MEDIA ROOTS — If one looks at a map of the Middle East’s US foreign policy points of interest over the last decade, it’s obvious the objectives stated in the neo-con think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC)’s 2001 foreign policy prescription, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, have been carried out. 

One by one, the US has strategically taken out leaders of countries that don’t quite comply with the Euro-American Imperialist agenda under the pretext of humanitarian efforts.  And the last adversarial nation standing in the way of total US dominance in the region is Iran.  The establishment has been sabre-rattling against Iran for years, while slowly closing in on them from all fronts with wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Now, like everything Obama does quietly, drone strikes, repression of protesters, evisceration of the people’s rights, thousands of US troops are quietly being deployed to Israel, raising speculation of imminent war between Iran and US-backed Israel.

Abby

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ENGLISH.ALARABIYA — The Middle East roils in crisis as a U.S. aircraft carrier entered one of the world’s most important choke point for oil shipments, the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has threatened to close if the United States raises sanctions against the Islamic Republic. The deployment of thousands of U.S. troops in Israel has raised speculation of an imminent war.

On December 20, the Jerusalem Post reported that Lt.-Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the U.S. forces based in Germany, said that there will be a deployment of several thousand American soldiers in Israel.

An Egypt-based military expert, major general Jamal Mathloum, said that “there is a military strategic cooperation between the U.S. and Israel since the 1980s and there is definitely mutual understanding.” He added that the U.S. troop deployment might not necessarily mean a direct signal of war, but that it could be read as Israel and U.S. readiness in case of a conflict arising in the region.

“There is already a U.S. radar station in southern Israel, and might contain from 500 to 700 American soldiers operating there,” Mathloum said.

But for Abdulaziz Sager, chairman and founder of the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, the deployment of U.S. troops in Israel is “definitely to send a clear signal to Iran.”

Read more about Thousands of US Troops Deploying to Israel.

© 2011 English.Alarabiya

Photo by flickr user Socom

MEDIA ROOTS — Welcome to the future of combat: robot wars.  Take official numbers of troop withdrawal with a grain of salt, because their work is now being done by unmanned predator drones and private mercenary armies (which make up at least half of the US military presence abroad).  

Although the use of predator drones is not a new war tactic by any means, Obama has set a new Executive precedent by extensively relying on the use of unmanned drones to find people and clandestinely kill them around the world.  During the last three years, his administration has built a widespread apparatus of control that spreads across at least six countries for the purpose of surveilling adversaries and facilitating secret assassinations.

Regarding Obama’s drone killings, CIA and JSOC kill lists, and U.S. imperialism, the Washington Post reports: “Remotely piloted aircraft were used during the Clinton and Bush administrations, but only in recent years have they become advanced and abundant enough to be deployed on such a large scale.”

“In Pakistan, the CIA has carried out 239 strikes since Obama was sworn in, and the agency continues to have wide latitude to launch attacks.”

“In Yemen, there have been about 15 [drone] strikes since Obama took office, although it is not clear how many were carried out by drones because the U.S. military has also used conventional aircraft and cruise missiles.”

“CIA and military strikes this fall killed three U.S. citizens…”  No trial, due process or human rights for the victims of the Obama administration’s secret drone programme.  The US continues to set the military stage.  As Obama ushers the proliferation of predator drone technology, arms race tensions will force other nations to keep up with war technology, all which enriches war profiteers at the expense of the proletariat.

MR

***

WASHINGTON POST — The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force­ ­cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents.

Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.

The rapid expansion of the drone program has blurred long-standing boundaries between the CIA and the military. Lethal operations are increasingly assembled a la carte, piecing together personnel and equipment in ways that allow the White House to toggle between separate legal authorities that govern the use of lethal force.

Read more about Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing.

© 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Photo (above) by Flickr user US Army, Photo (feature) by Flickr user Jim N Texas

MEDIA ROOTS — How does one determine when one’s society becomes unfree?  A society loses its freedoms not in one fell swoop, but in a slow and systematic erosion of successive legislation.  Like Charles Sullivan’s proverbial frog brought to a slow boil in a pot, the loss of freedom can easily go unnoticed until it’s too late.  Perhaps chattel slavery simply morphed into wage slavery and creeping fascism.

Naomi Wolf’s ominous Letter of Warning to A Young Patriot rings eerily true, as we witness the shredding of the U.S. Constitution and our human rights, by both the Republican and Democrats perpetually elected to office. 

On the first of December, the Senate turned up the burner by passing Senate Bill S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), co-sponsored by Republican Senator John McCain and Democrat Senator Carl Levin, which effectively suspends your Constitutional right to habeas corpus, a legal principal dating back a thousand years guaranteeing individuals the right to appear before a court of law and be provided with the body, or corpus, of evidence against them justifying their detention.  A detainee must be provided with the body of evidence for which they are being held.  If a court is unable to determine sufficient cause, per writ of habeas corpus, is duty-bound to order the individual be freed.

Obama went into immediate damage control mode when the S.1867 scandal broke– early on it was reported that President Obama would veto the NDAA if it passed the House and Senate. 

Then, in a disturbing revelation, Senator Carl Levin stated on the floor that it was Obama himself who insisted on the ‘indefinite detention’ wording within the NDAA.  One Forbes analyst notes, “the law as written is entirely too vague.”  Predictably, the Obama Administration dropped the veto threat and indicated that Obama would sign off on the NDAA the following week.

On Saturday, New Year’s Eve, Obama quietly signed the NDAA with the “truly pernicious” provision for arbitrary indefinite detention of any person anywhere on the planet.

According to the ACLU:

“While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations.”

This sets a ghastly precedent for the Executive role and Wall Street marionettes to further abuse human rights.  Every future president will now have this power.  Thanks, Obama.

S. 1867’s provisions authorize the Executive to activate the U.S. Military within the U.S. borders to conduct domestic ‘terror’ investigations and detain U.S. citizens on U.S. soil indefinitely without a hearing, so long as the government arbitrarily deems them a terrorist threat.  This, essentially, codifies practices already being perpetrated by U.S. forces under pretext of national security and further obliterates the Posse Comitatus Act against activating the U.S. Military against its own people.   

Constitutionally, the writ of habeas corpus may only be suspended per the Constitution, or Congress, in the case of an open rebellion or an invasion of the nation by enemy forces.  These martial exceptions are intended to be used in rare circumstances, in which the well-being of the nation is under immediate threat.

S. 1867 construes the rules of exception in a way that makes them unexceptional. The decade-long War on Terrorism is a war on a tactic, making who might or might not be a threat to national security ambiguous and open to interpretation by those in power.

Denying citizens their most basic rights, such as the writ of habeas corpus, is a move that comes when those in control are especially frightened.  The last time it was suspended, 70 years ago, was in the wave of paranoia following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, in which Asian Americans were tragically detained in Japanese Internment Camps.

We are committing a crime against ourselves by legislating the militarization of society and suspension of basic rights.  On this path, the Bill of Rights as the bedrock of US liberty is on its way to being fully cooked.

Obama’s new campaign slogan for 2012 should be “HOPE… you don’t get indefinitely detained!“

Written by Joel Hersch, Felipe Messina and Abby Martin for Media Roots

Photo by flickr user Bob Jagendorf

MEDIA ROOTS — Some of us will do our best to counter the two-party dictatorship, recognising they are both financed by the same Wall Street, corporate, paymasters with the obvious attendant consequences.  Yet, due to the grip corporate media has on the minds of hundreds of millions of people in the U.S., the anger against non-two-party candidates isn’t just coming from the two-party establishment leaders, but from its constituent voters as well.

Glenn Greenwald quotes a Matt Stoller essay about how “the anger [Ron Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear.”  Greenwald continues, “Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.”

Ron Paul has been deemed “more progressive” than Obama on civil liberties issues by the ACLU, and his strict non-interventionist foreign policy views makes him a much stronger opponent against the military-industrial complex than the President.  However, most progressives are still going to vote for Obama this year, even though he “advocates views…liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.”

On New Year’s Eve, Greenwald cut through much of the U.S. Presidential Election spin cycle, as it further dumbs down the already embarrassing state of U.S. political discourse.  Our job is to understand our political process as clearly as possible in order to make informed decisions as voters.  To that end, this article is among the more thoughtful analyses of Election 2012 to date. 

MR

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SALON – As I’ve written about before, America’s election season degrades mainstream political discourse even beyond its usual lowly state. The worst attributes of our political culture – obsession with trivialities, the dominance of horserace “reporting,” and mindless partisan loyalties — become more pronounced than ever. Meanwhile, the actually consequential acts of the U.S. Government and the permanent power factions that control it — covert endless wars, consolidation of unchecked power, the rapid growth of the Surveillance State and the secrecy regime, massive inequalities in the legal system, continuous transfers of wealth from the disappearing middle class to large corporate conglomerates — drone on with even less attention paid than usual.

Because most of those policies are fully bipartisan in nature, the election season — in which only issues that bestow partisan advantage receive attention — places them even further outside the realm of mainstream debate and scrutiny. For that reason, America’s elections ironically serve to obfuscate political reality even more than it usually is.

This would all be bad enough if “election season” were confined to a few months the way it is in most civilized countries. But in America, the fixation on presidential elections takes hold at least eighteen months before the actual election occurs, which means that more than 1/3 of a President’s term is conducted in the midst of (and is obscured by) the petty circus distractions of The Campaign. Thus, an unauthorized, potentially devastating covert war — both hot and cold — against Iran can be waged with virtually no debate, just as government control over the Internet can be inexorably advanced, because TV political shows are busy chattering away about Michele Bachmann’s latest gaffe and minute changes in Rick Perry’s polling numbers.

Read more about Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies.

© 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.

MEDIA ROOTS – Paul Rockwood Jr. was a weather forecaster in King Salmon, Alaska who became highly critical of US foreign policy in a post-9/11 world.  During his quest to understand the motive behind 9/11, he was drawn to the Islam religion and eventually converted.

At the mosque he attended, he was approached by an undercover FBI operative who eagerly commiserated with Rockwood about his views on terrorism.  Over time, the informant manipulated Rockwood’s frustration and demanded that he take it one step further by providing him with an “assassination list” of those responsible for war atrocities perpetrated by the US in exchange for a sum of $8,000.  With a baby on the way and little financial stability, Rockwood took the bait and now faces an eight year prison sentence for charges of terrorism and perjury.

Rockwood is now just another casualty of the War on Terror’s domestic front, exemplifying the lengths at which the FBI will go to make their case for combating terrorism on US soil.  It is immoral at best, and an enormous waste of US taxpayer resources.

The FBI’s methods of entrapment eerily mirrors those used by the recruiters of the very suicide bombers the War on Terror is waged against.  When the FBI’s plans of entrapment don’t backfire, the agency preys upon the emotionally deranged or weak, financially down and out members of society and facilitates them to carry out crimes in exchange for financial compensation.

Abby

***

ALASKA DISPATCH –A little more than a year ago, he was a weather forecaster at a remote outpost in King Salmon, Alaska, population 442. He and his wife — he with his close-trimmed red beard and shy smile, she with her rosebud cheeks and sweet English accent — lived in a two-story frame house strewn with toys. They were popular dinner companions and regulars at community theater productions.

Now Paul Rockwood Jr. is a convicted terrorist, serving eight years in a federal prison. His wife, Nadia, is exiled on probation in England after her own criminal conviction. Since their arrest in 2010 — accused by the FBI of drafting and delivering a list of targets for terrorist attacks — friends and neighbors have been left in confusion, wondering how the nice young couple could have turned into the terrorists next door.

The possible answer, provided in Rockwood’s first interview since his arrest, opens a window on one man’s uncertain spiritual journey and radicalization after the Sept. 11 attacks. It also offers a look at the government’s increasingly deep dragnet for suspected domestic terrorists.

To federal authorities, Rockwood, 36, is a man who turned from hard-partying bartender and ex-Navy seaman to Muslim militant committed to killing fellow Americans.

To Rockwood, the plot involving targeted assassinations and bombs was a “pure fantasy” created by a government agent he thought was his friend, a common refrain in the nation’s burgeoning number of “home-grown” terrorism plots prosecuted since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Rockwood concedes that he drew up a list of people. He thought they should be punished.

“But … it was all talk,” Rockwood said in a small interview room at the correctional facility he has called home since July 2010.

Read more about Former Weatherman to Accused Terrorist.

© 2011 Alaksa Dispatch

Photo by Flickr user Dnewman8