom desire last February was even more bizarre since the Republican had just completed his stint as arguably the most unpopular politician in modern day White House politics. (Somewhere Richard Nixon was smiling.)

That is not an exaggeration. According to a CBS/New York Times poll at the time of the Cheney's White House departure, his job approval rating stood at a how-is-that-possible 13 percent. Yet despite his historically poor standing with the public, and despite the fact that his party had just been trounced in an electoral landslide, and despite the fact that former VPs were never considered to be newsworthy just two weeks after they packed their White House bags, there was the Politico brain trust in February 2009, sitting at Cheney's knee ("Suddenly a man of leisure ... his own mood was relaxed, even loquacious") and treating him like he was still vice president -- treating him like he was a popular vice president. Treating Cheney like a man with all the answers.

For Palin, it hasn't just been Politico's staff that's adopted the unfortunate stenography approach to covering the failed VP candidate. The truth is that since the launch of her book last November, Palin has refused to sit down with a single serious, independent reporter. Instead, she's stuck close to lifestyle interviews (i.e. Oprah and Barbara Walters) as well as taking questions from her professional right-wing media enablers.

Can you imagine the media caterwauling if, for instance, Hillary Clinton published a book and then refused to sit down with a single nonpartisan cable TV host, radio talker, or political reporter from a major newspaper or magazine? If Clinton roped off the press while she only did interviews with The Nation, Rachel Maddow, and Air America? The Beltway press would go berserk mocking Clinton for her timidity. But Palin completely snubbed the D.C. press corps, and rather than calling her out, journalists rewarded her with probably tens of millions of dollars in free book publicity. (Not that most Americans even cared about her book launch.)

Worse, Palin's refusal to engage directly with the press has, at times, led to confusion about what she did and did not say. The confusion may be purposeful on her part, but it hinders public debate and makes precise journalism nearly impossible. That trend was famously highlighted after Palin posted on Facebook her claim that proposed Democratic health care reform would mean bureaucratic "death panels" would ultimately decide whether Americans would live or die. (Palin specifically referenced her parents and her son as possible "death panel" targets.) Of course, the claim was thoroughly debunked and eventually named "Lie of the Year." In response to that dubious achievement, Palin returned to Facebook and claimed people had misunderstood her original "death panels" reference. It was an explanation some journalists echoed before Media Matters then debunked that as well.

But guess what? If Palin, like virtually every other politician on the planet, agreed to talk to real reporters on occasion, that kind of "confusion" would quickly be solved. Rather, Palin hides from the press. And instead of punishing her for her timidity, journalists act as dutiful stenographers by typing up Palin's online postings -- which she may or may not write herself -- and treating them as news.

From a journalism perspective, the whole spectacle has been embarrassing to watch. As David Weigel at The Washington Independent noted, "The media's indulgence of Palin's strategy -- which often results in pure stenography of press releases that may or may not have been written by her -- is ridiculous, bordering on pathetic."

And Weigel's right. Those Facebook postings are nothing more than modern-day press releases, yet they're treated as news. In the not-so-distant past, newsroom trash cans (both physical and email) were filled with politicians' press releases, tossed aside by dismissive scribes who would never dream of lowering themselves to regurgitating quotes typed up on some hand-out. Media elites didn't waste their time with press releases.

First of all, it's considered an embarrassment and a public acknowledgment that journalists don't have any juice; that they don't have real access to important people. Second, typed-up statements don't lend themselves to context or understanding. But for covering Palin, regurgitating press releases has suddenly become the accepted norm.

From a recent Wall Street Journal news article: