China Seizes Lead in Alternative Energy

China Seizes Lead in Alternative Energy: "

The Chinese have leapt past Western competitors in the race for alternative energy, becoming the world’s largest makers of wind turbines and solar panels. And they’re not done yet. —JCL

The New York Times:

China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year.

China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.

These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.

‘Most of the energy equipment will carry a brass plate, ‘Made in China,’ ’ said K. K. Chan, the chief executive of Nature Elements Capital, a private equity fund in Beijing that focuses on renewable energy.

Read more

"

(Via Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines.)

Nostalgia for Bush/Cheney radicalism

Nostalgia for Bush/Cheney radicalism: "

As has been voluminously documented here, one of the most notable aspects of the first year of the Obama presidency has been how many previously controversial Bush/Cheney policies in the terrorism and civil liberties realms have been embraced. Even Obama's most loyal defenders often acknowledge that, as Micheal Tomasky recently put it, 'the civil liberties area has been [Obamas] worst. This is the one area in which the presidents actions dont remotely match the candidates promises.' From indefinite detention and renditions to denial of habeas rights, from military commissions and secrecy obsessions to state secrets abuses, many of the defining Bush/Cheney policies continue unabated under its successor administration.

Despite all that, there is substantial political pressure from all directions for Obama to reverse the very few decisions where he actually deviated from Bush/Cheney radicalism in these areas. In the wake of extreme political pressure, mostly from Democrats, the White House just forced Eric Holder to retreat on his decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City, and numerous Democrats now appear prepared to join with the GOP to cut-off funding for civilian trials altogether, forcing the administration to try all Terrorists in military commissions or just hold them indefinitely. The administration has created a warped multi-tiered justice system where only a select few even get civilian trials -- those whom they know in advance they can convict -- yet there are growing signs that the President will abandon even that symbolic, piecemeal nod to due process.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post is publishing demands from former Bush CIA and NSA Chief Michael Hayden -- who presided over the blatantly criminal warrantless eavesdropping program -- that Obama must even more closely model his Terrorism policies on Bushs, as though the architects of Bushs illegal policies are our Guiding Lights when deciding what to do now. Even Obamas own top intelligence official criticized the Justice Departments decision to treat Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as what he is -- a criminal -- and accord him normal due process. And an internal Justice Department investigation which -- under Bush -- had concluded that John Yoo and Jay Bybee committed ethical violations in their authoring of the 'torture memos' and should be investigated by their state bars has now, under Obama, reportedly been changed -- whitewashed -- to conclude that they acted appropriately (even if their written opinions exhibited 'poor judgment').

In sum, there is clearly a bipartisan and institutional craving for a revival (more accurately: ongoing preservation) of the core premise of Bush/Cheney radicalism: that because were 'at war' with Terrorists, our standard precepts of justice and due process do not apply and, indeed, must be violated. To relieve ourselves of guilt and of the bad lingering taste left from having such discredited and unpopular leadership for eight years, we collectively pretended for a little while to regret the excesses of the Bush/Cheney approach to such matters. But its now crystal clear that the country, especially its ruling elite, is either too petrified of Terrorism and/or too enamored of the powers which that fear enables to accept any real changes from the policies that were supposedly such a profound violation 'of our values.' One can only marvel at the consensus outrage generated by the mere notion that we charge people with crimes and give them trials if we want to lock them in a cage for life. Indeed, what was once the most basic and defining American principle -- the State much charge someone with a crime and give them a fair trial in order to imprison them -- has been magically transformed into Leftist extremism.

To see how radical our establishment consensus in this area has become, just consider two facts. First, look at the Terrorism policies of what had previously been the most right-wing administration in Americas history: the Reagan administration. In this post yesterday, Larry Johnson does quite a good job of documenting how Terrorism by Islamic radicals had been a greater problem in the 1980s than it is now. There was the 1983 bombing of our Marine barracks in Lebanon, a 1982 and 1984 bombing of Jewish sites in Argentina, numerous plane hijackings, the blowing up of a Pan Am jet, the Achille Lauro seizure, and what the State Department called 'a host of spectacular, publicity-grabbing events that ultimately ended in coldblooded murder' (many masterminded by Abu Nidal).

Despite that, read the official policy of the Reagan Administration when it came to treating Terrorists, as articulated by the top Reagan State Department official in charge of Terrorism policies, L. Paul Bremer, in a speech he entitled 'Counter-Terrorism: Strategies and Tactics:'

Another important measure we have developed in our overall strategy is applying the rule of law to terrorists. Terrorists are criminals. They commit criminal actions like murder, kidnapping, and arson, and countries have laws to punish criminals. So a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are -- criminals -- and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them.

It was also Ronald Reagan who signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 -- after many years of countless, horrific Terrorist attacks -- which not only declared that there are 'no exceptional circumstances whatsoever' justifying torture, but also required all signatory countries to 'ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law' and -- and Reagan put it -- 'either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.' And, of course, even George W. Bush -- at the height of 9/11-induced Terrorism hysteria -- charged attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid with actual crimes and processed him through our civilian courts.

How much clearer evidence can there be of how warped and extremist weve become on these matters? The express policies of the right-wing Ronald Reagan -- 'applying the rule of law to terrorists'; delegitimizing Terrorists by treating them as 'criminals'; and compelling the criminal prosecution of those who authorize torture -- are now considered on the Leftist fringe. Merely advocating what Reagan explicitly adopted as his policy -- 'to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against' Terrorists -- is now the exclusive province of civil liberties extremists. In those rare cases when Obama does what Reagans policy demanded in all instances and what even Bush did at times -- namely, trials and due process for accused Terrorists -- he is attacked as being 'Soft on Terror' by Democrats and Republicans alike. And the mere notion that we should prosecute torturers (as Reagan bound the U.S. to do) -- or even hold them accountable in ways short of criminal proceedings -- is now the hallmark of a Far Leftist Purist. Thats how far weve fallen, how extremist our political consensus has become.

Second, consider the company we keep, specifically where our mentality falls on the spectrum that defines the rest of the world. Countries which have been victimized by horrific terrorist attacks over the last several years -- Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia -- have tried and convicted the perpetrators as criminals in their civilian court system, right in their normal courthouses, in the heart of the cities that were the target of the attacks. These countries -- which arent protected by oceans and (in the case of India and Indonesia) arent bordered by friendly countries -- didnt invent special military commission to abridge due process or simply imprison the accused without a trial. They didnt pour water down their throats, freeze them, disorient them with sleep deprivation, or hang them naked from the ceiling. Instead, they followed the Reagan administrations policy for dealing with Terrorists -- 'use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them' -- despite the fact that they had suffered deadly attacks.

By contrast, look at what Libya is doing. The U.S. has, for decades, harshly criticized Libya as one of the most tyrannical and uncivilized regimes on the planet. In 2008, the State Department not only amazingly condemned that country for 'torture' (which included such U.S.-embraced methods as 'depriving detainees of sleep, food, and water; hanging by the wrists; suspending from a pole inserted between the knees and elbows . . . . threatening with dog attacks'), but also for indefinitely detaining people without trials ('The law stipulates that detainees can be held for investigation after being arrested up to eight days. In practice security services can hold detainees indefinitely. Although the law requires that detainees be informed of the charges against them, it was not enforced in practice. The law states that in order to renew a detention order detainees must be brought before a judicial authority at regular intervals of 30 days, but in practice security services detained persons for indefinite periods without a court order').

Consistent with those abuses, Libya just announced its new policy for how it will treat accused Al Qaeda Terrorists -- a policy that should sound quite familiar to all Americans:

Libya will hold up to 300 al Qaeda members in jail indefinitely after they have completed their prison terms to stop them staging fresh attacks, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said on Thursday.
'These people are heretics. They are followers of (Osama) Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. They killed a number of civilians and police,' Gaddafi told a gathering of his top legislative body, referring to al Qaeda's two global commanders.
'It is a necessity to keep them in prison. They are very dangerous as they are ready to resume killing people in our streets here or travel to Algeria or Egypt or elsewhere to stage attacks,' he said in remarks broadcast on state television and monitored in Rabat.

At least Libya seems to be indefinitely imprisoning those who were at one time convicted; the U.S., by contrast, is doing so with regard to detainees who have never been charged, let alone convicted, of anything. Saudi Arabia has a similar policy of simply imprisoning people in the name of Terrorism without trials or due process.

So thats where the American consensus now lies. The practices used by Britain, Spain, India and Indonesia (and the Reagan administration) of treating Terrorists as criminals and convicting them in normal courts -- with due process -- is too fringe Leftist for the United States, which has spent decades sermonizing to the rest of the world about the need for due process and the evils of arbitrary detention. Instead, our political and media establishment demands that we replicate the policies of Libya and Saudi Arabia: simply hold accused Terrorists without trials or, at most, invent special due-process-abridging military tribunals to ensure they are convicted.

George Bush and Dick Cheney ended up as two of the most despised political leaders of the last century, so our establishment had to pretend that they, too, found their policies to be distasteful and extreme. But that was clearly a pretense. In those very rare instances where Obama and his Attorney General try to deviate, theyre accused (including by leading members of their own party) of accommodating 'the Far Left' and being 'Soft on Terror.' The undeniable truth is that our establishment craves Bush/Cheney policies because it is as radical as they are. That one is automatically accused of being too Leftist merely by literally reciting Reagan administration policy on Terrorists (in words if not deeds) -- and that one can be 'centrist' only by standing with the due-process-denying practices of Libya and Saudi Arabia -- reflects just how far the American spectrum has regressed."

(Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.)

America's Dollar Disaster

America's Dollar Disaster: "The gridlock in Washington is more than just a political problem. Jeffrey E. Garten on the dollar's coming decline-and the terrible ripple effects ahead.
Most analyses of the president's State-of-the-Union speech Wednesday night have dwelled on its..."

(Via The Daily Beast - Blogs and Stories.)

Bob Herbert: A Radical Treasure

Op-Ed Columnist: A Radical Treasure: "Think of what this country would be like if Howard Zinn and others like him never bothered to fight for what they believed in."

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

How About Freezing Defense Spending?

How About Freezing Defense Spending?: "

How did we get into such a budget mess? The disastrous Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (passed by reconciliation, thank you very much) and two never-ending wars, replete with extremely lucrative contracts to political allies like Eric Prince. Which brings us to spending freezes.

This morning, both Greenwald and Ackerman weigh in on defense spending. Their voices have been bolstered by Senator Ben Cardin's, who tells Obama to freeze military spending, too:

'Defense represents a significant part of our discretionary spending in this country. The defense establishment needs to be under fiscal discipline, as do all of our agencies.' Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) told reporters in the Capitol. 'I don't think defense should be exempt. If there are extraordinary things that occur that require us to respond for national security, we always will be prepared to do that. But to exempt the normal military spending just because it's military, to me, is wrong.'

The U.S. government spends more on defense than on all other discretionary spending combined, according to the Congressional Budget office.

The CBO estimated that for fiscal year 2009, the government will spend $584 billion on non-defense discretionary spending. Meanwhile, the U.S. will lay out $657 billion on defense spending. That would make it 4.6 percent of the gross domestic product, the highest share since 1992, when the Cold War ended.

That spending is not sustainable, as a just-released White Paper from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments explains (via Ackerman).

[D]efense spending has risen to a historically high level, in real dollars. The [fiscal year] 2010 budget requested $534 billion in discretionary and $4 billion in mandatory funding for the base defense budget and an additional $130 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This exceeds the previous peak in total defense spending of $517 billion in Fy 1986, adjusting for inflation. However, defense spending as a percent of GDP is not at a historically high level because over the past several decades the overall economy has grown faster than defense spending. This suggests that the current level of defense spending, while high, remains affordable by historical standards. But given the state of the federal budget and the ongoing cost of the wars, it is unlikely the base defense budget will be able to maintain the rate of growth experienced over the past ten years.

As an example, here's a chart from that report, just showing aircraft procurement. Ackerman:

In last year’s budget, that spending represented 5 percent of the budget, or between $38.6 billion and $40.1 billion, depending on whether you want to include funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in your calculation or not.

You see that bright green line? The one at the top? The one that’s way higher than all its colorful competitors? That represents procurement funding for combat aircraft.

Has it sunk in yet?

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say we don’t use combat aircraft in the wars we’re fighting.

You want to show fiscal discipline? Look to where the bloat and the waste really resides in our budget, and freeze discretionary defense spending, too. That doesn't mean abandoning the troops or national security. It means ending defense contractor welfare."

(Via Daily Kos.)

Steve Clemons: Obama Freeze Forfeits Americas Future

Steve Clemons: Obama Freeze Forfeits America's Future: "

Barack Obama's plan to unveil tonight a non-defense discretionary spending freeze for the next three years will essentially forfeit America's growth future to China.

China has been massively investing in its high speed rail, its science labs, its educational system, its roads, its energy grid an its information super-duper highway. It has been obsessed with job retention and job creation. It has been building a mind-boggling number of every kind of power plant imaginable -- natural gas, high end coal, low end coal. It's investing in next gen renewable energy projects on a scale larger than the United States. It has been subsidizing all of this with a neo-mercantilist currency policy, pumping exports which it finances to consumers not only in the US but all over the world. China flaunts a robust 'Buy China' requirement in its government and semi-private industrial procurements and contracting.

And the President of the United States, one year into his job, and still dealing with the tail winds of the worst economic disaster in global markets and the US economy since the Great Depression, is saying that he is going to freeze spending on virtually everything but the wars we have on hand.

America needs to invest in itself.

This economic crisis we continue to flounder in with effective unemployment higher than 19%, according to Leo Hindery's valuable monthly head-knocking reminders, requires leadership and decisive, large scale action to make the investments in America and its manufacturing and innovation base that create recurring returns to the nation over time.

Obama's team, content to have bailed out Wall Street, seem to now run the rest of the economy on a cash accounting basis. That's bad, self-defeating policy.

What needs to be run on a cash accounting basis -- that is not -- is the part of the budget Obama seems not to want to reign in.....a huge, runaway bill to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, the cost of America's Iraq engagement will still run more than $150 billion. And add to that $100 billion plus for Afghanistan.

One QUARTER OF A TRILLION DOLLARS is what the US is spending on two nations, Iraq and Afghanistan that together have a COMBINED GDP of just $23 billion.

That is lunacy. Americans have a US President who is going to say tonight -- we cannot afford our future, we cannot afford investment in ourselves, but we can afford to bail out Wall Street financiers, and we can afford to pump $250 billion into two small countries abroad, but we can't afford to do the right things by American working families -- who deserve far better.

There are parts of what the President's team is doing -- particularly what Jared Bernstein, Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee have been working on -- that I do support.

But the broader issue that we are going to cease deep investment in the US in a way that is big, significant and consequential -- while China does everything the reverse that we are doing and reaps the rewards is a sign of America's collapse, not America rebuilding itself."

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Tom Engelhardt: Our Wars Are Killing Us

Tom Engelhardt: Our Wars Are Killing Us: "It’s time for Americans to stop saluting and end the Pentagon’s free ride before America’s wars kill us. "

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Freeze This: No Intelligent Being Believes There isn’t Bloat in the Defense Budget

Freeze This: No Intelligent Being Believes There isn’t Bloat in the Defense Budget: "Everyone in Washington who studies the Pentagon budget quickly finds gobs and gobs of wasteful spending. Not some people. Not dirty hippies. Every. Single. Defense. Analyst. If I were so inclined, I could spend my days doing nothing but attending conferences on the latest defense jeremiad or policy paper about how to cut it. I already spend too much of my time reading this stuff on defense-community email listservs.

For the Obama administration to exempt defense spending from its kinda-sorta-spending-freeze is a position that makes no sense from a policy perspective. None at all. From a political perspective, it only begins to make sense because a brain-dead media would amplify the braying ignorance blasted from a GOP congressional megaphone about Defense Spending Cuts OMG. And even then it doesn’t make sense. A holdover Republican Defense Secretary is now the biggest advocate of an even slightly sensible defense budget in the Obama administration."

(Via Firedoglake.)

The Fiscal Pivot

The Fiscal Pivot: "It is simply astonishing that the GOP is now posing as a party of fiscal responsibility. It's like Bristol Palin campaigning against teen pregnancy. They cannot be allowed to get away with this canard without a thorough accounting of their own profound responsibility for the current state of affairs. Obama was forced to spend in his first year to avoid a second Great Depression. He must be careful not to overdo it and risk a double dip. But he must make solvent government his core objective and he must pound that home day after day, even as he also focuses on jobs. Without that kind of reform, no one should have long term faith in the US economy - because its political system is failing it."

(Via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

The Bad Ideas Epidemic

The Bad Ideas Epidemic: "After a year in office, Obama still hasn't moved America beyond dead ideas on health care, financial markets, and taxes. Matt Miller on the need for new thinking.
As Barack Obama marks his first anniversary in office, America confronts a harsh truth:..."

(Via The Daily Beast - Blogs and Stories.)

Spending Freeze: Bad Policy, Bad Politics

Spending Freeze: Bad Policy, Bad Politics: "Christopher Hayes There's lots of progressive backlash in the blogosphere to the announcement that the president is going to call for a multi-year freeze on "non-security discretionary spending," in the State of the Union.
The anger is totally justified, but I'll let others handle the policy of this. (Short version: it's criminally stupid).
But let me talk about the politics. I'm sure that in the short term it polls well. Most voters don't have a great grasp of what makes up the federal budget and the fact that about two-thirds of what the government does is security and social insurance for the elderly. Thanks to decades of right-wing attacks on Big Government, many people think that most of what the government spends money on are things like food stamps and foreign aid.
That's why this is so inexcusably insidious: because it uses the full power of the bully pulpit to reaffirm and endorse a kind of ignorance that the right-wing has spent years stoking, and in so doing further erodes what little conceptual and rhetorical foundation we have domestically for social democracy. It may be a head fake, the fine print may basically have a lot of loopholes, in which case the policy itself won't be terrible, but again it reinforces the enemy's narrative: that government spends too much on "programs," that defense and "security" spending doesn't count for the deficit and that times of economic misery and widespread unemployment the solution is fiscal austerity.
I wish there was a way to sue for political malpractice, because what we're seeing from the White House and congressional Democrats these last two weeks would make for a depressingly good case."

(Via The Nation: Top Stories.)

Jacob Heilbrunn: President Obama: Replace Bernanke With Volcker

Jacob Heilbrunn: President Obama: Replace Bernanke With Volcker: "

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is finished. Whether or not you blame Bernanke for the current economic crisis doesn't even really matter. The fact is that with Senators Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold coming out against renominating Bernanke for a fresh term, Bernanke could, at best, stumble over the finish line, and probably won't. He'll have to withdraw. The sooner he does, the better.

Already the upheaval and uncertainty has the markets tumbling. But there's an obvious fix for Obama: nominate 82-year-old Paul Volcker to run the Fed again. It's time for the seasoned old guy who rescued the American economy in the 1980s to pull off a second act. Already Obama is signing off on Volcker's prudent recommendations to limit banks from engaging in dicey activities such as owning hedge funds, while taxpayers shoulder the risk. Now he should entrust Volcker with stewardship over the economy.

Volcker is a modest man. A few years ago I saw him at a conference at the Four Seasons hotel in Washington, DC and told him, 'You're the guy who saved the economy.' He shrugged his shoulders, laughed, and said, 'If you say so.' But lurking underneath his amiable exterior is a shrewd and decisive leader who crushed double-digit inflation in the early 1980s, a feat that set up the economy for several decades of growth.

In short, Volcker has credibility. No one is better positioned to crack down on Wall Street excesses and push through genuine deficit reduction than Volcker. Maybe Bernanke, who will continue to serve on the Fed's Board of Governors until 2020, can watch Volcker and learn from him. By that time, he may be ready to run the Fed himself again. But for now, it's over. The only question is who Obama will decide to appoint in his stead. It should be an easy decision."

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Bob Herbert: They Still Don’t Get It

Op-Ed Columnist: They Still Don’t Get It: "The Democrats seem not just helpless to deal with the crisis, but completely out of touch with the hardships that have fallen on so many Americans."

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

The SCOTUS Decision

The SCOTUS Decision: "

I know readers are befuddled by my relative silence on this. It strikes me as an extreme interpretation of the First Amendment, as extreme as this courts interpretation of the Second Amendment. And I think it will tilt the political balance toward a fusion of government and corporatism - even more than we have already. Ill leave the rest to Fallows here and here.

So we have a government fused with corporations, a legislature run by corporate lobbyists who have just been given a massive financial gift to control the process even more deeply; we have a theory of executive power advanced by one party that gives the president total extra-legal power over any human being he wants to call an 'enemy combatant' and total prerogative in launching and waging wars (remember Cheney did not believe Bush needed any congressional support to invade Iraq); we have a Supreme Court that believes in extreme deference to presidential power; we have a Congress of total pussies on the left and maniacs on the right and little in the middle; we have a 24-hour propaganda channel, run by a multinational corporation and managed by a partisan Republican, demonizing the president for anything he does or does not do; we have the open embrace of torture as a routine aspect of US government; and we have one party urging an expansion of the war on Jihadism to encompass a full-scale war against Iran, an act that would embolden the Khamenei junta and ensure that a civilizational war between the nuttiest Christianists in America and the vilest Islamists metastasizes to Def Con 3.

Theres a word that characterizes this kind of polity. Its on the tip of my tongue ...

"

(Via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

Obama to indefinitely imprison detainees without charges

Obama to indefinitely imprison detainees without charges: "

One of the most intense controversies of the Bush years was the administrations indefinite imprisoning of 'War on Terror' detainees without charges of any kind. So absolute was the consensus among progressives and Democrats against this policy that a well-worn slogan was invented to object: a 'legal black hole.' Liberal editorial pages routinely cited the refusal to charge the detainees -- not the interrogation practices there -- in order to brand the camp a 'dungeon,' a 'gulag,' a 'tropical purgatory,' and a 'black-hole embarrassment.' As late as 2007, Democratic Senators like Pat Leahy, on the floor of the Senate, cited the due-process-free imprisonments to rail against Guantanamo as 'a national disgrace, an international embarrassment to us and to our ideals, and a festering threat to our security,' as well as 'a legal black hole that dishonors our principles.' Leahy echoed the Democratic consensus when he said:

The Administration consistently insists that these detainees pose a threat to the safety of Americans. Vice President Cheney said that the other day. If that is true, there must be credible evidence to support it. If there is such evidence, then they should prosecute these people.

If there was a single progressive who objected to that principle, Im unaware of it. Leahy also insisted that the Constitution assigns the power to regulate detentions to Congress, not the President, and thus cited Bushs refusal to seek Congressional authorization for these detentions as a prime example of Bushs abuse of executive power and shredding of the Constitution.

But all year along, Barack Obama -- even as he called for the closing of Guantanamo -- has been strongly implying that he will retain George Bushs due-process-free system by continuing to imprison detainees without charges of any kind. In his May 'civil liberties' speech cynically delivered at the National Archives in front of the U.S. Constitution, Obama announced that he would seek from Congress a law authorizing and governing the Presidents power to imprison detainees indefinitely and without charges. But in September, the administration announced he changed his mind: rather than seek a law authorizing these detentions, he would instead simply claim that Congress already 'implicitly' authorized these powers when it enacted the 2001 AUMF against Al Qaeda -- thereby, as The New York Times put it, 'adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.'

Today, The New York Times Charlie Savage reports:

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday.

The Washington Post says that these decisions 'represent the first time that the administration has clarified how many detainees it considers too dangerous to release but unprosecutable because officials fear trials could compromise intelligence-gathering and because detainees could challenge evidence obtained through coercion.' Once that rationale is accepted, it necessarily applies not only to past detainees but future ones as well: the administration is claiming the power to imprison whomever it wants without charges whenever it believes that -- even in the face of the horrendously broad 'material support for terrorism' laws the Congress has enacted -- it cannot prove in any tribunal that the individual has actually done anything wrong. They are simply decreed by presidential fiat to be 'too dangerous to release.' Perhaps worst of all, it converts what was once a leading prong in the radical Bush/Cheney assult on the Constitution into complete bipartisan consensus, removed from the realm of establishment controversy.

There are roughly 200 prisoners left at the camp, which means roughly 25% will be held without any charges at all. Using the administrations perverse multi-tiered justice system, the rest will either be tried in a real court, sent to a military commission or released. What this means, among other things, is that the Presidents long-touted policy of closing Guantanamo is a total sham: the essence of that 'legal black hole' -- indefinite detentions without charges -- will remain fully in place, perhaps ludicrously and dangerously shifted to a different locale (onto U.S. soil) but otherwise fully in tact. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Military Commissions Act unconstitutionally denied the right of habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees -- a principle the Obama administration has vigorously resisted when it comes to Bagram detainees -- but mere habeas corpus review does not come close to a real trial, which the Bill of Rights guarantees to all persons inot only 'Americans') before the State can keep them locked in a cage.

Numerous Democrats have spent the year justifying Obamas desire for indefinite detention with dubious excuses that would have been unthinkable to hear from them during the Bush years. I addressed all of those excuses in full back in May, here. Whatever else is true, both Obamas policy and the rationale -- we must imprison Terrorists without charges because there's no evidence to convict them but they're somehow still deemed too dangerous to release -- is exactly what the Bush/Cheney faction endlessly repeated to justify its 'legal black hole.'

But no matter. If theres one thing weve seen repeatedly all year long, its that many Democrats simply do not believe in the axiom best expressed by The New York Times' Bob Herbert when he said that 'Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention.' As Herbert wrote: 'policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House.' That precept should be too self-evident to require expression and yet is widely rejected. Hence, exactly that which very recently was condemned as 'a dungeon, a gulag, a tropical purgatory, and a black-hole embarrassment' is now magically transformed into a beacon of sober pragmatism from a man -- a Constitutional Scholar -- solemnly devoted to restoring Americas Standing and Values.

* * * * *

Yesterday, prior to this decision being announced, I conducted a 20-minute interview with ACLU Exeuctive Director Anthony Romero regarding that groups newly released report on Obamas civil liberites record after the first year in office, pointedly entitled: 'America Unrestored.' Ill post that discussion later today. Additionally, I will have an analysis of the Supreme Courts obviously momentous decision in Citizens United -- invaliding restrictions on corporate and union election spending -- posted later."

(Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.)

Murders at Gitmo?

Murders at Gitmo?: "A new report alleges that the U.S. covered up the 2006 murders of three detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Conor Friedersdorf on why the GOP must reckon with the illegal, immoral acts of the Bush administration before mounting a return to power.
With their..."

(Via The Daily Beast - Blogs and Stories.)

Johann Hari: The Age of the Killer Robot Has Arrived: Meet Americas Newest G.I.s

Johann Hari: The Age of the Killer Robot Has Arrived: Meet America's Newest G.I.s: "

In the dark, in the silence, in a blink, the age of the autonomous killer robot has arrived. It is happening. They are deployed. And - at their current rate of acceleration - they will become the dominant method of war for rich countries in the twenty-first century. These facts sound, at first, preposterous. The idea of machines that are designed to whirr out into the world and make their own decisions to kill is an old sci-fi fantasy - picture a mechanical Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing up a truck and muttering 'Hasta la vista, baby.' But we live in a world of such whooshing technological transformation that the concept has leaped in just five years from the cinema screen to the battlefield - with barely anyone back home noticing.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they had no robots as part of their force. By the end of 2005, they had 2400. Today, they have 12,000, carrying out 33,000 missions a year. A report by the US Joint Forces Command says autonomous robots will be the norm on the battlefield within twenty years.

The NATO forces now depend on a range of killer-robots, largely designed by the British Ministry of Defence labs privatized by Tony Blair in 2001. Every time you hear about a 'drone attack' against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that's an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it 'chooses.' Fox News proudly calls it 'the G.I. of the twenty-first century.' And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, who will leave these models looking like a ZX Spectrum or the bulky box on which you used to play Pong.

At the moment, most are controlled by a soldier - often 7500 miles away - with a control panel. But insurgents are always inventing new ways to block the signal from the control centre, which causes the robot to shut down and 'die.' So the military is building 'autonomy' into the robots: if they lose contact, they start to make their own decisions, in line with a pre-determined code.

This is 'one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare,' according to P.W. Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA. In his must-read book Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First Century, he warns: 'Humanity has started to engineer technologies that are fundamentally different from all before. Our creations are now acting in and upon the world around us.'

Humans have been developing weapons that enabled us to kill at ever-greater distances and in ever-greater numbers for millennia, from the longbow to the cannon to the machine-gun to the nuclear bomb. But these robots mark a different stage. The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more 'sophisticated' ways - but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn't fought by you any more: it's fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts.

The military say this is a safer model of combat. Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command says of the warbots: 'They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.' Why take a risk with your soldier's life, if he can stay in Arlington and kill in Kandahar? Think of it as War 4.0. There are proposals to bring this model home into domestic law enforcement too: the Department of Homeland Security recently requested money to buy eighteen drone planes to patrol the US-Mexico border.

But the evidence punctures this techno-optimism. We know the programming of robots will regularly go wrong - because all technological programming regularly goes wrong. Look at the place where robots are used most frequently today: factories. Some 4 percent of US factories have 'major robotics accidents' every year - a man having molten allunimium poured over him, or a woman picked up and placed on a conveyor belt to be smashed into the shape of a car. The former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was nearly killed a few years ago after a robot attacked him on a tour of a factory. And remember: these are robots that aren't designed to kill.

On its first public outing in 2007, one of South Africa's first warbots went haywire and began firing explosive shells all around it at the rate of 550 a minute. Nine soldiers died. Think about how maddening it is to deal with a robot on the telephone when you want to pay your phone bill. Now imagine that robot had a machine gun pointed at your chest.

Robots find it almost impossible to distinguish an apple from a tomato: how will they distinguish a combatant from a civilian? You can't appeal to a robot for mercy; you can't activate its empathy. And afterwards, who do you punish? Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch says: 'War crimes need a violation and an intent. A machine has no capacity to want to kill civilians ... If they are incapable of intent, are they incapable of war crimes?'

Robots do make war much easier - for the aggressor. You are taking much less physical risk with your people, even as you kill more of theirs. One US report recently claimed they will turn war into 'an essentially frictionless engineering exercise.' As Larry Korb, Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of defence: 'It will make people think, 'Gee, warfare is easy.'

If virtually no American forces had died in Vietnam, would the war have stopped when it did - or would the systematic slaughter of the Vietnamese people have continued for many more years? If we weren't losing anyone in Afghanistan or Iraq, would the call for an end to the killing be as loud? I'd like to think we are motivated primarily by compassion for civilians on the other side, but I doubt it. Take 'us' out of the picture and we will be more willing to kill 'them.'

There is some evidence that warbots will also make us less inhibited in our killing. When another human being is standing in front of you, when you can stare into their eyes, it's hard to kill them. When they are half the world away and little more than an avatar, it's easy. A young air force lieutenant who fought through a warbot told Singer: 'It's like a video game [with] the ability to kill. It's like... freaking cool.'

When the US First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq was asked in 2006 what kind of robotic support it needed, they said they have an 'urgent operational need' for a laser mounted onto an unmanned drone that can cause 'instantaneous burst-combustion of insurgent clothing, a rapid death through violent trauma, and more probably a morbid combination of both.' The request said it should be like 'long range blow torches or precision flame throwers.' They wanted to do with robots things they would find almost unthinkable face-to-face.

While 'we' will lose fewer people at first by fighting with warbots, this way of fighting may well catalyze greater attacks on us in the long run. US army staff sergeant Scott Smith boasts they create 'an almost helpless feeling... It's total shock and awe.' But while terror makes some people shut up, it makes many more furious and determined to strike back. Imagine if the skies over Washington and Manhattan were filled with robots controlled from Torah Borah, or Beijing, and could shoot us at any time. Some would scuttle away - and many would be determined to kill 'their' people in revenge. The Lebanese editor Rami Khouri says that when Lebanon was bombarded by largely unmanned Israeli drones in 2006, it only 'enhanced the spirit of defiance' and made more people back Hezbollah.

Is this a rational way to harness our genius for science and spend tens of billions of pounds? The scientists who were essential to developing the nuclear bomb - including Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and Andrei Sakharov - turned on their own creations in horror and begged for them to be outlawed. Some distinguished robotics scientists, like Illah Nourbakhsh, are getting in early, and saying the development of autonomous military robots should be outlawed now.

There are some technologies so abhorrent to human beings that we forbid them outright. We have banned war-lasers that permanently blind people along with poison gas. The conveyor belt dragging us ever closer to a world of robot wars can be stopped - if we choose to. All this money and all this effort can be directed towards saving life, not ever-madder ways of taking it. But we have to decide to do it. We have to make the choice to look the warbot in the eye and say, firmly and forever, 'Hasta la vista, baby.'

"

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Robert Scheer: What Massachusetts Got Right

Robert Scheer: What Massachusetts Got Right: "

The president got creamed in Massachusetts. No amount of blaming this disastrous outcome on the weaknesses of the local Democratic candidate or her Republican opponent's strengths can gainsay that fact. Obama's opportunistic search for win-win solutions to our health care concerns and our larger economic problems is leading to a lose-lose outcome for the president and the country.

The two issues that mattered on Election Day were the economy, which Obama has sold out to Wall Street -- as quite a few disgruntled voters pointed out -- and his plea to save health care reform, which the voters who had backed him for the presidency with a huge majority now spurned. It is significant that it was the voters of Massachusetts who have now derailed the Democrats' efforts to revamp the country's health care system by denying them the necessary 60th vote in the Senate, for these voters know the subject well.

The federal proposal is based on their own state's model requiring people to obtain health insurance without the state doing anything to effectively control costs through an alternative to the private insurance corporations. Lacking a public option, the cost of health care in Massachusetts, already the highest in the nation at the time of the plan's implementation, has spiraled upward. Services have been curtailed, and many, particularly younger people, feel they are being forced to sacrifice to pay for a system that doesn't work.

Instead of blindly following the failed Massachusetts model, Obama should have insisted on an extension of the Medicare program to all who are willing to pay for it. He squandered the opportunity to bring about meaningful health care change that the public would have supported had it been kept simple and just. Instead, Obama gave away the store to medical profiteers. They, in turn, hopelessly muddied the waters with well-funded scare advertising tactics that principled leadership on Obama's part could have thwarted.

A mere seven months ago, the New York Times/ CBS poll found that 72% of Americans 'supported a government-administered insurance plan -- something like Medicare for those under 65 -- that would compete for customers with private insurers.' Even half of those identified as Republican said they would back such a public plan, as would three out of four independents and 90% of Democrats. Instead of heeding that call by endorsing a serious extension of Medicare, along with increased subsidies for those who could not afford it, Obama played to the conservatives in Congress -- and they rolled him.

If he wasn't prepared to make a breakthrough in health care, and that meant a reform program that would begin sooner rather than later, he should have put it on a back burner. The furor over a very unsatisfactory plan drew attention from the far bigger crisis concerning the meltdown of the nation's economy. By accepting and indeed expanding the Bush administration's strategy of throwing money at Wall Street, Obama ceded the populist label to the Tea Party Republicans who now pretend that a banking mess brought about by their radical deregulatory philosophy is not of their making.

It is the economy, stupid, and the sooner Obama grasps that, the better for his and the nation's prospects. A new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll finds that 'Americans ranked job creation and economic growth as their clear top priority for the federal government, well above national security and deficit reduction. Health care, Mr. Obama's top domestic priority in 2009, now ranks fourth, closely trailing the deficit and government spending.'

Of course, the public is right. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in 70 years, why waste enormous political capital battling to pass a health care plan that is modeled on a proven failure in Massachusetts, as voters there clearly registered? Meanwhile, the president has dropped the ball in the effort to make bankers act responsibly by forcing them to forego outrageous bonuses and help homeowners stay in their homes.

Again quoting the message of that Wall Street Journal/NBC poll: 'The president's focus on health care amid heightened job concerns could be hurting his ratings. At the one-year mark of his presidency, 35% of Americans said they were 'quite' or extremely' confident he had the right priorities to improve the economy, down from 46% at midyear.' The Journal noted that a majority disapproved of the government's response to the financial crisis, adding, 'The related problem for Mr. Obama is the public's lingering anger about the bailouts of 2008 and 2009, which helped boost bank profits even as unemployment grew--a toxic political problem.'

To salvage his presidency, Obama must reverse course and make solving the 'toxic political problem' of Wall Street greed that's bankrupting the country his highest priority."

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Lawrence B. Wilkerson: Shadow Elite: War And The Deadly Privatization Of Public Power

Lawrence B. Wilkerson: 'Shadow Elite': War And The Deadly Privatization Of Public Power: "

One of the principal emphases of Janine Wedel's excellent new book, 'Shadow Elite', is the privatization of power. In some respects, that's a strange turn of phrase.

After all, throughout modern history, the forces of capitalism have wielded privatized power--creating people and corporations with a great deal of influence. And today, some of the most massive accretions of power are indisputably private. Think ExxonMobil and the price of a barrel of oil; General Electric and the now irreversible pollution of the Hudson River; or Goldman-Sachs and the recent Wall Street failures and subsequent bailouts.

Certain private corporations, some would contend, long before Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton deregulated America, the stultifying effects of the Cold War wore off, or government was reinvented--all transmogrifying forces in Wedel's text--were far too powerful, even causing many governments to look powerless in comparison. But the privatization of power today, in one respect in particular, seems different and deadly dangerous. That is the privatization of power wielded for the public good, described in some detail in 'Shadow Elite'.

No aspect of this phenomenon more vividly demonstrates this point than the privatization of war. Killing people for state purposes--and risking the lives of one's own citizens for those same purposes--should be the ultimate public power in a democratic federal republic such as ours. Yet war's privatization proceeds at an alarming pace.

For example, for several years the Department of Defense has circumvented Congressionally-mandated limits on the size of the armed forces by privatizing those forces' functions. Today, battlefield strength in both Iraq and Afghanistan is roughly doubled by the presence of private contractors. Indeed, without the hundreds of thousands of private contractors working for the government, the U.S. could not sustain its wars in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

One clear outcome of this privatization of public power, besides the doubling of battlefield strength, is the increasing ease with which the executive branch has usurped the power to make war from the legislative branch where men such as Washington, Madison, and Franklin clearly placed it. This executive facility for making war means more war as well, as Madison, 'the father of the Constitution,' so eloquently warned more than two centuries ago.

Similarly, the so-called reconstruction and stability operations (or 'counterinsurgency operations' as the new professors of war label these efforts) that are underway in Afghanistan and winding down somewhat in Iraq would be impossible without private contractors. And, as Wedel points out in 'Shadow Elite,' today these private contractors not only carry out public functions but oversee, supervise, and manage other contractors who perform such functions.

Such privatization of public power has almost obliterated the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). On any given day in either Iraq or Afghanistan, it would be impossible for any government--i.e., public--individual or office to report definitively on what is happening with development aid in that country. Private contractors possess that information, not public officials. And since information is power--and its possession often leads to accountability as well, something most contractors want nothing to do with--these contractors guard it zealously, releasing it only to gain new contracts and increase profits.

Such developments can mean only one thing: more war more incompetently executed and more long, drawn-out, seemingly never-ending post-conflict operations costing billions and even trillions of taxpayer dollars, generating high profitability for the private corporations and individuals who increasingly are responsible for conducting such operations.

Madison once wrote: 'Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded....Hence it has grown into an axiom that the executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war: hence it is the practice of all states, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence.'

Sadly, today we are witnessing the very opposite of this, no matter who is president, no matter which political party is in power. Our executive's 'propensity to war' may be disguised as combating terrorists, but if we simply examine the balance of exchange we obliterate that disguise: the United States has spent almost two trillion dollars in response to an attack by al-Qa'ida that cost that organization about $500,000 to carry out.

Moreover, we kill more citizens on the highways of this country in a single year than have been killed in all the terrorist attacks against us in our history.

One of the principal reasons for this repudiation of what our Founding Fathers declared most prudent about the war power is the privatization of that power. For those who participate, it is a hugely profitable enterprise. For the nation, it is extremely dangerous."

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Stop Coddling Wall Street!

Stop Coddling Wall Street!: "As a new probe of the financial meltdown continues, Obama is still way too soft on big banks. Joel Kotkin on how the Democrats failed to exploit populist outrage.
By all historical logic and tradition, Wall Street's outrageous bonuses-almost $20..."

(Via The Daily Beast - Blogs and Stories.)

Newsflash: Right Is Not Center

Newsflash: Right Is Not Center: "By David Sirota

On economic issues, we are often told that right is center, center is left, and left is fringe. For a year, national reporters (with help from conservative talk-radio goons) have depicted the center-right Obama administration and its corporatist policies as quasi-Marxist."

(Via Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines.)

Gail Collins: The 10 Percent Rules

Op-Ed Columnist: The 10 Percent Rules: "If there was a terror alert code for the special election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, it would be at orange with yellow tents."

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

Harold Ford: Bird Murderer

Harold Ford: Bird Murderer: "His pedicures--I don't begrudge a man his pedicures. Toes needn't be neglected just because they're so far away, at the end of our feet. Being chauffeured around town while the rest of us wait in the Tolstoyan cold for the M4--who can really blame him? I'd recline in the roomy interior of luxury car too if I were pulling down seven figures a year. But where Harold Ford Jr. crosses the line that gets on the bad side of me is when he coolly tells The New York Times:

Asked about his own experience with guns, he said he was an occasional bird hunter. ‘I shoot at things that can’t shoot back,’ he said with a smile, ‘and will continue to do that.’

Bad enough that Harold Ford is an emotionless Machiavellian cyberbotic Manchurian Candidate whose home planet may not be earth, but a proud slayer of defenseless, harmless birds too?--no, that is unacceptable. Go join a tea party, Harold, or fuck off to your fancy nail salon in your camouflage fatigues, that's what I say."

(Via James Wolcott's Blog.)

Robert Scheer: Dont Blame China

Robert Scheer: Don't Blame China: "

The Chinamen did it. In the great American tradition of finding foreign scapegoats for our problems, the hunt is on to somehow hold China responsible for the misery that Wall Street financiers inflicted upon the world. Even the normally restrained New York Times editorial page argued Tuesday that China's tying its currency to the dollar was a devious trick that 'is exacerbating economic weakness around the globe.'

Tell that to the shoppers at Wal-Mart and Costco who are managing to stay decently clothed while still affording some of the diversionary electronic trinkets that keep them from going crazy-mad at the bankers who cost them their jobs and homes. How absurd to blame China for a crisis brought on by Wall Street hustlers operating within a mile of the Times' home office. The bankers' greed was unleashed by a radical deregulation of the financial industry that the newspaper had once encouraged.

Back on April 8, 1998, a Times editorial applauded the 'Monster Merger' of Citicorp bank and the Travelers insurance company to form the too-big-to-fail financial conglomerate that a decade later had to be bailed out by U.S. taxpayers. The merger represented a clear violation of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which Congress at that point had refused to repeal despite decades of lobbying by the banking industry. The Clinton administration issued a temporary waiver to allow the merger, and the Times couldn't have been more pleased:

'Congress dithers, so John Reed of Citicorp and Sanford Weill of Travelers Group grandly propose to modernize financial markets on their own. They have announced a $70 billion merger--the biggest in history--that would create the largest financial services company in the world, worth more than $140 billion. ... In one stroke, Mr. Reed and Mr. Weill will have temporarily demolished the increasingly unnecessary walls built during the Depression to separate commercial banks from investment banks and insurance companies.'

Citigroup led the way into the massive marketing of toxic collateralized debt obligations that has brought the world's economy to its knees, and China, which did nothing to create that problem, suffered mightily as a result. Yet instead of attacking the U.S. and its dubious dollar, the Chinese continued to buy our questionable paper. For that reason alone we should be happy that China recently managed to turn the corner on the adversity we created for it, thanks to a stimulus program that makes ours pale in comparison. As a result, not only did China's exports rise 18 percent last month, as compared to the previous December, but imports rose an astounding 56 percent. China is now not only the world's biggest exporter, having surpassed Germany, but it topped the United States as the world's leader in auto sales last year.

All of this is good news, given the fact that hundreds of millions of people in China have witnessed a dramatic improvement in their lives. Instead of being a source of misery at home and undesired migration abroad, the once-feared Chinese population bomb is now a source of increasingly skilled labor and the most promising emerging market for the rest of the world's products. Of course, with its vast population of more than 1.3 billion, China remains a very poor country, and if it doesn't manage to spread the wealth to rural areas and solve major environmental problems the future may be dreary for the Chinese as well as for us.

That is precisely the reason we should welcome China's success rather than bemoan it. If China has figured out how to cope with a U.S.-engineered financial meltdown so as to feed its people instead of starving them, isn't that a victory for human rights that we all should applaud? But if that weepy sentiment doesn't cut it for you, do we really want a trade war with China that might compel it to shun the dollar and stop carrying our debt load?

The Times' editorial warns correctly that a 'trade war with China would be disastrous' but then shifts the blame to China, stating 'we fear no one is going to feel restrained if China doesn't change its strategy.'

Suddenly, after a century of preaching the virtues of the free market to the world when we held the upper hand, we will now play the protectionist game? I think not. Too many jobs in this country, and too much profit for our big multinational corporations, would be lost to other industrialized nations. Anyway, it's just absurd to blame a Made-in-the-U.S.A. crisis on a foreign import."

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Frank Rich: The Other Plot to Wreck America

Op-Ed Columnist: The Other Plot to Wreck America: "The financial crash precipitated by the failure of Lehman Brothers was the banking industry’s 9/11. Without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed."

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

Obama’s Alternate Universe

Obama’s Alternate Universe: "

By Scott Ritter

The ‘war on terror’ is a self-perpetuating problem with no solution. Worse, it ultimately will destroy America, not from any actions by whatever ‘enemy’ America conjures up, but rather from the actions undertaken by America itself."

(Via Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines.)

More cause and effect in our ever-expanding "war"

More cause and effect in our ever-expanding "war": "

If it is taboo to discuss how Americas actions in the Middle East cause Terrorism -- and it generally is -- that taboo is far stronger still when it comes to specifically discussing how our blind, endless enabling of Israeli actions fuels Terrorism directed at the U.S. An article in yesterday's New York Times examined the life of Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian who blew himself up, along with 7 CIA agents, in Afghanistan this week. Why would Balawi -- a highly educated doctor, who was specifically recruited by Jordanian intelligence officials to infiltrate Al Qaeda on behalf of Western governments -- want to blow himself up and murder as many American intelligence agents as possible? The article provides this possible answer:

He described Mr. Balawi as a 'very good brother' and a 'brilliant doctor,' saying that the family knew nothing of Mr. Balawi’s writings under a pseudonym on jihadi Web sites. He said, however, that his brother had been 'changed' by last year’s three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians.

An Associated Press discussion of the possible motives of accused Christmas Day airline attacker Umar Faruk Abdulmutallab contained this quite similar passage (h/t Casual Observer):

Students and administrators at the institute said Abdulmutallab was gregarious, had many Yemeni friends and was not overtly extremist. They noted, however, he was open about his sympathies toward the Palestinians and his anger over Israels actions in Gaza.

When the Saudi and Yemeni branches of Al Qaeda announced earlier this year that they were unifying into 'Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula,' they prominently featured rhetoric railing against the Israeli attack on Gaza, and 'presented their campaign as part of the struggle to liberate Palestine, since Israel and the Crusaders are one.' So extreme is anger towards Israel over Gaza among Yemenis that even that countrys President -- our supposed ally in the War on Terror -- called for the opening of camps to train fighters against Israel in Gaza. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright claimed that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta signed his 'martyrs will' from Al Qaeda on the day in 1996 when Israel attacked Lebanon, and he did so due to 'outrage' over that attack. Theres just no question that the U.S.s loyal enabling of (and support for) Israels various wars with its Muslims neighbors contributes to terrorist attacks directed at Americans.

As always whenever the words 'Israel' and/or 'Terrorism' are mentioned, there is a severe danger of over-simplification and distortion from all sides, rendering several caveats in order: where U.S. support for Israel is a cause of anti-American Islamic extremism, it is generally not the only or even primary cause, but one of several; there is ample American interference and violence in the Muslim world that is quite independent of Israel, and that was true long before 9/11 and especially after. Al Qaeda leaders who actually care little about the Palestinian cause have a history of exploiting that issue to generate public support. The fact that Terrorists object to Policy X does not prove that Policy X should be discontinued. And most of all: to discuss causes of Terrorism is not to imply justification; one can seek to understand what we do to fuel Terrorism without suggesting that the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians is in any way legitimate or justified.

Despite all that, its impossible to grow accustomed to the extreme fantasy atmosphere and self-absorbed blindness that pervades American discussions over Terrorism, especially in the wake of a new scare. The Right, seeking as always to exploit Terrorism fears, falsely accuses Obama of not displaying 'war' language and a 'war' mentality, in response to which he and his aides step forward to affirm -- yet again -- that WE ARE AT WAR!, and to point to all of the times Obama decreed this to be so and all of the war actions he has ordered. So weve spent the last decade screaming to the world that WE ARE AT WAR!, that were a War Nation, that were led by a War President. That we are 'at war' -- not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but generally against Islamic extremists -- is an absolute bipartisan orthodoxy that must be affirmed by all Serious people. And we are currently waging some form of actual war in no fewer than five predominantly Muslim countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia); are threatening Iran with 'crippling' sanctions and -- from our more deranged quarters -- war; and continuing our unbroken devotion to Israels causes.

Yet even in the face of all of that, it is bewilderment and confusion that reign when our media stars and political figures talk about attempts to attack Americans. Why would they possibly want to do this? They must be crazy, or drunk with religious fervor, or consumed by blinding, inhumane hatred. Much of that is probably true for individuals willing to blow themselves up in order to slaughter as many innocent civilians as possible. But its equally irrational to think that youre going to spend a full decade bellowing WE ARE AT WAR! to the world, send bombs and troops and all forms of death to multiple Muslim countries (both directly and through Israel), and not have that directed back at us. Thats what happens when a country is 'at war' -- it doesnt just get to blow up things and people in other countries, but its own things and people sometimes get blown up as well. Thats how 'war' works.

Its truly astounding to watch us -- for a full decade -- send fighter jets and drones and bombs and invading forces and teams of torturers and kidnappers to that part of the world, or, as we were doing long before 9/11, to overthrow their governments, prop up their dictators, occupy what they perceive as holy land with our foreign troops, and arm Israel to the teeth, and then act surprised and confused when some of them want to attack us. In general, the U.S. only attacks countries with no capabilities to attack us back in the 'homeland' -- at least not with conventional forces. As a result, we have come to believe that any forms of violence we perpetrate on them over there is justifiable and natural, but the Laws of Humanity are instantly breached in the most egregious ways whenever they bring violence back to the U.S., aimed at Americans. Its just impossible to listen to discussions grounded in this warped mentality without being astounded at how irrational it is. What do Americans think is going to happen if we continue to engage in this conduct, in this always-widening 'war'?

The principal problem is that by pretending that we do nothing to fuel Islamic radicalism, we stay unaware -- blissfully ignorant -- of the staggering costs of our actions. I defy anyone to find a political figure in either major partys leadership who has, in the context of discussing U.S. policy towards Israel, ever even mentioned the fact that undying, endless American support for Israel -- making all of their conflicts our own -- increases the risk of terrorist violence aimed at the U.S. But it so plainly does. The fact that Israel is now explicitly vowing that its 'next wars' against its Muslim neighbors will be 'much harsher' than even the grotesque atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon means these costs are almost certain to increase even further.

Again, these facts do not, standing alone, prove that we ought to change these policies. The mere fact that Islamic radicals object to what we do does not prove we should stop, as there may be net benefits to those actions or they may be morally justifiable. But at the very least, rational discussions require that these costs and benefits be weighed, and that can only happen if we acknowledge the costs. But when it comes to our own actions in the Muslim world, and especially our undying devotion to supporting everything Israel does, acknowledging the costs (to say nothing of the morality) is exactly what we steadfastly refuse to do."

(Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.)

The Bitter Fruits of a Finance-Oriented Economy

The Bitter Fruits of a Finance-Oriented Economy: "

It’s quite true that even in America we have and have always had an ‘industrial policy.’ That said, even if a country didn’t ‘do’ ‘industrial policy’ that would still be a policy and it would have consequences and there would be alternatives. I think the buzzword should probably be stricken from the lexicon since it’s so loaded and instead we can just talk about ‘bananas’ or, you know, ‘economic policy.’

For example, economic policy in the United States has led to a situation in which finance has been increasingly important to the overall economy:

I think America’s self-image in the sixties was as the country where the General Motors and Boeing and General Electric are. By the past fifteen years, that had changed to a self-image as the country where Microsoft and Google and Apple are. But to a large extent the real change is that we became the land of Citigroup and Bank of America and Wells Fargo. And this has had consequences:

However, Maxine suspects that the longest term and most severe damage from the finance casino will not be from government deficits required to shore up too-big-to-fail banks and insurers. It will be from two powerful, long-standing price distortions that have distorted the composition of our labor force and the mix of human capital within it. The first distortion is the past diversion of some our best technical and mathematical minds away from physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, and, yes, even economics, to financial modeling, risk analysis, and all the other marvelous tools of speculation and gaming. Over the last 20 years or so, the financial sector has been diverting our future scientists and mathematicians into creating new derivatives aimed at managing risk (ha!) and into developing creative investment instruments aimed at obscuring risk.

The second long-term distortion is similar to the first. Maxine is thinking of all those bright, young, energetic people who came out of some of our best universities and opted to go to work for investment banks, not in technical jobs, but as traders, ratings specialists, analysts, again to support the conversion of trillions of dollars into chaff. Many of them might have gone on to graduate degrees in chemistry, biochemistry, physics, engineering, biology or medicine. Graduate work in psychology, sociology, English, history, political science, public health would have added more value than destroying wealth across the globe. Instead of a workforce that gained diverse skills that might one day transform the world in positive and substantive ways, we have a surfeit of MBAs with concentrations in finance and empty houses on overgrown lots.

The question of whether we should put the set of policies that led to this dynamic in the ontological category of ‘industrial policy’ or the ontological category of ‘free market outcomes’ isn’t actually important. The economy is what it is. The question is whether we can do better."

(Via Matthew Yglesias.)

Bob Herbert: An Uneasy Feeling

Op-Ed Columnist: An Uneasy Feeling: "Our society is in deep trouble and the fixes currently in the works are in no way adequate to the enormous challenges we’re facing. "

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

Fulfilling al-Qaida's "warrior" wish

Fulfilling al-Qaida's "warrior" wish: "

(updated below - Update II)

Its so striking how often the agenda of Americas Right and the desires of Al Qaeda Terrorists perfectly coincide. The greatest gift one could give Terrorists is to fulfill their supreme wish: to treat them (i.e., venerate them) as warriors -- enemy combatants -- rather than as what they are: criminals. To understand how true that is, consider this exchange at the Sentencing Hearing of Richard Reid, the convicted shoe bomber, between Reid and Federal Judge William Young, who sentenced him to life in prison:

MR. REID: I further admit my allegiance to Osama bin Laden, to Islam, and to the religion of Allah. Okay? With regards to what you said about killing innocent people, I will say one thing. Your government has killed two million children in Iraq. Okay? If you want to think about something, 20 against two million, I dont see no comparison. Okay?
Your government has sponsored the rape and torture of Muslims in the prisons of Egypt and Turkey and Syria and Jordan with their money and with their weapons. Okay? I dont know, see what I done as being equal to rape and to torture, or to the deaths of the two million children in Iraq. Okay?
Thirdly. So, for this reason, I think I ought not apologize for my actions. I am at war with your country. I'm at war with them not for personal reasons but because they have murdered more than, so many children and they have oppressed my religion and they have oppressed people for no reason except that they say we believe in Allah.
This is the only reason that America sponsors Egypt. It's the only reason they sponsor Turkey. It's the only reason they back Israel. Okay? . . . .

THE COURT: There is all too much war talk here. And I say that to everyone with the utmost respect. Here in this court where we deal with individuals as individuals, and care for individuals as individuals, as human beings we reach out for justice.
You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier gives you far too much stature. Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or that happens to be your view, you are a terrorist.
And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice. So war talk is way out of line in this court.
You're a big fellow. But you're not that big. You're no warrior. I know warriors. You are a terrorist. A species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders. In a very real sense Trooper Santiago had it right when first you were taken off that plane and into custody and you wondered where the press and where the TV crews were and you said you're no big deal. You're no big deal.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, at his military commission, insisted on the same pretense -- that he was a warrior and a combatant in a raging war, just like George Washington and the members of the American military he was addressing, and, he argued, they should therefore understand that the civilian casualties Mohammed caused on 9/11 are simply part of what every 'military man' does (click on images to enlarge):

...Nothing plays more right into the hands of Al Qaeda than glorifying them as some sort of special and unique class of warriors -- enemy combatants -- rather than treating them as the lowly, common, murderous criminals they are. When we deny them due process and imprison them without charges because theyre something stronger and scarier than mere criminals -- when we pronounce that they are our enemies waging holy war on America -- we do more to elevate their stature and, in the eyes of their followers, justify their violence than anything they could hope to do themselves. The more fearful and extreme our reaction to them is, the better their cause is served. Is there anything they can do or say to make that clearer?

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From what I can gather, the principal New Years wish of our media class is that we will bomb and occupy more Muslim countries in 2010, and that nobody in any of those countries will try to bring any violence to us in return. What a truly bizarre expectation. I discussed that dynamic, along with several other issues, on Democracy Now this morning; the video and transcript are here.

UPDATE: One of the greatest mysteries is how someone can read something like this and this and doubt that our various wars and similar foreign policy actions are exacerbating -- not diminishing -- the terrorist threat.

UPDATE II: As always, Charles Krauthammer is one of Al Qaeda's greatest allies:

Obama reassured the nation that this 'suspect' had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant -- an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians -- and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.

He sounds just like Richard Reid and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed."

(Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.)