War on Terror: The medicine is worse than the disease

Common Dreams reports:

In their joint report— Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the 'War on Terror—Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival, and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War concluded that this number is staggering, with at least 1.3 million lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone since the onset of the war following September 11, 2001. ... According to Gould's forward, co-authored with Dr. Tim Takaro, the public is purposefully kept in the dark about this toll. "A politically useful option for U.S. political elites has been to attribute the on-going violence to internecine conflicts of various types, including historical religious animosities, as if the resurgence and brutality of such conflicts is unrelated to the destabilization cause by decades of outside military intervention," they write. "As such, under-reporting of the human toll attributed to ongoing Western interventions, whether deliberate of through self-censorship, has been key to removing the 'fingerprints' of responsibility."

Continue ReadingWar on Terror: The medicine is worse than the disease

Blank check war

From a mass emailing I received this morning from Rep. Alan Grayson:

So we had a hearing a week ago on ISIS ("we" being the House Foreign Affairs Committee), and the witnesses were three experts on U.S. policy in the Middle East, all dues-paying members of the Military-Industrial Complex. They were James Jeffrey, who was Deputy Chief of Mission at our embassy in Iraq; Rick Brennan, a political scientist at the Rand Corp.; and Dafna Rand, who was on the National Security Council staff. The White House had just released the President's draft Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against ISIS, and I felt that I needed a good translator, so I asked them what the ISIS war authorization meant. Their answers were chilling: the ISIS war authorization means whatever the President wants it to mean. If you don't believe me, just listen to them: GRAYSON: Section 2(c) of the President's draft Authorization for the Use of Military Force reads as follows: "The authority granted in subsection A [to make war on ISIS and forces 'alongside' ISIS] does not authorize the use of US armed forces in enduring offensive ground combat operations." Ambassador Jeffrey, what does 'enduring' mean? JEFFREY: My answer would be a somewhat sarcastic one: "Whatever the Executive at the time defines 'enduring' as." And I have a real problem with that. GRAYSON: Dr. Brennan? BRENNAN: I have real problems with that also. I don't know what it means. I can just see the lawyers fighting over the meaning of this. But more importantly, if you're looking at committing forces for something that you are saying is either [a] vital or important interest of the United States, and you get in the middle of a battle, and all of a sudden, are you on offense, or are you on defense? What happens if neighbors cause problems? Wars never end the way that they were envisioned. And so I think that that's maybe a terrible mistake to put in the AUMF. GRAYSON: Dr. Rand? RAND: Enduring, in my mind, specifies an open-endedness, it specifies lack of clarity on the particular objective at hand. GRAYSON: Dr. Rand, is two weeks 'enduring'? RAND: I would leave that to the lawyers to determine exactly. GRAYSON: So your answer is [that] you don't know, right? How about two months? RAND: I don't know. Again, I think it would depend on the particular objective, 'enduring' in my mind is not having a particular military objective in mind. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingBlank check war

Claim by Editor of Major German Newspaper: CIA planted pro-war stories

Here's an excerpt from this stunning but unsurprising admission: Becoming the first credentialed, well-known media insider to step forward and state publicly that he was secretly a "propagandist," an editor of a major German daily has said that he personally planted stories for the CIA. Saying he believes a medical condition gives him only a few years to live, and that he is filled with remorse, Dr. Udo Ulfkotte . . . said . . . he accepted news stories written and given to him by the CIA and published them under his own name.

Continue ReadingClaim by Editor of Major German Newspaper: CIA planted pro-war stories