Obama administration embraces war criminal Henry Kissinger with Distinguished Public Servant Award

The Obama administration, via its Department of Defense, had war criminal Henry Kissinger over at the Pentagon yesterday. The reason? To award Kissinger its highest honor, the award for Distinguished Public Service.

If you measure “public service” as being responsible for more deaths than any other living American in the effort to spread the influence of American empire over the globe, Kissinger was surely deserving.

It is not news that Kissinger has been embraced by this White House. The Obama administration use of this criminal has been open since the first days of the Obama presidency. The Kissinger issue, if I may call it that, surfaced again during the Clinton-Sanders debates, when Sanders decried Clinton’s reliance on the advice and counseling of Kissinger. For her part, Clinton lionized the former Nixon Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. (See the full transcript here.)

Sanders made it clear, that given Kissinger’s record, he would never rely on him for anything having to do with a Sanders administration. Indeed, it’s clear that Kissinger should be in jail. Sanders erred only in not saying it would prosecute him for war crimes.

The fact is, support for Kissinger is right at the dividing line between those who support and those who oppose an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy. In his reward speech, speaking of his so-called accomplishments , Kissinger said, “the fact is we were engaged in good causes" during his tenure in the Nixon and Ford White Houses.

For Kissinger, the Vietnam War, with its massive use of napalm, Agent Orange, its secret bombing campaigns, and use of torture and assassination, was a “good cause.” When the Obama administration, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, embrace Kissinger, both his legacy and the man, they are embracing the greatest set of war crimes in living memory by the United States, a war that killed millions, and also destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans.

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who gave the award personally to Kissinger, was named by Politico recently as a top candidate for the Secretary of Defense position under a Hillary Clinton administration, not least because of his hawkish views.

Vox editorialized news of the recent award, in its article, “The Obama administration is honoring Henry Kissinger today. It shouldn’t be.”

While Kissinger deserves real credit for some of America's most important Cold War victories, including Nixon's diplomatic opening to China, he is also responsible for some of its worst atrocities. Carpet-bombing Cambodia, supporting Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh, greenlighting the Argentinian dictatorship's murderous crackdown on dissidents — all of those were Kissinger initiatives, all pushed in the name of pursuing American national interests and fighting communism.
While the Obama administration might want to pretend that only the first half of his résumé exists, that doesn't change reality. The secretary of defense is handing an award to a man whose actions belie the values Obama administration claims to stand for.

The Nation also chimed in:

It’s exhausting trying to keep track of what is now a quarterly celebration of the 92-year-old Kissinger. It was just six or so months ago when The New York Times Book Review assigned Kissinger’s preferred authorized biographer to review a Kissinger biography written by Kissinger’s second-choice biographer. A “masterpiece”! the first said of the second. And then, three months ago, Hillary Clinton, in a debate with Bernie Sanders, cited Kissinger’s recommendation as a referral for the White House. 

At the time, Clinton’s remarks seemed a misstep, allowing Sanders an opening to criticize her catastrophic interventionism in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Now, though, it is clear that Clinton’s invocation of Kissinger wasn’t a fluke but rather a preview of a general election strategy to run to Trump’s right on foreign policy and win over the hawkish wing of the Republican Party.

Now some of you reading this may not realize how horrific Kissinger really is. But since he has become a campaign issue, and for some people — like myself — is a serious consideration not to support the presumptive candidate for the Democratic Party, you will need to educate yourself about who Kissinger is and what he’s done. Among his crimes are the mass bombing of civilian populations, support for assassinations and torture, wiretapping of journalists, support for invasions and military repression in numerous countries. He was notoriously involved in helping secure a military coup against the democratically elected government of Salvadore Allende in Chile.

Anyone can Google the information these days, but I particularly recommend reading the reproduction of Chapter One of the late Christopher Hitchens’ book, The Case Against Henry Kissinger at this link. Here’s a small section:

Declassified documents show that Kissinger- who had previously neither known nor cared about Chile, describing it offhandedly as "a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica"-took seriously this chance to impress his boss. A group was set up in Langley, Virginia, with the express purpose of running a "two track" policy for Chile, one the ostensible diplomatic one and the other -- unknown to the State Department or the U.S. ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry -- a strategy of destabilization, kidnapping, and assassination designed to provoke a military coup…. 

The short-term obstacle lay in the person of one man: General Rene Schneider. As chief of the Chilean Army, he was adamantly opposed to any military meddling in the electoral process. Accordingly, it was decided at a meeting on September 18, 1970, that General Schneider had to go…. 

On September 15, 1970, Kissinger was told of an extremist right-wing officer named General Roberto Viaux, who had ties to Patria y Libertad and who was willing to accept the secret American commission to remove General Schneider from the chessboard. The term "kidnap" was still being employed at this point and is often employed still. Kissinger's "track two" group, however, authorized the supply of machine guns as well as tear-gas grenades to Viaux's associates and never seem to have asked what they would do with the general once they had kidnapped him.

On October 22, 1970, after one failed attempt, Kissinger’s Chilean surrogates succeeded in machine gunning Schneider. It was a prelude to the coup that was to come.

The Obama administration is to be condemned for honoring this mass murderer. The supporters of Hillary Clinton have to answer for why they are supporting a candidate whose foreign policy mentor is someone who lauds the Vietnam War as a “good cause.”

Once upon a time, a site such as Daily Kos, which claimed to be for progressive causes, would not have let something like this pass unnoticed or uncommented upon. But with the rush to support a hawkish candidate for president in Hillary Clinton, the past crimes of U.S. foreign policy are being flushed down the memory hole. An earlier diary on this by pablito got ignored or disparaged by various readers.

That should not be.

Originally posted at Daily Kos, May 10, 2016

Jared Loughner's Possible Mental Illness

Originally posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

As more details are revealed about the background of purported 22-year-old shooter Jared Loughner, who is in custody currently for the shooting in Tucson today of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Federal Judge John Rell and a number of others, at least five of whom have died, a number of people are speculating about his possible mental illness. One diagnosis that keeps arising is schizophrenia. It's worth looking into what that might mean.

Over the course of my psychology career, I have worked with schizophrenic individuals, and most are quite afraid of the world, and are far more likely to be victims than victimizers. However, there are a small minority whose delusions have led them to commit crimes.

I am a licensed psychologist and from afar, and am not in the position to diagnose Mr. Loughner. However, one can make some initial impressionistic comments based upon the video content he posted on YouTube. The autistic, in the sense of highly encapsulated and personal, nature of his thought processes, his emphasis on coercion from without (see his discussion about being taught letters of the alphabet), the strange nature of his logic and language, the paranoid attitude toward the world in general, are consistent with known cases of schizophrenia, paranoid type.

I cannot know if he is the shooter, but his videos do display a garbled mixture of political concerns, and there is a great deal about conscience (“conscience dreams”), about not doing wrong, about the definition of “terrorist”, about “grammar” and “currency”, about “brainwashing” and “mind control”. At times, appears as if he’s grappling with something struggling inside himself.

There are also indications of a sense of multiple internal selves, or a dissociated kind of experience (“conscience dreaming”) that may also mean he had dissociated personality as well. In fact, this combination of dissociated identity and schizophrenia is much more highly associated with violence than schizophrenia alone. Then again, his comments may only appear to indicate such dissociative processes, and be better accounted for by a thought disorder.

If one researches the words “conscience dreaming” online, you will find a YouTube video with that title, not by Mr. Loughner, and no connection with the latter is inferred, except that he may have watched the video. The video concerns three characters, The Agent, The Assassin, and The Dream Maker. There is also one imprisoned anonymous character. I find it quite coincidental to say the least that a phrase the supposed shooter used a number of times links to such a video which has such characters in it.

I would caution against implying any politics to someone who appears so disturbed, as his interpretation of political symbols and phrases are interpreted in a highly idiosyncratic and irrational way. However, if he were susceptible to violence, then the targets available by the given society, i.e., the rhetoric out there in the society, would have pointed him towards liberals, leftists, Muslims, or other minorities, and that kind of rhetoric has mainly been from the right-wing, as has been copiously commented upon.

As for whether such a person could be manipulated, it’s possible, but if he is as insane as he appears, he would have been a very unstable person upon which to base any such conspiracy. I tend to think, despite his talk about mind control and brainwashing, that he was not the subject of any such conspiracy. More likely, these concerns are more about such an individuals anxieties and paranoia about being controlled from without, about things outside himself threatening to invade his personal world. Concern with brainwashing is a common thread in narratives from schizophrenic individuals.

However, this doesn’t mean that mind control conspiracies by the government don’t exist. I’ve documented government documents, including of contemporary vintage, that prove such activity by the government still occurs. If one reads the history of this kind of research, attempts to really use mind control are not applied to schizophrenic individuals, though one does look for highly suggestible individuals, and then apply drugs and hypnosis and other programming techniques. The success or failure of such enterprises is highly classified.

My condolences to all who were affected by this terrible tragedy in Tucson today.

Update:

Here’s an example taken from one of Mr. Loughner’s videos, showing the strangeness of his thinking and language, which is circular, syntactically intact, but with extremely opaque meaning, which relies on repetitiveness. The language implies something very profound, which only the thinker understands:

Firstly, the current government officials are in power for their currency, but I’m informing you for your new currency! If you’re treasurer for a new money system, then you’re responsible for the distribution of a new currency! We now know — the treasurer for a new money system, is the distributor of the new currency. As a result, the people approve a new money system which is promising new information that’s accurate, and we truly believe in a new currency. And above else, you have your new currency, listener?

Second, my hope is for you to be — literate! If you’re literate in English grammar, then you comprehend English grammar. The majority of people, who reside in District 8, are illiterate — hilarious! I don’t control your English grammar structure, but you control your English grammar structure.

This is not the ramblings of a right-wing crackpot, which some have claimed Loughner to be, but gibberish. This doesn't take away from the possibility Loughner reacted to right-wing propaganda, but quite likely out of madness, not political motivation, such as we understand such motivation.

Assassination in Court, U.S. Argues to Make Legal What It’s Always Done

What an incredible era we live in!

Today in federal court, government attorney Douglas Letter argued against a lawsuit brought by both the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) that the U.S. executive power had the right to kill an American citizen abroad, without review by the judiciary. In his argument to drop the suit, brought on behalf of the father of "radical" Muslim cleric Anwar Al-Aulaqi [Awlaki], Letter claimed, "If we use lethal force we do so consistent with the law."

According to the Christian Science Monitor story on today's proceedings:

The lawsuit does not seek to prevent the government from carrying out targeted killings. Instead, the ACLU is asking Judge Bates to examine the government’s criteria for placing Awlaki on the alleged kill list.

To justify lethal action, the ACLU suit says, the government must be able to demonstrate that the targeted killing is necessary to prevent a direct and imminent threat to public safety. In addition, the suit says, the government must be able to show there are no non-lethal options available to neutralize a threat from Awlaki.

According to a joint press release by ACLU and CCR:

"If the Constitution means anything, it surely means that the president does not have unreviewable authority to summarily execute any American whom he concludes is an enemy of the state," said Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU, who presented arguments in the case. "It's the government's responsibility to protect the nation from terrorist attacks, but the courts have a crucial role to play in ensuring that counterterrorism policies are consistent with the Constitution."

Chickens and Coincidences

It seems strongly coincidental that on the day of the hearing, a new Awlaki video should appear on the scene, courtesy of the dubious SITE Institute, remembered for their unveiling of another timely video, the 2007 Osama bin Laden 9/11 statement, which featured a robotic, unmoving bin Laden, which even MSNBC questioned as faked. Then there was that Gainsville, Georgia chicken farm, whose lawsuit against SITE is still pending, accused by SITE of funneling money to terrorists. SITE's founder Rita Katz delivered one of the more memorable of all "war on terror" quotes when she told 60 Minutes, ""Chicken is one of the things that no one can really track down."

Now SITE is back, with a new name (from SITE Institute to SITE Intelligence Group), with a new fire-snorting Awlaki video, just in time for the government's arguments to dismiss the suit that would challenge the government's right to kill the U.S.-born cleric, supposedly hiding out in Yemen, a leader of Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninula (AQAP). The New York Times led the way with a blog story by Robert Mackey this morning, "Kill Americans, Says Yemeni-American Cleric." The story followed the news last week that You Tube had removed all of al-Awlaki's videos from its site. Mackey references SITE and their new Awlaki video, while blandly noting that Monday was the day "a federal judge will hear arguments in a lawsuit brought by civil libertarians who claim that the Obama administration does not have the right to order the targeted assassination of Mr. Awlaki and other suspected militants." Gee, what a coincidence the headline for that same Monday article quotes the same Mr. Awlaki as inciting the killing of Americans. As is often the case, the rest of the U.S. press stood up and saluted as the Times sent the story up the proverbial flagpole.

"How popular will Anwar al-Awlaki's latest video be?" asks the Christian Science Monitor. CNN weighed in, too: "U.S.-born cleric rails against Yemen, Iran, United States." Paula Kruger at Australia's ABC was not to be outdone, however, with a headline clanging in its clarion call of danger: "US-born cleric calls for death of all Americans."

ANWAR AL-AWLAKI (translation): Do not seek any permission when it comes to the killing of the Americans. Fighting the devil doesn't need a religious edict, deliberation, prayer or guidance. They are the party of the devil and fighting them is the personal duty of our times.

We reach that moment when it is either us or them. We are two opposites that will never meet. They want something that cannot happen unless they wipe us out. This is a decisive battle. This is a battle of Moses and pharaoh; this is a battle of righteousness and falsehood.

"We reach that moment when it is either us or them." Well, if it was your head being hunted by the CIA or the Pentagon's JSOC Special Forces assassination squads, you might see the world that way, too. In fact, the blurriness of right and wrong is only made worse by the U.S. assertion that it can kill whomever it wants to, irregardless of constitutional niceties, if only it can claim the right is somehow lodged in the 9/11-inspired Authorization for Use of Military Force. Congress has rubber-stamped the AUMF for years now, and President Obama dutifully pressed it upon a Democratic Party-controlled House and Senate... well, once controlled, as Democratic Party lassitude in the wake of the worst economic recession, if not depression, in sixty years saw their short lived ascendancy in both houses of Congress come crashing down around their well-deserving heads.

Mackey at the Times makes sure we don't forget that Awlaki is associated with AQAP, which smuggled -- no doubt in Mackey's mind -- those bomb packages on freight cargo jets last month. And he notes that a Yemeni judge has issued an order for Awlaki's capture. But, in the tradition of open-mindedness so bally-hooed around the Times, he gives the final word to legal pundit Jonathan Turley, who noted last August:

If a President can unilaterally kill a U.S. citizens on his own authority, our court system (and indeed our constitutional rights) become entirely discretionary. The position of the Administration contains no substantial limitations on such authority other than its own promise to make such decisions with care.

Bathed in Blood

"War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade," wrote the Romantic English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley almost 200 years ago now. But one can only look back to an interesting story in the London Times to gain another kind of perspective on the current events surrounding the obscene U.S. argument for assassinating its own citizens without due process, of running hit teams and killing or death lists.

In 1976, journalist Peter Watson was at a NATO conference in Oslo, when a U.S. Navy psychologist, Dr. Thomas Narut, from the U.S. Naval Hospital in Naples told Watson and New Jersey psychologist Dr. Alfred Zitani, that the Navy sought men to train as assassins in overseas embassies. The following is from the London Sunday Times, "The soldiers who become killers," September 8, 1974, but reproduced from a conspiracy site, as the original, and most references to it, plentiful even when I first read about it some years ago, are limited now to a few dozen conspiracy sites. The story is also told at some length in Watson's book (out of print), War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology, published by Basic Books in 1978.

[Narut's] naval work involved establishing how to induce servicemen who ma[y] not be naturally inclined to kill, to do so under certain conditions. When pressed afterwards as to what was meant by "combat readiness units," he explained this included men for commando-type operations and - so he said - for insertion into U.S. embassies under cover, ready to kill in those countries should the need arise. Dr. Narut used the word "hitmen" and "assassin" of these men.

The method, according to Dr. Narut, was to show films specially designed to show people being killed and injured in violent ways. By being acclimated through these films, the men eventually became able to dissociate any feelings from such a situation. Dr. Narut also added that U.S. Naval psychologists specially selected men for these commando tasks, from submarine crews, paratroops, and some were convicted murderers from military prisons. Asked whether he was suggesting that murderers were being released from prisons to become assassins, he replied: "It's happened more than once."

The story goes into various mind-control methods by which the training was done. The Pentagon denied the story, and also wouldn't allow Watson access to interview personnel at the U.S. Naval Neuropsychiatric Center in San Diego, where the training was supposedly done. The whole tale might seem fantastic, unless one remembered that the U.S.-sponsored Phoenix Program in Vietnam was responsible for the assassination of 20,000 or more people in the 1960s. The U.S. also supplied assassination lists to the Indonesian government during the bloody 1965 coup that slaughtered half a million people.

“For the first time, U.S. officials acknowledge that in 1965 they systematically compiled comprehensive lists of Communist operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres. As many as 5,000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured, according to the U.S. officials,” Kathy Kadane wrote for South Carolina’s Herald-Journal on May 19, 1990. [Kadane's article also appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on May 20, 1990, the Washington Post on May 21, 1990, and the Boston Globe on May 23, 1990.]

The Indonesian mass murder program was based in part on experiences gleaned by the CIA in the Philippines. “US military advisers of the Joint US Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) and the CIA station in Manila designed and led the bloody suppression of the nationalist Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan,” notes Roland G. Simbulan (Covert Operations and the CIA’s Hidden History in the Philippines).

[Lt. Commander Narut evidently died in 1994, and was buried in Orlando, Florida.]

The history of the United States and assassination, post-World War II, and particularly from the 1960s on, has been a sorry tale of botched public attempts (as of Castro), and a bloodbath dealt by U.S. proxy death squads, and if we can believe the Watson story, by deep cover U.S. assassins themselves. In 1976, in the wake of the many revelations about U.S. government crimes, including assassinations, President Gerald Ford issued a presidential directive (EO 11905) banning assassinations, a directive whose basic premises lie in shreds after ten years of Bush/Obama rule.

It would be remiss not to note in this context the blood bath that is U.S. history on the subject, not to bring up Phoenix, and all the rest of it. Recent revelations in the Iraq logs Wikileaks cache of documents suggests that the U.S. helped form torture squads, and perhaps death squads in Iraq. In any case, they certainly turned thousands of prisoners over to Iraqi forces they knew from hundreds of observations were torturing prisoners, often to death. This deliberate war crime, a direct violation of the Convention Against Torture treaty, was conducted under both the Bush and Obama administrations. But where in our society is the outrage? The society cannot seems to pick itself up out of the muck of triviality and standard party politics and cable TV scandal-mongering.

So forgive me if I don't jump on the bandwagon to talk about Bush and his approval of waterboarding claims. Is he smug? Of course he's smug, because Americans have been ignoring news about torture and assassinations on behalf of the ruling elite for decades now. I don't know what it will take to turn such a historical situation around. Looking at the young and those vulnerable to such confusions as massive societal hypocrisy can allow, one can understand why some have turned even to radical Islam. But I can't recommend it. I'd like to see the young take up the banner that was once Percy Shelley's: free love, hatred of tyrannies, including -- if not especially -- the tyranny of one's own state, and equality of all sexes, peoples, religious practice (including atheism), and add to it the wisdom of a century's struggle for economic justice and against the exploiters of mankind.

But for now, all forward-seeking and progressive individuals should be backing the CCR/ACLU lawsuit, because if the U.S. gets its way, tomorrow it may not be the unsavory Awlaki, it may be you or me. And anyone who was forced to study history a semester or two knows that to be true.

Cross-posted from Firedoglake

Bushism Redux: Charge 'em if you can't kill 'em

More on the ACLU/CCR filing I reported on last month. It seems, as Glenn Greenwald put it in an article on Wednesday, Obama has adopted a Red Queen strategy: "Sentence first -- verdict afterward."

Marcy Wheeler caught what a very odd point in the AP story on the government's turn in strategy: "The Obama administration is considering filing the first criminal charges against radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in case the CIA fails to kill him and he’s is captured alive in Yemen." Wheeler added:

And the claim that they’re charging al-Awlaki just in case they happen to capture him alive rather than dead (opps!)? I’d suggest it probably has a lot more to do with the suit CCR and ACLU have taken against the government. I’m guessing that following shortly on formal charges, DOJ will tell the courts they can’t litigate the al-Awlaki suit because it pertains to an ongoing criminal investigation. Voila! No discovery in the lawsuit!!

For myself, I found a good deal of dry, wry humor in the ACLU/CCR comment that the changes "would be a step in the right direction." Damn. I'd hate to see what a step in the wrong direction would look like at this point.

Here's the press release from CCR and ACLU. Please support these organizations with some donations so they can do this necessary work for all of us.

CCR and ACLU Respond to Report that the Government Will Bring Charges Against Anwar Al-Aulaqi

EW YORK – The Obama administration is considering filing criminal charges against Anwar Al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen located in Yemen whom the U.S. government has already targeted for death without charge or trial, according to an AP story today.

In August, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a lawsuit challenging the government’s asserted authority to carry out “targeted killings” of U.S. citizens located far from any armed conflict zone. The groups were retained by Nasser Al-Aulaqi to bring the lawsuit in connection with the government’s decision to authorize the targeted killing of his son, Anwar Al-Aulaqi. The groups charge that if the government has evidence that a U.S. citizen is involved in terrorist activity, he should be charged with a crime and prosecuted.

The following can be attributed to the ACLU and CCR:

“Our organizations have long stated that if the government has evidence that Anwar Al-Aulaqi is involved in terrorist activity, it should present that evidence to a court – not authorize his execution without charge or trial. Now, months after the government announced its intent to kill Al-Aulaqi, it may finally bring charges against him. This would be a step in the right direction. The constitutional guarantee of due process relies on the critical distinction between allegations and evidence. If the reports that charges may be brought against Al-Aulaqi are true, the fact that it has taken the government this long – months after having announced his death sentence – suggests that, in this case, the government’s allegations were far ahead of its evidence.

“While bringing charges against Al-Aulaqi based on credible evidence would be a step in the right direction, it would not mean that he could now be targeted for killing without trial. It is well established that the government cannot use extrajudicial killing to punish people for past acts, but only to prevent grave and imminent threats. A criminal charge for past crimes does not provide a license to kill.

“We continue to believe that the courts must play a role in establishing legal standards for when the government can take the life of one of its own citizens without charge or trial. For that reason, we will continue with our litigation.”

For more information on the case, including fact sheets and legal papers, visit: ccrjustice.org/targetedkillings and www.aclu.org/targetedkillings.

Rights Groups File Challenge to U.S. Assassination Policy

From an important joint press release by the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, announcing an important lawsuit against President Obama, the CIA and the Department of Defense, attempting to block the wide-spread "targeted killing" policy of the U.S. government. As a recent article at AlterNet put it, "mass U.S. assassination on a scale unequaled in world history lies at the heart of America's military strategy in the Muslim world, a policy both illegal and never seriously debated by Congress or the American people."

Rights Groups File Challenge To Targeted Killing By U.S.

CCR And ACLU Charge That Practice Violates The Constitution And International Law

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) today filed a lawsuit challenging the government's asserted authority to carry out “targeted killings” of U.S. citizens located far from any armed conflict zone.

The authority contemplated by the Obama administration is far broader than what the Constitution and international law allow, the groups charge. Outside of armed conflict, both the Constitution and international law prohibit targeted killing except as a last resort to protect against concrete, specific, and imminent threats of death or serious physical injury. An extrajudicial killing policy under which names are added to CIA and military “kill lists” through a secret executive process and stay there for months at a time is plainly not limited to imminent threats.

“The United States cannot simply execute people, including its own citizens, anywhere in the world based on its own say-so,” said Vince Warren, Executive Director of CCR. “The law prohibits the government from killing without trial or conviction other than in the face of an imminent threat that leaves no time for deliberation or due process. That the government adds people to kill lists after a bureaucratic process and leaves them on the lists for months at a time flies in the face of the Constitution and international law.”

The groups charge that targeting individuals for execution who are suspected of terrorism but have not been convicted or even charged – without oversight, judicial process or disclosed standards for placement on kill lists – also poses the risk that the government will erroneously target the wrong people. In recent years, the U.S. government has detained many men as terrorists, only for courts or the government itself to discover later that the evidence was wrong or unreliable.

According to today’s legal complaint, the government has not disclosed the standards it uses for authorizing the premeditated and deliberate killing of U.S. citizens located far from any battlefield. The groups argue that the American people are entitled to know the standards being used for these life and death decisions.

“A program that authorizes killing U.S. citizens, without judicial oversight, due process or disclosed standards is unconstitutional, unlawful and un-American,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “We don’t sentence people to prison on the basis of secret criteria, and we certainly shouldn’t sentence them to death that way. It is not enough for the executive branch to say ‘trust us’ – we have seen that backfire in the past and we should learn from those mistakes.”

CCR and the ACLU were retained by Nasser Al-Aulaqi to bring a lawsuit in connection with the government's decision to authorize the targeted killing of his son, U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Aulaqi, whom the CIA and Defense Department have targeted for death. The complaint asks a court to rule that using lethal force far from any battlefield and without judicial process is illegal in all but the narrowest circumstances and to prohibit the government from carrying out targeted killings except in compliance with these standards. It also asks the court to order the government to disclose the standards it uses to place U.S. citizens on government kill lists.

Today’s lawsuit was filed against the CIA, Defense Department and the president in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Attorneys on the case are Jameel Jaffer, Ben Wizner and Jonathan Manes of the ACLU; Pardiss Kebriaei, Maria LaHood and Bill Quigley of CCR; and Arthur B. Spitzer of the ACLU of the Nation's Capital. Co-counsel in Yemen is Mohammed Allawo of the Allawo Law Firm and the National Organization for Defending Human Rights (HOOD).

For more information on the case, including fact sheets and legal papers, visit: www.aclu.org/targetedkillings and ccrjustice.org/targetedkillings.

See also Glenn Greenwald's article on the lawsuit filing, "Lawsuit challenges Obama's power to kill citizens without due process":

The lawsuit -- captioned Al-Aulaqi v. Obama -- was filed in federal court in the District of Columbia, and names Barack Obama, Leon Panetta and Robert Gates as defendants. Among other relief, the Complaint asks the court to (a) "declare that the Constitution [along with 'treaty and customary international law'] prohibits Defendants from carrying out the targeted killing of U.S. citizens, including Plaintiff’s son, except in circumstances in which they present concrete, specific, and imminent threats to life or physical safety, and there are no means other than lethal force that could reasonably be employed to neutralize the threats"; (b) "enjoin Defendants from intentionally killing U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Aulaqi" unless they demonstrate the applicability of those narrow circumstances; and (c) "order Defendants to disclose the criteria that are used in determining whether the government will carry out the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen" (emphasis added [in original])....

What I've found most disturbing about this controversy from the start is how many Americans are willing to blindly believe the Government's accusations of Terrorism against their fellow citizens -- provided they're Muslims with foreign-sounding names -- without needing to see any evidence at all. All government officials have to do is anonymously leak to the media extremely vague accusations against someone without any evidence presented (Awlaki is involved in multiple plots!!), and a substantial number of people will then immediately run around yelling: Kill that Terrorist!!

It's an authoritarian scene out of some near-future dystopian novel, yet it's exactly what is happening.

Why is the NY Times Underplaying Account of Task Force 373’s Extrajudicial Killings?

Crossposted from Firedoglake/The Seminal

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to examine the question posed in the title of this piece as carefully as I’d like, but even the quickly posted Wikipedia entry on Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Task Force 373 notes that there is a large discrepancy between the amount of targets on TF373’s "kill/capture" list as reported by the major media.

The figures are drawn from the extraordinary release of previously classified Afghan war reports by Wikileaks, and now searchable at the latter’s website.

Task Force 373 is alternately described by the New York Times as "a secret commando unit"; as "an undisclosed ‘black’ unit of special forces" by the UK Guardian; and "an elite American unit…. which operates in Afghanistan outside of the ISAF mandate" by Spiegel Online. These three news sources were partners with Wikileaks in the release of the documents, and had special access to the material prior to their public posting.

By all accounts, Task Force 373 seems to be a kidnapping and death squad, run by the Americans, but housed at a German base in Afghanistan. The very secret unit, unknown even to other ISAF forces, works off a "kill or capture" list known as JPEL, which stands for "Joint Prioritized Effects List." From this bland name springs an operations force that, according to the UK Guardian, has "more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida" on its seize or kill list. Most of the world press has reported this same or similar figure, though Spiegel only says the figure is "large":

The list of targeted individuals is arranged according to process number and priority level. Depending on the case, the commandos are sometimes given the option to arrest or kill their prey. Nowhere in the available documents is that list printed in full, but a total of 84 reports about JPEL operations can be filtered out of the thousands of documents. It is not possible to work out from the documents exactly how many JPEL targets there are in Afghanistan, but the four-digit process numbers are enough to suggest that the total number of targets is large.

It was the four-digit process numbers that the Guardian used to determine their figure. Simply put, they counted.

The pursuit of these "high value targets" is evidently embedded deep in coalition tactics. The Jpel list assigns an individual serial number to each of those targeted for kill or capture and by October 2009 this had reached 2,058.

But however they did it, the New York Times came up with a much different and drastically lower number.

Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.

The dramatically lower of numbers reported may be a fudged way of looking at figures. They say "top insurgent commanders", and this may be a subset of the total of 2000 or more. But the Times never reports the larger number, or even that it runs into the four digits. The import of this is to underplay the amount of killings. It’s unlikely there are 2000 or more "top insurgent commanders." So, who is the U.S. seizing or killing?

Operation Phoenix Redux

The Guardian article by Nick Davies reports much more than the single paragraph the New York Times dedicates to the story, emphasizing the legal, moral and political ramifications of the Task Force’s actions.

The United Nations’ special rapporteur for human rights, Professor Philip Alston, went to Afghanistan in May 2008 to investigate rumours of extrajudicial killings. He warned that international forces were neither transparent nor accountable and that Afghans who attempted to find out who had killed their loved ones "often come away empty-handed, frustrated and bitter".

Now, for the first time, the leaked war logs reveal details of deadly missions by TF 373 and other units hunting down Jpel targets that were previously hidden behind a screen of misinformation. They raise fundamental questions about the legality of the killings and of the long-term imprisonment without trial, and also pragmatically about the impact of a tactic which is inherently likely to kill, injure and alienate the innocent bystanders whose support the coalition craves.

The Guardian story documents some of the cases of killings of women and children, and notes that there is also likely a British version of Task Force 373 operating in Afghanistan as well. The parallels with Vietnam are extraordinary, where U.S. counterinsurgency amounted to a large degree to a capture, torture and assassination program known to us today as Operation Phoenix.

It was only a few weeks ago that I noted (based on an observation in a Guardian story by Ian Cobain and Owen Bowcott) that documents released in Britain in the Binyam Mohammed et al. suit had referenced what sounded like extrajudicial killings associated with the rendition program. "Is it clear that detention, rather than killing, is the objective of the operation?" asks a protocol for MI6 operatives working with the U.S. on rendition operations.

Now we have evidence of massive killings underway by secretive U.S. forces, and of plenty of deaths of civilians who get in the way. But the U.S. press has mostly deep-sixed this aspect of the Wikileaks Afghan logs. A story by CNN makes no mention of how many people might be on TF373’s target list, but does add a word of dissent:

“You have people going in with a kill list and the public accountability simply doesn’t exist,” said Sarah Knuckey, director of the Project on Extrajudicial Executions at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law.

Marc Ambinder on Task Force 373

Mainstream bloggers appear to be taking the lead of the major U.S. press. Take Marc Ambinder’s story on the release at The Atlantic, and his own reference to TF373:

The task forces themselves — well, there’s TF 373, the Joint Special Operations Command task force for Afghanistan, which has since morphed into something else. The structure is different today. There are, however, references to the activities of Task Force 2-2, a multi-element special operations element that has — and I emphasize has — the authority to basically self-task, to take bad guys off of the JPEL list (the joint prioritized effects list) and decide whether to capture or kill them based on the situation at hand.

There are several incidents in which 2-2 and other 373 elements killed civilians and saw those killings covered up or obscured in official press releases.

Ambinder’s link is to the same Guardian story on TF373 that I have quoted here, so I’ll give him that. But the failure to report the extent of the targets, and the reference to "take bad guys off the JPEL list" makes them sound, well, sort of innocuous, basically good guys. His view that the TF is "basically self-task" is belied by the Guardian’s coverage, which reports, "The process of choosing targets reaches high into the military command." Additionally, the idea that there have only been "several incidents" underplays the extent of damage done by the secret U.S. death squad.

Consider this "incident", reported by Speigel Online:

The documents don’t just reveal the existence and activities of the Taliban hunters, they also show why these special units cause so much anger in the Afghan population. Mistakes made by special units are kept secret. One particularly sensitive report of a TF 373 operation dated June 17, 2007 is classified so secret that details of the mission must not be passed on to other ISAF forces. On this day the soldiers appear to have committed a particularly fatal error. The aim of the mission seems to have been to kill the prominent al-Qaida official Abu Laith. The unit had spent weeks watching a Koran school in which the Americans believed the al-Qaida man and several aides were living. But the five rockets they launched from a mobile rocket launcher ended up killing the wrong people.

Instead of the finding the top terrorist, the troops found the bodies of six dead children in the rubble of the completely destroyed school.

The Guardian reports, "The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path."

It is a sign of how debased our society has become that reports of "targeted killings" and assassinations are met with little outrage in the press or by the public. Perhaps this is because we use terms that will not offend as much. Indeed, in the title of this very piece I use the term "extrajudicial killings" rather than "death squads" (which I do clearly use in the text) because I fear that this reality will be so discordant to readers that they will shun the article, perhaps too psychologically defended to accept the terrible truth about the government they have and the country they live in.

Let us say, too, that the mainstream press plays a major role in this. The downsizing of the figure of killings — really murders — by the Special Operations task force, as reported by the New York Times, or underplayed by major bloggers such as Marc Ambinder, lulls the population into believing the terror wrought by the U.S. military in Afghanistan is really not so bad. But it is bad. It is a war crime, and Julian Assange, who orchestrated the release of the documents upon which this story is based is correct in saying that they give evidence of war crimes. I’m reminded of recent stories that have cited the Harvard study (PDF) that showed how the media dropped using the word "torture" after Abu Ghraib.

One wonders what kind of schizoid state exists at the New York Times. One minute their ed board calls President Obama’s forcible deportation of an Algerian Guantanamo prisoner back to a country where he feared persecution, torture, or death "an act of cruelty that seems to defy explanation.” The next minute, the editorial news staff is minimizing the number of targets on a U.S. military task force hit list. I’ll let them figure that one out for themselves.

As for the rest of us, we need to step up the demand that U.S. and NATO forces pull out of Afghanistan.

U.N. Expert Calls For U.S. To Halt CIA Drone Killings

The initial blockquoted text below is from a press release from the ACLU, describing the report by the U.N. special rapporteur regarding the illegality of the Obama Administration's use of drones to assassinate people. These drone attacks have infamously killed scores of innocents, but their use on even supposed "legitimate" targets borders on lawlessness.

U.S. use of these high-tech tools of state terror is criminal, and is an extremely dangerous precedent, threatening all who would ever oppose the U.S. state politically. How long, we must ask, before these proverbial chickens come home to roost? Drones are already being used for surveillance over portions of the United States.



The ACLU press release:

NEW YORK – Targeted killings, including the use of drones, are increasingly used in ways that violate international law, according to a report out today by a U.N. expert on extrajudicial killings. The American Civil Liberties Union said the report underscores the alarming legal questions raised by the U.S. program of targeting and killing people – including U.S. citizens – sometimes far from any battlefield.

According to the report by U.N. special rapporteur Philip Alston, which will be presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council Thursday, while targeted killings may be permitted in armed conflict situations when used against combatants, fighters or civilians who directly engage in combat-like activities, they are increasingly being used far from any battlefield. The report states that "this strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other States can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial killings."

Alston also criticized the U.S. invocation of the "law of 9/11," which it uses to justify the use of force outside of armed-conflict zones as part of the so-called global war on terrorism. The report called for the United States and other countries to end the "accountability vacuum" by disclosing the full legal basis for targeted killings and specifically the measures in place to ensure wrongful killings are investigated, prosecuted and punished.

"The U.S. should heed the recommendations of the rapporteur and disclose the full legal basis of the U.S. targeted killings program, and it should abide by international law. The entire world is not a battlefield, and the government cannot use quintessentially warlike measures anywhere in the world that it believes a suspected terrorist might be located," said Jamil Dakwar, Director of the ACLU Human Rights Program. "The Obama administration has pledged to lead by example and restore respect for rule of law, but U.S. targeted killings are impeding U.S. leadership on human rights and sending the message that some causes can be fought outside the rule of law and without transparency and accountability."

The ACLU in March filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit demanding that the government disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, and in April sent a letter to President Obama condemning the U.S. policy on targeted killings and urging him to bring it into compliance with international and domestic law.

"The U.S. program of targeted killing outside of armed conflict zones is illegal and raises serious policy questions that ought to be debated publicly," said Jonathan Manes, legal fellow with the ACLU National Security Project. "In addition to the legal basis, scope and limits of the program, the Obama administration should disclose how many civilians have been killed, how the program is overseen, and what accountability mechanisms exist over the CIA and others who conduct the targeted killings."

More information about the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit is available online at: www.aclu.org/national-security/predator-drone-foia

The ACLU's letter to Obama is available at: www.aclu.org/human-rights-national-security/letter-president-obama-regarding-targeted-killings

Bmaz at Emptywheel had an excellent posting yesterday on this very topic, U.N. Expert Calls On U.S. To Halt CIA Targeted Killings. In the post, he captures the exquisite yet abhorrent irony in how the U.S. is handling the so-called legality issues surrounding these remote-control assassinations:

Today, the report is out, and Charlie Savage again brings the details in the [New York] Times:

A senior United Nations official said on Wednesday that the growing use of armed drones by the United States to kill terrorism suspects is undermining global constraints on the use of military force. He warned that the American example will lead to a chaotic world as the new weapons technology inevitably spreads....

In an interview, Mr. Alston, said the United States appears to think that it is “facing a unique threat from transnational terrorist networks” that justifies its effort to put forward legal justifications that would make the rules “as flexible as possible"....

Alston’s concerns are especially troubling considering Charlie Savage’s first NY Times report in last Friday’s print edition on the quiet efforts of the Obama Administration to insure its drone operators can never be prosecuted for the extrajudicial murders they commit. Describing surreptitious efforts to amend the Military Commissions Manual:

The Pentagon delayed issuing a 281-page manual laying out commission rules until the eve of the hearing. The reason, officials say, is that government lawyers had been scrambling to rewrite a section about murder because it has implications for the C.I.A. drone program.

An earlier version of the manual, issued in 2007 by the Bush administration, defined the charge of “murder in violation of the laws of war” as a killing by someone who did not meet “the requirements for lawful combatancy” — like being part of a regular army or otherwise wearing a uniform. Similar language was incorporated into a draft of the new manual.

But as the Khadr hearing approached, Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, pointed out that such a definition could be construed as a concession by the United States that C.I.A. drone operators were war criminals. Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department general counsel, and his staff ultimately agreed with that concern. They redrafted the manual so that murder by an unprivileged combatant would instead be treated like espionage — an offense under domestic law not considered a war crime.

All of which is not just distressing, but telling as to who the United States have become as a country. Made all the more sickening by the fact the extrajudicial assassination program has exacerbated geometrically under the short, but deadly, tenure of the supposedly enlightened Constitutional law authority Barack Obama.

Why's Obama Joking About Killing w/Predator Drones?

Adapted from a diary originally posted at Daily Kos

Take a look at this YouTube video clip of a portion of Barack Obama's speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner the other day.

President Obama made the following "joke" about killing the Jonas brothers with predator drones. Given that this comes from the man who orders such strikes, which have killed hundreds of innocent civilians in Afghanistan, I don't find it funny. In fact, if Bush had made such a joke, the progressive community would have been all over it.

"The Jonas Brothers are here; they're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don't get any ideas. I have two words for you, 'predator drones.' You will never see it coming."

(Link if the embed doesn't work for you)

The drone killings have been quite controversial. Human rights organizations have criticized them. Even with conditional support, the conservative Brookings Institute noted last summer:

Critics correctly find many problems with this program, most of all the number of civilian casualties the strikes have incurred. Sourcing on civilian deaths is weak and the numbers are often exaggerated, but more than 600 civilians are likely to have died from the attacks. That number suggests that for every militant killed, 10 or so civilians also died.

New America Foundation reported that from 2006 through part of 2009, over 300 innocent people were killed by U.S. predator drones in Pakistan. Adding even more controversy, the New York Times reports that contractors from Blackwater have been assembling and loading the pilotless drones from secret bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Of course, the government is currently saying (reported via Reuters) that the drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal areas "have killed more than 500 militants -- the vast majority of them low-level -- but fewer than 30 civilians..." Meanwhile, the ACLU is suing to see government documents that might tell us more about the program.

As controversial as their purported effectiveness, and the human cost of its killings, is its supposed legality. DefenseNews recently reported that assassinations by drones may bring legal trouble for the Obama administration:

Speaking on March 23 before the House Oversight and Government Reform national security and foreign affairs subcommittee, American University law professor Kenneth Anderson said "at some point, there will be a collision" between the U.S. government and the international legal community unless the Obama administration moves to address the legality of drone strikes over nations with which the United States is not at war.

In an article at The New Yorker, Jane Mayer described what a Predator attack looks like:

People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying. “You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,” a former C.I.A. officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack. (He watched the carnage on a small monitor in the field.) Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: “squirters.”

Given all the above, what do you think about Obama's "joke"? Vote in the poll below. I'm sure I'll also get some, ahem, comments. [Note: In the original Daily Kos diary, I put in a poll asking how people felt about the joke. At Daily Kos, approximately half felt it was "funny, harmless, no big deal, etc"; a quarter thought it was "tasteless, outrageous, obscene, etc"; approximately 10% thought "Obama should apologize for his remarks," while another 12% or so thought my diary "another Obama-bashing outrage". All together, the poll as of writing had 307 votes.]

H/T for the video to Adam Serwer at the American Prospect (via Jamelle Bouie at Attackerman/FDL)

Declassified Document: Kissinger Blocked U.S. Protest on South American Assassinations

Originally posted at FDL/The Seminal

A controversy has simmered for some years over the role of the United States, and particularly of its then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in the actions surrounding Operation Condor. Condor was an assassination and torture plan implemented by a number of South American countries, braintrusted by Pinochet’s Chile.

A new FOIA release, courtesy of the National Security Archive, shows that only five days before former high-ranking Allende official, Orlando Letelier, and his U.S. assistant, Ronnie Moffit, were assassinated by Chile’s notorious DINA secret service in Washington, DC, a September 16, 1976 State Department cable from Henry Kissinger told his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, Harry Shlaudeman, to cancel a formal demarche to the Uruguayan government, protesting the assassinations and other activities of Operation Condor. The cable was followed four days later by instructions from Shlaudeman to numerous South American U.S. embassies to forego any protests regarding Condor policy, offering the excuse that Condor appeared to be inactive.

Yet, only the next day, a Condor assassination took place in the streets of Washington, DC, when a car bomb blew up Letelier and Moffitt. According to British historian, Kenneth Maxwell, the U.S. government was aware of Operation Condor, and even "that a Chilean assassination team had been planning to enter the United States." A flap over Maxwell’s favorable review in the journal of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), Foreign Affairs of Peter Kornbluh’s book The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, led to Maxwell’s resignation from the CFR some months later.

See Maxwell’s account in "The Case of the Missing Letter in Foreign Affairs: Kissinger, Pinochet and Operation Condor," PDF. Today, Kornbluh is a Senior Analyst at the National Security Archive, and edited the introduction to the documents on Kissinger and Operation Condor.

What is Operation Condor?

According to a September 28, 1976 cable to FBI headquarters from FBI agent Robert Scherrer, who previously had worked with Paraguayan police in intelligence gathering on leftists, Operation Condor was work of "cooperating services in South America in order to eliminate Marxist terrorists and their activities in the area…. Chile is the center for Operation Condor, and in addition it includes Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. Brazil has also tentatively agreed to supply input for Operation Condor."

Scherrer, who later captured Letelier and Moffitt’s killer, continued:

A third and more secret phase of Operation Condor involves the formation of special teams from member countries to travel anywhere in the world to non-member countries to carry out sanctions, [including] assassination, against terrorists or supporters of terrorist organizations from Operation Condor member countries. For example, should a terrorist or a supporter of a terrorist organization from a member country be located in a European country, a special team from Operation Condor would be dispatched to locate and surveil the target. When the location and surveillance operation has terminated, a second team from Operation Condor would be dispatched to carry out the actual sanction against the target. Special teams would be issued false documentation from member countries of Operation Condor.

According to a 2005 BBC story, greater documentary evidence came to light in 1992, thanks to the chance discovery of a Paraguayan judge. "The archives counted 50,000 persons murdered, 30,000 "desaparecidos" and 400,000 incarcerated" (link).

The participation of U.S. military and intelligence agencies in facilitating Condor have been slow to surface, but there are some. In October 1978, a State Department cable from U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White, to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, noted that the intelligence chiefs in Condor kept in touch with each other through encrypted messages sent through "a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covers all of Latin America." White told Vance that since "there is [a] likelihood Condor will surface during Letelier trial in the U.S…. it would seem advisable to review this arrangement to insure that its continuation is in U.S. interest."

Further declassifications of the Scherrer memo have shown that the Pentagon had quite detailed information about the mobilizations behind Condor operations.

Most recently, just yesterday, the Los Angeles Times, with Andrew Zajac and David S. Cloud reporting, described the response to the latest revelations surrounding Kissinger’s role in letting Operation Condor proceed:

"The document confirms that it’s Kissinger’s complete responsibility for having rescinded a cease-and-desist order to Condor killers," said Kornbluh, author of a 2004 book on Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

In a statement, Kissinger said Kornbluh "distorted" the meaning of the cable and said it was intended only to disapprove a specific approach to the Uruguayan government, not to cancel the plan to issue warnings to other nations in the Condor network.

Former State Department officials who worked under Kissinger during that period now say that his cable did interrupt the U.S. effort to rein in Operation Condor, not just with Uruguay but with other countries in the region.

Assassinations, Then and Now

The Kissinger/Condor revelations come at a time with the issue of U.S. assassinations abroad have taken center stage. There is the ongoing controversy over whether the United States has a legal right to conduct "targeted killings", i.e., murders, by pilotless drones in Afghanistan and elsewhere. These drone killings have left a trail of assassinations of purported Al Qaeda leaders, and hundreds of innocent civilians dead, and are believed to be alienating support for U.S. policy in that region.

Even more, reports of CIA and Joint Special Forces assassination squads, given the green-light by former President George W. Bush, and approved by his successor, Barack Obama, have also surfaced. Marcy Wheeler has followed the story in a number of recent articles. There was also the explosive tale by Seymour Hersh, that alleged that there was a special assassination squad attached directly to the office of Vice President Cheney.

The history of the United States is not one generally known to its average citizen. It involves the support and engagement in the use of torture, assassination, and covert interventions into the sovereign affairs of scores of other nations over the course of many decades, from Operation Gladio to Operation Condor. This policy has culminated in 2001-2003 with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, over a quarter million U.S. troops are in that region, and the United States has documented use of torture and assassination as a matter of state policy.

President Obama came to office promising change and greater transparency. He has not lived up to this promise, and it may be that no commander-in-chief can do so, lacking from the populace itself a determination to uproot the militarist mind-set that occupies the programmatic operations of much of the government. But on the other hand, Obama has not indicated any appetite to appeal to the people on these issues, and instead follows the policies of his generals and admirals, and the spooks who populate the vaunted IC ("Intelligence Community").

The military and intelligence sectors of the government and the economy have grown unimaginably powerful. It is not an exaggeration that the actions of the U.S. government have made any claims of benefit in its activities abroad suspect. It is up to citizens of this country to take its democracy back, and hold its government accountable for what it has done.

Important New Book Links the Murder of Frank Olson with CIA Cold War Experiments

The following is a review I wrote at Amazon.com for the newly published book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments. 

H.P. Albarelli, Jr. has written a fully detailed, compelling account of the murder of CIA-linked 1950s Army biochemist Frank Olson. The somewhat surprising death of an otherwise little-known Midwestern scientist would become for contemporary historians, journalists, and researchers -- years after the event -- a crucial nexus providing a gathering point for the multitudinous strands connecting a welter of secretive Cold War intelligence and military programs. 

The Olson case burst upon the public's consciousness in the mid-1970s, along with other revelations at the time concerning CIA and military domestic spying and medical experimentation upon unwitting victims, thanks in part to a landmark expose by then-New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh. Pursued by Olson's family, attorneys, government commissions, newspaper reporters, and even some CIA agents, the truth behind Olson's death after a hundred-foot fall from a Manhattan hotel window on November 28, 1953, has been obscured over the years by a combination of myth, government misdirection, amateurish or hack "research," and, crucially, a lack of access to essential documentation. Now, after almost a decade of research, writer and researcher Albarelli has produced his magnum opus on Olson's death, and it has been well worth the wait.

"A Terrible Mistake" is part history book, part biography, part memoir, and part mystery tale. In order to understand the story of Frank Olson's life and death, and the cover-up surrounding that death, Mr. Albarelli must take the reader on a journey into the history of Cold War experimentation on mind and behavioral control, implemented by a welter of CIA and military programs whose names have passed into the iconic nomenclature regarding the underworld of American covert activities: Project Bluebird, Project MKULTRA, Project Artichoke, MKNAOMI, and others. In addition, because Olson was a government scientist with top secret clearance working on biological weaponry programs for the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, the book also offers a peek into this very little reported corner of U.S. history.

The book is quite long, yet remains a page-turner. I won't reveal the mystery Albarelli solves, i.e., who killed Frank Olson and why, but the long build-up describing the various covert operations of the intelligence agencies, well-documented in the book, builds to a startling pay-off.

In the first half of the book, the author describes Olson's life, the government programs that touch upon his work, Olson's death and its aftermath. The latter part of the book picks up from the initial public revelations surrounding his death, coming over 20 years after it occurred, and the following investigations, including the reopening of the murder investigation by the New York City's District Attorney's office in 1996. Throughout, we are entertained by a kaleidoscopic sequence of characters, including former CIA chiefs Allen Dulles and William Colby, CIA psychiatrists, Watergate burglars (for instance, we learn James McCord was the CIA agent initially sent out to deal with Olson's death), former CIA agents, hotel managers, hired assassins, mobsters, high-priced attorneys, dubious informants, U.S. diplomats and generals, politicians (including a mid-1970s appearance by both Don Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney), and many, many more.

This is not just a book about a dusty, decades-old murder case. With the news of the past few years around U.S. use of torture, as well as recent revelations by Nobel Prize-winning Physicians for Human Rights surrounding possible torture experimentation upon detainees held by the CIA, the history of similar activities by the same United States agencies, as narrated in Albarelli's book, has direct significance to crucial news events of our own day.

I strongly recommend this book. The author's honesty and willingness to look at the facts, rather than wishful thinking, or rely upon accepted wisdom, makes this investigatory journey well-worth the reader's time. The book has a fully-documented "Notes" section, which will satisfy the most avid researcher, or those who wish to double-check the author's assertions. Also included is a section with photographs of key documents.

It seems certain that "A Terrible Mistake" will take its place along other classics of its historical genre. But it is also the most fascinating and entertaining book you will purchase for a long time.

[Full disclosure: the author mentions me in his Acknowledgments section. I had no role in the writing of his book, and my earlier contact with the author amounted to literally a few e-mails. When I wrote the author later and wondered why I was included in the Acknowledgments section, it apparently was due to his appreciation of my own investigations into the current torture scandal, as published in various places online. I thank him for that, but wish to make it clear here that this review is solely based upon my own reading and reaction to this book.]

U.S. Funding of the... Taliban?!

From a new Democracy Now! article by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales, posted over at Truthout:

In a last-minute dissent ahead of a critical war cabinet meeting on escalating the Afghan war, US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry has cast doubt on a troop escalation until the Afghan government can address corruption and other internal problems. Meanwhile, a report reveals how the US government is financing the very same insurgent forces in Afghanistan that American and NATO soldiers are fighting. Investigative journalist Aram Roston traces how the Pentagon’s civilian contractors in Afghanistan end up paying insurgent groups to protect American supply routes from attack....

“How the US Funds the Taliban” is the cover story of the latest issue of The Nation magazine.

Investigative journalist Aram Roston traces how the Pentagon’s civilian contractors in Afghanistan end up paying insurgent groups to protect American supply routes from attack. The practice of buying the Taliban’s protection is not a secret. US military officials in Kabul told Roston that a minimum of ten percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts consists of payments to the Taliban.

Well, well, well. Just when I thought the inanity and corruption of the U.S. adventure in Afghanistan couldn't get any weirder... I thought the scandal about Karzai's heroin-kingpin brother had already topped it all. Then there was the excellent article by Jane Mayer on the Predator assassinations in the Ag-Pak war. Now it's U.S. funding of the Taliban. Oh boy, no wonder Obama reportedly doesn't like any of the options presented on Afghanistan.

How about this, President Obama? Withdraw now.

And, by the way, as long as I've brought up the Predator issue, Mayer is now reporting that:

Philip Alston, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s investigator on extrajudicial executions, issued a formal warning to the Obama Administration, demanding proof that the C.I.A. program doesn’t violate international law:

While there may be circumstances in which the use of such techniques is consistent with applicable international law, this can only be determined in light of information about the legal basis on which particular individuals have been targeted, the measures taken to ensure conformity with the international humanitarian law principles of discrimination, proportionality, necessity and precaution, and the steps taken retrospectively to assess compliance in practice.

U.S. Government Culpability in Death of Martin Luther King

On this 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., there's been a lot of speechifying and article-writing. But I have seen precious little that recounts the campaign of the United States government to discredit and vilify Dr. King. The activities of the FBI's Cointelpro program were documented by the United States Senate in its Church Committee Report. The "likelihood" that King was shot by James Earl Ray "as a result of a conspiracy" was the conclusion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1975. Unlike the JFK case, the HSCA documents on the MLK assassination remain classified to this day.

Yet we will hear nothing about these facts in today's mainstream news. It's unlikely that much will even be said at the liberal blogs. Yet, outside of the work of Dr. King himself, it's the most salient fact about this day of dark remembrance.

I am charging the U.S. government, and most specifically the FBI, with culpability in the assassination of Martin Luther King. What does "culpability" mean?

Culpability generally implies that an act performed is wrong but does not involve any evil intent by the wrongdoer. The connotation of the term is fault rather than malice or a guilty purpose. It has limited significance in Criminal Law except in cases of reckless Homicide in which a person acts negligently or demonstrates a reckless disregard for life, which results in another person's death. In general, however, culpability has milder connotations. It is used to mean reprehensible rather than wantonly or grossly negligent behavior. Culpable conduct may be wrong but it is not necessarily criminal.

I personally believe the guilt of the U.S. government is greater, but I don't have the evidence to prove it. Such a charge of complicity requires much more evidence than the circumstantial but damaging facts I will quote from the Church Committee report below. However, the activities of the FBI in the King case clearly helped create an atmosphere of hatred and distrust around the person of Dr. King. Rather than seeking to protect American leaders from harm, the FBI clearly sought to cripple the life and reputation of the U.S. civil rights leader.

Let's look at the Church Report itself. All bolded material is my emphasis. All footnotes must be referenced in the original document via link:

SUPPLEMENTARY DETAILED STAFF REPORTS
ON INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND THE
RIGHTS OF AMERICANS

_____

BOOK III
_____

FINAL REPORT

OF THE

SELECT COMMITTEE
TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS

WITH RESPECT TO

INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES
UNITED STATES SENATE

APRIL 23 (under authority of the order of April 14), 1976

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., CASE STUDY

I. INTRODUCTION

From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to "neutralize" him as an effective civil rights leader. In the words of the man in charge of the FBI's "war" against Dr. King:

No holds were barred. We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business. 1

The FBI collected information about Dr. King's plans and activities through an extensive surveillance program, employing nearly every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau's disposal. Wiretaps, which were initially approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were maintained on Dr. King's home telephone from October 1963 until mid-1965; the SCLC headquarter's telephones were covered by wiretaps for an even longer period. Phones in the homes and offices of some of Dr. King's close advisers were also wiretapped. The FBI has acknowledged 16 occasions on which microphones were hidden in Dr. King's hotel and motel rooms in an "attempt" to obtain information about the "private activities of King and his advisers" for use to "completely discredit" them. 2

FBI informants in the civil rights movement and reports from field offices kept the Bureau's headquarters informed of developments in the civil rights field. The FBI's presence was so intrusive that one major figure in the civil rights movement testified that his colleagues referred to themselves as members of "the FBI's golden record club." 3

The FBI's formal program to discredit Dr. King with Government officials began with the distribution of a "monograph" which the FBI realized could "be regarded as a personal attack on Martin Luther King," 4 and which was subsequently described by a Justice Department official as "a personal diatribe ... a personal attack without evidentiary support."5

Congressional leaders were warned "off the record" about alleged dangers posed by Reverend King....

The FBI's program to destroy Dr. King as the leader of the civil rights movement entailed attempts to discredit him with churches, universities, and the press. Steps were taken to attempt to convince the National Council of Churches, the Baptist World Alliance, and leading Protestant ministers to halt financial support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and to persuade them that "Negro leaders should completely isolate King and remove him from the role he is now occupying in civil rights activities." 6 When the FBI learned that Dr. King intended to visit the Pope, an agent was dispatched to persuade Francis Cardinal Spellman to warn the Pope about "the likely embarrassment that may result to the Pope should he grant King an audience." 7 The FBI sought to influence universities to withhold honorary degrees from Dr. King. Attempts were made to prevent the publication of articles favorable to Dr. King and to find "friendly" news sources that would print unfavorable articles. The FBI offered to play for reporters tape recordings allegedly made from microphone surveillance of Dr. King's hotel rooms.

The FBI mailed Dr. King a tape recording made from its microphone coverage. According to the Chief of the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division, the tape was intended to precipitate a separation between Dr. King and his wife in the belief that the separation would reduce Dr. King's stature. 7a The tape recording was accompanied by a note which Dr. King and his advisers interpreted as a threat to release the tape recording unless Dr. King committed suicide. The FBI also made preparations to promote someone "to assume the role of leadership of the Negro people when King has been completely discredited." 8

The campaign against Dr. King included attempts to destroy the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by cutting off its sources of funds. The FBI considered, and on some occasions executed, plans to cut off the support of some of the SCLC's major contributors, including religious organizations, a labor union, and donors of grants such as the Ford Foundation. One FBI field office recommended that the FBI send letters to the SCLC's donors over Dr. King's forged signature warning them that the SCLC was under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS files on Dr. King and the SCLC were carefully scrutinized for financial irregularities. For over a year, the FBI unsuccessfully attempted to establish that Dr. King had a secret foreign bank account in which he was sequestering funds.

The FBI campaign to discredit and destroy Dr. King was marked by extreme personal vindictiveness. As early as 1962, Director Hoover penned on an FBI memorandum, "King is no good." 9 At the August 1963 March on Washington, Dr. King told the country of his dream that "all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, I'm free at last."' 10 The FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division described this "demagogic speech" as yet more evidence that Dr. King was "the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country".... The depth of Director Hoover's bitterness toward Dr. King, a bitterness which he had effectively communicated to his subordinates in the FBI, was apparent from the FBI's attempts to sully Dr. King's reputation long after his death. Plans were made to "brief" congressional leaders in 1969 to prevent the passage of a "Martin Luther King Day." In 1970, Director Hoover told reporters that Dr. King was the "last one in the world who should ever have received" the Nobel Peace Prize. 13

The extent to which Government officials outside of the FBI must bear responsibility for the FBI's campaign to discredit Dr. King is not clear. Government officials outside of the FBI were not aware of most of the specific FBI actions to discredit Dr. King. Officials in the Justice Department and White House were aware, however, that the FBI was conducting an intelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation, of Dr. King; that the FBI had written authorization from the Attorney General to wiretap Dr. King and the SCLC offices in New York and Washington; and that the FBI reports on Dr. King contained considerable information of a political and personal nature which was "irrelevant and spurious" to the stated reasons for the investigation. 14 Those high executive branch officials were also aware that the FBI was disseminating vicious characterizations of Dr. King within the Government; that the FBI had tape recordings embarrassing to Dr. King which it had offered to play to a White House official and to reporters; and that the FBI had offered to "leak" to reporters highly damaging accusations that some of Dr. King's advisers were communists. Although some of those officials did ask top FBI officials about these charges, they did not inquire further after receiving false denials. In light of what those officials did know about the FBI's conduct toward Dr. King, they were remiss in falling to take appropriate steps to curb the Bureau's behavior. To the extent that their neglect permitted the Bureau's activities to go on unchecked, those officials must share responsibility for what occurred. The FBI now agrees that its efforts to discredit Dr. King were unjustified.

"The FBI now agrees... its efforts to discredit Dr. King were unjustified" -- ya think? In Taylor Branch's well-regarded biography of MLK, we find the following (NYT link & Google cache link):

The systematic character of the F.B.I. vendetta astonishes to this day. After the bureau learned of assassination threats against a number of prominent Americans, each was notified -- except King.

Forty years after Dr. King was assassinated, we must demand that the government declassify its files on the case. This is the proper way to remember the civil rights leader. Re the suppression of the MLK files, I also found this at Wikipedia:

In January 31, 1977, in the cases of Bernard S. Lee v. Clarence M. Kelley, et al. and Southern Christian Leadership Conference v. Clarence M. Kelley, et al. United States District Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968 to be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.

I don't care if Obama, or Hillary, or McCain (who voted against a Martin Luther King Day holiday when it was first proposed), or anyone attended any memorial service. It's all pious posturing. Let us seek justice for the murdered leader, and know the full truth about U.S. culpability (or worse) in King's murder.