Further destabilization of Pakistan

This is just purely depressing.

Jon Boone, The Guardian:

A lawyer leading the effort to prosecute Pakistan’s former military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, over the murder of Benazir Bhutto has been shot dead in Islamabad as he was driving to court.
Pakistan’s former prime minister Benazir Bhutto shouts ‘freedom freedom’ slogans at a protest camp arranged by journalists against the media crackdown in Islamabad Benazir Bhutto.

Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, a state prosecutor for the Federal Investigation Agency, died in a hail of bullets on Friday when his car was attacked by unidentified gunmen riding on motorbikes as he was travelling through a busy street in the Pakistani capital, police said.

I.A. Rehman, Dawn:

The terrorist attacks on candidates, election meetings and political workers have certainly made holding a free and fair election nearly impossible. Except for Punjab, all parts of the country are disturbed, with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, and Fata in an acute state of disorder. Thus, peaceful elections in 124 National Assembly constituencies, 45.5 per cent of the seats up for direct election, are quite unlikely.

The terrorists are enjoying the freedom of the land.
…
Unfortunately, the blood of all those killed in election-related violence is not on the hands of militant extremists alone. The hands of all those who have the power to confront the extremists are not clean either. Besides, a ceaseless campaign to demonise politicians, started by Ayub Khan and carried out to this day by holy knights of various brands and in different robes, has alienated the people from democracy to an extent that they do not see in the killing of a political worker an attack on their own rights.

Coleen Rowley on the presumed link in the Boston bombing

Coleen Rowley, The Consortium

I almost choked on my coffee listening to neoconservative Rudy Giuliani pompously claim on national TV that he was surprised about any Chechens being responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings because he’s never seen any indication that Chechen extremists harbored animosity toward the U.S.; Guiliani thought they were only focused on Russia.

Giuliani knows full well how the Chechen “terrorists” proved useful to the U.S. in keeping pressure on the Russians, much as the Afghan mujahedeen were used in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1980 to 1989. In fact, many neocons signed up as Chechnya’s “friends,” including former CIA Director James Woolsey.

For instance, see this 2004 article in the UK Guardian, entitled, “The Chechens’ American friends: The Washington neocons’ commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own.”

Author John Laughland wrote: “the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled ‘distinguished Americans’ who are its members is a roll call of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the ‘war on terror.’

“They include Richard Perle, t…Elliott Abrams … Kenneth Adelman…Midge Decter…Frank Gaffney…Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen …; and R. James Woolsey, the former CIA director…
…
But still the full truth [about the intelligence failure behind 911] did not come out, even after Shenon’s blockbuster discovery in 2011 of the April 2001 memo linking the main Chechen leader Ibn al Khattab to Osama bin Laden. The buried April 2001 memo had been addressed to FBI Director Louis Freeh (another illegal recipient of MEK money, by the way!) and also to eight of the FBI’s top counter-terrorism officials.”

So far we don’t know whether the Boston bombing was more like Columbine or more like the Murrah Building. Rowley is careful to emphasize that point. But when you say the word “Chechnya,” you ring an awful lot of memory bells.

Department of “I Told You So”

David Taintor, TPM:

President Obama said in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) Friday that 100 U.S. troops have been deployed to Niger to assist the French operation in Mali.

“The total number of U.S. military personnel deployed to Niger is approximately 100. The recently deployed forces have deployed with weapons for the purpose of providing their own force protection and security,” Obama said in the letter.

Obama added that the troops were deployed “in furtherance of U.S. national security interests.”

I took a lot of crap at DK for saying that the US would get involved in the region:

Whether this turns into another American war is yet to be seen… but the stakes are significant enough that it would be surprising if we don’t get involved.
…
For now it’s just French soldiers resisting their advance. But the stakes are serious enough that it’s inconceivable to me that the US will not be involved within days if not weeks.

The Yellowcake War may be just in its opening innings. See here and here. Or just read Tom Englehardt:

Here, in fact, is a rule of thumb for you: keep your eye on the latest drone bases the CIA and the US military are setting up abroad – in Niger, near its border with Mali, for example – and you have a reasonable set of markers for tracing the further destabilisation of the planet. Each eerily familiar tactical course change (always treated as a brilliant strategic coup) each next application of force, and more things “metastasise”.

All the Islamists have to do is make nice with the Tuaregs and get a rebellion going in Niger to make this a very serious situation. True, the US, France, and Africa could get this right, but I see no signs they are doing so.

The Gatekeepers: interviews of six heads of Shin Bet on the future of Israel

The director of the recent film The Gatekeepers, Dror Moreh, was interviewed by DemocracyNow. The film includes some astonishing quotes from the directors of Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police.

Moreh complained that DemocracyNow had decontextualized the quotes to portray the Palestinians as innocent victims of Israeli aggression. But even understood in context, namely that Shin Bet’s efforts are aimed not at civilians but at terrorists, the film is both powerful and relevant to the US so-called “Global War on Terror.”

Civil wars and sectarian conflicts such as Afghanistan and the intifada of Palestine cannot be understood as isolated acts of violence. Both sides have grievances. No side is innocent. Our own Revolutionary War was presaged, in part, by what would be called acts of terror today. Think Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty. The Gatekeepers, appropriately, focuses on what the suppression of the Palestinians is doing to Israelis. In this context, there is this exchange:

AARON MATÉ: Well, we certainly aren’t here to debate the history with you, but we are trying to portray your film, and your movie has some very powerful statements that should be highlighted. You know, you have Avraham Shalom saying something like—a line like: “[We’ve become] a brutal occupation force similar to the Germans in World War II.”

DROR MOREH: Yeah.

AARON MATÉ: “We have become cruel, to ourselves as well, but mainly to the occupied population, using the excuse of the war against terror.”

Moreh goes on to draw the parallel between an Israeli attack that killed one terrorist (who was supposedly organizing a truce) and over a dozen innocent people and American drone attacks.

The heads of Shin Bet are unanimous in their view that the occupation is dangerous and destabilizing to Israel. Even when the attacks are targeted against terrorists, they inevitably raise questions about proportionality, about the deaths of innocents, and about the brutalization of the occupier.

By increasing the settlements, Israel is coming dangerously close to forced removal of the Palestinians, i.e. what’s called ethnic cleansing. Moreh is right:

Dror Moreh: … I think that those people who came to speak in the movie, the six heads of the security defense establishment, the Shin Bet, came because they feel that the occupation of the Palestinians in the last 45 years is something that is not good for the state of Israel and should be stopped.

The same can be said of many American occupations and interventions. Unless they resolve grievances, establish a superior living standard, and especially respect the whole community and their traditions, they will backfire–even if they are tactically brilliant and otherwise morally justifiable. This film looks to go a long way toward showing why this is so.

US claims authorization to intervene in Mali

Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy:

1) The Obama Administration has apparently made a legal determination that the conflict in Mali is covered under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Most of the reservations about whether President Obama has the legal authority to engage in military operations in Mali were resolved, the New York Times reports, after it was determined that the main targets were linked to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. This means that the Administration is using the same legal authority to intervene that it is using to conduct drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, which means that the Administration could conduct drone strikes in Mali under this interpretation of the 2001 AUMF.

But the degree to which President Obama wants to get involved in Mali is still an open question, the Times says….Gen. Carter Ham, the head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, has said, “Realistically, probably the best you can get is containment and disruption so that Al Qaeda is no longer able to control territory.”

I haven’t found the NYT article and it’s behind a paywall. But if we have the right to intervene and the French are unable to actually end the conflict, what is likely to happen?

Asked again: Will the US intervene in Mali?

Since I quickly put together a post titled The Yellowcake War on whether the US would intervene in Mali, the following have emerged:

* The US is not permitted to directly aid the Malian government, such as it is, because it was formed through a coup.
* The US is permitted to do whatever it wants because the Islamists have chosen to include Al Qaeda in their name (no, I am not kidding)
* The US is absolutely committed to making sure that the Islamists don’t establish a base of operations in Mali
* Ryan Crocker, who frequently expresses DoD thinking, has all but said the US needs to intervene.
* there are lots of good reasons not to get involved

At present, the rationale being presented to the public is that it wouldn’t do to give Al Qaeda free rein. And this is true. Given uninterrupted access to Mali’s uranium properties, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb would figure out how to make yellowcake and produce the material for a dirty bomb. And, of course, it would be a base to strike into Niger, where a number of other Tuaregs live and which is home to a well-developed nuclear industry essential to Europe’s energy security. But no one has mentioned the role of uranium in this story. After all, minus the uranium, the Maghreb is pretty much like Tattoine.

I see it as likely that the US will intervene because it’s unlikely that France can deal with the Salafis, much less the Tuaregs; because US troops are coming free thanks to winding down Iraq and Afghanistan; because Niger’s uranium is both crucial to Europe’s energy security; and because keeping the Salafis away from uranium over the longer period is critical.

The Yellowcake War: Our Splendid New Adventure?

(Crossposted with notable improvements at Daily Kos)

Whether this turns into another American war is yet to be seen… but the stakes are significant enough that it would be surprising if we don’t get involved. DemocracyNow has an excellent wrap explaining the basic situation: Mali is composed of the Tuareg north and the Bambara south, with the Tuaregs in rebellion. Northern Mali and neighboring northern Niger are rich in uranium. Niger’s uranium supplies France’s nuclear industry. And there’s oil and gold. Northern Niger is also a Tuareg region, and rebellions in one state tend to spread across the border.

Add to the mix these three facts: (a) that a large part of Qaddafi’s army was Tuareg, and these soldiers are repatriating to Mali and (b) that there has been a major in-gathering of Al Qaeda elements who saw the Tuarag rebellion as an excellent starting point for their own actions and who had the collaboration of the former president of Mali Amadou Toumani, and (c) the US-trained Malian army is not necessarily loyal to anyone or anything.

Oh, yeah. And the Al Qaida guys have tons of money from hostage taking of westerners and drug running.

Adam Nossiter, Eric Schmitt, and Mark Mazzetti, NYT:

But as insurgents swept through the desert last year, commanders of this nation’s elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian military officials.

“It was a disaster,” said one of several senior Malian officers to confirm the defections.

Then an American-trained officer overthrew Mali’s elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. American spy planes and surveillance drones have tried to make sense of the mess, but American officials and their allies are still scrambling even to get a detailed picture of who they are up against.

Now, in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe, the French have entered the war themselves

The only ray of hope in all this, if that is what one can call it, is that Al Qaida may be doing its usual public relations stuff, cutting off hands, and so on. Many are foreigners, Algerians and Mauritanians (al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) whose presence will probably not improve with time, but there is also Ansar al Din and MUJAO with more local roots.

For now it’s just French soldiers resisting their advance. But the stakes are serious enough that it’s inconceivable to me that the US will not be involved within days if not weeks.

Policemen are your friends

This is a story that was buried in the Christmas data dump. It seems that the FBI has overstepped the boundaries of what can be considered apolitical law enforcement. Again.

DemocracyNow:

MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, the documents, as you stated, show that the FBI and American intelligence agencies were monitoring and reporting on Occupy Wall Street before the first tent even went up in Zuccotti Park. The documents that we have been able to obtain show the FBI communicating with the New York Stock Exchange in August of 2011 about the upcoming Occupy demonstrations, about plans for the protests. It shows them meeting with or communicating with private businesses. And throughout the materials, there is repeated evidence of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, American intelligence agencies really working as a private intelligence arm for corporations, for Wall Street, for the banks, for the very entities that people were rising up to protest against.

… even in these heavily redacted documents, you can see the FBI using at least private entities as a proxy force for what appears to be infiltration. There is—there are documents that show the Federal Reserve in Richmond was reporting to the FBI, working with the Capitol Police in Virginia, and reporting and giving updates on planning meetings and discussions within the Occupy movement. That would appear, minimally, that they were sending undercovers, if not infiltrators, into those meetings.

There is another document that shows the FBI meeting with private port security officers in Anchorage, Alaska, in advance of the West Coast port actions. And that document has that private port security person saying that they are going to go attend a planning meeting of the demonstrators, and they’re reporting back to the FBI. They coordinate with the FBI. The FBI says that they will put them in touch with someone from the Anchorage Police Department, that that person should take the police department officer with him, as well.

And so these documents also show the intense coordination both with private businesses, with Wall Street, with the banks, and with state police departments and local police departments around the country.
…
MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: I think that that is very much a measure of box checking by the FBI. I don’t believe—and their documents show that they did not believe—that this was a movement that posed a threat of violence. Now, throughout the documents, they’re using their counterterrorism resources and counterterrorism authorities, they are defining the movement as domestic terrorism and potentially criminal in nature. But the fact is, they also throughout the documents say that they know that this is a peaceful movement, that it is organized on a basis of nonviolence. And by that logic, of course, you can investigate everyone in every activity in the United States on the grounds that someone might do something sometime. And, in fact, think about the tea party rallies. The tea party was having rallies all around the United States where their members come carrying weapons—they’re open carrying—including at events where the president of the United States was speaking. But the FBI is turning its attention to this movement.

And when they reference the locations in Florida, I think that’s actually a political analysis, a recognition that this is a movement whose time has come. And whether it’s in hibernation right now, it is based on an organic reality of the economic situation in the United States. And the FBI is referencing the high level of unemployment, the needs that people have, and it’s a recognition, too, of the dynamism and the dynamic nature of the people of the United States, the people all over the world, when they organize and come together. That’s the threat that we believe the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are truly focused on, not a threat of violence.
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MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD:…his is just part and parcel of the long history of the FBI. And this is not the first incident, it is not going to be the last, and it’s not the worst, to be honest. We all know that. It’s not—you know, the FBI has a long history — ’50s, ’60s, ’70s — of mass surveillance, of targeting of people based on political ideology, of efforts to disrupt the movements for social justice, for efforts to shut down black liberation movement, the antiwar movement. And in the ’70s, of course, there were these great revelations about the abuses of the FBI, of the CIA, of other security agencies. And there were the Church Committee hearings. There were supposedly protections put in place. But we can see, you know, decade after decade, with each social justice movement, that the FBI conducts itself in the same role over and over again, which is to act really as the secret police of the establishment against the people.(emphasis added)

And, you know, it’s not just a secret police directed against all subversive movements, but specifically against left-wing movements. The FBI took decades to engage against the KKK, was blindsided by Tim McVeigh, and as far as we know are doing nothing to rein in the sorts of people who use threats of violence–or actual violence– against persons/property in an attempt “to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85).”

The very definition of law suggests a universally applicable principle. But the Tea Party was treated as a legitimate political movement, while Occupy was treated as a domestic threat. The Tea Party engaged in intimidation against political officials. Occupy (maybe) broke some windows in Oakland (unless it was agents provocateur).

There is nothing recognizable as a “law” in the way these two movements have been treated.

Benghazi “consulate” was a CIA station

Melvin Goodman, former CIA analyst, at Consortium:

It’s now apparent that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was no ordinary consulate; in fact, it probably was no consulate at all. The consulate’s primary mission was to provide an intelligence platform that would allow the CIA to maintain an operational and analytical role in eastern Libya.

… Both the State Department and the CIA share responsibility for seriously underestimating the security threat in Libya, particularly in Benghazi.

Any CIA component in the Middle East or North Africa is a likely target of the wrath of militant and terrorist organizations because of the Agency’s key role in the global war on terror waged by the Bush administration and the increasingly widespread covert campaign of drone aircraft of the Obama administration.

U.S. programs that included the use of secret prisons, extraordinary renditions, and torture and abuse involved CIA collaboration with despotic Arab regimes, including Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. The U.S. campaign to overthrow Gaddafi didn’t clean the slate of these abuses; it merely opened up the opportunity for militants and Islamists to avenge U.S. actions over the past ten years.
…
The CIA failure to provide adequate security for its personnel stems from degradation in the operational tradecraft capabilities of the CIA since the so-called intelligence reforms that followed the 9/11 attacks.
…
There were other complications as well. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was an extremely successful and popular ambassador in Libya, but he had become too relaxed about security in a country that had become a war zone.
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The success of the Bush and Obama administrations in compromising the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General has ensured that the Agency’s flaws have gone uncorrected. The politicization of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 was the worst intelligence scandal in the CIA’s history, but there were no penalties for those who shared CIA Director George Tenet’s willingness to make phony intelligence a “slam dunk.”

This is a balanced analysis that shows that the causes of the attack and the response, both on-the-ground and at senior levels, are distributed around the entire system, from Susan Rice to Ambassador Stevens himself. Barack Obama does need to take responsibility for having failed to end politicization of the Agency and for having failed to end US involvement in torture, not to mention for permitting Rice to speak before the facts were known. I feel fairly certain in saying that a Romney presidency would have done worse. But I want to see a second Obama presidency that does much, much better.

A comment on drones

Not that anyone pays any attention to my opinion, but I think that the complaints about using drones for targeting killing are probably largely misplaced. Drones are bombs. Bombs are instruments of war. If one believes that we are at war with a stateless army, then killing members of that army with drones is preferable to the alternatives (e.g., cluster bombs, saturation bombing, and so on).

The real problem is that we have not really declared war. We have this strange Authorization of Military Force (see here for legal analysis), which probably applies to the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and almost certainly does not apply to Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and other groups that formed subsequent to 9/11. If the Executive wants to continue to use drone strikes–or make war by any means outside of the AfPak region– he should ask for an updated AUMF. This is not a nicety. It’s one major means by which we prevent presidents from becoming tyrants.

As for assassinating American citizens, or any non-combatant, military or not, that’s plainly illegal. The claim for killing Anwar al-Awlaki was that he was serving as a chaplain for AQAP. Would we accept the targeting of an American chaplain as a legitimate action by an enemy? On many levels [fn], this was a war crime. Add one more level of wrongness for the killing of his son. The fact that drones were used is irrelevant to the basic legal issues and when the left focuses on the technology, it undermines its arguments against targeted killing.

They do have a better case against Israeli action, since Operation Cast Lead and subsequent events made it abundantly evident that Israel is involved in collective punishment against an occupied nation, not warfare.

As I say, not that anyone will listen.
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fn. Lack of authorization for action against AQAP. lack of due process, since in principle al-Awlaki might have been a hostage rather than an active collaborator. Lack of evidence that he was an active combatant. For son, add targeting of a minor. More broadly, there’s the question of whether there’s even adequate oversight over who gets put on the kill list and whether there’s oversight over issues of “collateral damage,” i.e., dead innocent people.