We frequently get reports of how civilians, including women and children, get killed in air strikes by drones and other military aircraft. But why does this keep happening, when the technology is now supposed to be so advanced that people can be identified at long range? Surely you should be able to at least be able to make out children to alert you that you are not engaging fighters?

This article, based on military documents and transcripts of cockpit and radio conversations obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, describes in detail how one such tragedy came about. It shows the power of confirmation bias, how when you are determinedly looking for something, you interpret events as supporting your beliefs even if they do not.

While attention is focused on Libya, the authorities in Bahrain, aided by Saudi Arabian forces, are brutally cracking down on demonstrators in that country, turning it into an ‘island of fear’.

Joe Stork of the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the apparent police beatings featured in the latest pictures as “extremely disturbing”.

“Bahrain is now a state where the police are acting with complete impunity. There is no accountability, not even an effort to cover up what is going on,” said Mr Stork, HRW’s Middle East and Bahraini expert.

This is a wonderful local organization that is trying to stop the US’s endless wars around the world. You can get more information at its website or by phone at 216-736-4716 or email to noacinfo@aol.com.

They are having a demonstration to end US/NATO Military Strikes on Libya.

‘Stop US/ NATO War on Libya’ Demonstration – Come to the Rally and Judge for Yourself
Friday, April 8, 3-4:30 pm,
the Federal Bldg., Lakeside Ave. and East
9th St., downtown Cleveland

[Read more…]

Barack Obama steadily accumulates king-like powers, an affinity for an imperial presidency that he deplored when Bush/Cheney displayed that trait in office.

PolitiFact finds that in the way he has gone to war against Libya, Obama has done the ‘Full Flop’, their term for an unambiguous 180-degree switch from what he said as a candidate, which was that, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

But that is not the only ‘Full Flop’ by Obama. As a candidate he advocated strong transparency and praised whistleblowers as important in preventing waste, abuse, and inefficiency and promised them greater protections. As president, he now attacks whistleblowers and journalists with a passion that exceeds even Bush/Cheney. The mainstream media did not seem to care as long as the targeted whistleblowers were merely government employees. Now that the ever-deferential New York Times is also being targeted, it will be interesting to see how they respond.

Glenn Greenwald talks about how Obama is now even attacking our Miranda rights. But everything is sunny in Obama Land where he can do no wrong and his reputation as a constitutional scholar remains unsullied.

[T]he good thing about being Barack Obama is that you’re justified in what you do even when you first do X and then do Not X.

Thus, when you argue that wars need Congressional approval, you’re standing up for the Constitution; when you start a war without Congressional approval, you’re a humanitarian. When you announce you will release torture photos in the government’s possession, you’re a stalwart defender of transparency; when you change your mind two weeks later and announce you’ll conceal those photos, you’re standing up for The Troops. When you give Miranda warnings to Terrorism suspects, you’re honoring the Rule of Law and protecting American values; when you turn around and deny those very same rights, you’re showing your devotion to Keeping us Safe.

Barack Obama must be channeling Mel Brooks as King Louis XVI in the film The History of the World, Part 1 who did anything he wanted without suffering any consequence, all the while saying, “It’s good to be the king.”

Obama is enabled in this by the amount of deference he receives from his followers, which is similar to what Bush/Cheney received from their fans. For example, Kevin Drum is a blogger at Mother Jones who can be labeled a centrist. He recently wrote about his concerns about Obama’s decision to attack Libya:

So what should I think about this? If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I’d literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he’s smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust his judgment, and I still do.

This is quite extraordinary. It is one thing to say that when someone whose judgment you respect disagrees with you, it gives you pause. That pause presumably makes you investigate further until you can justify your prior judgment or learn something new that changes your view. It is quite another to say that you would simply take that judgment over your own when you disagree.

One could also say that on an issue which one has no expertise to evaluate and arrive at a reasonably informed judgment because of the technical knowledge involved (say climate change or details of evolutionary theory or cosmology or monetary policy), one goes with the judgment of people whom one trusts to have the required expertise and judgment.

But that is not the case with Libya, which involves principles and policies that can and should be publicly articulated as part of the process of persuading the Congress and the nation that going to war is justified, unless one thinks that Obama has reasons that he cannot divulge to the country. But then we are entering “We have secret information that Saddam Hussein has WMD” territory and we know how that ends up.

James Madison got it right when he said, “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

The Obama Department of Justice has announced that it is giving up on the original plan to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged leader of the 9/11 plot, in a regular court in New York City and will instead use a military tribunal in Guantanamo. This is shameful. As Glenn Greenwald says:

Indeed, as I’ve documented before — virtually every country that suffers horrible Terrorist attacks — Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia — tries the accused perpetrators in its regular court system, on their own soil, usually in the city that was attacked. The U.S. — Land of the Free and Home of the Brave — stands alone in being too afraid to do so.

Related to that: the notion that political opinion in America would not allow Obama to do anything differently on these issues is empirically disproven; he ran on a platform of opposing all the measures he now supports and won decisively. By itself, that proves that — when these debates are engaged rather than conceded — these positions are politically sustainable. Obama adopts Bush Terrorism policies because he wants to and has no reason not to — not because doing so is a political necessity.

Finally — and as is usually true for this excuse — the notion that “Congress made him do it” is totally false: aside from the fact that the Obama administration long ago announced that it would retain the military commission system, the White House — long before Congress acted to ban transfers of detainees to the U.S. — removed decision-making power from the DOJ in the KSM case and made clear it would likely reverse Holder’s decision.

[UPDATE: Dahlia Lithwick also excoriates the Obama administration on its reversal.]

Elsewhere, Jason Ditz recounts the history of excuses on not closing Guantanamo.

Things are never quite what they seem on the surface when it comes to international affairs. Pepe Escobar writing in the Asia Times describes what went on behind the scenes prior to the Arab League resolution on Libya.

On Wednesday, April 5 from 2:00-3:30 (Eastern time) there will be a live video stream of Fight Back USA! a national teach-in on “Austerity, Debt, Corporate Greed (and what YOU can do about it).”

197 campuses are participating but for some reason my own is not on the list as yet.

Israel has a long history of awful treatment of the Palestinians, treating them in a way that has been compared to the apartheid system used by the white minority in South Africa to oppress the blacks. But Israel has got even worse in recent days. Ran Ha Cohen describes the rise of outright racism in Israel. Israeli police are even reported to be illegally arresting arrest five-year old Palestinian children.

The occupation of Palestinian is becoming so ugly that New Yorker editor David Remnick calls for it to end and has led even strong supporters of Israel like Jeffrey Goldberg (who has served in the Israel Defense Forces) to speculate that Israel could soon no longer claim the label of being democratic. Ilan Pappé, a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK and director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, goes further and says:

Israel is definitely not a democracy. A country that occupies another people for more than 40 years and disallow them the most elementary civic and human rights cannot be a democracy. A country that pursues a discriminatory policy against a fifth of its Palestinian citizens inside the 67 borders cannot be a democracy. In fact Israel is, what we use to call in political science a herrenvolk democracy, its democracy only for the masters. The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is useless and meaningless if you don’t give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the State, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level from official legislation through governmental practices, and social and cultural attitudes, Israel is only a democracy for one group, one ethnic group, that given the space that Israel now controls, is not even a majority group anymore, so I think that you’ll find it very hard to use any known definition of democracy which will be applicable for the Israeli case.

The growth of outright racist views often voiced by rabbis, and its tolerance by the Israeli government and higher echelons of society, is causing some concern within that country amongst people who fear the emergence of a theocracy: “Hundreds of rabbis sign a manifesto prohibiting Jews from renting or selling apartments to non-Jews, yet no response is heard from the justice minister. The chief rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliahu, continuously incites and no criminal or disciplinary procedures were commenced against him.”

As Juan Cole points out, the racism in Israel is already quite overt as can be seen in the restrictions on interfaith marriage.

Israel, like Lebanon and some Muslim countries, for the most part makes no provision for civil marriage, requiring individuals to marry within the religious law of their sect. Israel’s rabbinate opposes civil marriage in part out of fear it would encourage inter-faith marriage. At the moment, couples of different faith heritages in Israel must go to Cyprus or elsewhere abroad to marry, and have the marriage recognized on their return. Such a marriage cannot be performed in Israel itself.

It is no secret that Israel, and its lobby in the US, have been urging a military attack on Iran. US leaders routinely threaten Iran with the possibility of a nuclear attack by saying that ‘the nuclear option is not off the table’. Israel makes sure everyone is aware that it can and will attack Iran at a moment’s notice if given the green light by the US, and both countries have repeatedly and recently invaded other countries in that region. And yet it is Iran, which has not attacked any neighbor for over a millennium, that is portrayed in the media here as the dangerous extremist nation, while the US and Israel are the ‘moderates’.

I have been puzzled by Israel’s preoccupation with Iran since the leaders of Iran are not stupid and are not likely to use any nuclear weapons it manufactures because of certain and overwhelming retaliation. It seems pretty obvious to me that if they seek nuclear weapons at all, it is as a deterrent to attacks on them by the US and Israel. I am more fearful of the Israeli or US governments using nuclear weapons because they refuse to deny that they are willing to use them (and the US has used them in the past) and there is no deterrence to their use.

Juan Cole provides a possible explanation for Israel’s preoccupation with Iran, based on cables released by WikiLeaks. Apparently Israel is concerned that the rate of immigration is slowing down and that its demographic edge over the native Arab population might soon disappear.

The Jewish Agency, which was created to promote the immigration to Israel of Jews all over the world, has conceded that the era of mass immigration by Jews is over. This peaked in the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of Jews — and many non-Jews — flooded into the country after the Soviet Union collapsed.
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This year, the Jewish Agency expects around 18,000 Jews to move to Israel from the United States and elsewhere and the number is likely to dwindle.

Israel’s demographic makeup has undergone dramatic change in recent years. Out of a population of around 7 million, one-fifth are Palestinian Arabs. Another large minority is made up of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are non-Jews as defined by Jewish religious law, or Halaka.

The rise in power of right-wing orthodox Jewish religious groups and their attempts to impose their absurdly restrictive lifestyle on the still significantly large secular population is causing tensions within the country. What is happening is that the new immigrants from Russia and the former Eastern bloc countries seem to be more anti-Arab, pro-settlement, and hard line nationalists. The Israeli government may be fearful that if Iran did manage to produce nuclear weapons, then its Jewish population that has been made so fearful of Iran would emigrate in even larger numbers, worsening the demographic problem. The government’s own polling says that one-third of Israelis would emigrate if Iran developed a nuclear weapon. The people who are most likely to leave are the more secular modernist elements, leaving the country even more firmly in the grip of its religious extremists. If this happens it will result in an Israel that looks like the Jewish equivalent of mullah-dominated Islamist states in which the religious nutters impose their crazy rules on everyone, whether they are believers or not. One Israeli Minister warns that Israel is already turning into Iran.

Whenever religion gains influence over a government, the results are bad. Religion is a menace and we would all be better off without it.

There is a legend that each outgoing president writes a letter to the person succeeding him and on his last day in office leaves it in the desk in the Oval Office for the new president to read. The contents of the letters are not revealed but based on the pattern of history, I think I have figured out what it says.

It consists of a single sentence: “Bomb another country.”

Glenn Greenwald discusses how the doctrine that the president is unconstrained by either the Constitution or the Congress is being advanced even more vigorously, that “the Obama administration is arrogating unto the President the unilateral, unrestrained right to start wars in all circumstances, whether or not the U.S. is attacked.” And Obama’s defenders are using the same arguments they criticized when Bush’s defenders used them when he similarly ignored the constitution.

Greenwald adds:

Then there’s the notion that Presidents in the past have started similar wars without Congressional approval. That’s certainly true, but so what? The fact that an act is commonplace isn’t a defense or justification. That “defense” was also a common refrain of Bush followers to justify their leader’s chronic unconstitutional acts and other forms of law-breaking: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and FDR interned Japanese-Americans, so why are you upset that Bush is acting outside the law? The pervasiveness of this form of thought underscores the dangers of learned acquiescence: once a government engages long enough or pervasively enough in a certain form of criminality or corruption, the citizenry is trained to accept it and collectively ceases to resist it, even learns to embrace it. What Obama is doing in Libya is either lawful or it isn’t on its own terms; whether other Presidents in the past have acted similarly (and they have) is irrelevant.
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One’s views on the desirability of the Libya war have absolutely nothing to do with whether Obama has acted legally and/or whether his theories of presidential power are valid. This, too, should have been decisively settled during the Bush years, when Bush followers invariably argued that Bush was justified in eavesdropping without warrants or torturing because of the good outcomes it produced (Keeping Us Safe) — as though Presidents have the power to violate laws or transgress Constitutional limits provided they can prove that doing so produces good results. The one and only safeguard against tyranny is that political leaders are subjected to the constraints of the Constitution and law (we’re a nation of laws or a nation of men, said Adams: you must choose). To argue that you’re supportive of or indifferent to lawless acts because of the good results they produce is simply another way of yearning for a benevolent tyrant (and is another way of replicating the mindset of the Bush follower).