Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Northfoto
June 9, 2013
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Editor's Note: This is the first
article of a four-part series by Fred Branfman on the U.S. Executive
Branch's military, police and intelligence agencies which have
aggregated far more power, committed far more evil by destroying the
lives of countless innocents, and operated far more illegally, than any
other governing institution in the world today.
The
Executive Branch is also America's most undemocratic and thus unamerican
institution. The U.S. Executive justifies its mass murder,
incarceration of the innocent, authoritarianism, secrecy, deceit,
lawlessness, spying, and prosecution of whistleblowers, the press and
activists on the claim that it is protecting U.S. "National Security."
As this article and chart below it entitled "Experts Say U.S. Secret War
Is Not Working" demonstrate, however, the Executive's present campaign
in the Muslim World is only the greatest of its many strategic failures
to protect U.S. national security. It is in fact today endangering
American lives and democracy as never before. A U.S. Executive Branch
which constantly deceives its own people, robbing them of the "informed
consent" required by the Constitution, cannot legitimately claim to rule
in their names. And its citizens are under no moral obligation to obey
or support it with their tax dollars, sons or daughters until such time
as public and Congressional action have made it subject to truly
democratic rule.
If you aren't familiar with Branfman's work, here's some background from his long-time colleague and collaborator, Noam Chomsky:
Branfman “worked for years, with enormous courage and effort, to try to
expose what were called the ‘secret wars’ [against Laos and Cambodia
during the Vietnam War]. The secret wars were perfectly public wars
which the media were keeping secret, government. And Fred … finally did
succeed in breaking through, and [helped prompt] a tremendous exposure
of huge wars that were going on.”
Many have expressed surprise that under President Obama - a former Constitutional Law Senior Lecturer who promised
transparency, protection for
whisteblowers and respect for
international lawwhen running for office - U.S. Executive Branch agencies have:
- Built up a fleet of 7,000 drones, operating from a growing number of secret bases around the world, as they train more drone than conventional pilots; waged automated war in an ever-expanding number of nations, lawlessly murdering thousands of human beings without even knowing their names, while greatly strengthening America's foes (see chart below), destabilizing allied governments and, in the case of Pakistan, greatly increasing the risk of nuclear materials falling into anti-American hands;
- Created the top-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) consisting of 60,000 persons operating in 75 nations, the first unit of American assassins in U.S. history, who have illegally murdered many thousands more people and conducted night raids recalling World War II Gestapo movies which, according to Afghan President Karzai, have helped strengthen the Taliban and destabilize his government;
- Prosecuted more whistleblowers and journalists than even Messrs. Cheney and Bush;
- Collected records of millions of phone calls of Americans citizens from Verizon, Sprint, ATT and other phone carriers, and spied on millions more Americans' search histories, email content, file transfers and live chats while on the Internet;
- Authorized
the use of drones in the United States, which the Federal Aviation
Administration estimates could lead to 30,000 drones in U.S. skies by
2020, leading privacy advocates to fear their massive use by police
departments to spy on Americans;
- Claimed the President’s right to kill or imprison without trial any American citizen;
- Increased paramilitary
training and equipment, and created secret police spying operations in
thousands of states and cities around the nation (see chapter 7, “Report
Suspicious Activity”, Top Secret America, by Dana Priest and William Arkin);
- Created “huge biometric databases – with fingerprints and iris scans – of nearly 100 million people” (Top Secret America, p. 53);
- As
Priest and Arkin have also revealed, the Executive Branch has created
“a jaw-dropping 1,074 federal government organizations, and nearly two
thousand private companies involved with programs related to
counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in at least 17,000
locations across the United States – all top secret. The biggest growth
had come within the many agencies and large corporations that had
existed before the attacks and had since inflated to historic
proportions.” This has amounted to "a parallel top secret government
whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic,
sprawling universe of its own, visible only to a carefully vetted cadre,
and its entirety, as Pentagon intelligence chief James Clapper
admitted, visible only to God." (pp. 52, 86).
Under Mr.
Obama, America is still far from being a classic police-state of course.
But no President has done more to create the infrastructure for a
possible future police-state. This infrastructure will clearly pose a
serious danger to democratic ideals should there be more 9/11s, and/or
increased domestic unrest due to economic decline and growing
inequality, and/or massive global disruption due to climate change,
and/or a President with even less scruples than Mr. Obama.
What
gives? How could a fellow who spoke so eloquently of the need for the
rule of law when running for President now be presiding over a lawless
"industrial-sized killing machine" abroad and a massive threat to civil liberties at home? Why has Mr. Obama made the U.S. even
more hated in the Muslim world than when he took office - even though his
stated goal in 2009 was to reshape U.S. policy in the region? How is it that both he and Mitt Romney both ran on essentially the same
foreign policy, despite significant differences between them on domestic policy?
Much
of the answer to such questions lies in something that we rarely do in
this nation - seeing the U.S. Executive Branch Mr. Obama nominally heads
for what it really is: the most powerful
institution in the history of the world, one that has killed, wounded or made homeless well over 20 million human
beings (
"Dollars and Deaths,"Cong. Record, 5-14-75, p. 14262), mostly civilians, since 1962 - far more than any other government in the world.
Nothing
demonstrates this institution's power more than Mr. Obama himself. The
fact that he has so violated his own values and belief system as
Commander-in-Chief is not merely a matter of personal hypocrisy; it is a
dramatic illustration of how the Executive's institutional violence,
secrecy and deceit overwhelm even Presidents who begin their terms with
relatively good intentions.
Just six days before Mr. Obama’s recent
speech
stating that “perpetual war — through drones or Special Forces or troop
deployments — will prove self-defeating”, Pentagon officials gave
testimony
to Congress calling for just such perpetual war. If Mr. Obama is
serious about actually changing present U.S. policy, he will find
himself blocked at every turn by powerful Executive Branch officials
whose salaries, promotions, agency budgets and future well-paying
private sector jobs depend upon perpetual war, at home and abroad.
Americans
have been conditioned to focus on the personality of the President, and
to see the giant Executive Branch as a mere servant of its
"Commander-in-Chief." Countless books and newspaper stories have been
written about the differences between the "Reagan", "Carter" or
"Clinton" foreign policies. There are of course significant differences
between Administrations, though often due as much to differing objective
conditions as Presidential desires. But the simple fact is that these
differences have been far outweighed by a remarkable consistency in U.S.
foreign policy since the end of World War II. And a President is far
more limited in his options than popular folklore suggests. It is only
when one understands the Executive Branch as an institution that one can
make sense, not only of Mr. Obama, but much of both America's postwar
history and frightening future.
Famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward's
Obama's Wars reporting
on Mr. Obama's Afghanistan Policy Review in the fall of 2009 provides
an instructive case-study of just how limited a President's options are
when faced with institutional opposition from within the Executive
Branch.
Woodward reported that after Mr. Obama had acceded to the
military demand for an addition 21,000 troops shortly after taking
office, he asked them to produce a set of options that would include a
reduced U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. The Pentagon refused to
do so and instead began publicly lobbying for an additional 40,000
troops. Joint Chief of Staff head Admiral Mike Mullen first
pushed for a troop increase at a
September 15
Senate Armed Services hearing. White House aides Rahm Emanuel and Tom
Donilon were, Woodward reports, "furious. The president is being screwed
by the senior uniformed military, they (said). The generals and
admirals are systematically playing him, boxing him in." Mullen
apologized and said it wouldn't happen again.
But then two weeks
later, on October 1, 2009, U.S. Afghan military commander Stanley
McChrystal committed an act of insubordination far more serious than the
later
Rolling Stone interviews which got him fired. He again
publicly lobbied for more U.S. troops to Afghanistan in a major
speech in London. Woodward reports that "McChrystal's comments marked a
seminal moment for the White House staff. What better proof that the
military was on a search-and-destroy mission aimed at the president?
(National Security Advisor) James Jones said that McChrystal's speech
was either “insubordination or stupid. It read like a direct challenge
to the president. 'It is a firing offense, but McChrystal won't be fired
because we need him.'" Woodward also reported that "Obama felt
disrespected and trapped. The White House saw the speech as a scheme on
the part of McChrystal, Mullen and Petraeus."
And Mr. Obama was
indeed trapped, far more controlled by the military than its actual
"Commander-in-Chief". As CIA chief Leon Panetta summed up the situation:
"no Democratic president can go against military advice, especially if
he asked for it. So just do it. Do what they say." Mr. Obama was thus
forced to accede to the Pentagon's harebrained scheme for a "surge" that
increased U.S. troops in Afghanistan by 30,000 (with an
additional 10,000 from NATO allies) that achieved little and continued
to weaken U.S. national security by worsening conditions in neighboring,
and far more important, Pakistan.
The logic behind Panetta's
"give them what they want" mentality is obvious. A President might
conceivably survive another 9/11 or losing in Afghanistan - but not if
military sources continually leaked information to the media and
Congress blaming it on his or her failure to support the military. And,
for the same reason, a President is often "trapped" by the NSA, CIA or
any other major Executive agency.
A President also rarely takes
the initiative in developing such military strategies as drone and
ground assassination, or major surveillance operations. Such operations
are initiated and developed within the CIA, Pentagon or NSA, and then
presented to the President as a near fait accompli. It would require a
very high profile in courage indeed for a U.S. President seeking
reelection or governing mandate to abort such an operation at that
point. Presidents come and go. The Executive Branch endures, often
setting the terms under which any President must operate. We understand
this when looking at institutions like the Chinese or Soviet Politburos.
But we fail to apply this obvious truth when looking at our own
Executive Branch.
The U.S. Executive Branch agencies that conduct
U.S. foreign military and domestic police operations - the White House,
National Security Council, Pentagon, CIA, Departments of State, Defense
and Homeland Security, National Security Agency and FBI - have an
overall budget of well over
$1 trillion, employ 3-4
million people, and spend more money on the military than the next 10 nations
combined.
Its enormous power has allowed it to operate unilaterally since the end
of WWII, with little meaningful oversight or even the knowledge of
Congress and the American people.
The Executive
has had one overriding purpose since it emerged from the ashes of World
War II: to keep foreign governments deemed "pro-U.S." in power, and to
weaken or overthrow those considered "anti-U.S." The first key feature
of a "pro-U.S." government is that it permits U.S. corporations and Wall
Street investors access to its natural resources and cheap labor. As
former Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan
stated,
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what
everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." The second is that
it allows the U.S. military and spy agencies to operate freely in its
territory, including building military bases and conducting clandestine
operations.
While convincing its own people that its policies are
meant to support “freedom” and “democracy” around the world, its
practice has often been exactly the opposite. It has installed and/or
supported dozens of brutal, police-state regimes and paramilitary forces
in every corner of the globe which are the very antithesis of democracy
– including the Somoza family (1936-79) and then Contras in Nicaragua
(1980s); death squads in El Salvador (1980s); vicious military regimes
in Chile, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil in Latin America from WWII
until the 1990s; the Mobutu (1965-97) and South African apartheid
regimes (until 1990) in Africa; police-state and military governments in
South Vietnam (1956-75), Cambodia (1970-5) and Indonesia (1967 until
the present); and the despotic regimes of Mubarak in Egypt (1981-2011),
Ben Ali in Tunisia (1987-2011), the Shah of Iran (1952-79), Saudi Arabia
(1945-present), and Bahraini (1971-present) in the Middle East. It has
also supported the Israeli government’s mistreatment of the Palestinians
and refusal to negotiate a settlement based on countless U.N.
resolutions.
In general the U.S. Executive prefers to achieve its goals without overt violence. As President Bill Clinton himself later
acknowledged
with regard to Haiti, for example, his Administration's "free trade"
policies featuring NAFTA and the World Trade Organization impoverished
hundreds of millions of poor rural and slum dwellers around the world by
giving U.S. corporations unprecedented access to Third World markets
and labor, and extending loans that enriched local elites while forcing
the population as a whole to repay them by cutting health, education and
other social services.
But when such nonviolent means have not
sufficed to fulfill Executive Branch aims, it has ruthlessly used
massive violence to achieve its goals - from dropping 6.7 million tons
of bombs on Indochina and invading it with 550,000 troops; imposing and
supporting brutal police-state regimes around the world; and, more
recently, relying on drone and ground assassination.
Any
individual joining Executive Branch agencies conducting U.S. foreign and
police policy automatically finds her or himself part of an institution
whose most noteworthy feature is a culture of violence relying upon
secrecy and deceit to achieve its goals. Whatever his personal beliefs
prior to becoming President Mr. Obama, as the Executive's titular
leader, has necessarily signed up to support the secrecy, lying, and
disinformation it employs to enjoy maximum flexibility from democratic
oversight in order to pursue its policies of overt and covert violence.
Two important new books - Jeremy Scahill's
Dirty Wars and Mark Mazzetti's
The Way of the Knife
- describe how, in near-total secrecy, the U.S. Executive is a world of
its own. Over the last 12 years, Executive officials have unilaterally
and secretly launched, escalated or deescalated wars; installed and
supported massively corrupt governments, savage warlords, or local
paramilitary forces, and overthrown leaders that have displeased it;
created the first unit of global American assassins and fleets of
machines waging automated war; engaged in vicious turf wars for more
money and budget; spied on Americans including the media and activists
on a scale unmatched in U.S. history; compiled 3 different sets of
global "kill lists" independently operated by the White House, CIA and
Pentagon/JSOC; used police-state tactics while claiming to support
democracy, e.g. when it fed retina scans, facial recognition features
and fingerprints of over 3 million Iraqi and Afghani males into a giant
data base; incarcerated and tortured, either directly or indirectly,
tens of thousands of people without evidence or trial; and much more.
All
of these major activities are conducted entirely by the Executive
Branch, without meaningful Congressional oversight or the knowledge of
the American people. The foundational principle of the U.S. Constitution
is that governments can only rule with the "informed consent" of the
people. But the U.S. Executive Branch has not only robbed its people of
this fundamental right. It has prosecuted those courageous
whistleblowers who have tried to inform them.
The U.S. mass media,
dependent upon the Executive for their information and careers, and run
by corporate interests benefiting from Executive largesse,
predominately convey Executive Branch perspectives on an hourly basis to
the American people. Even on the relatively few occasions when they
publish information the Executive wishes to keep secret, it has little
impact on Executive policies while maintaining the illusion that the
U.S. has a "free press". The U.S. Executive is essentially free to
conduct its activities as it wishes.
In future articles in this space we will explore three key features of the U.S. Executive Branch:
(1) Evil
- If evil consists of murdering, maiming, and making homeless the
innocent, and/or waging the “aggressive war” judged the “supreme
international crime” at Nuremberg, the U.S. Executive Branch is today
clearly the world’s most evil institution. It has killed, wounded or
made refugees of an officially-estimated 21 million people in Iraq and
Indochina alone, far more than any other institution since the time of
Stalin and Mao. President Obama is the first U.S. President to
acknowledge, in his recent "counterterrorism" speech, that this number
has included killing "hundreds of thousands" of civilians in Vietnam
whom it officially claimed it was trying to protect. Former Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara put the total number of Vietnamese killed at
3.4 million.
(2) Lawlessness - If illegality consists of refusing to obey the law, the Executive is clearly the most
lawless
institution in the world. It routinely violates even timid legislative
attempts to control its unilateral war-making. And no nation on earth
has signed fewer international laws, and so failed to observe even those
it has signed. These include measures like those intended to clean up
the
tens of millions of landmines and cluster bombs
with which it has littered the world, refused to clean up, and which
continue to murder and maim tens of thousands of innocent people until
today.
(3) Authoritarianism - And if
"authoritarianism" consists of a governing body acting unilaterally,
regularly deceiving its own citizenry, neutering its legislature ,and
prosecuting those who expose its lies, the U.S. Executive is clearly the
most undemocratic institution in America. Indeed its deceiving its own
people - keeping its activities secret and then lying about and covering
them up when caught - throws its very legitimacy into question. How can
these giant agencies claim to legitimately represent an American people
if they do not truthfully inform them about its activities? And how
much loyalty do the American people owe to such an institution which
does not in fact represent them?
In seeking to understand the U.S.
Executive Branch, and its evil, lawlessness and authoritarianism, it is
important to note that we are not delving here into "conspiracy
theory". On the contrary. U.S. Executive Branch policy is determined not
by conspiracy by a few but rather out of the interaction of hundreds of
semi-independent power centers within the bureaucracies and corporate
world, the huge agglomeration that
Eisenhower
termed the "military-industrial complex." Policy emerges as a result of
countless meetings, lobbying sessions, phone calls, meals,
negotiations, promises of future jobs in the private sector in return
for government contracts, forming and breaking alliances, promoting and
demoting individuals.
It is also important to note that when we
speak of "evil", we are not speaking of evil individuals as normally
understood. The term is conventionally applied to the clearly demonic
monsters who periodically pop up in world history, most notably of
course Hitler and other Nazi leaders, i.e. the standard humanist
understanding of what most people call evil.
By contrast, most
U.S. Executive Branch leaders tend to be rather conventional types
before they join the Executive. Like Mr. Obama most have some feeling
for their mates, children and/or dogs, give to charity, and hold
accepted beliefs about democracy and the rule of law. They do not lie as
a matter of course to family and friends, or commit face-to-face
violence against those with whom they disagree.
But in the postwar Executive world one need not
be classically evil to
do evil. It is
institutional
evil, e.g., mass murder, conducted by normal individuals which poses
the greatest threat to human life, decency, democracy and the rule of
law in our time. Top Executive Branch leaders are not motivated by grand
theories of “purifying the race” or “thousand year Reichs”, but rather
simply succeeding in their jobs, advancing in their careers, making more
money, being promoted, and gaining more power.
Henry Kissinger
obviously did not devastate Indochina because he cared about the
wellbeing of the 6 million people he helped kill, wound or make
homeless; nor did he wish to promote democracy when supporting a savage
police-state in South Vietnam which held more political prisoners than
the rest of the world combined. Those who know him best say he was
motivated by simple careerism – a desire not to be blamed for the fall
of Indochina while in office, and to be admired - and rewarded for -
being seen as a “statesman” after leaving it.
As important as it
is to understand the U.S. Executive's institutional evil, lawlessness
and authoritarianism, however, there is one question that must be
addressed first: its claim to be protecting "national security."
For
this claim is the foundational rationale of all Executive action.
American democracy has become so debased that most Americans passively
accept the fact that the public servants whose salaries they pay
routinely lie to them; wage losing and murderous wars that waste
trillions of dollars that they need at home to make a living and support
their families; send their sons and daughters off to be senselessly
killed; and routinely break the domestic and international laws in which
all Americans claim to believe, and upon which Executive officials base
their right to rule.
They accept these Executive Branch
violations of the most basic principles upon which their country was
founded for one basic reason: they believe Executive Branch leaders are
protecting them, that even clearly illegitimate activities are
legitimate because they protect U.S. "national security."
So deep
is the unconscious need to be protected that the words "national
security" have acquired a near-mystical power that overwhelms the
undeniable factual evidence that U.S. Executive Branch leaders are
endangering not protecting Americans, as they lose U.S. influence around
the world. The U.S. Executive has maintained much of its influence in
key areas where it has not engaged in violence, notably Europe and
Japan. But since the end of World War II in more problematic areas:
- U.S.
Executive Branch leaders have not won a single major war they have
waged, fighting to a stalemate in Korea, losing massively in Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia (though destroying these nations' ability to create
alternative economic models), being forced to retreat from Iraq and
Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, trillions wasted,
in war-making that has weakened not strengthened America.
- They
massively miscalculated in the Middle East by supporting the Shah of
Iran until the very end. Just three months before the Shah fell, a
clueless U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan predicted that " the riots
erupting in provincial cities would play themselves out and were not a
cause of major concern." The regime that replaced the Shah has become
America's major foe in the Muslim world, and the Executive has foolishly
strengthened it far further by invading Iraq.
- By its support
for death squads, torture and mass incarcerations by the brutal regimes
it imposed upon the people of Central and Latin America, it has
understandably turned most of the subcontinent against the U.S. today;
- U.S.
influence is waning in Asia, as China's rises due to the U.S. financial
and corporate sector having exported millions of jobs and ever-more
sophisticated manufacturing and high-tech technology there, even as a
debt-ridden U.S. economy has allowed its industrial base,
infrastructure, and schools to precipitously decline.
U.S.
Executive Branch foreign and military policy is characterized above all
by two fatal flaws. In the 1960s Senator William Fulbright criticized
the Executive’s "arrogance of power", and this arrogance - combined with
ignorance about the countries they attack - has continued until today.
U.S. officils regularly try to force local leaders to behave as the
Executive wishes, even when these leaders believe it is against their
national interests. And the Executive ignores the local public opinion
that is increasing the power of anti-U.S. groupings throughout the Third
World.
Its second flaw is conducting a short-term,
tactics-oriented foreign and military policy at the expense of long-term
strategic U.S. interests. For nearly a decade, for example, U.S.
Executive military and political leaders were so obsessed with achieving
short-term military successes in Afghanistan that they endangered far
more important long-term U.S. strategic interests in nuclear-armed
Pakistan.
In actual practice U.S. Executive foreign and military
policy is above all driven by ambitious politicians, military and
intelligence officials looking to further their careers in the
short-term, as when David Petraeus managed to become the head of the CIA
after totally
mismanaging
U.S. policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan; bureaucracies fighting
vicious turf wars in an attempt to increase their budgets for the
upcoming fiscal year; and U.S. corporations seeking to boost next
quarter's profits.
Both arrogance and short-term thinking are in
dramatic evidence today in what is the U.S. Executive's single greatest
strategic error since Vietnam: its waging an expanding war in the 1.8
billion strong, nuclear-armed and oil-rich Muslim world. Its policies
are turning hundreds of millions of Muslims against the U.S., including
countless potential suicide bombers, as it creates far more enemies than
it kills. If Executive actions were protecting the U.S., the numbers of
U.S. foes would be decreasing. Instead they are exponentially
increasing, and spreading to an increasing number of nations.
Executive
arrogance, ignorance and short-term thinking are most dangerous today
in Pakistan, a nation of 180 million people possessing well over 100
nuclear weapons. This nuclear stockpile, a Harvard Study has
reported,
is the fastest-growing and least stable in the world. It was for this
reason that President Obama said "Pakistan" in response to actor George
Clooney's question as to what issue most keeps him up night.
But
despite Mr. Obama’s realization of the dangers the U.S. faces in
Pakistan, both he and George W. Bush have catastrophically mishandled
U.S.-Pakistani relations, irresponsibly putting America at risk. In the
immediate wake of 9-11, Pakistan's powerful ISI (Directorate of
Interservices Intelligence) agreed to cooperate with the CIA, and within
a few years had helped capture top al-Qaeda operatives Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. This, Mark Mazzetti reported, “led many
top Bush officials to believe the partnership was working.” He also
reported that Brigadier-General Asad Munir “thinks about the respect the
two spy services had for each other, respect that might have been
something approaching trust.”
But the cooperation did not continue
because Executive officials decided to pressure Pakistan to support the
U.S. war in Afghanistan, against what the ISI and other top Pakistanis
felt was their national interest. The Executive also conducted dozens of
drone strikes in Pakistan, infuriating the populace and helping to
convince
74% of the population - over 125 million people - that the U.S. is
their "enemy." This in turn, as U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson revealed
in the Wikileaks cables, made it impossible for the Pakistani government
to cooperate with the U.S. on safeguarding its nuclear materials and
reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation. She
explained
that “the negative media attention has begun to hamper U.S. efforts to
improve Pakistan’s nuclear security and nonproliferation practices”.
Although
Pakistan is the most flagrant example of U.S. Executive incompetence,
however, its general pattern of ignoring Arab public opinion has sown a
whirlwind throughout the Muslim World, from Egypt to Asia to Africa. Its
support for the hated Hosni Mubarak in Egypt until the very end has
helped bring the far more anti-U.S. Muslim Brotherhood to power in that
pivotal nation. And hatred of the U.S. has also fanned the flames of
jihadism and helped extremists increase their power and influence
throughout the Muslim World. The U.S. Executive's invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq while Mr. Bush was President, and its escalation of
drone strikes under Mr. Obama, has dramatically reduced U.S. national
security and could well cost many U.S. lives at home and abroad in the
coming decade.
Equally significantly, Executive incompetence, by
making future 9/11s more likely, has seen it increasingly turn to
police-state measures back home. Bob Woodward has
warned that “another 9/11 … could happen, and if it does, we will become a police state
.” This threat will grow until the U.S. Executive is thoroughly transformed.
As
noted, many American accept the Executive’s immorality, illegality and
incompetence out of a desire to be protected. But if the public was to
realize that Executive policies are in fact endangering their lives,
harming not strengthening our national security, it could lead to a
movement to rein the Executive in, cut its budgets and demand the
transparency upon which Mr. Obama ran for President.
In his
recent counterterrorism speech
and background briefings, the Obama Administration promised to halt
signature drone strikes, target only people actively planning to kill
Americans instead of also targeting those only trying to change their
own governments, and to make greater efforts to avoid killing civilians.
If
implemented, these will be welcome steps. As pushback begins from
within the Executive, and from outside it from conservatives, however
Mr. Obama will be hard-put to fulfill his pledges. It will also be of
great moment to see if these changes can be institutionalized or
whether, say, the election of a Republican President in 2016 will undo
them.
Policies toward the Muslim World that will enhance U.S.
national security are obvious. Above all the U.S. needs to be perceived
as an ally not enemy by Pakistan, so that cooperation on safeguarding
its nuclear materials can once again become possible. This will require
the immediate cessation of all
negative U.S. activities, e.g.
drone strikes and other incursions of Pakistani territory, and
withdrawing clandestine CIA personnel like
Raymond Davis whose murder of two Pakistanis, as Mark Mazetti reports, outraged Pakistanis even more than the capture of Bin Laden.
But
these would only be first steps. Far more importantly as Mr. Obama
implied in calling for more foreign aid, reducing the anti-U.S. hatred
generated over the past decades will require a whole series of new
positive steps. First and foremost among them will be extending massive aid to help the Pakistani government achieve its
main goal:
providing 24 hour a day electricity to every home in the nation. Would
America have been safer today had it brought electricity rather than
drones, cross-border incursions and violent CIA and JSOC personnel to
Pakistan? If it had continued to work with the ISI and been seen as an
ally, would it have captured Osama bin Laden years earlier and helped
make Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile safer? To ask such questions is to
answer them.
As we shall explore in coming articles in this
series, achieving the massive shift in U.S. priorities in the Muslim
World needed to enhance not weaken U.S. national security will not only
require fundamental changes in U.S. policies abroad. Achieving them will
also necessitate massive institutional changes within the U.S.
Executive branch at home. Over the past 70 years its evil, lawless and
authoritarian culture of violence has produced national security
disaster after disaster. The institution itself must be changed if the
Executive is to genuinely protect the American people.
Mr. Obama
himself acknowledged this when he stated that "in the absence of a
strategy that reduces the well-spring of extremism, a perpetual war —
through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments — will prove
self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways." The strategy
he called for involved support for democracy and more economic aid in
the Muslim world.
This part of his speech was particularly
noteworthy because it repudiated the very "National Strategy for
Counter-Terrorism" that Mr. Obama released just two years ago, a
strategy that called for precisely the "perpetual war" that he now
claims is "self-defeating".
His previous "counter-terrorism"
strategy reflected the thought and practice of the U.S. Executive Branch
over the past 70 years. To now change it so dramatically would thus be a
tremendous undertaking, requiring dismantling much of the
"counter-terror" apparatus the Executive has built up over the past
decade, opening up many of its activities to public and Congressional
scrutiny, ending prosecution of whistleblowers, bringing Executive
officials who violate domestic and international law to justice, and
both ratifying and obeying the numerous international laws that the
Executive now ignores.
Future articles in this series will explore
in greater depth the Executive's culture of violence. For a deeper
understanding of how the world's most powerful institution really
operates is required in order to comprehend the vast changes needed for
it to actually protect Americans and, equally importantly, strengthen
rather than continue to threaten democracy at home.
OFFICIALS AND EXPERTS: U.S. DRONE AND ASSASSINATION STRATEGY NOT WORKING:
Admiral Dennis Blair, Former Director Of National Intelligence
“Admiral Dennis Blair, the former director of National Intelligence (in the)
New York Times: While
“drone attacks did help reduce the Qaeda leadership in Pakistan,” he wrote,
“they also increased hatred of America.” He said the drone has also damaged
“our
ability to work with Pakistan [in] eliminating Taliban sanctuaries,
encouraging Indian-Pakistani dialogue, and making Pakistan’s nuclear
arsenal more secure.””
--"
The Petraeus Projection, Part I: The CIA Director's Record Since The Surge - Hero Worship Hides The Military Failures Of The CIA Director's 'Global Killing Machine'", by Fred Branfman,
Salon, October 3, 2011
Michael Boyle, Former Obama Counter-Terrorism Adviser
“Michael
Boyle, who was on Obama's counter-terrorism group in the run-up to his
election in 2008, said the US administration's growing reliance on drone
technology was having "adverse strategic effects that have not been
properly weighed against the tactical gains associated with killing
terrorists … The vast increase in the number of deaths of low-ranking
operatives has deepened political resistance to the US programme in
Pakistan, Yemen and other countries."
--"Us Drone Attacks 'Counter-Productive', Former Obama Security Adviser Claims,” January 7, 2013,
The Guardian
General James Cartwright, former Vice-Chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff
“Gen.
James E. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and a favored adviser during Mr. Obama’s first term, expressed
concern in a speech here on Thursday that America’s aggressive campaign
of drone strikes could be undermining long-term efforts to battle
extremism. ‘We’re seeing that blowback. If you’re trying to kill your
way to a solution, no matter how precise you are, you’re going to upset
people even if they’re not targeted.’”
--“As New Drone Policy Is Weighed, Few Practical Effects Are Seen”,
NYT, March 22, 2013
CIA Station Chief in Islamabad
"The
CIA station chief in Islamabad thought the drone strikes in 2005 and
2006 — which, while infrequent at that time, were often based on bad
intelligence and had resulted in many civilian casualties — had done
little except fuel hatred for the United States inside Pakistan and put
Pakistani officials in the uncomfortable position of having to lie about
the strikes."
--
The Way of the Knife, Mark Mazetti, Kindle loc. 2275
Council On Foreign Relations
"There
appears to be a strong correlation in Yemen between increased targeted
killings since December 2009 and heightened anger toward the United
States and sympathy with or allegiance to AQAP ... One former senior
military official closely involved in U.S. targeted killings argued that
`drone strikes are just a signal of arrogance that will boomerang
against America' ... A world characterized by the proliferation of armed
drones ... would undermine core U.S. interests, such as preventing
armed conflict, promoting human rights, and strengthening international
legal regimes." Because of drones' inherent advantages over other
weapons platforms, states and nonstate actors would be much more likely
to use lethal force against the United States and its allies."
-- "Reforming U.S.Drone Strike Policies," January 2013, Micah Zenko, Council on Foreign Relations
Sherard Cowper-Coles, Former U.K. Special Representative To Afghanistan
“Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, close ally Britain's Special Representative to Afghanistan, stated that David Petraeus should be
"ashamed of himself," explaining that
"he has increased the violence (and) trebled the number of special forces raids." As Cowper-Coles has
explained, "for every dead Pashtun warrior, there will be 10 pledged to revenge."“
--"Obama's Secret Wars: How Our Shady Counter-Terrorism Policies Are More Dangerous Than Terrorism", by Fred Branfman,
AlterNet, July 11, 2011
Muhammed Daudzai, Karzai Chief Of Staff
Muhammed Daudzai, chief of staff for Afghan president Hamid Karzai,
said “when we do those night raids the enemy will get stronger and stronger in numbers.”
----"
The Petraeus Projection, Part I: The CIA Director's Record Since The Surge - Hero Worship Hides The Military Failures Of The CIA Director's 'Global Killing Machine'", by Fred Branfman,
Salon, October 3, 2011
Director of National Intelligence’s National Intelligence Estimate
"The
final report concluded that Iraq had become a '"cause célèbre" for
jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim
world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.'
... The report predicted that an increasingly decentralized global
jihad movement would splinter even further, with regional militant
groups proliferating. "
--
The Way of the Knife, Mark Mazetti, Kindle loc. 1945
Andrew Exum, ex-Army Ranger, Fellow, Center for a New American Security
"We
were so focused on getting these high value targets ... I think we
ended up exacerbating a lot of the drivers of conflict and exacerbating
the insurgency ... It doesn't take a genius to realize that by dragging
people out of their homes in the middle of the night ... could inflame
tensions, how this could actually exacerbate drivers of conflict,"
-- from
Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, Kindle Loc. 3171
Farea al-Muslimi, Yemeni Villager
“Now,
however, when they think of America, they think of the fear they feel
at the drones over their heads. What the violent militants had failed to
achieve, one drone strike accomplished in an instant.”
--Testimony,
Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and
Human Rights, quoted in “Drone Strikes Turn Allies Into Enemies, Yemeni
Says”, NYT, April 23, 2013
Robert Grenier, Former Head Of The Cia Counterrorism Center
“The mentality behind counterrorism has been described by former head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center in 2005-6,
Robert Grenier … has explained that
"it's
not just a matter of numbers of militants who are operating in that
area, it also effects the motivations of those militants ... They now
see themselves as part of a global Jihad. They are not just focused on
helping oppressed Muslims in Kashmir or trying to fight the NATO and the
Americans in Afghanistan, they see themselves as part of a global
struggle, and therefore are a much broader threat than they were
previously. So in a sense, yes, we have helped to bring about the situation that we most fear." (Emphasis added)
--"Obama's Secret Wars: How Our Shady Counter-Terrorism Policies Are More Dangerous Than Terrorism", by Fred Branfman
Alternet, July 11, 2011
“We
have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are
creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield. We are
already there with regards to Pakistan and Afghanistan,"
--“Drone Attacks Create Terrorist Safe Havens, Warns Former CIA Official”, Guardian, 6-5-12
Michael Hayden, Former Cia Director
“Former
CIA Director Michael Hayden has openly criticized the Obama’s
administration use of pilot-less drones to assassinate suspected
militants around the world. Hayden said, "Right now, there isn’t a
government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these
operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel." The drone program
began under President George W. Bush but has rapidly expanded under
Obama. So far, the Obama administration has carried out drone strikes in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Ethiopia and Libya. Hayden also
criticized the U.S. assassination of the U.S. born cleric Anwar
al-Awlaki in Yemen. Hayden said, "We needed a court order to eavesdrop
on him, but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that
something?"
--”Former CIA Director Hayden Slams Obama Drone Program”, Democracy Now, February 7, 2012
Mathew Hoh, ex-Combat Vet, Top Civilian Official in Afghanistan Province
"I
think we're engendering more hostility. We're wasting a lot of very
good assets going after midlevel guys who don't threaten the United
States or have no capacity to threaten the United States,"
-- from
Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, Kindle Loc. 7393
David Ignatius, Washington Post Columnist
“My
quick reaction, as a journalist who has chronicled the growing use of
drones, is that this extension to the Libyan theater is a mistake. It
brings a weapon that has become for many Muslims a symbol of the
arrogance of U.S. power into a theater next door to the Egyptian and
Tunisian revolutions, the most promising events in a generation. It
projects American power in the most negative possible way.”
--“Drone attacks in Libya: A mistake”,
Washington Post, 4-21-11
ISI - The Pakistan Interservices Intelligence Agency
“The
Wall Street Journal reported:
Pakistan's main spy agency says homegrown Islamist militants have
overtaken the Indian army as the greatest threat to national security
... for the first time in 63 years.
Yes, that's right. Pakistani
military intelligence now rates domestic insurgency a greater threat
than India for the first time since Pakistan was created -- largely as a
result of U.S. actions.”
-- "'Beyond Madness': Obama's War on Terror Setting Nuclear-Armed Pakistan on Fire", Fred Branfman,
Alternet, November 3, 2010
Gregory Johnson, Princeton Yemen Expert
“The
most enduring policy legacy of the past four years may well turn out to
be an approach to counterterrorism that American officials call the
“Yemen model,” a mixture of drone strikes and Special Forces raids
targeting Al Qaeda leaders … Testimonies from Qaeda fighters and
interviews I and local journalists have conducted across Yemen attest to
the centrality of civilian casualties in explaining Al Qaeda’s rapid
growth there. The United States is killing women, children and members
of key tribes. “Each time they kill a tribesman, they create more
fighters for Al Qaeda,” one Yemeni explained to me over tea in Sana, the
capital, last month. Another told CNN, after a failed strike, “I would
not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined Al Qaeda as a result of
the latest drone mistake.”
--“The Wrong Man for the C.I.A.”, by Gregory Johnson,
N.Y. Times, 11-19-12
David Kilcullen, Former Petraeus Counterinsurgency Advisor
“David Kilcullen, Petraeus’ own counterinsurgency adviser in Iraq, has
characterized U.S. policy as
a fundamental “strategic error ... our insistence on personalizing this
conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, devoting time and resources
toward killing or capturing ‘high-value’ targets ... distracts us from
larger problems.” As Kilcullen had
noted earlier,
these “larger problems” include the potential “collapse of the
Pakistani state,” which he called a calamity that in light of the
country’s size, strategic location and nuclear stockpile would “dwarf”
all other dangers in the region … Kilcullen
has warned that
the drone war “has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians
... [is] now exciting visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of
Pakistani opinion in Punjab and Sindh, the nation’s two most populous
provinces.”
Kilcullen has noted,“Al
Qaeda and its Taliban allies must be defeated by indigenous forces—not
from the United States, and not even from Punjab, but from the parts of
Pakistan in which they now hide. Drone strikes make this harder, not
easier.”
--From “Replace Petraeus,” by Fred Branfman,
Truthdig, June 2, 2009
Colonel David Kilcullen, a key Petraeus advisor in Iraq,
who testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on
May 23, 2009, that, "Since 2006, we've killed 14 senior Al Qaeda
leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we've killed 700
Pakistani civilians in the same area. We need to call off the drones."
--"Mass Assassinations Lie at the Heart of America's Military Strategy in the Muslim World", by Fred Branfman,
Alternet, August 24, 2010
Emile Nakhleh, Senior CIA Analyst
"We
are not generating good will in these operations," Emile Nakhleh ... We
might target radicals and potential radicals, but unfortunately...other
things and other people are being destroyed or killed. So, in the long
run ... these operations will not necessarily help to deradicalize
potential recruits ..."
-- from
Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, Kindle Loc. 9824
General Stanley McChrystal
"[
General McChrystal says that] for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies."
-- "The Runaway General," Rolling Stone, 6/22/10
”There’s
widespread resentment against drone strikes in Pakistan, says the
former commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley
McChrystal. At the launching ceremony of his book, “My Share of the
Task”, on Friday evening, the retired general repeated what he had said
earlier that US drone strikes were “hated on a visceral level”. He
warned that too many drone strikes in Pakistan without identifying
suspected militants individually can be a bad thing. Gen McChrystal said
he understood why Pakistanis, even in the areas not affected by the
drones, reacted negatively against the strikes. He asked the Americans
how they would react if a neighbouring country like Mexico started
firing drone missiles at targets in Texas. The Pakistanis, he said, saw
the drones as a demonstration of America’s might against their nation
and reacted accordingly. “What scares me about drone strikes is how they
are perceived around the world,” Gen McChrystal said in an earlier
interview. “The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes …
is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated
on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the
effects of one.””
--“McChrystal opposes drone strikes”,
Dawn, 2-10-13
Cameron Munter, Former U.S. Ambassador To Pakistan
“The
problem is the political fallout … Do you want to win a few battles and
lose the war? … The definition is a male between the ages of 20 and 40 …
My feeling is one man’s combatant is another man’s—well, a chump who
went to a meeting.”
--“A Former Ambassador to Pakistan Speaks Out”,
Daily Beast, Nov 20, 2012
Anne Patterson , Ex-U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan
“Patterson’s
cables also reveal that U.S. leaders know that present policy is
destabilizing Pakistan, thus making a nuclear disaster more likely.
Referring to U.S.
“unilateral operations” in northwest Pakistan
(such as drone strikes, ground assassination and other infringements of
Pakistani sovereignty), she wrote
that “increased unilateral
operations in these areas risk destabilizing the Pakistani state,
alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and
provoking a broader governance crisis in Pakistan without finally
achieving the goal.” She then added that
“to be effective, we
must extend the writ of the Pakistani state into the FATA [Federally
Administered Tribal Areas] in such a way that Taliban groups can no
longer offer effective protection to al-Qaeda from Pakistan’s own
security and law enforcement agencies in these areas” (9-23-09 cable).
--"WikiLeaks Exposes the Danger of Pakistan’s Nukes", Fred Branfman,
Truthdig, January 13, 2011
Bruce Riedel, Obama “AfPak” Advisor
The
evidence is mounting that U.S. assassinations are so ineffective they
are actually strengthening anti-American forces in Pakistan. Bruce
Riedel, a counterinsurgency expert who coordinated
the Afghan review for President Obama, said: "The
pressure we've put on (jihadist forces) in the past year has also drawn
them together, meaning that the network of alliances is growing
stronger not weaker."
--"Mass Assassinations Lie at the Heart of America's Military Strategy in the Muslim World", Fred Branfman,
Alternet, August 24, 2010
Jeremy Scahill, Author, Dirty Wars, On Somalia
"Many
seasoned Somalia analysts belied that a handful of radicals in the
country could have been contained and that the central aim of
stabilizing the country should have been to disarm an disemplower the
warlords. Instead, Washington directly supported an expansion their
power and, in the process, caused a radical backlash in Somalia, opening
the doors wide for al Qaeda to step in... Al Shabab's meteoric rise in
Somalia, and the legacy of terror it wrought, was a direct response to a
decade of disastrous US policy, which had strengthened the very threat
it was intended to crush."
-- from Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, Kindle Loc. 2689
Michael Scheueur, Former CIA Counterterrorism Operative
“Former CIA counterrorism operative Michael Scheuer has
stated that "
Petraeus's
'decapitation' approach was also unlikely to work. 'The Red Army tried
that for 10 years, and they were far more ruthless and cruel about it
than us, and it didn't work so well for them.'"
--"Obama's Secret Wars: How Our Shady Counter-Terrorism Policies Are More Dangerous Than Terrorism", by Fred Branfman, Alternet, July 11, 2011
Fred Branfman's writing has
been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New
Republic, and other publications. He is the author of several books on
the Indochina War.
