My only VICE

On Monday, VICE published a piece of mine concerning the liberal media's reliance on unpaid and barely paid labor ("interns"). As I explained later to a writer for Romenesko.com, no traditionally "left" outlet was willing to publish the piece -- only VICE -- which is itself a commentary on the state of progressive media. I'm tempted to send all the outlets that declined or ignored my pitch a link to this.

On Friday, Inter Press Service published my interview with Madiha Tahir, a journalist who spoke to survivors of US drone strikes in Pakistan for her new documentary, Wounds of Waziristan.

I had another piece on interns that was supposed to be published this week by an outlet named in my VICE piece. Maybe next week.

Religous students found guilty of being Pakistani

When a man shot up a Sikh temple in Wisconsin last year, Barack Obama announced how “deeply saddened” he was that such an attack "took place at a house of worship.” His Republican challenger for the presidency, Mitt Romney, likewise expressed his disgusted at “a senseless act of violence . . . that should never befall any house of worship.”

At the time, that was grotesquely funny because, by that point, Barack Obama had himself committed numerous acts of senseless violence against houses of worship. And, being the commander-in-chief of a military fighting a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan that he dramatically expanded upon taking office, he has continued to bomb religious institutions ever since.

As Reuters reported on Wednesday:

A suspected U.S. drone fired on an Islamic seminary in Pakistan's northwestern region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa early on Thursday, killing at least five people, police said.

#####

Fareed Khan, a police officer, said the unmanned aircraft fired at least three rockets at the madrassa in the Hangu district, killing two teachers and three students just before sunrise on Thursday.

Now, and this is important: an anonymous official did say a potentially bad person was potentially seen at that madrassa a few days earlier (potentially), so Barack Obama can sleep soundly at night knowing he authorized the killing of a few people who were probably familiar with that bad guy, even if that bad guy himself is currently back at home alive and well playing Call of Duty: Death to America.

Meanwhile:

The attack took place a day after Pakistan's foreign policy chief Sartaj Aziz was quoted as saying that the United States had promised not to conduct drone strikes while the government tries to engage the Taliban in peace talks.

The United States has not commented on Aziz's remarks.

I'm really pretty sure that it has.

Shahzad Akbar on (not) coming to America

Update: The State Department has finally granted Akbar a visa. Check out his statement.

Shahzad Akbar is a lawyer in Pakistan who represents some of the many civilian victims of the Obama administration's drone war in his country. Later this month, he is scheduled to speak at a conference in Washington on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to wage war and, in the words of State Department lawyer Harold Koh, deliver habeas-free "justice" to America's perceived enemies. However, in what, gosh, has to be a coincidence, Akbar has been denied the visa he needs to enter the Greatest Force for Freedom in Human History.

Last week, I asked Akbar what that says about President Obama's commitment to peace and freedom. What follows is a copy of the exchange, edited for clarity:

Do you have any evidence that your visa is being denied because of your views -- e.g. contacts at the embassy who may have told you that, others who have gone through the same experience -- or is that just your assumption? Are such delays or non-responses atypical?

I applied for this visa about 14 months ago on invitation of Columbia University and at that time, the dean of the law school checked with his contact at the State Department and was informed that it wasn't the State Department which is holding my visa but a 'certain agency' (I assumed CIA) which I seem to have annoyed. 

This time I reached out to US Deputy Ambassador Richard Hoagland saying that I believe that the US has blacklisted me, preventing me from obtaining a US visa, which I have not been given despite the passing of a year. I got a reply from the embassy saying that my visa is still under 'administrative process'. It was further added at a later stage that it's Homeland Security which is holding my visa and the State Department has no role in its delay/denial.

It is also interesting to note that my last visa to US was official visa which was given to me within 3 working days of applying.

Before my drone litigation, I had good interaction with the US Embassy political section and many would interact with me to discuss various legal and political issues, but after my drone litigation and criticism of the CIA I became 'persona non grata'.

In my personal opinion, in the US when it comes to matters outside the US, the security establishment i.e CIA and related agencies have unfettered discretion without any check. 

If it's true your visa is being denied because of your outspokenness on the drone war, what does that suggest about White House claims that remarkably few civilians have been killed? What does it say about the Obama administration's commitment to transparency and open debate?

It says simply one thing: that the White House has become hostage to the CIA's covert wars and unfettered discretions. Perhaps President Obama is naive to believe that no civilians are being killed in drone attacks, but he is too smart for that. I believe he is lying to American people. He has lost the sense of reality in his efforts to bring US troops home and has forgotten that the people he is killing through the robotic warfare are human beings too and they have rights as well, like due process and the right to life. Ironically, this whole exercise is not even making America safer as more people around the world now hate America for its drone attacks and places like Guantanamo and Bagram. 

What, exactly, have you uncovered with respect to the drone war and in what ways does it challenge the official Washington narrative? 

The first Obama strike was initially reported to have killed a high-value target. Our efforts and work have unearthed that the people killed were the family of Fahim Qureshi, a 15-year-old pre-engineering student who got injured himself, losing one eye as well. He also lost his Uncle Khalil who was in wheel chair for many years. Fahim also lost his 12-year-old cousin, Imran Khan. These people are here ready to face any allegation from United States, asking if they are terrorists then the US should bring evidence against them. They are waiting for justice for wrong done to them. There are many other cases where we are challenging the US narrative of killing high-value targets and this is what annoys the US about us.

The purpose of my visit to the US is to let the American people know what their government is doing in this part of the world and why people have strong reservations about America. My visit is in the context of Americans' right to know, which is being denied. Obama wants that Americans should only listen and believe what he tells them -- this, I must add, is the worst type of tyranny ever imposed by an elected President of the United States, which used to be an emblem of freedom of speech.

The American way

The Obama administration insists that Raymond Davis, a 36-year-old special forces veteran accused of killing two Pakistani men, is a U.S. consulate official -- and thus legally entitled to murder with impunity (oh, the perks of gang membership!). The Guardian, however, is reporting that he is "beyond a shadow of a doubt" a member of the CIA, in the words of a Pakistani intelligence officer, and thus fair game for a prosecution.

And while Davis -- no relation -- claims he was acting in strict self-defense, Pakistani officials dispute that, saying one of the men was apparently shot in the back as he tried to flee the scene, his body found 30 feet away from his motorbike.

"It went way beyond what we define as self-defence. It was not commensurate with the threat," a senior police official involved in the case told the Guardian.

Hmm. "Way beyond what we define as self-defense." "Not commensurate with the threat." I'm confused: is the dude talking about Raymond Davis or the war on terror?

(via Steve Hynd)

Can we really blame Republicans for the wars?

Michael Moore has a list of five things he says Democrats should do to avoid a disaster at the polls in November. His first recommendation? That the Democratic Party run ads reminding voters "Who the Hell Put Us in the Misery We're In":

People need to be reminded over and over that it was the REPUBLICANS who concocted and led the unnecessary invasion of two countries, putting us in our longest war ever, wars that will eventually cost us over $3 trillion.

I know readers of this blog probably don't need me to detail all that is wrong with that sentence but, fuck it, I'll try to anyway. First, it was Democrat Bill Clinton who signed into law a bill that made regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy, and it was the Clinton administration, by continually bombing Iraq and maintaining a deadly sanctions regime throughout the 1990s ostensibly due to an ongoing, scary (and conveniently swarthy) threat of a madman with weapons of mass destruction, that helped make the 2003 invasion politically possible.

Second, Democrats were critical to selling the Iraq war in the wake of 9/11, with the likes of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry -- and the top candidates for the party's 2004 and 2008 presidential nomination -- taking to the Senate floor with tales of ties to al-Qaeda and WMDs to justify an aggressive war against a country that was not threatening the United States. And the authorization to use force in Iraq was approved by more than half the Democrats in the Senate and more than 80 of those in the House. Sure, more dissented than in the Republican ranks -- just not many in meaningful leadership positions and none with greater political ambitions.

Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan was overwhelmingly supported by the Democratic Party; Congress authorized the use of force by a vote of 420-1 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. And during the 2008 election campaign, and before that in 2006, Democrats across the country campaigned on a platform that labeled Afghanistan the Good, Forgotten War, with Harry Reid, Barack Obama, et. al denouncing the Bush administration for not sending enough young Americans to kill and be killed there.

There's also this small quibble I have with the "blame REPUBLICANS for the wars" strategy: as "our longest war ever" drags on with no end in sight, draining taxpayers of tens of billions of dollars every year, the Democratic Party controls the House, the Senate and the presidency. The Democrats, it can be fairly said, control the government of the United States of America -- the same government that not only continues to occupy two Middle Eastern countries, but has further expanded the war on terror in Yemen and Pakistan, killing hundreds of civilians with Predator drones and cluster bombs.

Democrats can go ahead and blame the GOP all they want for starting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I suspect some voters will rightly respond: "well okay then, Bush should've been impeached and John Boehner is totally a dick, but who's dropping the bombs now?"

A curious discrepancy

Speaking about the recent attempted car bombing in Times Square allegedly perpetrated by Faisal Shahzad, Attorney General Eric Holder categorically declared on NBC's Meet The Press -- the Washington elite's long-preferred vehicle for disseminating politically advantageous disinformation -- "that the evidence that we've now developed shows that the Pakistani Taliban has directed this plot."

"We know that they helped facilitate it," Holder added. "They helped direct it, and I suspect that we are going to come up with evidence that shows they helped to finance it.  They were intimately involved in this plot."

On Monday, though, a "senior administration official" clarified Holder's comments in remarks to CNN, saying, "The question is: Did he go there looking for help or did he fall in their lap? It seems the former. It appears he went seeking help for this attack."

"He had an attack in mind when he went there," the official added.

Now, not to jump to a brash conclusion -- I'm a mere blogger, after all, not the U.S. attorney general -- but it almost seems as if the Obama administration, taking a page from its predecessor and basically every government that has ever existed ever, chose to spin events in such a way as to to bolster public support for its policies, namely the president's escalation of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (even though the attack is likely blowback from said wars, but hey, this is America). And given that one can fairly conclude Eric Holder was privy to the exact same information as the anonymous official who walked back the attorney general's comments in remarks to CNN, it's almost as if the administration chose to tie the failed attack to the Pakistani Taliban without any regard for the actual facts -- retracting the claim only after it made headlines -- preferring instead to exploit it to further a roll back of civil liberties and boost support at home for its belligerent policy abroad.

The inescapable conclusion? Holder -- and the Obama administration in general -- is not to be trusted.

(via Max Fisher)

Paging Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is a funny and intelligent guy, but ever since his weepy America-has-finally-fulfilled-its-promise performance upon the election of Barack Obama, he hasn’t been quite the same -- epitomized by his disappointingly pathetic apology for the perfectly sensible (thus politically unpopular) statement that President Harry “Hiroshima” Truman was a war criminal.

While interviewing Newsmax.com writer Ronald Kessler earlier this week, Stewart -- though brilliant and scathing when he’s on -- had another cringe-worthy outing, apparently forgetting that Barack Obama is not the nice guy with a great smile he once interviewed, but the commander-in-chief, the head of a global empire -- a guy who okayed the deaths-sans-trials for over a dozen Pakistanis within days of taking office.

Responding to Kessler’s comment that “Obama [smokes] on a regular basis, despite his claims that he gave it up,” Stewart appeared to forget these uncomfortable facts (a shockingly prevalent phenomenon among Obama boosters), telling Kessler:

Stewart: Now that seems okay with me. I’ll take that.

Kessler: You’re a smoker?

Stewart: I was a smoker for 20 years. And I prefer that to... bombing countries. I’ll take a smoker.

Well Jon, with Barack Obama you get both a president that smokes and a president that bombs sovereign countries without so much as a declaration of war. Since taking office, Obama has overseen hundreds of Pakistani deaths from attacks that he's signed off on, in addition to the hundreds of Afghan civilians who have died to further the U.S. goal of -- wait, we’re still waiting for a blue ribbon commission to get back to us on what that is.

To refresh your memory, here’s a woefully incomplete list of just some of our peace president’s overseas contingency operations:

January 23, 2009:

Barack Obama gave the go-ahead for his first military action yesterday, missile strikes against suspected militants in Pakistan which killed at least 18 people.

May 6, 2009:

US-led air strikes have killed dozens of Afghan people, the Red Cross said today as the Pentagon launched a joint investigation into what appeared one of the deadliest incidents and heaviest civilian losses so far at the hands of coalition forces.

Rohul Amin, the governor of Farah province in west Afghanistan, where the bombing took place during a battle on Monday and Tuesday, said he feared 100 civilians had been killed.

June 23, 2009:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An airstrike believed to have been carried out by a United States drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral in South Waziristan on Tuesday, residents of the area and local news reports said.

August 1, 2009:

The widening war in Afghanistan between Taliban militants and American-allied Afghan forces is taking an increasingly heavy toll on civilians, with 1,013 killed in the first six months of 2009, up from 818 during the same period in 2008, according to a United Nations report released Friday.

Explosions and suicide attacks carried out by anti-government forces, including the Taliban, caused a majority of the civilian deaths, killing 595 during the period, the report said. Of the 310 deaths attributed to pro-government forces, about two-thirds were caused by American airstrikes.

August 5, 2009:

A US air strike has killed a wife of the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, delivering a message to the notorious militant commander that western and Pakistani pursuers are closing in on him.

Two missiles from an unmanned drone plane struck a house near Makeen in South Waziristan, a Mehsud stronghold near the Afghan border, last night, killing at least two people and wounding several others.

Unfortunately, like many of his fellow American liberals, it would appear Jon Stewart values soothing rhetoric about human rights (and torture bad!) over actual policy.

Obama condemns violence in Iran. No word about Pakistan.

Speaking to reporters about the ongoing unrest in Iran, U.S. President Barack Obama declared he was “appalled and outraged” by the events of the past few days, stating that “we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere it takes place.”

Meanwhile . . .

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An airstrike believed to have been carried out by a United States drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral in South Waziristan on Tuesday, residents of the area and local news reports said.

Details of the attack, which occurred in Makeen, remained unclear, but the reported death toll was exceptionally high. If the reports are indeed accurate and if the attack was carried out by a drone, the strike could be the deadliest since the United States began using the aircraft to fire remotely guided missiles at members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The United States carried out 22 previous drone strikes this year, as the Obama administration has intensified a policy inherited from the Bush administration.

Of course, it would be a grave act of moral equivalence to equate the deaths of a few Pakistanis -- excuse me, “suspected Taliban militants” -- with those protesters who have been victimized by the Iranian regime. After all, it is widely accepted that those accused of being terrorists or opponents of U.S. military action (or do I repeat myself?) are entitled to no legal safeguards save the right to be murdered alongside their families by an unmanned Predator drone -- assuming, that is, they have brown skin and live in a far off land.

Also: Twitter. It’s hard to empathize with a people that aren’t up to date with the latest in American social networking fads.

The imperial imperative of leadership

The United States is a lot like the Roman Empire, according to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, but that’s not a bad thing! he argues in a staggeringly silly op/ed for The Washington Post:

Our brigade combat teams are not the legions of old. . . . But we in the U.S. military are likewise held to a high standard. Like the early Romans, we are expected to do the right thing, and when we don't, to make it right again.

I have a feeling much of the world would prefer the U.S. government to, say, mind its own business and not attack and occupy other countries in the first place, rather than continuing the oxymoronic quest to "make . . . right again" what it has already shown itself woefully incapable of making right the first time. That said, it is refreshing to hear the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff echoing the likes of Gore Vidal in drawing the obvious comparison between the U.S. and the ancient Romans.

But Mullen is not one to see comparisons between the U.S. and the Roman Empire as a critique of Washington’s reckless and brutal subjugation of foreign, impoverished peoples. Rather, Mullen sees the similarities as a good thing. In his piece, he recounts an apocryphal tale about the Romans’ kind and meek treatment of the Locrians after the latter complained about widespread abuses (like slavery) committed against them by the local Roman authorities, suggesting the U.S. would act likewise. While other occupied peoples would presumably not petition their occupiers for redress of their grievances, the Romans had a “reputation for equanimity and fairness”, Mullen writes. “Such were the responsibilities of leadership.”

It never appears to occur to Mullen that perhaps the Romans would not have needed to respond in such an equanimous manner had they not occupied the Locrians territory in the first place, seeing as how there would have been no occasion for a Roman kleptocracy to enslave them. But Mullen, like much of the foreign policy establishment in Washington, has no fundamental problem with the U.S. invading and occupying other countries -- obviously -- so it likely never occurred to him that the Romans’ (alleged) reputation for kindness in foreign affairs might be incongruous with their well-documented history of invading and occupying their peaceful neighbors.

When he isn’t regurgitating politically convenient and questionable historical analogies, Mullen simply chooses to skip over uncomfortable episodes in U.S. history. After discussing the need to view the war in Afghanistan through a “regional lens”, he bemoans the lack of trust -- nay, the existence of a “trust deficit” -- between U.S. and Pakistani military officials:

Any effective strategy must be inclusive of the security challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan, if not also the countries surrounding them.

Looking through that regional lens is difficult given our trust deficit with Pakistan. A whole generation of Pakistani military officers either doesn't know the United States, doesn't trust us or both. What they do know is that military aid restrictions went into effect under the Pressler Amendment in 1990. We basically cut them off for 12 years, and in the process cut ourselves off.

As one Pakistani official put it recently, "The U.S. abandoned Pakistan, and that mutual distrust didn't allow and still in many ways does not allow both parties to find a common strategy to defeat terrorism."

What Mullen doesn’t write is that the Pressler Amendment only called for cutting off aid in the event that Pakistan covertly developed nuclear weapons, as it did with a wink and a nod from the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s, eventually forcing the first Bush administration to acknowledge as much and enact the amendment's restrictions. Meanwhile, for what great purpose was that aid to Pakistan being put to use? Mostly funding the Afghan mujahideen -- aka bin Laden and friends -- through the Pakistani intelligence service while propping up an authoritarian military dictator. Truly God’s work.

Mullen concludes thusly:

We don't always get it right. But like the early Romans, we strive in the end to make it right. We strive to earn trust. And that makes all the difference.

Yes, the fact that the U.S. doesn’t always “get it right”, but strives to do so I’m sure “makes all the difference” to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead as a result of an illegal and ill-considered war of aggression. And some people have the nerve to think Americans are arrogant . . .

The audacity of irony

While I did my best to avoid tonight's "debate" (joint press conference) between Barack Obama and John McCain, living in DC makes that more difficult than it might seem, and I ended up catching a few exchanges while eating dinner at a local bar. 

What caught my attention was not the ludicrousness of the most powerful country on Earth pretending to be a "democracy" while allowing but two candidates to debate each other on whose biography is more compelling -- one party rule being totalitarian, while two parties is just right -- but Obama's laborious attempt to make McCain seem reasonable in contrast.

After making several cogent points regarding McCain's lack of judgment in supporting the Iraq war, Obama proceeded to repeat his call for a war with Pakistan -- though he of course did not call it that. Instead, the supposed peace candidate in this election-that-will-not-end cast his support for violating international law and Pakistan's sovereignty by speaking of "strikes" against "terrorists" in the the Pakistani tribal region bordering Afghanistan (the "good" military occupation to U.S. liberals).

What was amazing was that John "crazy old warmonger" McCain responded to Obama's call for another military conflict by pointing out that maybe, just maybe, the United States should not launch unilateral strikes against a sovereign nuclear power that just so happens to be an ally -- for better or worse -- of the U.S. government. (That said, McCain still hinted that perhaps we should launch attacks against Pakistan, but we just shouldn't talk about it.)

Now, while I won't profess to be a master political strategist (I still have something of a soul left), one would think the Democrats could capitalize on the American public's general discontent with the status quo with regard to the state of the economy and U.S. foreign policy by running a campaign centered around a rather simple message: no more wars, and no bailouts for the irresponsible rich. Unfortunately, one can rest assured that won't happen.

Why? Because rather than a departure from the status quo, Barack Obama represents merely a fresh new face committed to the same old policies in furtherance of the American empire -- as should be evident from the Democratic Congress' unabashed support for endless war, corporatism, and the centralization of power. 

Sadly, the difference between Obama and McCain is a lot like the difference between Coke and Pepsi: while some are committed partisans to one or the other, in the end, they are both little more than corporate products that ultimately just might kill you.