Native Resistance! is a blog to help create conscious resistance against the reactionary forces of Amerikan Fascism and raise humane consciousness in our fight for liberty, justice and democracy!
It will take a strong global mass movement to liberate Brother Leonard as it
is still confused, immature and befuddled in many ways on the domestic level.
Many of the elders are gone or ave busy engaged in other activities if they are involved in any kind of Movement activities at all. Many of the youth have no
real memory of AIM in the early days or the struggles that went on during the
60's and 70's.
Here now the progressive movement inside the United States is so divided
and scattered out that I would not count on it alone to set him free. Many
progressives can easily get distracted by events thousands of miles away,
which has its positive aspects, yet not look at the local situation on the
domestic level (let alone in their own backyards and alleys).
We are going to have to invent new ways of stimulating positive mass
mobilization, raise our collective consciousness and forge strong alliances
with aggressive vanguard elements. Brave hearts will continue to carry on
and enrich our collective liberation struggle with fresh blood and higher
inspiration. Never give up! Never give up! Never give up!
From: "info@FreePeltierNow.org" <info@FreePeltierNow.org> To: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com Sent: Tue, December 8, 2009 4:01:14 PM Subject: [Friends of Peltier] Looking Towards 2010: Urgent Plea for the New Year
Sent on behalf of the LP-DOC
Well, no more beating around the bush. No one likes asking for money, but the LPDOC needs a surge of financial support going into the new year. Among the projects we have on the table is a full-page ad we have prepared for an influential national news magazine signed by prominent activists, writers, and editors. It calls on President Obama to grant Leonard immediate and unconditional release and proposes a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the Reign of Terror on Pine Ridge in the 1970s. But it will remain on the table unless we can raise $3000 in the next week or so.
There are now several ways to contribute through paypal on the website, from one-time donations to monthly or quarterly pledges. Please consider pledging a monthly contribution for the upcoming year to give us the financial stability to move forward and, hopefully, complete our task. We also have raffle tickets and gift certificates available for Christmas presents that send a message of justice and reconciliation.
Whatever your faith or beliefs, this is a season of homecoming, of giving, and of reflection upon the past year and planning for the new one. For Leonard Peltier, 2009 was a year of raised hopes and shattered dreams. On Jan. 13, Leonard was brutally assaulted in an incident that the Bureau of Prisons refused to acknowledge or release information on in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by an AP reporter. Despite obtaining thousands of letters from around the world in support of his parole, the U.S. Parole Commission on Aug. 20 denied Leonard his well-deserved release on the basis of false and unsubstantiated claims by the FBI and the Justice Department.
It is time to take a stand.
Help us give Leonard hope for a homecoming in the new year by contributing what you can to his committee. The President has made Afghanistan his war, and Leonard Peltier is now Barack Obama's political prisoner. Also, please call the White House (202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414) and demand a Christmas pardon for one of the longest-serving political prisoners in the world. If President Warren Harding could free political prisoners for the holiday season in his first year in office after World War I, we can expect no less of a president who promised us changes for peace and human rights but now seems to be delivering more of the same. If you contributed to the campaign of Barack Obama or any member of congress, tell them you will instead send the money to the LPDOC unless and until they get on board to help end the persecution of an indigenous freedom fighter whose only crime was to defend human rights and self-determination in Indian Country.
In the Spirit of Leonard Peltier,
Betty Ann Peltier-Solano Executive Director Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee
Time to set him free... Because it is the RIGHT thing to do.
Government announces $1.4 billion settlement in Indian Trust case
Washington, D.C.12-8-09
After more than a decade of litigation, U.S. officials announced today that the federal government has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle claims that it grossly mismanaged Indian trust accounts.
The potential settlement, which must still be approved by Congress and the courts, would bring a close to the long-running Cobell Indian trust case, and would result in payments to roughly 300,000 individual Indian trust accounts. It would also create a program to consolidate ownership of Indian trust lands.
The class action, brought in 1996 by Elouise Cobell, alleged that the Interior Department had been failing for more than a century to properly disburse payments from a trust fund set up to manage revenues from Indian land. Cobell had originally sought $58 billion in the case, but last year, Judge James Robertson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the government was only liable for $455.6 million.
The settlement was announced on Dec. 8 at a joint press conference with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Justice Department officials.
Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. urged Congress to act quickly to approve the settlement. "Between the settlement and the trust reform measures that the secretary is announcing today, this administration is taking concrete steps to redefine the government's relationship with Native Americans," Holder said
1. Rise with the sun to pray. Pray alone. Pray often. The Great Spirit will listen, if you only speak.
2. Be tolerant of those who are lost on their path. Ignorance, conceit, anger, jealousy and greed stem from a lost soul. Pray that they will find guidance.
3. Search for yourself, by yourself. Do not allow others to make your path for you. It is your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.
4. Treat the guests in your home with much consideration. Serve them the best food, give them the best bed and treat them with respect and honor.
5. Do not take what is not yours whether from a person, a community, the wilderness or from a culture. It was not earned nor given. It is not yours.
6. Respect all things that are placed upon this earth - whether it be people or plant.
7. Honor other people's thoughts, wishes and words. Never interrupt another or mock or rudely mimic them. Allow each person the right to personal _expression.
8. Never speak of others in a bad way. The negative energy that you put out into the universe will multiply when it returns to you.
9. All persons make mistakes. And all mistakes can be forgiven.
10. Bad thoughts cause illness of the mind, body and spirit. Practice optimism.
11. Nature is not FOR us, it is a PART of us. They are part of your worldly family.
12. Children are the seeds of our future. Plant love in their hearts and water them with wisdom and life's lessons. When they are grown, give them space to grow.
13. Avoid hurting the hearts of others. The poison of your pain will return to you.
14. Be truthful at all times. Honesty is the test of ones will within this universe.
15. Keep yourself balanced. Your Mental self, Spiritual self, Emotional self, and Physical self - all need to be strong, pure and healthy. Work out the body to strengthen the mind. Grow rich in spirit to cure emotional ails.
16. Make conscious decisions as to who you will be and how you will react. Be responsible for your own actions.
17. Respect the privacy and personal space of others. Do not touch the personal property of others - especially sacred and religious objects. This is forbidden.
18. Be true to yourself first. You cannot nurture and help others if you cannot nurture and help yourself first.
19. Respect others religious beliefs. Do not force your belief on others.
20. Share your good fortune with others. Participate in charity.
Obama's War Speech: The Questions It Raises… And The Answer That Must Be Given
By Larry Everest
On Tuesday, December 1, at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, President Barack Obama announced that he would send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. He also called for 10,000 more NATO troops, which pushes the total U.S.-led forces to nearly 150,000, and he announced plans to step up the war on a number of fronts including (without being specific) in Pakistan. Obama has now tripled the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan since he took office.
These military forces will not be going to Afghanistan to set up vaccination programs or conduct literacy classes for Afghan girls. They are going there as part of the most destructive military machine on the planet, to wreak violence. The military machine that has bombed wedding parties, that has held thousands of young Afghan men in Bagram prison without charges, that kicks down doors in the middle of the night—this machine is being strengthened and further unleashed.
The West Point speech is being called the "defining moment" of Obama's presidency. Thus far into his term, at least, that is true. So it is important to look deeply at the questions Obama posed and the answers he gave—and in doing so to get into the real underlying causes of the military escalation now being put into effect.
Why is the U.S. Army in Afghanistan?
Obama began his speech this way: "It is important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place. We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers.… As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda…. Al Qaeda's base of operations was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the Taliban—a ruthless, repressive and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet occupation and civil war, and after the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere."
Obama later returned to his explanation of why the Taliban and al Qaeda had taken root in Afghanistan: "Now, the people of Afghanistan have endured violence for decades. They've been confronted with occupation by the Soviet Union, and then by foreign al Qaeda fighters who used Afghan land for their own purposes."
Obama implies that the U.S. had nothing to do with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and that it bears no responsibility for the growth of the Taliban and al Qaeda there, or the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. According to Obama, the U.S. itself therefore played no role in the events that lead to the attacks of 9/11.
The facts are different. The U.S. actually helped prompt the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In July 1979, some five months before the Soviet invasion, the U.S. had initiated a covert campaign to destabilize Afghanistan's pro-Soviet government by arming and funding the Islamist opposition. The goal, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, was "to induce a Soviet military intervention." When the Soviets did intervene in December, Brzezinski wrote Carter: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."
The Carter administration undertook this operation because at the time the U.S. was locked in a bitter struggle for global supremacy with what was then the Soviet Union.* After helping trigger the Afghanistan invasion, the U.S. worked behind the scenes with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia throughout the 1980s to make the war much longer, more violent, and more destructive. These forces organized, funded, and armed the Mujahideen ("warriors for Islam"). While many other Afghans took up arms against the Soviet invaders, the U.S. and its partners worked to build up the reactionary Islamic fundamentalist fighters. Over the next decade, the U.S. government funneled more than $3 billion in arms and aid to these fundamentalist forces, and in so doing helped fuel a global Islamist movement. This is where Osama bin Laden got his start. This is where the seeds of al Qaeda and the Taliban were first sown.
During the 1980s there were some Afghans fighting against the Soviet occupation who opposed religious fundamentalism and both U.S. and Soviet imperialism. They stood for an entirely different future—a future free of imperialist domination, free of capitalist exploitation, and free of the backward, traditional feudal social relations and ideology that keep most of the Afghan people in shackles—especially women. These forces were led by Afghanistan's revolutionary Maoists. Yet these forces were targeted—viciously and murderously—by all the reactionary forces involved in the Afghan conflict—the U.S. imperialists, the Soviet imperialists, the Islamic Mujahideen, and the U.S.-backed warlords.
When the Soviets finally pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, more than a million Afghans (along with 15,000 Soviet soldiers) had been killed and one-third of the population—that's over 7 million people—driven into refugee camps. Just two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Its defeat in Afghanistan had played a major role.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan was left in a state of civil war between the existing pro-Soviet regime and different groups of Islamist religious fanatics and reactionary warlords who fought each other while repressing the people. Yet the U.S. rulers considered their Afghan gambit a tremendous success. When asked by the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998 (January 15) whether he regretted inducing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and "having supported the Islamic [fighters], having given arms and advice to future terrorists," Brzezinski replied: "Regret what?... What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
"What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these 'outmodeds,' you end up strengthening both."
Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA From the talk, "Why We're in the Situation We're in Today… And What to Do About It: A Thoroughly Rotten System and the Need for Revolution"
It is easy, of course, to start the movie on September 11, 2001. But if you press the rewind button you find out that the U.S. government had not been innocently minding its business all these years only to find itself the victim of an utterly unprovoked attack.
There is a whole history here of arming and utilizing Islamic fundamentalists, and of being party to destroying a million lives. Indeed, it is hard to overstate the level of horror and needless suffering that was visited on the Afghan people through this superpower dance of death. All of this was done in the interests of preserving and defending U.S. imperial domination. None of that justifies what was done on 911—but if we are to understand the actual causes of what is going on, we had best understand the full dimensions of the story.
Is Obama's "Attention Deficit Disorder" Diagnosis True?
Obama said that after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, "the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere."
So where was U.S. attention focused in the 1990s in this part of the world? Beginning with the first Bush administration (George H.W. Bush) and continuing through the Clinton administration, the U.S. moved on a number of fronts to consolidate the tremendous advantage it derived from the fall of the Soviet Union. It aimed in particular to deepen and extend its domination of the Middle East and Central Asia. This included the 1991 invasion and destruction of Iraq, which caused what a U.S. Census Bureau international analyst—Beth Osborne Daponte—estimated to be over 200,000 deaths (another 500,000 at least were killed by UN sanctions during the 1990s), and the basing of massive U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. It also included new overtures to, and increased working through, predominantly Hindu India, which aggravated the rivalry between India and Pakistan—a rivalry which the U.S. has attempted to manipulate and play for its own advantage. All this, along with the continued U.S. support for Israel in the face of the massive rebellion of the Palestinian people in the late '80s and early '90s, involved tremendous and often horrific levels of violence against Arab and Central Asian peoples and the assertion of open U.S. domination.
At the same time, deeper American economic and social penetration of the region modernized certain aspects of the societies there, while undercutting traditional relations. Taken together, all this led to the beginning of open conflict between the U.S. and Islamist forces. The same so-called "holy warriors" whom the U.S. had initially supported and often pulled together on the basis of reactionary opposition to "modernization" now began to oppose the U.S. and to carry out guerrilla operations against it in that region. Meanwhile, by 1996, the Pakistani government had helped install the Taliban in Afghanistan to both stabilize the country under extremely repressive Islamic rule, and to use it as a counterweight to Indian ambitions in Afghanistan and the region. All these developments led the U.S., by the late 1990s, to once again intensify its attention to Afghanistan, in the context of the region as a whole. During this period a consensus emerged (which was solidified by 9/11) among what would become the dominant political forces in the U.S. that Islamic fundamentalism was becoming a prime obstacle to U.S. objectives, that it would need to be defeated, and that a radical restructuring of the whole region was needed to undercut these forces and secure U.S. hegemony.
Much of this history is well-known—certainly to anyone in public office or in the mainstream press. Yet following Obama's speech there was no comment on his "omission" from either.
What Was the U.S. Trying to Accomplish By Invading Afghanistan in 2001?
Obama defends the decision to invade Afghanistan and says it brought good results. He notes that Congress "authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and those who harbored them, an authorization that continues to this day"—98-0 in the Senate, 420-1 in the House of Representatives—and that NATO supported the U.S. and that the UN Security Council "endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks. America, our allies, and the world were acting as one to destroy al Qaeda's terrorist network and to protect our common security."
"Under the banner of this domestic unity and international legitimacy—and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden—we sent our troops into Afghanistan."
Here we must go deeper into exactly what was done under "this banner of domestic unity and international legitimacy" and why.
The Bush regime had a number of objectives in invading Afghanistan in October 2001. First, to quickly and massively attack and conquer Afghanistan in order to demonstrate to the world that America's will had not been shaken by the September 11 attacks and that it was still willing and able to crush with overwhelming force any who dared challenge it. This is not just macho posturing, but essential to maintaining global "credibility"—i.e., fear—and dominance.
Second, the U.S. wanted to quickly overthrow the Taliban regime and install a loyal client state in Afghanistan as part of an overarching effort to deepen its military control of Central Asia (Afghanistan abuts two of the U.S.'s main potential rivals—Russia and China) and to gain greater access to and control of the region's energy. (During the 1990s the U.S. was attempting to build a pipeline across Afghanistan that would avoid going through Russia or Iran. The U.S. oil giant UNOCAL was the prime contractor—one of its consultants was Hamid Karzai, later installed by the U.S. as President of Afghanistan.) Doing so was also part of an effort to defeat anti-U.S. Islamist forces across the region.
Simply capturing or killing Osama bin Laden was never the central objective. (Obama's claim that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden" is at least open to serious question. According to the Guardian UK (10/14/01), "President George Bush rejected as 'non-negotiable' an offer by the Taliban to discuss turning over Osama bin Laden if the United States ended the bombing in Afghanistan.")
Obama praises the results of the U.S. invasion: "Within a matter of months, al Qaeda was scattered and many of its operatives were killed. The Taliban was driven from power and pushed back on its heels. A place that had known decades of fear now had reason to hope," and points to the formation of a U.S.-created regime with Karzai at the head as a positive development "to help bring a lasting peace to a war-torn country."
It was nothing of the kind. The Karzai regime was a regime of U.S. lackeys, warlords, drug-dealers and war criminals—many as hated as the Taliban they replaced. Warlord Gen. Abdul Dostom, who has served as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Afghan National Army under Karzai, is responsible for the 2001 Dasht-e-Leili massacre when some 2,000 prisoners of war were forced into boxcars, suffocated to death, and dumped in the desert. And, among other viciously anti-woman policies and laws, the US-installed Afghan government passed a law in February, 2009, which applies to Afghanistan's Shia population (10-15 percent of the Afghan people) that explicitly legalizes rape in marriage by banning women from refusing to have sex with their husbands. That law also prevents women from working, going to school, getting access to health care or other services, or even leaving her home without husband's permission. This replacement of one set of oppressors with another—not surprisingly—did nothing to end oppression there. Rather it reinforced the sources of oppression in Afghanistan—foreign domination, capitalism and feudalism, religious fundamentalism, and patriarchy.
(It is also important to briefly take note of what else was done under "the banner of domestic unity and international legitimacy." In the days directly after 9/11, the Bush Administration introduced the USA-PATRIOT Act, which tremendously heightened the reach and scope of the repressive apparatus in the U.S. Immigrants were rounded up and held for months without charges and often deported in the dead of night. Massive surveillance programs were begun, beyond even what had been authorized by the PATRIOT Act and without the knowledge of most of Congress. "State secrets" was made an excuse to deny all kinds of information that showed the U.S. in a bad light, even when this meant preventing people who had been detained and tortured "by mistake" from having their day in court. The U.S. arrogated to itself the right to kill and capture people anywhere in the world, without trial, if the U.S. suspected these people of being "terrorists." Most dramatically, it instituted a widespread regimen of torture—beginning at Guantánamo (where people were detained indefinitely, in violation of international law and of the U.S. Constitution) and then spreading throughout the military, into Iraq and Afghanistan; and over 100 people were killed as a result of this torture. None of this was even mentioned in Obama's speech—in large part because he has actually continued the great majority of these repressive measures!)
Why is the Taliban Resurgent and the U.S. Occupation in Trouble?
"It is a system of capitalism-imperialism…a system in which U.S. imperialism is the most monstrous, most oppressive superpower…a system driven by a relentless chase after profit, which brings horror upon horror, a nightmare seemingly without end, for the vast majority of humanity: poverty and squalor…torture and rape…the wholesale domination and degradation of women everywhere…wars, invasions and occupations…assassinations and massacres…planes, missiles, tanks and troops of the USA bombarding people in faraway lands while they sleep in their homes or go about their daily lives, blasting their little children to pieces, cutting down men and women in the prime of life, or in old age, kicking down their doors and dragging them away in the middle of the night…while here in the USA itself the police harass, brutalize and murder youth in the streets of the inner cities—over and over again—and then they spit out their maddening insults, insisting that this is 'justified,' as if these youth are not human beings, have no right to live, deserve no respect and no future."
How did things get to the current point—with the Taliban resurgent and the U.S. occupiers in trouble and losing ground?
Obama claims that after starting out well things started going badly (i.e., for the U.S. occupiers) in Afghanistan for two reasons. First, "in early 2003, the decision was made to wage a second war in Iraq... for the next six years, the Iraq war drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention..." Second, while the Karzai regime is "a legitimate government ... elected by the Afghan people," according to Obama, "it's been hampered by corruption, the drug trade, an under-developed economy, and insufficient security forces."
What about this explanation? Yes, resources were diverted to the war in Iraq. But without getting into a full analysis of the trajectory of the Afghanistan war, it's important to note that this isn't the essential reason for the Taliban's resurgence and its ability to "control additional swaths of territory in Afghanistan" as Obama put it. There are deeper reasons which have to do with what U.S. capitalism-imperialism brings to the world and countries like Afghanistan.
The first is the brutality of the U.S. occupation. U.S. forces—hailed as heroes by Obama—have committed countless atrocities in Afghanistan—from bombing wedding parties, to murdering civilians, to humiliating Afghans with house-to-house searches, to locking people up in U.S.-controlled dungeons, where torture, illegal detention, and rendition have been in effect.
Here's one example. On August 22, 2008, the people in Azizabad, a small village in western Afghanistan, were asleep when U.S. forces attacked—first with guns, then air strikes. By the next morning, according to UN investigators, over 90 people had been massacred, including 60 children and 15 women. There have been many such massacres during the course of the war—most recently on September 9 of this year when 100-200 were killed in one attack in Kunduz province. While there are no precise figures for the number of Afghan casualties (in part because the U.S. military refuses to release – and perhaps doesn't even count -- them), studies have been done that give a glimpse of the scope of the carnage. Prof. Marc Herold documented 3,000-3,400 civilian deaths, mainly as a result of U.S. bombing, during the first six months of the war alone. The Guardian UK (11/19/09) estimates that 6,584 civilians were killed (by both the U.S. coalition and the Taliban) between 2006-Oct. 2009. Womens' rights activist and former member of the Afghan Parliament Malalai Joya states that 8,000 civilians have been killed in the war. (Democracy Now!, 10/28/2009)
These crimes have strengthened the Taliban. The Taliban for its part has used a combination of strong-arming people combined with playing upon the nationalist sentiments of the masses (particularly the Pashtun nationality in Afghanistan), as well as the appeal of "traditional Islam" in a society that has been deeply shattered, to take advantage of this.
Second, the warlords, landlords, tribal chiefs and pro-U.S. power brokers in Afghanistan are widely hated for preying on, exploiting and brutalizing the Afghan people. A prime example is Karzai's own brother—Ahmad Wali Karzai, who was put in charge of Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city. He's a major warlord and drug trafficker—and also on the CIA payroll.
It was not until 2005 that the Taliban began to mount an offensive against the occupation in earnest; the U.S. occupation forces and their hand-picked lackeys had years to show they could improve life for the Afghan people. But they didn't do it. Why? Because the U.S. imperialists were not in Afghanistan to liberate the people or develop the country; they were in Afghanistan to achieve their global objectives: to defeat al Qaeda and to create a pro-U.S. regime that would not destabilize neighboring countries and would be amenable to U.S. regional objectives.
And there is a deeper reason here. You cannot "improve life" for the Afghan people without uprooting the traditional social relations, and the class forces that benefit from those relations, which have held the masses in subjugation and darkness for centuries. Imperialism introduces great instability into oppressed nations, driving peasants off land and into the cities, and often introducing education to a broader section of masses (in order to modernize some sectors of the society). This is a byproduct of, and a necessity for, the implantation of capitalist relations in predominantly feudal societies. In doing this, imperialism relies on the former ruling forces and new elites to keep a lid on the upheaval ("to manage the transition," in their words)—that is, to prevent masses from raising their heads and rebelling against the exploitation, the dispossession, and the backward relations and ideas that still hold the society and its people in their grip. Imperialism relies on, and must rely on, the very forces, in other words, that benefit from either the old traditional forms of oppression or the new "market-based" ones—and sometimes both.
The kind of revolution that would decisively move to uproot those relations—the kind of revolution that would rely on and unleash the masses to take destiny into their own hands -- would necessarily directly oppose structures of foreign (including U.S.) domination. That's why the U.S. must rely on and further entrench and reinforce very oppressive forces, which do in fact stand in the way of a better life for the people, as a bulwark against any such revolution. A force like the Taliban—which does not actually pose the possibility for a real rupture with those relations of domination and dependence and which represents, often very directly, some of the most backward feudal forces in the country—can "gain traction" in that situation; at least to the point where they win a following among a section of people, and can intimidate the rest into acquiescence.
Third, Obama mentioned that al Qaeda and the Taliban had been able to establish havens in Pakistan. What he did not mention is that the Pakistani state, long backed and funded by the U.S., has actively promoted Islamic fundamentalism as a pillar of its legitimacy, and funded, supported and probably helps direct Jihadist fighters in Afghanistan and in Kashmir as part of its rivalry with India. This has included tolerating, even supporting, the Taliban and al Qaeda. And many in Pakistan are turning to the fundamentalists out of hatred for the dictatorial rule of the military, and the domination of Pakistan by U.S. imperialism, in league with big landlords and capitalists—a domination that has left the vast majority of the population in deep poverty and deprivation.
(While Obama did not spell out his precise plans for Pakistan, a subject we'll be covering in future issues of Revolution, there are widespread reports that he will be escalating the war there too, including through stepped up attacks by drone or unmanned aircraft. The stability of the Pakistani state is of major concern to the imperialists and one of their main reasons for escalating in Afghanistan.)
Again, these are the kinds of relations and regimes the U.S. promotes around the world. And Obama is not breaking from this practice—he's escalating it, as we'll discuss below.
How Can Obama Label One Million Deaths a "Success"?
While Obama spoke out against the war in Iraq in 2002, and rode to the White House based in large part on the credibility among the disaffected with which that endowed him, at West Point he hailed this war as a success and job well done: "Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end ... we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people." And his "surge" in Afghanistan is being justified by, and modeled in important ways on, Bush's "successful" surge in Iraq.
Let's take a closer look at what Obama calls "success." The war in Iraq—a war based on lies—cost the lives of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqis; over 4 million have been driven from their homes; the Sunni population—some 20 percent of Iraq's population—has been decimated by the U.S. occupation and a sectarian war of ethnic cleansing unleashed by the reactionary Shi'a forces the U.S. helped empower—an ethnic cleansing with tacit U.S. support. That slaughter, along with cash payments to the defeated Sunni fighters, is at the heart of the "successful" surge in Iraq. Yet Obama did not utter a word about the Iraqi victims of this U.S. aggression. Apparently the only civilians worth talking about in his view are the 3,000 killed on September 11.
Obama's treatment of Iraq is typical of his approach throughout his speech. He repeatedly refers to Americans who have lost their lives, but not to those America has killed in its "war on terror," whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or other countries. By doing this, he is rendering totally invisible the enormous toll of people killed by the U.S. In sheer numbers, the U.S. has so far killed something like 200 to 300 people for every American killed in the attacks of 9/11! By rendering these victims invisible and not even worth mentioning, he is training people in this country to see the world as if only American lives count. He is training them, in other words, in the mindset of imperialism.
And what of this new Iraq? The U.S. has brought to power an alliance of reactionary, pro-U.S. Kurdish warlords with reactionary Shi'ite religious parties. Iraq's military and police are dominated by sectarian death squads. Religious fundamentalism has been strengthened and the abuse and subjugation of women—including enforced veiling and legal discrimination -- has intensified and is actually worse than it was under Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, Iraq is being gradually opened up to foreign exploitation– including its vast oil sector. And Iraq's ethnic and religious faultlines have not been healed—and remain volatile and potentially explosive.
Whose Interests—and What "Way of Life"—Are Really Served by Obama's New Strategy?
The strategy Obama laid out at West Point is not less violent or imperial, nor is it more truthful or humane than Bush's strategy.
The core of Obama's argument for why people should support an escalating and ongoing war in Afghanistan is the same as Bush's: I'm doing it to protect you and your loved ones:
"If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow.... I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here we were attacked on 9/11 and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak."
"This is no idle danger, no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards and al Qaeda can operate with impunity."
Here's the truth. The system Barack Obama is leading cares nothing for human life—whether those living within its borders or those living outside. It has demonstrated this for the 200-plus years of its existence by its actions in every corner of the globe. Its workings have savaged millions upon millions of lives, whether through outright killing or condemning people to lives of exploitation and destitution. The rulers care about people's safety only to the degree that it impacts on their power, legitimacy, and grip on the population.
"Our security" and "way of life" is based on global exploitation and plunder in the interests of a relative handful of imperialists. Crumbs from this plunder are used to pacify and/or retain the loyalty of a large section of the "home" population. The privileges accorded to a large section of Americans are based on the parasitical exploitation of billions. And this parasitical exploitation, in turn, rests on highly repressive, and widely hated, political structures in oppressed or Third World countries—like the Karzai regime in Afghanistan—imposed by the U.S. to enforce its strategic interests and meet the needs of global capital.
Our "security" and "way of life" also rests on the grinding exploitation of tens of millions of people within the U.S. itself, with millions of immigrants denied any rights whatsoever and declared outlaws and millions of others living in desperate circumstances, seeking jobs and a way to live and often consigned to a life of crime and punishment. This too is reinforced by both raw force carried out by the repressive institutions of the police, prisons and army—the instruments of dictatorship, to be scientific—and by the ideas promoted through the schools, media, religious institutions, etc. So Obama's talk of "we"—as if everyone living within the borders of the U.S. shares common interests and a common cause, as if "we're all in this together"—covers over the real divisions in the world and within the U.S. It's a framework and way of looking at the world that hides the most fundamental facts about society and how it operates, and instead aims to win people to go against their own most basic interests—which actually consist of a world without one nation dominating another, a world without exploitation, and a world without all the relations and poisonous ideas that flow out of and reinforce those relations-- in short, a communist world.
This "we-have-to-protect-our-way-of-life" outlook is poison—and promoting this outlook among both the most oppressed and more enlightened sectors of society—is Obama's special role, and special talent, for the rulers. If this speech does nothing else, it must serve as a way for those who do know better to break those who should know better out of this outlook.
So people shouldn't join the imperialists in "threat assessments" to their system, much less rally to its defense. But even if you take this selfish and ultimately complicitous standard—the "safety of the American people"—as your own, Obama's strategy—which will greatly increase the violence brought to bear against the people of Afghanistan—will further stoke hatred of the U.S. and support for Islamic fundamentalism.
How Is U.S. Imperial Domination Different From All Other Imperial Domination?
Toward the end of his speech, summing things up, Obama said: "We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation's resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours." This is double-talk aimed at obscuring how the system operates. First of all, when it suits their needs and interests, the imperialists will massively occupy countries for years, even decades—as they're doing right now with 100,000 troops in Iraq and perhaps even more in Afghanistan! At the same time, modern empires have many other tools for shaping the destinies of countries and entire regions without direct occupations.
And though the U.S. doesn't try to "claim resources" due to differences in "faith and ethnicity"—it does seek to control key resources (and indeed whole economies!) to further its strategic contention with other rivals and to maintain the functioning of U.S. capitalism—no matter the faith or ethnicity of its victims. And imperialism does enforce national oppression—against oppressed peoples (what Obama refers to as "ethnic" groups) right within its borders, and overall by forcibly perpetuating the national oppression and subordination of most countries in the world to imperialism. The history of the U.S. empire—from its genocide against the native peoples, the use of Africa as a hunting ground for the slaves who built its wealth, the theft of huge sections of Mexico, and its numerous invasions of other countries, clearly illustrates this—and clearly contradicts Obama's assertion. And a key element of the entire "war on terror" has been to seize greater access to crucial energy resources: in Afghanistan to further U.S. contention with Russia in particular over oil and gas pipelines; in Iraq to open up the country's vast oil resources to international capital.
Do We Need 9/11-Style "Unity" Again?
Obama ended his speech with a stark assessment of the difficulties confronting the empire, and a call for the kind of support the rulers had following 9/11:
"[W]e as a country cannot sustain our leadership nor navigate the momentous challenges of our time if we allow ourselves to be split asunder by the same rancor and cynicism and partisanship that has in recent times poisoned our national discourse. It's easy to forget that, when this war began, we were united, bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear. I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again."
Unity like we had after 9/11? If you recall, that was a time of a lynch-mob atmosphere of chauvinist hysteria, fear-mongering, and the suppression of any critical thinking about why the 9/11 attacks happened and what should be done about them, and any critical resistance to the crimes the U.S. empire was preparing before our eyes. Wars were launched on the basis of lies. Basic freedoms were severely truncated, and in some cases eliminated. Now, eight years later, after the horrors of what that "unity" and support for America brought to the world—over a million dead in Iraq, legalized torture, and the devastation of Afghanistan—why would anyone with a shred of concern for humanity want to repeat THAT chapter in U.S. history?
But that's precisely what Obama has called on people to do—to blindly get behind the empire as it violently forges ahead in Afghanistan and globally. Obama's course is a criminal course; to fall blindly behind this, or to merely express trepidation or opposition and then impotently shrug your shoulders… especially for those who knew better when Bush did the same… is nothing less than complicity.
The Answer That Must Be Given
People need to do just the opposite. We have pointed to the fundamentally antagonistic interests, worldwide and within this country, concealed and obscured by talk of "we the people," and by the chauvinist notion that American lives are more valuable than those of other people. The imperialists are pursuing their interests, and we've had eight years to see where that all leads—whoever the President is. It is time and past time to see that these interests are directly opposed to those of humanity as a whole … and to take up and fight for those larger interests.
Obama spoke the truth when he said America was "passing through a time of great trial," and in the midst of "storms." These storms are due to the workings of imperialism and the whole cauldron of contradictions the U.S. "war on terror" has set roiling in the Middle East and Central Asia in particular, as well as to the most profound financial crisis since the 1930s.
If anything positive for humanity is going to come out of this "time of trial" it will happen because millions of people refuse to heed Obama's call and refuse to choose between supporting either imperialism or Islamic fundamentalism. It will happen—and it will only happen—if people instead can be led to break out of the entire framework set by this current clash. Humanity does need another way, in the interests of the people. This means revolution and it requires the broadest and most determined possible resistance to this criminal escalation.
With the whole world watching, Obama and the U.S. rulers have been openly debating just how much force and violence they should bring to bear against the people of Afghanistan. Now the whole world is going to be watching what the people in the U.S. do when it's decided to escalate and continue this war of conquest and empire. Will they resist? Or will they passively go along? Will they shed their delusions about Obama—or will they face reality and judge him by what he's actually doing, not his false narratives, his empty promises, and his double-talk?
* The Soviet Union had actually been born through a revolution in 1917, and had embarked on building a socialist society and working toward a communist world. But, through a complex series of struggles, new bourgeois forces within the communist party there seized power and capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union by the mid-1950s. By the time we are referring to, it had become a capitalist-imperialist power and leader of its own bloc, which was clashing very sharply with the U.S. for global predominance during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. For more on this see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage, A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, February 2009, available online at revcom.us. [back]
From Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda on the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (documentation and endnotes can be found in the book)
Chapter 4: Double-Dealing Death in the Gulf, pp. 88, 89-90
The Soviet invasion, in turn, was motivated by a combination of Moscow's own imperial ambitions and its concern over stepped-up U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan and possible military action in Iran. In his book Iran Under the Ayatollahs, author Dilip Hiro argues that Moscow feared that following the embassy seizure, Washington was preparing a military assault on Iran, which in turn would "have encouraged President Hafizollah Amin of Afghanistan to loosen his ties with Moscow. Forestalling such a move was one of the main considerations which led Soviet officials to order their troops into Afghanistan."
The Soviet invasion came in the wake of stepped up "competition for influence with the United States throughout the Middle East, Indian Ocean, Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia regions," as the former Reagan NSC staffer Howard Teicher and his wife put it in their book on U.S. policy in the Gulf. Taking over Afghanistan rescued a pro-Soviet government in Kabul, gave Moscow control of a key buffer state between Iran and Pakistan, and put its forces closer to the Persian Gulf. For the U.S., the fertile crescent had become, as Brzezinski labeled it, an "arc of crisis" stretching from Afghanistan through Iran to Saudi Arabia—a label that is once again being applied to this region in the wake of the U.S. wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Empire Strikes Back
Intervention in the Iran-Iraq War was one facet of a multi-dimensioned and aggressive U.S. response to the shocking turn of events in 1979. Washington's overarching goals were protecting the Gulf's pro-U.S. oil sheikdoms while preventing the Soviet Union from turning regional turmoil into geopolitical gain.
In July 1979, some five months before the Soviet invasion, the U.S. had initiated a covert campaign to destabilize Afghanistan's pro-Soviet government by arming and funding the Islamist opposition. The goal, according to Brzezinski, was "to induce a Soviet military intervention." When the Soviets did intervene in December, Brzezinski wrote Carter:
"We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."
Over the next decade, the U.S. government funneled more than $3 billion in arms and aid to the Islamic Mujahideen, helping create a global network of Islamist fighters, some of whom would form the core of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. When the Soviets finally pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, more than a million Afghans (along with 15,000 Soviet soldiers) had been killed and one-third of the population driven into refugee camps.
*****
On U.S. National Security Strategy
Chapter 1: "Go Massive, Sweep It All Up", pp. 19-21
One World, One Empire
Neither mystical links with al Qaeda, invisible weapons of mass destruction, reflexive posturing, electoral politicking, nor diverting attention from corporate scandals and a weak economy explained why the U.S. government was hell-bent on attacking Iraq. But the sweep and enormity of its global agenda did.
"They have ambitions of essentially reshuffling the whole deck, reordering the whole situation—beginning with the strategic areas of Central and South Asia and the Middle East that are more immediately involved now—but, even beyond that, on a world scale," Bob Avakian of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA wrote shortly after Sept. 11. "They've set themselves a very far-reaching agenda with gigantic implications."
This momentous shift in U.S. global strategy was crystalized in a new National Security Strategy (NSS) published on September 20, 2002. This new NSS echoed and codified previous strategy papers, including the 1992 Pentagon Defense Guidance and the Project for a New American Century's 2000 paper, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," discussed above. Then it went further.
Taking off from the hegemonic vision developed by Reagan and Bush I officials during the 1990s, the NSS argued that the 1991 Soviet collapse had left the U.S. the world's only superpower—with "unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence"—and that U.S. policy should be to "work to translate this moment of influence into decades of peace, prosperity, and liberty."
What does this really mean? The document's mantra is creating "a balance of power that favors freedom." Like terrorism, "freedom" hasn't been defined by the Bush regime, but the substance of the NSS, as well as the voluminous writings of the imperial strategists who have shaped it, make clear that it means the freedom of America's dominant corporate-political elite to impose its values, interests, and economic system on all others. As the NSS baldly put it, "These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society."
The new National Security Strategy claims that the U.S. will not seek "unilateral advantage," yet it is a doctrine for just that—militarily, politically and economically. It amounts to an audacious declaration that the U.S. aims to remain the world's sole superpower for decades to come. The practical implementation of this new Bush doctrine will no doubt be shaped by internal debates and external events, including the growing unrest and resistance in now-occupied Iraq. Nonetheless, its implications are clearly enormous.
A core thesis, which has been a central theme in neo-conservative theorizing for over a decade, is preventing the rise of rival powers which could challenge the U.S. regionally or globally. The NSS envisions accomplishing this objective by first maintaining overwhelming military superiority over all other countries and combinations of countries, and second by no longer containing possible opponents, but eliminating them before they can emerge: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." Defense Secretary Rumsfeld elaborates that the U.S. would deter "potential adversaries not only from using existing weapons but also from building dangerous new ones in the first place," and the U.S. would no longer judge states by their actions or intentions, but by their potential "capabilities."
To achieve this staggering goal, the U.S. power structure envisions staggering methods, including disarming various countries, toppling defiant regimes, occupying strategic regions, and waging counter-insurgency wars against a variety of political forces standing in the way of U.S. control.
Marine General Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs vice chairman, has stated that "the scope for potential anti-terrorist action included—at a minimum—Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Georgia, Colombia, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and North Korea." Pace knew of what he spoke: The New York Times reported that by January 2003, the Pentagon had drafted a "National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism" which called for 20 to 30 years of war on a variety of states and anti-U.S. groups.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Comment: I thought this was marvelously done and I had been hoping to dissect his speech but the above is an excellent job.
Well done Brother Larry! Combat Amerikan Fascist Insanity!
THE ISSUE: Will illegal immigrants be eligible for taxpayer-supported health coverage under the proposed health care reforms?
THE POLITICS: This perennially controversial issue flared up in September when a Republican congressman, Joe Wilson of South Carolina, shouted ''You lie!'' as President Barack Obama said during a speech to Congress that illegal immigrants wouldn't be covered under his health plan. Within days White House officials, unwilling to leave themselves open to any such criticism, strengthened their position barring coverage for illegal immigrants in the health bill, and pushed lawmakers to do the same.
WHAT IT MEANS: Lawmakers initially intended to bar illegal immigrants from getting federal subsidies to purchase health coverage, but would have allowed them to use their own money to buy insurance within proposed new purchasing marketplaces called exchanges.
After the Wilson incident, the White House announced a new position that would prevent illegal immigrants from shopping in the insurance exchange at all, even if they used their own money.
That language was incorporated in Senate legislation, but in the House, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus rebelled over the issue and the language was kept out. So the House bill would let illegal immigrants buy coverage in the exchange using their own money -- including from a proposed new government insurance plan -- but the Senate legislation would not, an issue that will have to be resolved before any final legislation can go to Obama.
Currently illegal immigrants are barred from government-funded care except in certain emergency cases but many buy private insurance.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Comment: Here is another example of the Obama Regime rolling over and further oppressing non-U.S. citizens immigrants.
“The life of the man or woman who joins this complex pre-insurrectional organization is completely changed. The work is fascinating, and as plans are perfected and progress is made, it becomes possible to envision the column of liberation fighters who will ~~ in one portion of the continent ~~ begin the struggle to liberate all of it.
For the work to be successful, individual self-imposed discipline is essential. Whoever possesses this fundamental attitude of the liberation fighter must renounce the ‘normal’ goals and aspirations of the alienated man and woman subject to the present oppressive society. All the ‘old’ life is buried in the past, or at least great effort is made to leave it behind. The embryo of a new and different human being begins to appear, that of a person willing to make more and more sacrifices with more and more joy.”
~~ VIA Guido ‘Inti’ Peredo ~ General, Liberation Army of Bolivia {Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional}.
Taken prison and killed by Bolivian Army of La Paz, Bolivia, on September 9, 1969.
From 1st Edition in Spanish, Tania: La Guerrilla inolviable, Instituto del Libro, Havana, 1970
http://bit.ly/5mwgem After Honduras: Obama's Latin American Policy Looks Like Bush's
Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has his hat handed to him before a news conference inside the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa
Edgard Garrido / Reuters
After months of delay, Arturo Valenzuela was finally confirmed as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs last
month. But for a job with such a long title, he may find it's short on
clout these days. Ostensibly, Valenzuela is President Obama's new
point man on Latin America; in reality, that job looks to be under the control of Republicans in Congress and conservatives inside Obama's
own diplomatic corps. In fact, when it comes to U.S. policy in Latin America — as events this week in Honduras suggest — it's often
hard to tell if George W. Bush isn't still President.
Granted, Latin America is on Obama's back burner as he tackles Afghanistan. But next year he plans to tackle immigration reform —
an issue, like drug trafficking and free trade, that's heavily related
to how well the U.S. helps Latin America build more equitble
democratic institutions (the region has the world's worst gap between rich and poor). Yet as he ends his first year in office, Obama seems
to have ceded Latin America strategy to right-wing Cold Warriors
whose thinking — including the idea that coups are still an acceptable means of regime change — is no more equipped to help bring the
region into the 21st century than the ideology of left-wing Marxists is.
That's been most apparent in Honduras, where the country's congress this week refused to reinstate democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, a leftist who was ousted in a June 28 military coup. The Obama Administration condemned Zelaya's overthrow as an affront to Latin America's fledgling democracies. But conservatives led by GOP South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint — who blocked Valenzuela's confirmation to protest Obama's stance — and Bush Administration holdovers such as the U.S.'s ambassador to the Organization of American States, Lewis Amselem (who was finally replaced this week), pushed Obama into brokering a deal in which the U.S. effectively condoned yet another
armed putsch in the region. In an about-face, Obama recognized last Sunday's presidential election in Honduras, even though almost every other government in the world didn't because they consider the current regime there illegitimate. (The incoming Honduran president will be Porfirio Lobo, a wealthy cattle rancher.) (See a story about Zelaya protesting the Honduran election.)
U.S. officials had been optimistic that even if the Honduran Congress refused to restore Zelaya before last Sunday's election, it would at
least vote after the election to let him finish the remaining two months
of his term. It would be a good-faith sign that the country was returning to constitutional order. Instead the legislators, emboldened by the success of the coup, poked both Obama and constitutional order in the eye again this week. Coup-happy forces in other Latin American countries can only feel emboldened as well. (See pictures of post-coup violence in Honduras.)
The Honduras debacle is just the latest example of Obama's actions failing his words in Latin America. He wowed the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad last spring with soaring pledges to drop Washington's
heavy-handed double standards in the region. He won kudos for acknowledging that the drug war is as much about U.S. consumption
as it is about Latin corruption. But the cheers have since turned to
chagrin on numerous fronts. Obama is loath to offend supporters of
the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba; yet even Latin leaders who scorn the Castros shake their heads at Obama's insistence on retaining that utterly failed and globally rebuked policy — a position he holds despite polls that show a majority of Cuban-Americans now favor letting U.S. citizens travel to the communist island, and which suggest they're also weary of the 47-year-old embargo.
In South America, meanwhile, Obama has turned what should have
been a routine transfer of U.S. anti-drug operations into a diplomatic
row. By not consulting the continent's leaders about U.S. plans to use Colombian military bases not just for drug interdiction but also
counter-insurgency work, which could theoretically spill over
Colombia's borders, he needlessly revived deep-seated fears of
yanqui military interventionism south of the border and raised the hackles of U.S. allies like Brazil and Chile.
It was the kind of dismissive display that Bush was best known for in Latin America — and a gift to the anti-U.S. Latin left, whose leader, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, is galvanizing his political base at home in a difficult economy by hollering about an imminent U.S. invasion.
One of the U.S.'s more tiresome habits in Latin America is over-emphasizing elections as a political panacea. A transparent vote
is of course a good thing — but for too long the U.S. has given Latin countries the impression that it's the only thing, muffling the harder message that real democracy is what happens after elections. Critics
may call Chávez an authoritarian Castro wannabe. Yet he's remained
in power for 10 years, and may well last another 10, in part because
he's exploited Washington's election obsession.
He's been cleanly voted in three times and that's helped him retain a democratic legitimacy despite his hegemonic power inside Venezuela. Valenzuela insists that the recent Honduran election doesn't whitewash the coup; but Amselem recently told the OAS he thought it would. Now, by recognizing its results, after earlier warning that he wouldn't, Obama has essentially accepted Amselem's dubious principle.
Valenzuela, one of the U.S.'s most esteemed experts on Latin America, was "disappointed" by the Honduran Congress' decision not to let Zelaya finish out his term. "The status quo," he said, "remains unacceptable." But it's a status quo Obama let the Cold Warriors keep intact — and it's now up to Valenzuela to wrest Latin America policy back from them.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Comment: The progressive liberation movement needs to wake up! Needs to stop playing the stupid game of Sleeping Beauty waiting for a handsome prince to awaken it. Obama is backsliding quick, has betrayed the expectations of those of us who voted for him and has fallen victim to the psyche warfare of Amerikan Fascism. Or was he a willing accomplice? He saw himself as first and foremost an Amerikan, not necessarily Black, but Amerikan!
Nonetheless, it is our responsibility as global citizens not beholden to any passing regime to build ourselves up, unify ourselves, work together in solidarity with all with whom we share common dreams and we need to definutely get out of the left vs. right wings mentality, see the core truth in the center of connected reality!
The great eagle needs both wings to fly ever higher scanning the distant horizons. Quit the Democratic Party! Do not be a party to foreign wars and domestic fascism! Free yourself! Liberate yourself! Stay sober! Stay straight! Seize your sanity and seize the time! If it is to come true, it is up to you!
Flashback! We now know that Pres Obama has since this Open Letter
by Senor Moore made his fateful Afghan War Plan.
This is all going to get real real ugly. It reminds me of the early days of Vietnam, except now we should be a lot more wiser than those fateful days. Maybe a lot of you who may read these lines are too young to remember how Vietnam came down, the divisions in families and between friends over whether the U.S. should be in Vietnam or not.
Who would of thought that the great great Uncle Sam would lose a war? Did people study the history of Vietnam before they became all gung-ho? Remember the 60,00- plus troops we lost ~ DEAD ~ in 'Nam? Have you studied the history of Afghanistan?!?
War is of many hells, love heals. Know that The U.S. Warlords will surely fail in Afghan-nam. Have we as a people learned all we should of learned by now? I just saw this tonight by Mad Mike... Love, Peta
Do you really want to be the new "war president"? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, ) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do -- destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike. I simply can't believe you're about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn't so.
It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That's the way General Washington insisted it must be. That's what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. "You're fired!," said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in' hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).
So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea -- "Let's invade Afghanistan!" Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.
There's a reason they don't call Afghanistan the "GardenState" (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan's nickname is the "Graveyard of Empires." If you don't believe it, give the British a call. I'd have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev's number though. It's + 41 22 789 1662. I'm sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you're about to commit.
With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the "war president." Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line -- and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.
Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn't have to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.
I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush's Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.
Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you're doing it so you can "end the war") will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you've said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone -- and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout "tea bag!"
Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.
We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can't take it anymore. We can't take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of "landslide victory" don't you understand?
Don't be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn't be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can't change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.
The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can't be won over by abandoning the rest of us.
President Obama, it's time to come home. Ask your neighbors in Chicago and the parents of the young men and women doing the fighting and dying if they want more billions and more troops sent to Afghanistan. Do you think they will say, "No, we don't need health care, we don't need jobs, we don't need homes. You go on ahead, Mr. President, and send our wealth and our sons and daughters overseas, 'cause we don't need them, either."
What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that's what they'd do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.
All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam "might" be in (but never was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish -- the full terror of which we scarcely know.
When we elected you we didn't expect miracles. We didn't even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn't even function as a nation and never, ever has.
Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God's sake, stop.
Tonight we still have hope.
Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON'T have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother's son.
Afghanistan drawdown could take 2 to 3 years, defense secretary says
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 4, 2009
The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, scheduled to begin in July 2011, will "probably" take two or three years, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday, although he added that "there are no deadlines in terms of when our troops will all be out."
The Pentagon, meanwhile, quietly acknowledged slippage on the front end of the 30,000-troop deployment that President Obama authorized for the first half of 2010.
"They are not all going to be there in six months," a senior military official said. The current thinking, the official said, is that the Pentagon will be able to push about 20,000 to 25,000 troops into the country by late summer, but that the final brigade -- about 5,000 troops -- will probably not arrive until early fall.
New details fleshed out the revamped strategy Obama outlined Tuesday night as Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before Congress on the plan for a second day.
In an opening statement and in comments at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Gates tried to clarify his response to sharp questioning the day before on whether the deadline to begin withdrawal was as hard and fast as Obama had appeared to make it.
"July 2011, the time at which the president said the United States will begin to draw down our forces, will be the beginning of a process," Gates said. "But the pace and character of that drawdown, which districts and provinces are turned over and when, will be determined by conditions on the ground. It will be a gradual but inexorable process."
Those provinces and districts, a senior Pentagon official said, are likely to be areas that already are relatively peaceful, adding, "There are places we could transfer now."
The official described the deployment curve as beginning at a baseline of the 68,000 U.S. troops now in Afghanistan, rising at a 45-degree angle to 100,000, then continuing horizontally until July 2011 before beginning to slope back down. The fall "could be steep if everything is hunky-dory," he said, but "it could be much more elongated."
In Kabul on Thursday, U.S. officials sought to assure anxious Afghan leaders that despite the withdrawal deadline, Afghanistan will not be abandoned. Speaking with Afghan legislators, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander, insisted that the United States will ensure Afghan forces are ready to provide security before there are any meaningful reductions in the U.S. presence.
Still, Obama's speech has touched a nerve in Afghanistan, where large segments of the population remain deeply scarred by the U.S. decision to disengage soon after the Soviet Union pulled out its troops in 1989. The end of the proxy war between two superpowers spawned a civil war marked by some of the most intense combat seen in more than three decades of nonstop conflict in Afghanistan.
At a London news conference, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani sparred with reporters who asked him to respond to British and U.S. charges that Pakistan has been lax in locating al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in sanctuaries along its western border with Afghanistan.
"I doubt the information which you are giving is correct," Gillani said, "because I don't think Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan." He said that neither Britain nor the United States had provided actionable intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts, and that his government shared whatever intelligence it did have with them.
Clinton left Washington immediately after Thursday's hearing for Brussels, where she was to brief NATO allies on the strategy and solicit more allied aid. In the first of what the administration hopes will be a series of announcements, Italy said it will send 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
Staff writers Greg Jaffe in Washington and Griff Witte in Kabul contributed to this report.
Human Rights Defenders US Government Provides Assistance to Colombian Military Units that Violate Human Rights
In a joint letter, Human Rights First and the Fellowship of Reconciliation urged the State department to suspend US assistance to two Colombian military intelligence units responsible for specious intelligence gathering, arbitrary detention and trumped-up criminal charges against Colombian human rights defenders.
December 3, 2009 Arturo Valenzuela Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs Room 6262 United States Department of State Harry S. Truman Building, 2201 C Street, NW Washington, DC 20520 Fax: (202) 647-4780
Dear Assistant Secretary Valenzuela, We write to express our concern that units of the Colombian security forceshave been vetted by the State Department as being eligible for US assistanceand training despite evidence of serious human rights violations. Specifically,we are concerned that the 6th and 7th Regional Military Intelligence Units(RIMEs) that were vetted and received US assistance in 2006, 2007, andcontinued to be successfully vetted in 2008 and 2009, are responsible forspecious intelligence gathering, arbitrary detention and trumped-up criminalcharges against human rights defenders. We urge you to act to suspend USassistance to these RIMEs, given these serious human rights violations, andtake the other steps listed below to ensure that the United States is notfacilitating the violations.
In early May 2009, a military intelligence report was discovered in the department of Caquetá. The report was prepared by the 6th RIME in Florencia(No MD-EJC-CIME-RIME6-53.1, February 12, 2008), a unit vetted by theState Department. The report listed 97 individuals – including several humanrights defenders and civil society leaders - as members of the support networkfor the Amazon Front of the FARC rebel group.
The report was written by Lieutenant Colonel Rafael Eduardo Gutierrez Hortua, at the time director ofthe 6th RIME but since transferred to direct the Army School of Intelligenceand Counterintelligence. Included among the human rights lawyers, universityprofessors, and community leaders accused in the report was Domingo Emilio Perez Cuellar, president of the Caquetá chapter of the respected NationalMovement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE).
The report stated that acriminal process was underway against these defenders, yet provided absolutely no information linking them to the FARC. Many of the human rights defenders included in the report planned to participate in a Truth Hearing in Caquetá just a few days after the report came to light. The hearingwas designed to air testimony about extrajudicial killings and other humanrights violations allegedly committed by the army.
2 / 4 In May 2009, Human Rights First wrote to the Colombian Defense Ministry asking them toconfirm the authenticity of the report, but as of this writing no response has been received.1
We understand that at least ten people included in the specious military intelligence reporthave subsequently been arrested in military raids. In Medellin, various intelligence reports have come to light apparently prepared by TechnicalInvestigation Unit's (CTI) 74th prosecutor in Antioquia, in collaboration with the 7th RIMEand the 4th Army Brigade.
The reports state that a range of non-governmental organizations and human rights defenders are part of the FARC guerrilla group. Human Rights First has reviewed some of these reports,2 which list Winston Gallego as FARC guerrilla supporter.Gallego works for the well-respected human rights organization Sumapaz Foundation and hehas apparently been detained on the basis of that report since June 10, 2009.3 Also mentioned in these reports are the Judicial Freedom Organization (CJL) and its lawyers Elkin Ramirezand Bayron Gongora, renowned human rights defenders who have been subject to previousbaseless prosecutions. We are also alarmed by the existence of a falsified document in the name of CJL, dated May 4, 2009, that seeks to link various human rights defenders with theFARC guerilla group. The CJL categorically denies the authenticity of this document and itsappearance at the same time as the intelligence reports suggests a disturbing connection that should be investigated.
In July 2008, the State Department provided the Fellowship of Reconciliation with a list of allColombian military units that were vetted and received U.S. assistance from 2000 through2007. This list showed that the 6th and 7th RIMEs were vetted and received US assistance in 2006-07 and 2007-08. A list of units vetted and approved for assistance in 2008-09 and 2009- 10, provided by the State Department last month, shows these two RIMEs continue to beapproved for US assistance.
In February 2009, Human Rights First published In the Dock and Under the Gun: BaselessProsecutions of Human Rights Defenders which documented the extensive use of trumped-upcriminal charges to silence human rights defenders in Colombia. The report also explained the illegal and widespread use of falsified military intelligence reports as a basis to bring spurious investigations against defenders. This report and concerns about the role of RIMEs werepreviously communicated to the State Department during certification consultations withNGOs.
1 Human Rights First, Letter to Colombian Defense Ministry, Interior and Justice Ministry and Public Prosecutor's Office, May 27, 2009, available http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/pdf/090527-HRD-dan-ltr-eng-nosig. pdf 2 No. FGN. DS CTI. F.74 Nro. 645, May 15, 2008; No. OT 00181, S-0408/F-74, February, 27, 2009. 3 Human Rights First, Letter to Colombian Prosecutor General, June 10, 2009 available at: http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/pdf/090701-HRD-gallego-ltr-to-atty-gen.pdf 3 / 4 We are concerned that the actions by the vetted 6th and 7th RIMEs are an attempt to silencehuman rights defenders who continue to expose human rights violations despite the risks. U.S.law and policy correctly limits the provision of US assistance to security forces responsible for human rights violations. The Leahy Amendment prohibits assistance to any security forces unit if the State Department has "credible evidence that such unit has committed grossviolations of human rights." Even if the behavior of the 6th and 7th RIMEs does not rise to thelevel of a "gross violation of human rights", we believe that U.S. funding is not well spent on units with such a record.
Targeting human rights defenders in military intelligence reports as justification for criminalinvestigations and detention without providing any evidence of their links to the FARC is aclear breach of internationally recognized rights to privacy, liberty, fair trial and due process, as well as protection against arbitrary detention. The United States should neither facilitate nor reward units responsible for such violations by granting assistance to them.
In light of this information, we urge you to take the following measures: 1. Act to suspend US assistance to the 6th and 7th RIMEs in light of these serious human rightsviolations and the potential breach of Colombian law (see below). 2. Review the process for vetting military assistance, in light of the credible evidence provided to the State Department during certification consultations by various NGOs of violations bythese units, to determine whether sufficient resources are dedicated to reviewing reports of abuses by security units and whether criteria employed in that process are adequately implementing Leahy law. 3. Urge the Colombian Ministry of Defense to either provide evidence that the human rightsdefenders listed are in fact members of the FARC or publicly clear their names and initiate aninvestigation and disciplinary proceedings against the intelligence officials that prepared the documents. 4. Encourage the Prosecutor General's office to review the detentions of people listed in the intelligence reports mentioned above to see if the new Intelligence and Counter-IntelligenceLaw has been breached. That law prohibits intelligence reports from being used as evidence incriminal investigations. 5. Urge the Prosecutor General's office to review why these investigations are being conducted under the old criminal procedural code (law 6000 of 2000) when the events that arebeing investigated reportedly occurred after the date when the new code entered in force (law 906 of 2004). The new code provides increased protections to the accused.
We look forward to your response to this significant problem. 4 / 4 Sincerely, Andrew Hudson Manager Human Rights Defenders Program Human Rights First John Lindsay-Poland Director Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean Fellowship of Reconciliation Cc · Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Rights and Labor · Chris McMullen, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs · William Brownfield, Ambassador, Embassy of the United States, Colombia · Harold Hongju Koh, Legal Adviser · Dan Restrepo, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director, Western Hemisphere Affairs, National Security Council http://www.humanrightsfirst.info/pdf/091203-HRD-state-letter-vetting-units.pdf
