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Taking Bush’s Preventive War Doctrine Underground (Sort Of)
June 9, 2010
Ivan Eland

Remember when Democrats and independents craved a less belligerent U.S. foreign policy that eschewed the aggressive preventive war doctrine of the George W. Bush administration? When Barack Obama took office, the atmospherics did seem to change as the new president promised to withdraw forces from Iraq and actually talk to unfriendly nations, such as Iran and North Korea. The only problem is that the new boss is largely the same as the old boss in the war on terror.

To give some credit where it is due, the recently released Obama National Security Strategy has laudably narrowed the broad war to attacking al-Qaeda and associated groups around the world. But Obama has also made that war more aggressive and more secretive (sort of).

The war against al-Qaeda-related Islamic extremism is still too broad and makes the United States new and dangerous enemies. Since 9/11, al-Qaeda has morphed into a much more decentralized organization—with Osama bin Laden and its central trunk relegated to inspiring local franchise groups in Iraq, the Arabian peninsula, East Asia, and North and East Africa. These groups like the prestige of the al-Qaeda name but focus mainly on local grievances. Just as he must have been pleased with Bush’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq generating more Islamist radicalism, bin Laden would like to bait the United States into attacking its affiliate local groups around the world for the same reason. Foolishly, Obama is obliging him.

Obama is escalating the CIA’s “covert” drone attacks against al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, and other co-traveling groups in Pakistan and increasing the use of secretive U.S. Special Forces around the world. The Special Forces have been expanded—in troop levels, budget, and countries deployed from 60 to 75 in the last year and a half—and they are doing more unilateral preventive and retaliatory attacks against al-Qaeda-related groups and training of and joint operations with local counterterrorism forces. As well as retaining the rhetoric of the cult of the offensive against terror groups—as George W. Bush put it, “offense is the best defense”—the Obama administration is approving even more aggressive “covert” preventive military actions than the Bush administration did, according to high level U.S. military officials.

In particular, aggressive U.S. operations in Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen have been stepped up. Of course, the al-Shabaab Islamists in Somalia, the Pakistani Taliban, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula either hadn’t really been that popular in those areas or didn’t focus their attacks on American targets until the U.S. began escalating operations against them. Now the al-Shabaab is more popular than ever, the Pakistani Taliban has dispatched a bomber to New York’s Time Square, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has sent the Christmas BVD bomber the United States’ way.

And the Special Forces don’t think they are making the United States new enemies in enough places! One such official lamented to the Washington Post, “Eighty percent of our investment is now in resolving current conflicts, not in building capabilities with partners to avoid future ones.” Yet as Osama bin Laden has made clear time after time before and after 9/11, his main motive for attacking the United States is its “infidel” intervention in and occupation of Muslim lands. So the not-so-secret Special Forces presence in 75 countries is hardly helping to avoid conflicts, but is instead stirring the hornets’ nest of local groups and making them begin attacking the United States.

Lastly, as during the Cold War, the adversary often knows more about such “secret” operations than does the American public. Covert action has just been one more way of neutering the important constitutional requirement that the (entire) Congress must approve of military action. Although the Obama administration has laudably avoided the Bush administration’s breathtakingly ostentatious unconstitutional claims of executive power in wartime, it has nonetheless wildly stretched the congressional war authorization in 2001 to use “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons” that the president concludes “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks. Many of al-Qaeda’s local affiliates around the world had nothing to do with those attacks. Thus, Obama is still acting unconstitutionally without Congress’ authorization of the use of force.

Obama—for constitutional reasons and to keep U.S. citizens safe around the world and at home—should further narrow the focus of U.S. actions to only those entities mentioned in the congressional post-9/11 war resolution.

New from Ivan Eland! THE EMPIRE HAS NO CLOTHES: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed (Updated Edition) Most Americans don’t think of their government as an empire, but in fact the United States has been steadily expanding its control of overseas territories since the turn of the twentieth century. In The Empire Has No Clothes, Ivan Eland, a leading expert on U.S. defense policy and national security, examines American military interventions around the world from the Spanish-American War to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Learn More »»

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God and Oil Spills
June 9, 2010
Robert H. Nelson
Denver Post, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Kansas City Star, The Olympian, Bellingham Herald, The Tribune (San Luis Obispo), Tri-City Herald, The Ledger-Enquirer, Macon Telegraph, Miami Herald, Lexington Herald-Leader, Idaho Statesman, Bradenton Herald

One would have to be heartless not to be moved by photos of pelicans, sea turtles and other Gulf of Mexico wildlife mired in oil muck. The story line—man interfering with nature and now paying a heavy price—is biblical in its imagery.

But is it scientific?

Oil is a common, natural presence in the environment, including in the Gulf of Mexico. A 2009 article in Environmental Science and Technology reported that the naturally occurring Coal Oil Point seep field off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. has leaked 150 to 200 barrels of oil into the Pacific every day for probably thousands of years. Yet marine organisms still prosper there.

In 1942, in less than a month, eight tankers were sunk by German U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico, releasing 75,000 barrels—or nearly 2.3 million gallons—each. Not many years after those tankers went down, few traces of the oil remained, though the spill wasn’t cleaned up “quickly” by today’s standards. This comes as no surprise; oil spill impacts largely dissipate in one to five years.

Less active currents and colder water temperatures made Prince William Sound, site of the Exxon Valdez spill, less “resilient” than the Gulf of Mexico. Still, since the “disaster,” more than half the key species have completely recovered and all but two of the rest are close to full recovery.

Ironically, some of the greatest damage was caused by Exxon’s panicked response. Exxon literally washed the rocks and beaches clean, harming clams and other organisms in the process.

The $2 billion Exxon spent on clean-up efforts may have been more public penance than sound environmental policy. With legal settlements, the company spent $3.5 billion. While some individuals and businesses were harmed, Alaska’s economy actually showed a small upward blip for at least a year after the spill.

If oil spills are less harmful to the environment and economy than conventionally believed, why does the public react with such horror? If it was due solely to the effects on wildlife, why isn’t there similar outrage about the 130 million birds killed in the U.S. each year colliding with high tension electric wires?

The difference is that oil spills cause the sudden death of large numbers of “God’s creatures” whose suffering is splashed across the media. We see a similar phenomenon in the intensive coverage of an airplane crash. The fact that 33,963 people died in automobile accidents last year hardly warrants a mention.

But there is another less-obvious reason for the public’s horror and shock: Unforeseen environmental upheavals such as large oil spills produce emotions closely associated with religious experiences.

Environmental historian William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin explains that modern environmentalism is really a new religion that offers “a complex series of moral imperatives for ethical action, and judges human conduct accordingly.”

Like many Old Testament prophesies, oil spills easily appear as harsh environmental calamities by which God justly punishes us for sinfully tampering with his creation. Ted Turner, a longtime environmental advocate, recently suggested that the Gulf oil spill was a negative message from God.

Modern science and economics have given humans the power to play God with the world. But there is a common fear today that we may have overreached and signed a new pact with the devil. Science and economics may destroy us before they can save us.

Large oil spills, symbolically involving human beings tampering with primitive nature in search of more and more energy to power our modern economies, heighten such fears even among people who reject the Bible.

The reality is that we cannot avoid our basic dependence on oil and other energy sources. American energy policy must therefore be grounded in hard analysis of needs and circumstances, rather than surrogate religious experiences.

We don’t shut down the airlines after every crash; we should think the same way about drilling for oil and gas in complicated marine environments.

New from Robert H. Nelson! The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religionin Contemporary America “Economics and environmentalism are types of modern religions.” So says this analysis of the roots of economics and environmentalism and their mutually antagonistic relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Questions about the proper relationship between human beings and nature have led to the growth of these public theologies, or secular religions, even while both avoid mentioning their derivation from Western Judeo-Christian sources. So while environmentalists regard human actions to warm the climate, expand human populations, and increase economic growth as immoral challenges to the natural order, economists seek to put all of nature to maximum use for the production of more goods and services and other human benefits. Learn More »»

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Obama: Not as Honest as FDR
Even the Roosevelt administration knew make-work jobs don’t count
June 8, 2010
William F. Shughart II
Washington Times

In March 1933, when the Great Depression had driven the U.S. economy to rock bottom, the unemployment rate stood at 25 percent. One out of every four Americans who had had a job in 1929 was queuing in a bread line rather than working on an assembly line.

The unemployment rate remained at historically high levels throughout the following decade. Despite massive increases in federal spending under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, 14 percent of the labor force still was unemployed in 1941.

Unemployment didn’t fall into single digits until after Pearl Harbor, when millions of men were drafted into the armed forces to fight the first axis of evil. Mobilizing America for global war, outfitting youngsters of the so-called Greatest Generation with military uniforms, equipping them with M-1 rifles and sending many to die in France’s hedgerows or the South Pacific’s jungles not only dramatically lowered the overall unemployment rate, but also drew millions of women into the work force to help manufacture armaments.

Why did unemployment persist after FDR took the oath of office in March 1933, pledging to end Herbert Hoover’s perceived indifference to the economic hardships facing millions of American citizens, epitomized by Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s brutal routing of the “Bonus Army” gathered on the mud flats of Anacostia? Didn’t the alphabet soup of work-relief programs the president subsequently launched—the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and especially the Works Progress Administration, to name just a few—create jobs for hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans, providing them with sorely needed incomes without forcing them to suffer the stigmas of the dole?

The answer: The United States in the 1930s recognized that government-funded make-work jobs were not the same as real jobs.

To be sure, jobs financed at taxpayer expense were plentiful. But back then, the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn’t count people on work relief as employed. In fact, persons listed on Depression-era work-relief rolls were not included in the labor force at all.

Nowadays, the unemployment rate equals the number of unemployed persons divided by the total civilian labor force. If you are working as a temporary census enumerator or planting road signs along the highway courtesy of a government “stimulus” grant, you are considered employed.

The employment and unemployment statistics of the 1930s excluded people who would not be employed in the absence of public largesse.

People at that time recognized that someone who holds a job only because Congress has appropriated money for the position is not creating wealth but is merely the recipient of an income transfer. Those who at the time derided the WPA as “We Piddle Around” recognized the wasteful consequences of public profligacy.

Today, people holding make-work positions “created” by stimulus spending, jobs tax credits and government-directed “investments” in alternatives to fossil fuels and other “green” initiatives are counted as employed. If they weren’t, as they shouldn’t be, the unemployment rate would be much higher than 10 percent.

From William F. Shughart II Taxing Choice: The Predatory Politics of Fiscal Discrimination So-called “sin taxes”—the taxing of certain products, like alcohol and tobacco, that are deemed to be “politically incorrect”—have long been a favorite way for politicians to fund programs benefiting special interest groups. But this concept has been applied to such “sinful” products as soft drinks, margarine, telephone calls, airline tickets, and even fishing gear. What is the true record of this selective, often punitive, approach to taxation? Learn More »»

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Suicide or Murder at Guantánamo?

by Andy Worthington, June 7, 2010

Originally published by the Future of Freedom Foundation

On June 2 last year, the Pentagon announced that a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, Mohammed al-Hanashi (also known as Muhammad Salih) had died, reportedly by committing suicide. He was the fifth reported suicide at Guantánamo, following three deaths on June 9, 2006, and another on May 30, 2007, and he was the sixth man to die at the prison, following the death, by cancer, of an Afghan prisoner, Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, on December 26, 2007.

All of these deaths were, in one way or another, suspicious, except for Hekmati, a 68-year old Afghan, whose story, instead, hinted at medical neglect, and also revealed, on close examination, the callous cruelty of the regime at Guantánamo. A quiet hero of the anti-Taliban resistance, who had helped free three important anti-Taliban leaders from a Taliban jail, he had discovered at Guantánamo that no one in authority was interested in ascertaining whether or not there was any truth to his story, and he went to his grave without having been able to clear his name.

This ought to be a source of undying shame for those who failed to investigate his story — and who may well have not acted decisively to prevent the spread of his cancer — but, unlike the other five men, his death does not carry with it the suspicion that he was deliberately killed, whereas all the others do. Last week, I recalled the Saudi prisoner Abdul Rahman al-Amri, on the third anniversary of his death, and was unable to come up with an adequate explanation for why he would take his own life.

A devout man, who had traveled to Afghanistan to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance, he was deeply troubled by the kinds of sexual humiliation to which he and other prisoners were subjected, and this could, perhaps, have tipped him over the edge, but he was also a long-term hunger striker, and may, therefore, have been in such a weakened state at the time of his death that a round of particularly aggressive questioning may have been enough to kill him.

In addition, the deaths of the three men on June 9, 2006 — all long-term hunger strikers, like Abdul Rahman al-Amri — have long been contentious, and became more so in January this year when, in a compelling article in Harper’s Magazine, Scott Horton drew on eye-witness accounts by former soldiers, including Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, to paint a vivid and genuinely disturbing picture of how the alleged suicides of the three men in question — Salah Ahmed al-Salami, Mani Shaman al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani — were announced shortly after a vehicle had returned from a secret prison outside the prison’s main perimeter fence, where prisoners were reportedly tortured, and how there was, according to the soldiers, an official cover-up on an alarming scale.

I’ll be returning to Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman’s story in the near future, but in the meantime I want to shift the focus onto Mohammed al-Hanashi, to mark the first anniversary of his death, to ask why questions raised at the time have not been answered, and to bring readers up to date on further questions asked in the last year by the author and journalist Naomi Wolf and the psychologist and blogger Jeff Kaye. Shortly after his death, the released British resident Binyam Mohamed, who knew al-Hanashi in Guantánamo, provided an explanation of the circumstances of his death that was deeply shocking. In an article for the Miami Herald, he stated that he and al-Hanashi, who, at the time, weighed just 104 pounds (and at one point had weighed just 86 pounds), had both been on a hunger strike at the start of 2009, which had involved them being force-fed daily, strapped to restraint chairs while tubes were pushed up their noses and into their stomachs.

The man described by Binyam Mohamed was someone who stood up to the unjust regime at Guantánamo and “was always being put into segregation because of his determined insistence in pointing out the realities of what had happened to us all.” Mohamed continued:

The fact is, U.S. authorities didn’t like him talking about words and practices they were only too familiar with: kidnap, rendition, torture, degradation, false imprisonment and injustice. But, while [al-Hanashi] opposed the policies and treatment in Guantánamo, he didn’t have problems with the guards. He was always very sociable and tried to help resolve issues between the guards and prisoners. He was patient and encouraged others to be the same. He never viewed suicide as a means to end his despair.

However, as Binyam Mohamed explained, when the officer in charge of Camp 5 (a maximum-security block) sought out a volunteer “to represent the prisoners on camp issues such as hunger strikes and other contentious issues,” al-Hanashi agreed. On January 17, 2009, he was taken to meet with the Joint Task Force commander, Adm. David Thomas, and the Joint Detention Group commander, Col. Bruce Vargo, but he never returned to his cell. “[T]wo weeks later,” Mohamed wrote, “we learned that he was moved to what we called the ‘psych’ unit the behavioral-health unit (BHU).” He added:

There has yet to be any explanation as to why he was sent there or even what was the cause of death. The BHU was built as a secure unit to prevent, among other things, potential suicide attempts. Everything that someone could use to hurt himself has been removed from the cell, and a guard watches each prisoner 24 hours a day, in person and on videotape. In light of this, I am amazed that the U.S. government has the audacity to describe [al-Hanashi’s] death categorically as an “apparent suicide.”

Instead, Binyam Mohamed explained that he thought al-Hanashi’s death was “a murder, or unlawful killing, whichever way you look at it,” and wondered whether “he was killed by U.S. personnel — intentionally or otherwise” or whether his long years of hunger-striking “led to some type of organ failure that caused his death.” Last August, following up on the story, the author and journalist Naomi Wolf, who had been present at Guantánamo on the day al-Hanashi died (as part of a group of journalists covering pre-trial hearings in the trial by military commission of Omar Khadr), revealed that she had been deeply troubled by his death, and the “terse announcement” by the press office of his “apparent suicide.” Her unease heightened when, on her trip back to the States, she “happened to be seated next to a military physician who had been flown in to do the autopsy on al-Hanashi.” “When would there be an investigation of the death?” she asked, receiving the reply, “That was the investigation.” As she described it, “The military had investigated the military.” She added:

This “apparent suicide” seemed immediately suspicious to me. I had just toured those cells: it is literally impossible to kill yourself in them. Their interiors resemble the inside of a smooth plastic jar; there are no hard edges; hooks fold down; there is no bedding that one can use to strangle oneself. Can you bang your head against the wall until you die, theoretically, I asked the doctor? “They check on prisoners every three minutes,” he said. You’d have to be fast.

Wolf also noted that the story “smelled even worse after a bit of digging.” After discovering that al-Hanashi had volunteered to represent the prisoners in Camp 5, she noted that this would have meant that he “knew which prisoners had claimed to have been tortured or abused, and by whom.” She also raised doubts about whether it was possible for prisoners to kill themselves in the psychiatric ward, asking Cortney Busch of Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity whose lawyers represent dozens of Guantánamo prisoners, who explained, as Binyam Mohamed had, that “there is video running on prisoners in the psychiatric ward at all times, and there is a guard posted there continually, too.”

Shorn of these options, Wolf noted that al-Hanashi could have been killed during the force-feeding process, reflecting on “how easy it would be to do away with a troublesome prisoner being force-fed by merely adjusting the calorie level. If it is too low, the prisoner will starve, but too high a level can also kill, since deliberate liquid overfeeding by tube, to which Guantánamo prisoners have reported being subjected, causes vomiting, diarrhea, and deadly dehydration that can stop one’s heart.”

In an attempt to discover exactly what happened to Mohammed al-Hanashi, Wolf spent several months putting pressure on Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, the head spokesman for the Guantánamo press office, but never received a satisfactory answer, even though she pointed out that “[a]n investigation by the military of the death of its own prisoners violates the Geneva Conventions, which demand that illness, transfer, and death of prisoners be registered independently with a neutral authority (such as the ICRC), and that deaths be investigated independently.” As she explained, “If governments let no outside entity investigate the circumstances of such deaths, what will keep them from ‘disappearing’ whomever they take into custody, for whatever reason?”

In Yemen, where al-Hanashi’s body was repatriated, the government “announced only what the U.S. had — that al-Hanashi had died from ‘asphyxiation.’” Wolf added, “When I noted to DeWalt that self-strangulation was impossible, he said he would get back to me when the inquiry — now including a Naval criminal investigation — was completed.”

Wolf never heard back from DeWalt, but in November Jeff Kaye took up the story. Although he noted that self-strangulation was “rare,” but “possible,” he had other reasons for doubting the official story. The first is that al-Hanashi, who was seized in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, survived a massacre in a fort in Mazar-e-Sharif and subsequent imprisonment in a brutal Northern Alliance jail in Sheberghan, where he would have met survivors of another massacre, involving mass asphyxiation in containers, and may, therefore, have “hear[d] tales of U.S. Special Operations soldiers or officers involved.”

The second, which drew on my work, involves the fact that, in his tribunal at Guantánamo, the Pentagon inadvertently revealed that a false allegation made against him — regarding his presence in Afghanistan before he was even in the country — had been made by Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a “high-value detainee,” held in secret CIA prisons for over two years before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006. In every other instance, the names of the “high-value detainees” were redacted from the transcripts, but in al-Hanashi’s case, Ghailani’s name slipped through the censor’s net.

Last May, Ghailani was transferred to New York to face a federal court trial for his alleged involvement in the 1998 African embassy bombings, and, as Jeff Kaye pointed out, al-Hanashi’s “possible testimony at a trial in New York City, establishing that Ghailani's admissions were false, and likely coerced by torture, may have been a hindrance to a government bent on convicting the supposed bomber.”

Whether it was his knowledge of massacres in Afghanistan, his eligibility as a damaging witness in the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, or his knowledge of dark secrets in Guantánamo, it seems probable that, one way or another, Mohammed al-Hanashi knew too much, and what makes this suspicion even more alarming is the fact that he died just weeks after he was finally assigned a lawyer.

A review of the cases of all the alleged suicides reveals not only that all the men were long-term hunger strikers, but also that none of them had spoken to attorneys before their deaths, and that therefore any incriminating knowledge they may have had went to their graves with them. This may only be coincidental, but it is worth noting that, after the deaths in June 2006, the Pentagon initially reported that none of the three men had legal representation, but that, within days, officials were obliged to acknowledge that, in fact, two of the men did have legal representation.

In the case of the first man, Salah Ahmed al-Salami (also identified as Ali Abdullah Ahmed) it was also revealed that, at the time of his death, his lawyers had not been cleared to visit him, and in the case of the second man, Mani al-Utaybi, his lawyers had not been able to see him. Speaking at the time, his legal team complained that they had waited over nine months for the Pentagon to grant them clearance to see their client, and that, in the meantime, they had not been allowed to correspond with him at all, because of confusion over the spelling of his name. They also explained that, during a visit to Guantánamo just weeks before his death, they had been told that he wouldn’t see them, and that they had, therefore, been unable to tell him that he had been cleared for release.

This has always struck me as a particularly bleak commentary on Guantánamo — that no one told Mani al-Uyaybi that he had been cleared for release before his death — but in the bigger picture of the five unexplained deaths the most important thing is for these men not to be forgotten, and for calls to be made — loudly and regularly — for an independent inquiry into how they died.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

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