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]]>Under the War Powers Act of 1973, President Obama is required to report on where he has sent U.S. troops without specific Congressional authorization. In this year’s report, issued on Dec. 14, 2013, he revealed the five locations and missions described below in a post by Think Progress. For those who are keeping score, add these into the larger mystery of exactly how many official military bases the U.S. has around the world.
Jordan
The United States’ desire to see the Assad regime removed in Syria is no secret, nor is their support for several of the rebel groups working to oust the Syrian president. Friday’s letter to Congress served as a remind of just how much the U.S. is doing to bring this about, having left behind at the request of Jordan “a combat-equipped detachment of approximately 700 U.S. personnel remain in Jordan following participation in a training exercise that ended on June 20, 2013.” Among the equipment they are stationed along the Syrian border with includes “Patriot missile systems, fighter aircraft, and related support, command, control, and communications personnel and systems.” Their presence brings the total number of U.S. troops in Jordan to 1,500, among which are U.S. Special Forces of them are engaged in training Syrian rebels in tactics and providing military advice as needed.
Niger
“As indicated in my report of June 14, 2013, U.S. military personnel in Niger continue to provide support for intelligence collection and to facilitate intelligence sharing with French forces conducting operations in Mali and with other partners in the region,” Obama wrote to Congressional leaders. According to the White House, there are currently approximately 200 personnel deployed there at the time. The Sahel became noted as a prime area for counter-terrorism operations following al-Qaeda affiliate group Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) managed to takeover of most of northern Mali last year. In the aftermath of France’s intervention, the region has faded off the radar again, but the Washington Post in March of this year reported that the U.S. was establishing a drone base to conduct surveillance operations in West Africa.
Kosovo
Even though the intervention in Kosovo was more than a decade ago, the United States still has a sizable number of forces still in the former Serbian enclave. Once former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic capitulated, ending the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in the region, NATO opted following combat operations to leave behind a force known as KFOR to help keep the peace. “The U.S. contribution to KFOR is approximately 670 U.S. military personnel out of the total strength of approximately 4,900 personnel,” Obama informed Congress.
Central Africa
Made infamous through the social media campaign #Kony2012, the Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony has been dubbed a primary target of the United States, leading to the deployment of military personnel to aid African nations in the hunt for him. First deployed in 2011, the U.S. contingency of approximately 120 personnel is spread across the Republic of South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic in the hunt for Kony and other senior LRA leaders. “These forces, however, will not engage LRA forces except in self-defense,” Obama made clear in his letter.
Egypt
As part of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, a multinational force has been deployed between the two along the Sinai peninsula for decades. Originally meant to be a United Nations peacekeeping force, the U.N. was unable to comply due to the threat of a veto from the Soviet Union. In response, the U.S. worked with Egypt and Israel in setting up the Multinational Force and Observers. The U.S. joins Australia, Canada, Norway, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Fiji, Hungary, New Zealand, Columbia, Uruguay, and France in patrolling the region. 715 military personnel are assigned to the MFO currently, according to Obama.
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]]>Robert Redford’s latest movie, “The Company You Keep,” didn’t make me stand up and cheer, but it did make me think. The movie tells the tale of a group of former anti-Vietnam-War protesters, still on the run from the law more than 30 years later. One of the goals of the radical protesters of the 1960s and 1970s that the movie alludes to was to end the military draft. It was unfair—offering too many “easy outs” to privileged people like Dick Cheney [he had “other priorities” at the time], George W. Bush [he got a cushy assignment—which he may or may not have completed—in the reserves], and even Bill Clinton [who wangled his way out, too.] It was the mechanism that sucked an endless stream of 18- to 21-year-olds into the meat grinder of a futile war.
Eventually, we got our wish. In 1973, at the end of combat operations in Vietnam, America ended conscription and established a large, professional, all-volunteer military force.
But that fulfilled wish has had unintended consequences. The military now operates and lives in a world mostly isolated from civilian life, and war has become a spectator sport for most Americans. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t spark the same intensity of protest that we saw in the Viet Nam years.
Why? In an op-ed published in the New York Times [May 22, 2013], entitled “Americans and Their Military, Drifting Apart,” a former Army commander in Afghanistan and an emeritus history professor spell out some of the reasons, and offer arguments for reinstituting a modified military draft—and other ways to re-integrate civilian and military life.
What’s wrong with the all-volunteer model?
The all-volunteer military is failing America in several ways, say the authors—Karl W. Eikenberry and David M. Kennedy. In the absence of a military draft, Americans have become disengaged from the economics and the experience of war. Civilians are insulated from the military: Fewer serve, and a vastly reduced portion of Americans have contact with, help produce, or profit from the sale of war materials. We’re simply not as connected to the military as we once were, and our awareness of the issues involved in military service—and, of course—war itself—is dramatically diminished. It’s somebody else’s job, somebody else’s risk, somebody else’s war.
Eikenberry and Kennedy note that:
The modern force presents presidents with a moral hazard, making it easier for them to resort to arms with little concern for the economic consequences or political accountability. Meanwhile, Americans are happy to thank the volunteer soldiers who make it possible for them not to serve, and deem it somehow unpatriotic to call their armed forces to task when things go awry.
In other words, in the days of the compulsory military draft, more of us had skin in the game. Most civilians knew someone who was serving in the military. We could see the costs—economic, physical and emotional. We protested the Viet Nam war because we and our friends were at risk, as well as because the war itself was unwinnable—and therefore immoral—and ill-advised.
Moving toward a better system
Eikenberry and Kennedy offer several suggestions, such as:
-Institute a lottery draft:
[Such a s system would]…reintroduce the notion of service as civic obligation. The lottery could be activated when volunteer recruitments fell short, and weighted to select the best-educated and most highly skilled Americans, providing an incentive for the most privileged among us to pay greater heed to military matters.
-Re-establish the Total Force Doctrine
This philosophy…shaped the early years of the all-volunteer force, but was later dismantled. It called for large-scale call up of the reserves and National Guard at the start of any large, long deployment. Because these standby forces tend to contain older men and women, rooted in their communities, their mobilization would serve as a brake on going to war because it would disrupt their communities.
-Give Congress a larger role in war-making
Congress hasn’t formally declared war since World War II. Eikenberry and Kennedy say:
It’s high time to revisit the recommendation, made in 2008 by the bipartisan National War Powers Commission, to replace the 1973 War Powers Act, which requires notification of Congress after the president orders military action, with a mandate that the president consult with Congress before resorting to force.
-Pay for wars in real time
This is a lesson we are learning the hard way, in the wake of the economically disastrous, unpaid-for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eikenberry and Kennedy say:
Levying special taxes, rather than borrowing, to finance “special appropriations” would compel the body politic to bear the fiscal burden—and encourage citizens to consider war-making a political choice they were involved in, not a fait accompli they must accept.
The authors also suggest ways to break down the wall between civilian and military life, such as:
-Decrease reliance on contractors for non-combat tasks, so that the true size of the force would be more transparent
-Integrate veteran and civilian hospitals and rehabilitation facilities, which would let civilians see war’s wounded firsthand.
-Shrink self-contained residential neighborhoods on domestic military bases, so that more service members could pray, play and educate their children alongside their fellow Americans. We need to break down the civilian-military barrier and reinforce a sense of duty that that is critical to the health of our democratic republic, where the most important office is that of the citizen.
Of course, the best solution would be no wars–or at least no dumb wars and no trumped-up wars– and no need for a military or any kind of a draft. But that’s a utopian dream. If we must live with the reality of a military, we should at least try to do it better.
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]]>The post BBC documentary reveals American colonel who trained Iraqi torturers appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>A new documentary from the BBC (in cooperation with The Guardian newspaper) has revealed direct ties between the torture practices and death squads of the Shia militia in Iraq and an American trainer, who also is alleged to have trained Salvadoran death squads. Retired Col. James Steele was dispatched to Iraq by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and served under/with General Petraeus in Iraq. This was not the first time Petraeus and Steele cooperated. During El Salvador’s civil war, Steele trained special police brigades that have been linked to death squads and torture, when Petraeus visited the country to learn counter-insurgency techniques
Col. Steele’s history
Col. Steele’s military service goes back to Vietnam, where General George Patton Jr. called him “the best small-unit leader in my command.” After Vietnam, Col. Steele worked his way through the ranks, until El Salvador’s civil war heated up, with Steele being sent to train local “special Police brigades.” The units that Steele trained quickly became linked to accusations of torture and death squad activity. Former senior DEA agent Celerino Castillo knew Steele during his time in El Salvador, and has stated that when he heard that Steele had been sent to Iraq that the US was implementing the “Salvadoran option” to battle the insurgency.
Col. Steele was lauded for his work in El Salvador because the insurgency was stopped in its tracks. The cost to the people of El Salvador was more than 30,000 dead at the hands of the death squads. and many more tortured and abused. Col Steele was nominated to become one of the youngest full generals in the US military, but he was caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal, and was forced to retire early. The connections that Steele had from El Salvador included Dick Cheney. who turned to the retired officer to organize Panama’s new police force after the US threw out Noriega. In the periods between counter-insurgencies, Steele worked for corporations such as Enron and Buchanan as an “energy consultant.”.Buchanan has been accused of shady business practices in Liberia when Steele was with them, and Enron’s history speaks for itself.
“Salvadorization” of Iraq
In 2005, Peter Maas of the New York Times broke the story of former Col Steele’s return to counterinsurgency. The US invaders had been met with an insurgency, rather than the “flowers and candy” promised by the Bush administration. The war was becoming increasingly unpopular, and deaths among Iraqis and American troops were escalating. Steele arrived to replace efforts to train police by western policemen and turn to a more militarized option.
The insurgents were being led by those who had served under Saddam Hussein and were mostly members of the Sunni minority, which has long acted as leaders in Iraq. The Americans therefore turned to members of the Shia majority to act as the counter-insurgent forces. Steele worked alongside Col James H. Coffman, who reported directly to General David Petraeus on their progress in training the new special police brigades. Very quickly. the new Shia special police brigades gained a fearsome reputation in the areas they operated in, with accusations of torture surfacing almost immediately. When Peter Maas was invited by Steele to visit their operations to interview a Saudi insurgent, he reported walking into an office with blood dripping off the desk and hearing screams of pain and terror in the room next door. Col. Steele walked next door to where the screams were coming from. and the screams quickly ceased, so that Maas’s interview with the insurgent could proceed uninterrupted.
The leader of the special brigades was Adnan Thabit, an Iraqi officer who had been caught plotting to overthrow Saddam Hussein but had escaped with his life. Thabit has confirmed that Steele was the American trainer of his forces and knew exactly what he was up to. Thabit has also stated that although he disapproves of torture generally, that it is necessary to get “criminals to confess.”
Iraqi former general and government minister during Steele’s time in Iraq, Muntadher al-Samari, has also confirmed Steele’s knowledge of torture in Iraq. Al-Samari describes Steele seeing a prisoner suspended from the ceiling with bruising so severe that it would have been difficult to identify the individual. Describing Steele, al-Samari indicated his belief that Steele had been exposed to so much war and torture that he was incapable of “human feelings” and felt no empathy for the tortured prisoners he saw. After resigning his post from the gGovernment due to the abuse he witnessed, al-Samari was visited by Steele in Jordan. Steele questioned al-Samari about what he had witnessed and particularly asked if he had any physical proof of Steele’s actions such as documents or photos. Al-Samari now says he would be willing to testify about Steele’s knowledge of torture before a human rights court.
Torture was only a part of the special police brigade’s activity – they have also been accused in the deaths of thousands of opponents. At one point, 3,000 bodies were turning up in the streets of Iraq every month, with the majority attributed to the sectarian violence practiced by the Shia police brigades. So many bodies were being found that they were buried in local dumps. Most were not identifiable due to the extent of abuse and were buried with only tin cans to mark their locations.
Bradley Manning and Wikileaks
The BBC and The Guardian have attributed the genesis of their investigation into the abuses to documents released by Wikileaks in 2010. As of this writing, Bradley Manning has confessed to supplying these documents to Wikileaks. Manning has described the torture that he himself underwent as a result of revealing to the world the actions of the U.S. government involving torture and the deaths of innocent civilians. It is known that Steele reported directly not just to Petraeus, but wrote memos to Donald Rumsfeld, which were passed on to Dick Cheney and the White House. Meanwhile, retired Col. Steele lives quietly in Texas and earns large sums of money in return for speaking engagements on the subject of counter-insurgency.
Further reading:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13558.htm
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]]>The post Deciphering the double-speak of U.S. foreign policy appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>One of the most crazy-making aspects of political news is having to listen to government double-speak, especially when it involves foreign policy. When the White House, or the State Department, or the military issues a foreign policy statement, I listen for the code words that are hiding the truth of what’s really going on. I listen because I know I’m not being told the truth about whose interests our government’s foreign policy agenda is serving. The moral of the story is this: In this age of American imperialism on steroids, when listening to the nightly news, you better be wearing your secret decoder ring.
“Stability” sounds reassuring, doesn’t it?
Terms like “humanitarian mission,” “peace-keeping mission,” “American interests,” “national security,” or “stability” sound good. That’s because they are designed to elicit a sense of patriotism, idealism, and security for the majority of Americans. But they are sanitized terms that hide the real purpose of our hundreds of military bases around the world. This we can be sure of: those bases are not there to serve and protect you and me, or the people of our host countries. They are there to insure that corporations have access to natural resources, cheap labor, and markets. Many Americans vaguely know this, and, worse, believe that corporations having unfettered global access to what they want is good for America, but they know nothing of the ugly reality of U.S. aggression.
Young people are vulnerable to patriotic double-speak, which is used to manipulate them into joining our all volunteer army. If recruiters tell them they are needed to risk their lives to secure Wall Street profits, would they enlist?
Linguist Noam Chomsky on the code word “stability.”
Chomsky says “stability” means“conformity to American interests.” But, it helps to dig deeper. “American interests” are not your interests, or my interests, they are the interests of the upper 1%, and of Wall Street and global mega-corporations. So, the question Chomsky urges us to ask when the word, “stability” shows up on the evening news is, stability for whom and for what purpose?
Stability is—it’s kind of like democracy. Stability means conformity to our interests. So, for example, when Iran tries to expand its influence in Afghanistan and Iraq—neighboring countries—that’s called “destabilizing.” It’s part of the threat of Iran. It’s destabilizing the region. On the other hand, when the U.S. invades those countries, occupies them, half destroys them, that’s to achieve stability. And that is very common, even to the point where it’s possible to write—[as did the] former editor of Foreign Affairs—that when the U.S. overthrew the democratic government in Chile and instituted a vicious dictatorship, that was because the U.S. had to destabilize Chile to achieve stability. That’s in one sentence, and nobody noticed it, because that’s correct, if you understand the meaning of the word “stability.” Yeah, you overthrow a parliamentary government, you install a dictatorship, you invade a country and kill 20,000 people, you invade Iraq and kill hundreds of thousands of people—that’s all bringing about stability. Instability is when anyone gets in the way.
Iraq was defined as “unstable” as is Libya today. You may think the U.S. went to war with both countries to get rid of “unstable dictators” who posed a military threat to the United States. But that would be wrong. The United States has installed plenty of dictators to manage it’s many client states around the world. And neither Iraq or Libya posed a direct threat to the United States. What Iraq and Libya have in common is that they were/are independent nations that did not allow access to American corporations, or enough access to make the U.S. and other Western nations happy. Because they were not compliant and amenable to “American interests,” their leaders were considered unreliable “loose canons.”
Getting rid of loose canons
After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, leveled much of Baghdad with a bombing campaign the Pentagon called “shock and awe,” and got rid of Saddam, Gadhafi tried to ward off threatened aggression on Libya by making political and economic concessions to the U.S and other Western countries. He opened the economy to foreign banks and corporations, and he agreed to IMF demands for structural adjustment, i.e., privatizing many state-owned enterprises and cutting state subsidies on necessities like food and fuel. But in 2010, he began to be “difficult” and demanded terms that were not to the oil companies, or the IMF’s liking. The U.S. supported rebels, who oppose Gaddafi, appeared in 2011, waving the flag of the Western backed monarch he deposed in a coup in 1969.
No matter what you hear from the podiums in the White House or the State Department, we are not in Libya for humanitarian reasons. We are there to remove Gaddafi and install a reliable U.S. dictator who will give oil companies unfettered access to large proven quantities of sweet crude (the most sought after oil in the world) and to limit China’s access to Libyan oil. Also, the old Wheelus Air Force Base near Tripoli will make a handy staging point for the recently formed U.S. Africa Command, AFRICOM.
If you believe otherwise, then you really need to get a decoder ring.
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]]>The post U.S. military leads climate-change initiatives, and deniers know it appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>The U.S. military not only accepts the notion of climate change, its leaders see climate change as a national-security priority. But Congressional climate-change-deniers continue to pretend that the military’s full-speed-ahead program isn’t happening.
Looking at official policy statements reveals that the military is well on the way to spending vast sums of taxpayers’ dollars to deal with the national-security implications of global climate change. Yes, Senate and Congressional skeptics and deniers, you heard that right. The military establishment has solidly planted its boots in the camp of the tree-hugging, Sierra-clubbing, inconvenient-truthing climate changers.
Just take a glance at excerpts from the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review Report:
Climate change will shape the operating environment, roles, and missions. …The Department of Defense will need to adjust to the impacts of climate change on our facilities and military capabilities. …Climate change is expected to act as a “threat multiplier.”
Or try parsing the words of retired Navy Vice-Admiral Lee F. Gum, president of the American Security Project, to try to find a shred of evidence to refute the reality of climate change:
Addressing the consequences of changes in the Earth’s climate is not simply about saving polar bears or preserving the beauty of mountain glaciers. Climate change is a threat to our national security. Taking it head-on is about preserving our way of life.
And what about the claims of those who accept that climate change is real, but reject the role of human behavior? Perhaps they failed to read the official statements of the Department of Defense:
The Department is increasing its use of renewable energy demand to improve operational effectiveness, reduce greenhouse gas emissions in support of U.S. climate change initiatives [italics added], and protect the Department from energy price fluctuations. . . . The U.S. military is clearly working to address the twin threats of energy dependence and climate change.
Is it possible to explain away the words of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who identifies “energy as one of the Department’s top 25 ‘transformational priorities’ “? And Gates knows why that goal is at the top of the department’s list. At 80% of the U.S. government’s total energy consumption, defense is the largest government user of energy.
The evidence of the military treating climate change as settled fact is virtually everywhere: from official documents to policy statements. So, ignore the grandstanding of the skeptics and deniers, because the back story is that they’re not about to publicly affirm the truth that a momentous shift in energy policy is happening virtually under the radar. And that this shift was initiated at the very top by President Obama. The President, taking advantage of his seat at the head of the table, has quietly exploited his prerogatives as commander-in-chief to outline and implement bold and far-reaching renewable-energy initiatives within the military.
The number of program initiatives is staggering and the costs of implementation huge. And make no mistake about it: whatever the public positions of the deniers and skeptics, their sacred cows—the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force—are fully in the game.
Army Initiatives
Navy Initiatives
Air Force Initiatives
Facts? Military policy? Skeptics still stonewalling
The 2010 election seated at the legislative table the greatest number of climate skeptics and deniers the House and Senate has ever seen: 56 percent of the new Republican caucus in the House and 74 percent of Republican senators. These far-righters choose to ignore—with impunity—facts , figures, and conclusions based on sound science. Unfortunately, for Americans as well as for the global community, they may be winning their cynical and dangerous game.
Dismissing the conclusions of the more than three thousand earth scientists from around the globe who study climate change and who have affirmed that human activity is, in fact, a contributing factor in changing mean temperatures, the skeptics and deniers exploit the complexity of the science to confuse and misrepresent. The result? The public is fed a steady diet of increasingly outrageous misinformation peddled by politicians who are beholden to the oil, gas, and nuclear-energy lobbies.
Incredibly, the skeptics and deniers seem to be getting away with it. But can they get away with dismissing the conclusions of their own military? To put this issue in perspective, when was the last time these same conservatives were skeptical about any policy, decision, or request from the military establishment? Just take a look at the Ryan budget. Is military spending on the list of Republican austerity cuts? Of course not.
Look closer and the hypocrisy is even more stunning. The skeptics and deniers pander on the one hand to the traditional energy industry—some of their major campaign donors—while pretending on the other that the fully funded program well under way in the military to develop and use alternative energy is motivated by something other than climate change.
If the pretenders have their way, their stonewalling and hypocrisy may ensure catastrophic long-term effects that will be particularly disruptive in the developing world—that is, if the government of the country that contributes the greatest quantity of greenhouse gases into the global atmosphere—yes, that would be us—fails to muster the political courage to take even the first tentative steps toward reducing our polluting ways.
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