2009- 2010

PROJECT CENSORED– The Barack Obama administration is continuing the neo-conservative agenda of US military domination of the world— albeit with perhaps a kinder-gentler face.  While overt torture is now forbidden for the CIA and Pentagon, and symbolic gestures like the closing of the Guantanamo prison are in evidence, a unilateral military dominance policy, expanding military budget, and wars of occupation and aggression will likely continue unabated.

The military expansionists from within the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, G. W. Bush administrations put into place solid support for increased military spending. Clinton’s model of supporting the US military industrial complex held steady defense spending and increased foreign weapons sales from 16% of global orders to over 63% by the end of his administration.

The neo-conservatives, who dominated the most recent Bush administration, amplified this trend of increased military spending. The neo-cons laid out their agenda for military global dominance in the 2000 Project for a New American Century (PNAC) report Rebuilding America’s Defenses. The report called for the protection of the American Homeland, the ability to wage simultaneous theater wars, to perform global constabulary roles, and to control space and cyberspace. The report claimed that in order to maintain a Pax Americana, potential rivals — such as China, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — needed to be held in check. This military global dominance agenda required forward deployment of US forces worldwide and increasing defense/war spending well into the 21st century. The result was a doubling of the US military budget to over $700 billion in the last eight years. The US now spends as much on war/defense as the rest of the world combined, making Americans the highest war-tax payers in the world.

Barack Obama’s election brought a moment of hope for many. However, the Obama administration is not calling for decreased military spending, or a reversal of US military global dominance. Instead, Obama retained Robert Gates, thus making Obama the first president from an opposing party, in US history, to keep in place the outgoing administrations’ Secretary of Defense/War. Additionally, Obama is calling for an expanded war in Afghanistan and only minimal long-range reductions in Iraq.

The US military industrial complex is deeply embedded inside the Washington beltway. According to the most recent reports from OpenSecrets.org, 151 members of Congress in 2006 had up to $195.5 million of their personal assets invested in defense companies.

Major defense contractors were seriously involved in the 2008 elections. Lockheed Martin gave $2,612,219 in total political campaign donations, with 49% to Democrats ($1,285,493) and 51% to Republicans ($1,325,159). Boeing gave $2,225,947 in 2008 with 58% going to Democrats, and General Dynamics provided $1,682,595 to both parties.  Northrop Grumman spent over $20 million in 2008, hiring lobbyists to influence Congress, and Raytheon spent $6 million on lobbyists in the same period. In a revolving door appointment, Obama nominated Raytheon’s senior vice president for government operations and strategy, William Lynn, for the number two position in the Pentagon. Lynn was formally the Defense Department’s comptroller during the Clinton administration.

The International Monetary Fund’s prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent—the worst since World War II. The United Nations’ International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to close in 2009, and while official unemployment is at 7 percent in the US, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers, joblessness is closer to 14 percent. The military-industrial-political elite are worried about the potential of increasing global insecurity. The answer inside the Obama Administration is to continue high defense/war spending to insure military control of both domestic and foreign instabilities.

The military, industrial, congressional, and administrative elite profit from defense spending, both financially and ideologically.  Insider profit taking from pentagon spending is widespread in Washington. But perhaps more important is the belief that this global military machine is seen as necessary for the protection of US corporate interests and the American upper classes in an increasingly destabilized world. Given that belief, the Obama administration is unlikely to change the defense spending policies of the previous US administrations without significant disruptive pressure from anti-war activists and global empire resisters.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored a media research organization. His 2006 study on the Global Dominance Group in the US is available on line at: http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/the-global-dominance-group/

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CBS– In an apparent reversal, President Barack Obama is reviving the Bush administration’s much-criticized military tribunals for Guantanamo Bay detainees, shocking those who expected the president to end them completely.

CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier reports that the president says these will not be your Bush-era tribunals, promising a new system that guarantees more legal rights for detainees.

Mr. Obama said the changes were designed to give defendants stronger legal protections, such as a ban on evidence “obtained through torture, or by using cruel or degrading interrogation methods,” like waterboarding; limiting use of hearsay evidence; granting the accused more say in who represents them; and protecting detainees who refuse to testify from legal sanctions.

But his action was almost instantly denounced by critics who called the new tribunals “Bush Lite,” reports Dozier.

During his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was highly critical of the commissions used by the Bush administration.

“By any measure, our system of trying detainees has been an enormous failure,” he said last June 18.

And one of his first actions as president was setting in motion the closing of Guantanamo Bay prison within 12 months.

Re-opening these military tribunals may also delay the closing of Guantanamo, says Dozier. The earliest the trials of 13 defendents (9 of whom are charged with helping orchestrate the September 11 terror attacks) can resume is September. That would give prosecutors about four months to finish before the end of the year, because these military tribunals cannot be held back in the United States.

The rest of the 241 Guantanamo detainees will either be released, transferred to other countries, tried in civilian U.S. federal courts or, potentially, held indefinitely as prisoners of war with full Geneva Conventions rights.

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WASHINGTON POST– President Obama rebuffed calls for a commission to investigate alleged abuses under the Bush administration in fighting terrorism, telling congressional leaders at a White House meeting yesterday that he wants to look forward instead of litigating the past.

In a lengthy exchange with House  Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), Obama appeared to back away from a statement earlier this week that suggested he could support an independent commission to examine possible abuses, according to several attendees who spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss the private meeting freely.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, also seeking to clarify the president’s position, told reporters that “the president determined the concept didn’t seem altogether workable in this case” because of the intense partisan atmosphere built around the issue.

“The last few days might be evidence of why something like this might just become a political back and forth,” Gibbs said.

The push for a “truth commission,” which grew from the efforts of a few human rights groups, gained fresh momentum with last week’s release of the memos from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that provided the basis for the enhanced interrogation techniques, including the practice of simulated drowning known as waterboarding. Obama has said he is opposed to holding CIA interrogators legally accountable, but in a statement last week, he left open the possibility of legal jeopardy for those who formulated the policy.

On Tuesday, Obama explicitly raised the prospect of legal consequences for Bush administration officials who authorized the techniques applied to “high value” terrorism suspects, and said if Congress is intent on investigating the tactics, an independent commission might provide a less partisan forum than a congressional panel.

Some key lawmakers, including  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Judiciary Chairman  Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), pounced on his remarks to push for a commission with subpoena power and the ability to grant immunity to some witnesses.

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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR– Several US unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, fired a volley of missiles at houses in a village in Pakistan’s northwest on Tuesday and killed roughly 16 alleged Taliban militants, news agencies reported. Information on civilian casualties, if any, was not immediately available.

Agence France-Presse cited an unidentified Pakistani security official as saying that about 18 US missiles were fired at targets in the village of Dattakhel. Earlier news reports put the death toll at about 10. A later report by CNN claimed 29 killed.

The attack is just the latest confirmation of the commitment President Barack Obama has made to the assassination campaign inside Pakistan — a close US ally — that began under his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

The Long War Journal, a blog that focuses its coverage on the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been tracking US drone and other air power attacks in Pakistan for some time. Using open-source information, the blog tallied five US aerial attacks in Pakistan in 2007 and 36 in 2008, most of those in the last half of that year.

In 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, the tempo of such attacks in Pakistan increased 47 percent, to 53. The vast majority of these have been carried out with drones.

Tuesday’s strike brought this year’s tally to 12, with just over 100 fatalities. That’s just under a quarter of last year’s total. If that pace were matched for the rest of the year, there will be 134 US attacks inside Pakistan.

The Long War Journal says that 258 militants and 31 civilians were killed in these attacks in 2007, while 463 militants and 43 civilians were killed in 2008. It reports no civilian casualties so far this year.

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