Let's give peace a chance

This won't receive much attention what with Trump's government shutdown and his bleating about a fictional border crisis that requires a fantasy wall -- but Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group and Jon Finer of the Council on Foreign Relations offer some thoughtful advice to people concerned for peace who are revolted by the Preznit. It comes down to a simple thought: just because he's an impulsive, ignorant hate merchant, his instincts about ending endless wars are not crazy, merely ineptly executed (if indeed they come to be executed).

There is no shortage of policies and decisions made by President Trump worth criticizing, but since the earliest days of his presidential campaign, he has expressed at least one belief that deserves to be encouraged, not denigrated: the desire to disentangle the United States from costly overseas conflicts...

So much is objectionable about the Trump era that it is hard for critics to know which targets to strike. But principled opposition requires that progressive opponents of President Trump not distort their beliefs for quick rhetorical wins. Whatever administration eventually follows will have many messes to clean up and will need to distinguish those that truly matter.

Inevitably, the United States will face threats that will require the use of military force. But we ought to continually question our enduring involvement in faraway conflicts, particularly when they come at a terrible cost to the United States and local populations as in Afghanistan and Iraq; make us complicit in abuses as in Yemen; entangle us with unsavory partners as occurred with some elements of the Syrian opposition; or exacerbate anti-American sentiment as our broader counterterrorism campaign often did.

Troop withdrawals can be messy and costly even in the best of circumstances. But that is not a reason to drift into forever wars while searching for the perfect exit. It is a reason to be disciplined about objectives and judicious about intervening in the first place....

... So much is objectionable about the Trump era that it is hard for critics to know which targets to strike. But principled opposition requires that progressive opponents of President Trump not distort their beliefs for quick rhetorical wins. ...

It's worth reading it all.

Once again, a humane political stance demands that we learn to walk and chew gum at the same time: No Ban, No Wall, No Forever Wars.

Rumors of war in That Part of the World

E.P. has taken on the thankless task of surveying the carnage -- made in America, made by other powers, and homegrown -- in what we call the Middle East. With Trump running amok in other areas, we've tended to look away from the region that so inflamed our fears for the last 15 years. But we can't really. The consequences could be too dire.

With President Trump and his secretary of state now talking openly about a possible “escalation between us and the Iranians,” there is a real risk that some combination of the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia could initiate a war with Iran. If there’s one lesson to be learned from US wars since 9/11, it’s “don’t start another one.”

Read it all at the link.

Yemen: our forgotten war

Yesterday the BBC reported on the devastating consequences to starving Yemeni infants caught within that particular used war.

The crisis in Yemen has been overshadowed by the wars in Syria and Iraq. Barely 50% of the funding promised by donors has actually been delivered.

The senior UN official in the country, Jamie McGoldrick, is clearly exasperated at the international response.

"The politics of the situation has overcome the humanity," he says.

"The humanity doesn't work anymore here. The world has turned a blind eye to what's happening in Yemen... right now we are so under-resourced for this crisis, it's extraordinary."

Saudi attacks have destroyed the infrastructure of survival. The United States is paying for and abetting this carnage -- as usual with only the most murky of objectives.

In her latest analytical article, Erudite Partner has tried to explicate: The forgotten war in Yemen and the unchecked war powers of the presidency in the age of Trump. She does a pretty good job.

Checking in on the Forever War as Obama's term winds down

The Tampa Tribune, located where the U.S. Central Command makes its headquarters, treats as a local beat the doings of the force charged with carrying on U.S. military activity in the Middle East. President Obama is bringing in three new commanders this year, all of whom come out of the tight-lipped domain of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Reporter Howard Altman offers insight about the probable direction of the ongoing campaign.

The most significant change leading to this JSOC Trifecta is the choice of Army Gen. Joseph Votel as head of U.S. Central Command in Tampa, which oversees U.S. military operations in Iraq, Syria and 18 other nations in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

Votel lives next door to the current Centcom commander, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin III at MacDill Air Force Base, where both commands are headquartered. He will become the first Centcom commander to have come from the ranks of Special Operations Forces.

Army Lt. Gen Anthony “Tony” Thomas is likely to follow the route of JSOC commanders stepping up to take over Socom. Votel and his predecessor, retired Adm. William McRaven, were both JSOC commanders before taking over Socom.

And Maj. Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, current commander of the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence, will likely get his third star and take over JSOC.

... Clearly, Obama’s preference, in Iraq, Syria and in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Africa as well (and Yemen before we got kicked out) has been JSOC raids and drone strikes.

So Obama is putting the burden of the Forever War squarely in the lap of this secretive elite force, not the regular branches. Journalist Jeremy Scahill reported the exact moment when Obama discovered these operatives were his best bet for dialing down the visibility of the Forever War (which we don't like when we can see its carnage as in Iraq) while beating back the U.S. panic about terrorism. Remember when merchant ship Captain Richard Phillips was rescued by JSOC snipers from Somali pirates? Those shooters that day handed Obama a public relations triumph (and a live captain) and seems to have made him a believer in using such forces to lead our military adventures.

Obama knows perfectly well the tightrope he's trying to walk. He laid it out in the State of the Union speech.

“Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped,” he allowed. “But they do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story [the Islamic State] wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit.”

... And then came an appeal to the carpet-bombing constituency. Calling the Islamic State “killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed,” Obama boasted: “With nearly 10,000 air strikes, we are taking out their leadership, their oil, their training camps, and their weapons. We are training, arming, and supporting forces who are steadily reclaiming territory in Iraq and Syria.”

Peter Certo, Common Dreams

The people of this country get from our rulers as much war-making as we want. JSOC gives any President a means to keep much of our military force projection hidden domestically. Meanwhile our war is certainly not hidden from the people involuntarily on the wrong end of those airstrikes.

The Forever War will go on as long as we demand unrealistic "security" and it can be kept secret from us as long as we refuse to look at what we are doing. We do still need a peace movement.

Crimes catalogued and documented

I thought I had a pretty comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the ignorant and shameful policies chosen by the leaders of the United States since 9/11. But though I've worked to keep up with ongoing revelations, and I'm certainly not uninformed, I now believe I was wrong. Jeremy Scahill's new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, paints a panoramic picture of murder, arrogance, desperation and folly. For the moment, until additional sources spill further dimensions of perfidy and evil as they well might, this is the definitive account of our global "war on terror." Certainly see the movie, but if you can stand to care, you do need to read the book.

Unavoidably, lots of us have some awareness of what an ongoing horror show the US invasion of Iraq made of that unhappy country. That war was a bloody imperial lie from start to finish. And, painfully, we've gotten to the point that a majority of us think the Afghanistan adventure wasn't worth the blood and treasure (not to mention the dead Afghans.) But other escapades of empire, especially those in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, have gotten less notice. Scahill's been there.

I found the sections on Somalia informative; somehow I'd missed a lot of this. The CIA took the lead in our war in that nation and apparently replicated its practice from Afghanistan, buying up shady, vicious warlords to attack other factions it considered Islamist threats. In retrospect, it is hard to see any of them as "good guys." When many Somalis rallied around a faction that threw these warlords out, the US hired the Ethiopian state to invade. When Somalis rose up against the Ethiopian occupation, the US picked up a new set of warlords and the small al Shabab Somali set signed on with al Qaeda. Along the line, US special military forces (the Joint Special Operations Command [JSOC] -- the guys who finally offed bin Laden) took over the bulk of Somali operations, as they have also the better known US drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen.

President Obama seems to have become a great fan of using JSOC to do his dirty work. This military force seemed such a clean, safe alternative to George W.'s blunderbuss style of empire. He got his introduction to JSOC's value in 2009 when Somali pirates seized the merchant ship Alabama and carried its captain off in a small boat.

The commander asked, 'Do I have your permission to execute?' And the President says "Yes you do." The commander gives his order.

Pop. Pop. pop. Three shots, fired almost at the exact same moment by three different snipers. Three dead Somali pirates.

Captain Richard Phillips was rescued and returned to the United States with much fanfare. President Obama won praise from across the political spectrum for his leadership in taking down the pirates and bringing an end to the hostage situation without losing a single US life and with just three bullets fired. Behind the scenes, it was a powerful lesson for President Obama about the clandestine force that President Bush had once praised as "awesome" -- JSOC.

JSOC had given a politically dangerous made-for-TV movie episode a politically advantageous outcome -- and Obama apparently realized a President possessed a ready-made weapon controlled by him as Commander in Chief to replace George W.'s "dumb wars."

Scahill goes on to tell the story of our drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen and of the administration's embrace of targeted assassination, including of US citizens. The account is detailed and depressing and, like Mark Mazzetti's book on the CIA role, leaves me wondering how real a threat truly exists if so much energy can have been wasted on bureaucratic chest bumping over who got which piece of the action. ***For me, one of the most significant parts of Scahill's story is the reconstruction of what US forces, under the JSOC mantle, did at Camp NAMA near Baghdad during 2003-4. Though there have been numerous reports, there have been no consequences, no trials, no true accounting for this torture regime that didn't even serve any plausible military purpose.

The acronym NAMA stood for "Nasty-Ass Military Area," Its motto, as advertised in posters throughout the camp, was "No Blood, No Foul." A Defense Department official said it was a play on a task force adage: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it."

… The task force at NAMA was run by lSOC, but it was built by pulling personnel from a variety of agencies and units. There were CIA and DIA interrogators, air force interrogators, and a variety of analysts and guards. "They told us we can't tell our chain of command about who works here or what [the task force] does. You're completely shut off. You can only discuss it amongst yourselves. That's what they told us from the very first day," recalled an interrogator who worked at Camp NAMA in 2003-2004. … Many of the members of the task force would grow long beards and seemed eager to make themselves look as frightening or intimidating as possible. "This is the dark side of the forces. This is the realm where you have essentially a cadre of folks who have a great deal of freedom. 'The folks that get to this level are treated with a certain amount of deference," Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer told me.

… The harsh interrogation methods that were being refined in black sites and in Afghanistan were to be unleashed in Iraq. "There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," said a former senior intelligence official. "The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack [after 9/11] But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that [former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed] Chalabi and others had told them were there." … Each morning, the crisis action team had to report that another location was a bust. Rumsfeld grew angrier and angrier. One official quoted him as saying, 'They must be there!' At one briefing, he picked up the briefing slides and tossed them back at the briefers," according to [journalist Rowan] Scarborough.

… The JSOC Task Force did not categorize Camp NAMA as a prison but rather as a "filtration site" where intelligence was being obtained. This gave cover for all the dirty activity and the secrecy that shrouded it. … The interrogations … often incorporated extremely loud music, strobe lights, beatings, environmental and temperature manipulation, sleep deprivation, twenty-hour interrogation sessions, water and stress positions, and personal, often sexual, humiliation. The forced nudity of prisoners was not uncommon. Almost any act was permissible against the detainees as long as it complied with the "No Blood, No Foul" motto. But, eventually, even blood was okay.

One former prisoner -- the son of one of Saddam's bodyguards -- said he was made to strip, was punched repeatedly in the spine until he fainted, was doused with cold water and forced to stand in front of the air-conditioner and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Prisoners held at other facilities also described heinous acts committed against them by interrogators and guards, including sodomizing detainees with foreign objects, beating them, forcing water up their rectums and using extreme dietary manipulation-nothing but bread and water for more than two weeks in one case.

Members of the task force would beat prisoners with rifle butts and spit in their faces. One member of the task force reported that he had heard interrogators "beating the shit out of the detainee." According to a former interrogator with the task force, one of his colleagues was "reprimanded and assigned to desk duty because he pissed in a bottle and gave it to a detainee to drink." Members of the task force would also interrupt non harsh interrogations and begin slapping or beating detainees. On at least one occasion, they abducted the wife of a suspected insurgent being hunted by the task force "to leverage the primary target's surrender." The woman was a twenty-eight-year-old mother of three who was still nursing her six month-old baby.

…The abuse and torture at Camp NAMA was not an anomaly, but rather a model. When the US government began probing how the shocking horrors meted out against prisoners at Abu Ghraib happened, how it all began, the investigation revealed that those running the prison had looked to the example set at Camp NAMA, Guantanamo and at Bagram in Afghanistan.

President Obama says "we don't torture." That's dubious; we certainly do still "render" prisoners to other countries to torture and hold others in uncharged military detention. There has been no accountability for the intellectual authors who ordered these crimes, even if we were to choose to let the actual perpetrators off the hook as dupes of authority. The stain lingers.***I should mention that Jeremy Scahill is practicing journalism these days along with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and others at The Intercept.

Yemen: a story from yet another failed U.S. conflict zone

A morsel of conventional advice hammered into aspiring writers is "show don't tell." Gregory D. Johnsen's The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America's War in Arabia does exactly that. It wasn't until I'd finished the book that I fully took in its narrative power. The former Fulbright Fellow in Yemen carries his readers along on a fast-paced ramble through the history of this desert country on the south coast of the Arabian peninsula, its homegrown and imported Islamic terrorists, and the United States' fumbling, inconsistent responses.

Much of this terrain was familiar to me, having read FBI agent Ali Soufan's account of his investigation of the USS Cole bombing and having seen the movie version of Jeremy Scahill's expose of the U.S. drone campaign, Dirty Wars. But this was different, integrating a much more nuanced explication of Yemen's enormously complex tribal society which serves as a seed bed for AQAP's (al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) flourishing. Many familiar, and far more unfamiliar, names flew by in Johnsen's story; what sets this account apart is that Johnsen conveys through vivid narration far more of the interior logic that drives all the actors than any other account I've read.

As a citizen of a country that Johnsen portrays as having chosen to ape the indiscriminate violence of the terrorists through our drone strike campaign -- hey, we just wiped out a wedding party this week -- what interested me most was Johnsen's picture of the incentives that pushed our political leaders in that direction. Only some of them seem to have been undiscriminating racist war hawks. Others simply drifted into what seemed the least bad option in the context of a U.S. population that demands they guarantee absolute security against terrorist threats. If Johnsen is accurate, and he certainly seems knowledgeable, our drone campaign has only made sure there will be more terrorists.
***
Unfortunately, I "read" the volume as an audiobook and was surprised to discover that neither of the two libraries I have access to owns the volume. They should. This is an important story. I usually go to print editions to pass on the flavor of books here. Fortunately I can share a taste of Johnsen's conclusions from a recent Foreign Policy article. He faults U.S. policy makers for failing to understand that combating Arab terrorists on their own turf in Yemen is very different from killing expatriate Islamist Arabs in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He thinks the U.S. has mesmerized itself through focusing on a succession of known leaders rather than seeking to understand the local organizational structures AQAP has built. He concludes

The Obama administration's counterterrorism approach in Yemen is primarily concerned with preventing an immediate attack directed at America or its interests in the Middle East. This is a short-term goal that eclipses everything else, from long-term strategy to the stability of Yemen itself. The United States has yet to realize that this is not a war it can win on its own. Only the tribesmen and clerics in Yemen are in a position to decisively disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda.

The United States can do a lot of good in Yemen, but it can also do a lot of harm. And right now it is playing a dangerous game, firing missiles at targets in the hopes that it can kill enough men to keep AQAP from plotting, planning, and launching an attack from Yemen. … it may be time to rethink that approach in favor of a strategy that's more sustainable -- and more sensible too.

I could add also less randomly cruel. Johnsen doesn't go in for that sort of judgment, but I do.

Netroots Nation snapshots: Hanging in for our rapidly vanishing freedom under law

Retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, was the chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo until he resigned in protest after being asked to move cases against prisoners who he believed had been tortured in violation of the Nuremberg principles and the Geneva Conventions.

He pulls no punches:

“After 9/11, we [the people of the United States] became the constrained and the cowardly.”

"Every case that has come out of Guantanamo has been a black eye to the American government.”

Pardiss Kebriaei is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center Constitutional Rights. She has represented several Guantanamo detainees, both some released and some still held, as well as the al-Awlaki family of the father and son, both U.S. citizens never convicted of any crime, who were killed by U.S. drones in Yemen. She faults the President for failing to follow through with closing Guantanamo.

“Obama has failed to rebut false narratives that depict all detainees as terrorists.”

The majority still locked up at Guantanamo have been cleared for release, but the administration has failed to follow through. Many prisoners are on hunger strike, ready to die if, after a decade, they are left to give up hope.

Kebriaei also emphasized that conditions in supermax prisons inside the United States may not be any more humane than those in Guantanamo; significant numbers of prisoners are being held in solitary confinement on 23-hour a day lockdown, apparently for life.


At the panel "Challenging Drones from Pakistan to Oakland," moderator Zahra Billoo, director of CAIR California, asked participants to answer the question "Why should I care about drones?"

Omar Shakir was one of a Stanford Law School team responsible for a joint report with NYU Law students called Living Under Drones. He pointed out that, after experiencing a half a decade of overflights and repeated missile strikes from drones, most Pakistanis are firmly convinced that the United States is their enemy. How would you feel if you had these things flying around overhead all the time -- and sometimes firing? he asked.

"Only 2 percent of drone kills have been high level al Qaeda leaders."

Nadia Kayyali of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee works with local jurisdictions where law enforcement authorities are often salivating over the prospect of getting their own drones. The federal government seems to have money to throw at these purchases, even if for little else. Politicians listen to the well-heeled drone lobby speaking for war contractors. There is even a Drone Caucus in Congress.

She maintains that widespread domestic enthusiasm for police drones reinforces the normalization of

ambient and persistent surveillance in this country.

Linda Lye of the Northern California ACLU listed three reasons to care about drones:

• low cost: by the standards of high tech spying these are cheap toys. The usual expense disincentive is weak;

• surreptitiousness: we'll soon see police deploying bird size drones;

• and context: these days every public and private entity that can is gathering all the data it can sweep up on all of us.

She emphasizes that the legal framework for protecting individual rights has simply failed to keep up with technological progress. Consequently, we're all in danger of losing basic freedoms without debate or consent.

Dirty Wars without end

We saw this film on Friday night. If you have a chance to see it -- distribution is fairly wide so you might have a chance -- I'd recommend it. People who read this blog likely know how the United States has organized its killing forces for secretive, permanent war all over the globe. Without being bloody, the films shows you a few of the people we are killing and the places where they were living.

The sound and music by David Harrington and the Kronos Quartet serve as emotional glue to war reporter Jeremy Scahill's narrative. It works.

Dirty Wars is also a book.

Scahill's work reminds me of this from George Orwell's report from his foray into soldiering:

… every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.

It is hard to imagine where our current war is taking us, since it is designed to grind on without end.

What are they hiding this time?

Nothing new about government secrecy …

except the extreme enthusiasm with which the Obama administration seeks to protect it.

The A.P. said that the Justice Department informed it on Friday that law enforcement officials had obtained the records for more than 20 telephone lines of its offices and journalists, including their home phones and cellphones. It said the records were seized without notice sometime this year.

… In an angry letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday, Gary Pruitt, the president and chief executive of The A.P., called the seizure, a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its news gathering activities.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” he wrote. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news gathering activities undertaken by The A.P. during a two-month period, provide a road map to A.P.’s news gathering operations, and disclose information about A.P.’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

The various phone companies involved are set up technically to grab such information whenever the government asks for it. In investigations of leaks of "national security secrets," the Obama administration has sought twice the number of indictments issued under all previous administrations combined.

The investigation, thought to involve publication of news of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner, is one of two announced by the Justice Department last June. The other involves leaks to the New York Times about US-initiated cyberattacks on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Times has no knowledge of seized phone records in that case.

What this is really all about is whether the government can intimidate the press. The government wants to be free to decide which of its war-on-the-cheap projects the citizens get to know about. For the moment, we're a nation tired of declared wars and occupations. But our leaders (and particularly our spooks) have lots of places they want to project U.S. power. Maybe some of these efforts actually do protect us. Maybe some of them are monumental screw ups or even crimes that will ultimately make us less safe. None of them can be debated democratically if the government can succeed in hiding them in the name of "national security."

Want to keep on top of these machinations? I suggest reading Marcy Wheeler. She often has the story months before the "news" media.

Presidential inauguration contradictions

A good leftist like me would have to be a complete cad not to thrill to President Obama's second inaugural address. As much as someone who can be elected President is ever likely to, he presented a vision of the sort of country I wish this were: inclusive, generous, responsible, intelligent, fair-minded … No, the real country is not very worthy of any of those adjectives, but I don't mind someone at the center of the political world reminding us that these are ideals worth aspiring to.

James Fallows who has heard and studied a lot of Presidential speechifying call the speech "startling" and "a departure for him," That accords very much with my reaction: The Prez has seldom allowed himself the license to try to win by inspiring. Probably temperamentally, and certainly politically, it has served the guy well to modulate his utterances, never risking being perceived as too passionate. In this one, he dared a vision of our history formed in our citizens' struggles for democracy and equality. Good for him.

Yet even on this special day, I can't let him off the hook on what he obviously hopes he never has to talk about: the country's continued flouting of international law and human rights constraints in its overseas power projections. U.S. drones killed three people in Yemen today; are we at war there? With who? If so, for what? This President isn't saying beyond broadly claiming uncontested and secretive authority to label individuals "militants" and "al Qaeda" and blow them and anyone unlucky enough to be nearby to smithereens. This is not how a civilized democracy behaves.

And we didn't hear more today from this President who boldly outlawed torture on coming into office, but refused to make that edict stick by exacting any accountability from torturers and their enablers. Matthew W. Daloisio of Witness against Torture marked the inauguration with this truth:

Two presidents now, Bush and Obama, have worked to seal America’s identity as a torture nation, based in nearly incomprehensible hypocrisy and delusional commitment to the myth of America’s essential and unerring virtue.

Some people refuse to forget unfulfilled promises:

Yes, Mr. President, we still ask better of you. We take seriously the aspirations for a better country you presented today. We have no choice but to remind you there's more you must do.

Drone war thoughts

We live in the era of the drone war now. For the moment, the U.S. has something of a monopoly on using this new weaponry, though there is nothing to prevent other states from joining the fray. Do we really have any idea where this technological breakthrough is taking us?

Michael Cummings -- back from deployments with the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan -- has a simple explanation of what's dangerous about the military's new toys:

Kill enough of the wrong people, and everyone will join the insurgency. Why not? The Americans will probably come kill you soon enough.

That's the blowback the drone program creates in an actual theater of war. There's lots of argument about how many of the "wrong people" -- "innocents," non-combatants, children -- are being killed remotely in Afghanistan, but at least in that country there's a recognized war. And -- perhaps -- there's something of a recognized war in the adjacent areas of Pakistan where angry Pashtuns and many Taliban live, so there may be some justification for strikes on people the U.S. regards as "terrorists" in "safe havens." Whether knocking these guys (and their relatives) off is worth destabilizing a fragile nuclear weapons-armed state is a judgement question. A huge majority of Pakistanis certainly don't think so.

And we are also killing people in countries where we don't claim to be at war, but where there's not much government either, like Yemen and Somalia. Sometimes we know who we're killing, but apparently the administration has also authorized "signature strikes." If some bunch of remote tribal guys act in ways the C.I.A. associates with terrorist cells, sure -- blow 'em away.

Law professor David Cole points out the implications of that seemingly safe exercise:

While such a strategy might make sense on hot battlefields, where one frequently kills “the enemy” without knowing precisely who they are, it is extremely dangerous when employed beyond battlefields, where it can be very difficult to know with any degree of certainty which groups are engaged in hostile military action. For this reason, Obama initially banned such strikes in Yemen, but news accounts indicate that he has relaxed that ban recently. What criteria are used to distinguish the enemy from those who merely look like the enemy? As President Bush showed us, it’s all too easy to make mistakes in identifying the enemy. A mistakenly detained man can be released, as hundreds held at Guantánamo have been. Mistakes in the drone program are final.

That's the thing about killing people; you can't bring them back.

And that, perhaps, points up the worst feature of the drone option -- it seems so easy and clean. Press a button and "the enemy" is gone. But as real world warriors like Michael Cumming know, kill the "wrong people" and pretty soon all the people are ready to fight you. This new weapon may not prove so antiseptically safe after all.

At war in Yemen

Might as well say it: the United States is at war in Yemen. The administration would prefer we didn't notice this, but it is true. Listen to Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman at Wired's Danger Room:

For all the handwringing about the undeclared, drone-led war in Pakistan, it’s quietly been eclipsed. Yemen is the real center of the America’s shadow wars in 2012. After the US killed al-Qaida second in command Abu Yahya al-Libi earlier this month, Pakistan is actually running out of significant terrorists to strike. Yemen, by contrast, is a target-rich environment — and that’s why the drones are busier there these days.

The White House has declared al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen is to be the biggest terror threat to Americans today. The campaign to neutralize that threat is far-reaching — involving commandos, cruise missiles, and, of course, drone aircraft. It is also, according to some experts on the region, completely backfiring. Since the US ramped up its operations in Yemen in 2009, the ranks of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, have swelled from 300 fighters to more than 1,000.

These authors dig into developing U.S. operations in Yemen and produce considerable evidence that we're slipping more and more deeply into yet another country's civil war.

Ibrahim Mothana tried to get across what is happening in that strategically located ancient country in an oped in the New York Times:

“DEAR OBAMA, when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda,” a Yemeni lawyer warned on Twitter last month. President Obama should keep this message in mind before ordering more drone strikes like Wednesday’s, which local officials say killed 27 people, or the May 15 strike that killed at least eight Yemeni civilians.

Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair.

I'm old fashioned. I think when a President leads this country into a faraway war that will cause yet another population to hate us, he ought to tell us about it. Did not the Constitution say something about Congress declaring wars? How quaint.

Several sources recommend Waq al-Waq written by Gregory Johnsen, a Princeton scholar, for on-going English coverage of our Yemen war. Just in case we notice that we've poked another hornet's nest.

How to prolong and spread hatred

A couple of observations:

… the war on terrorism is like the war on drugs. We keep locking up drug dealers, but the demand for drugs is so strong, and selling them so lucrative, that there's always someone to fill the imprisoned drug dealer's shoes. Even if we put a whole drug-selling gang out of business--let's call it the al Qaeda of cocaine--a new drug distribution network will emerge.

The good news is that the war on terrorism is not, in principle, as challenging as the war on drugs. After all, the thing that keeps drawing people into the drug dealing business is built into human nature: the basic structure of brain cells makes cocaine feel good.

In contrast, the thing that draws people into the anti-American terrorism business--hatred of America--is a transient historical fact. Whereas cocaine has always felt good, hating America hasn't always felt good--at least, not to as many people as it feels good to now.

So how do we reduce the number of people who hate America? It's a tough, multi-dimensional problem, but here's something that probably isn't helping: endlessly raining drone strikes on Muslims. The strike that killed al-Libi also killed more than a dozen other people and was the third drone strike in Pakistan in three days.

Robert Wright

The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates up to 830 civilians, including many women and children, might have been killed by drone attacks in Pakistan, 138 in Yemen and 57 in Somalia. Hundreds more have been injured.

Now Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA's counter-terrorism center from 2004 to 2006 and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan, has told the Guardian that the drone programme is targeted too broadly. "It [the drone program] needs to be targeted much more finely. We have been seduced by them and the unintended consequences of our actions are going to outweigh the intended consequences," Grenier said in an interview. …

"We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield. We are already there with regards to Pakistan and Afghanistan," he said.

… I am very concerned about the creation of a larger terrorist safe haven in Yemen," Grenier said.

The Guardian

Killing for peace always reveals a terrible failure of imagination.

The administration has adopted a "military age male located in territory the U.S. does not control" as an adequate definition of a "terrorist" deserving death-by-drone. Furthermore, current strikes are evidently targeting mourners and first responders.

And we wonder why they hate us?

President Obama's war … and ours

The New York Times shared a long piece yesterday that amounted to presenting and arguing the Obama administration's case for its strategy of war from offshore.

By withdrawing from Iraq and preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan, Mr. Obama has refocused the fight on Al Qaeda and hugely reduced the death toll both of American soldiers and Muslim civilians. But in moments of reflection, Mr. Obama may have reason to wonder about unfinished business and unintended consequences.

His focus on [remote drone] strikes has made it impossible to forge, for now, the new relationship with the Muslim world that he had envisioned. Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president.

Justly or not, drones have become a provocative symbol of American power, running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents. With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies.

Mr. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, said the strike campaign was dangerously seductive. “It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness,” he said. “It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”

Not a bad summary. The truly telling bit of the story describes how Obama reacted to the 2010 failed underwear bomber; he apparently demanded that his advisors become even more focused on low-casualty measures to destroy al-Qaeda. And it is clear what spurred him to action:

David Axelrod, the president’s closest political adviser, began showing up at the “Terror Tuesday” meetings, his unspeaking presence a visible reminder of what everyone understood: a successful attack would overwhelm the president’s other aspirations and achievements.

If we don't like the President's policy of killing perceived enemies using drones wherever in the world our spooks identify targets, we have to change what Axelrod's participation flags: as a people we continue to insist that our government respond to every threat, however objectively inconsequential, as if it were existential. While the people continue to demand an illusory absolute security from all hostile dangers, Presidents will continue to twist historic assumptions about sovereignty and law like a limp strand of spaghetti. And our leaders will crow over the bloody results.***As for the drone war in Yemen, not all reporters are as sanguine about its success as the Times reporters. Jeremy Scahill from the Nation visited that country last year.

I'm very skeptical of reports that say, you know, 11 suspected militants were killed, because we don't have reporters on the ground that are going to the scene and are evaluating who was killed. The United States is relying entirely on its own imagery from its drones and satellites, as well as intelligence on the ground from Yemeni military officials and Yemeni government officials and intelligence officials who have an agenda to make sure that the United States believes that all the people that they're killing are suspected militants rather than, say, an important tribal leader.

And I bring that case up because there was a case where it appears as though the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president of Yemen, fed the United States bad intel, telling the U.S. that there's an al-Qaida group meeting in a particular area, and they killed an important tribal leader who happened to be an opponent of the regime.

… the U.S. built up, and it began in the mid-2000s, ended up not fighting terrorism but actually defending the failing regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh. So they were never operating in the territories where al-Qaida figures were believed to be but rather being used to defend the U.S.-backed regime of Saleh as it was crumbing to pieces.

And so there was a lot of resentment from Yemenis. They call them the Saleh family military, the U.S.-backed units. They call them the Saleh family military, not the national military. Anyway, so the U.S. builds up that, they have trainers on the ground, and then you have a network of Saudi informants that are inside of Yemen.

And then you have U.S. airpower in the form of drones, as we've mentioned, but also cruise missiles that are being launched off the coast of Yemen from vessels or submarines that are there ostensibly to fight pirates in the Gulf of Aden, and there have been a number of Tomahawk cruise missile strikes. In fact, the most deadly strike that we know of in Yemen to date, authorized by the Obama administration, was his first strike in Yemen, and that was on December 17, 2009, and it was not the CIA, and it was not a drone.

It was cruise missiles launched from the sea, and it slammed into this village called Al-Majalah, which is in south Yemen, and the U.S. had intelligence that was given to it by the Yemeni government that there was an al-Qaida training camp there and storage facilities for weapons.

Well, it turned out that that wasn't true, and the U.S. bombed this village and killed 46 people, and we know the names of all of the people that were killed. I went there myself. I interviewed a woman who lost her entire family. An old man, 17 of those 46 people that were killed were members of his family. There were five pregnant women among the dead.

…I think that we're seeing the future of U.S. war fighting in Yemen. I think this is the model that has emerged over the past decade, where President Obama wants to draw down large-scale military occupations, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we are going to be, for decades to come, fighting special operations forces, CIA war of attrition against terrorism or against anyone determined to be an enemy of the United States.

Read or listen to it all here.