Craig Murray — Continued American Occupation of the Middle East Does Not Suppress Terrorism, It Causes It

Even the neo-con warmongers’ house journal The Guardian, furious at Trump’s attempts to pull US troops out of Syria, in producing a map to illustrate its point, could only produce one single, uncertain, very short pen stroke to describe the minute strip of territory it claims ISIS still control on the Iraqi border.

Of course, the Guardian produces the argument that continued US military presence is necessary to ensure that ISIS does not spring back to life in Syria. The fallacy of that argument can be easily demonstrated. In Afghanistan, the USA has managed to drag out the long process of humiliating defeat in war even further than it did in Vietnam. It is plain as a pikestaff that the presence of US occupation troops is itself the best recruiting sergeant for resistance. In Sikunder Burnes I trace how the battle lines of tribal alliances there today are precisely the same ones the British faced in 1841. We just attach labels like Taliban to hide the fact that invaders face national resistance.

The secret to ending the strength of ISIS in Syria is not the continued presence of American troops. It is for America’s ever closer allies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to cut off the major artery of money and arms, which we should never forget in origin and for a long time had a strong US component. The US/Saudi/Israeli alliance against Iran is the most important geo-political factor in the region today. It is high time this alliance stopped both funding ISIS and pretending to fight it; schizophrenia is not a foreign policy stance.... 

The chaos of this incoherent and counterproductive strategy is, peculiarly enough, what the neocons actually want. Perpetual war and destabilisation in the Middle East is their goal. One of the findings I had not expected to discover in writing Sikunder Burnes was that the British had been deliberately exploiting and exacerbating the Shia/Sunni divide as early as 1836 to the Imperial purpose. Today, by keeping Arab populations poor and politically divided, the neo-cons believe that they enhance the security of Israel, and they certainly do facilitate the access of western companies to the oil and gas of the region, as we see in destabilised Iraq and Libya.… 

I have written before that Trump may be a rotten President for Americans, but at least he has not initiated a major war; and I am quite sure Hillary would have done by now. For a non-American, the choice between Hillary and Trump ended up in balancing on one side of the scale the evil of millions more killed and maimed in the Middle East and the launching of a full on, unreserved new Cold War, against on the other side of the scale poorer Americans having very bad healthcare and social provision and America adopting racist immigration policies. I do hope that the neo-con barrage today arguing for more American troops in the Middle East, will help people remember just how very unattractive also is the Hillary side of the equation....

Craig Murray Blog
Continued American Occupation of the Middle East Does Not Suppress Terrorism, It Causes It
Craig Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee

Josh Marshall — Deadly Blowback from Neo-Imperial Wars

In what may be the most dramatic blowback yet from Western military intervention in the Middle East, terrorism and the mass influx of foreign migrants are now putting the very existence of the European Union at risk. Foreign wars fanned by European and American interventionists in the name of democracy and humanitarianism now threaten those same values in Europe as never before since the end of World War II.

This threat comes at a time of popular discontent over the region’s chronic economic weakness, caused by Germany’s austerity policies and the straightjacket of the euro monetary union. The region has been further buffeted by the rise of right-wing parties, confrontations with Russia over Ukraine and NATO expansion, and the potential withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the E.U. In short, Europe faces a perfect storm.…

This is also a nightmare that keeps Secretary of State John Kerry up at night. If turmoil gets any worse in the Middle East, he told reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, “You could have a massive migration into Europe that destroys Europe, leads to the pure destruction of Europe, ends the European project, and everyone runs for cover and you’ve got the 1930s all over again, with nationalism and fascism and other things breaking out. Of course we have an interest in this, a huge interest in this.”…

Consortium News
Deadly Blowback from Neo-Imperial Wars
Josh Marshall

Zero Hedge — A Furious Turkey Says US Is "Acting Like An Enemy," Demands Washington Brand Kurds "Terrorists"

Harsh.

Zero Hedge
A Furious Turkey Says US Is "Acting Like An Enemy," Demands Washington Brand Kurds "Terrorists"

Submitted by Tyler Durden

Reuters picks up the story.

Turkey calls for unconditional U.S. support against Kurdish YPG

Diane Goldstein — Take It From a Cop: The Drug War Poisons Community Policing

The Ferguson riots are the latest high-profile example of the deep schism between American law enforcement and the communities it serves. This schism has been made demonstrably worse by the way the drug war has blurred the police mission. The community policing mission should always be fundamentally different to that of the military—yet that often hasn’t been the case, thanks in large part to wrongheaded policies put in place decades ago. 

The long history of racial disparity in the enforcement of our drug policies was greatly exacerbated by the architect of the modern war on drugs, Richard Nixon. His vision was to create a crime- and violence-free society—but his false belief was that black heroin addicts were the primary cause of crime in our communities. 

Nixon once stated to his aide H.R. Haldeman, “you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” 

Nixon’s dream of devising a criminal justice system that targets communities of color through the mechanism of our drug policies was achieved. According to the ACLU report “ War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” among myriad other sources, law enforcement’s attempt to eradicate drug use in America has hit communities of color the hardest.…

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) speaker and retired police chief Dr. Joseph McNamara once noted the effect of war language on law enforcement professionals: 

“When you’re telling cops that they’re soldiers in a Drug War, you’re destroying the whole concept of the citizen peace officer, a peace officer whose fundamental duty is to protect life and be a community servant. General Colin Powell told us during the Persian Gulf War what a soldier’s duty is. It’s to kill the enemy. And when we allowed our politicians to push cops into a war that they’ll never win, they can’t win, and let them begin to think of themselves as soldiers, the mentality comes that anything goes.”

AlterNet
Take It From a Cop: The Drug War Poisons Community Policing
Diane Goldstein | Substance.com
Then it was a short step to criminalizing dissent, which Nixon also attempted to do at the time of the Vietnam anti-war movement, especially after the bombing of Cambodia and the mass protests that followed. Of course, 9/ll and the Global War on Terror greatly amplified that.

See also Mike Konczal, Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit: The Neoconservative Origins of Our Police Problem, at Rortybomb.

Before it was anything else, the neoconservative movement was a theory of the urban crisis. As a reaction to the urban riots of the 1960s, it put an ideological and social-scientific veneer on a doctrine that called for overwhelming force against minor infractions -- a doctrine that is still with us today, as people are killed for walking down the street in Ferguson and allegedly selling single cigarettes in New York. But neoconservatives also sought, rather successfully, to position liberalism itself as the cause of the urban crisis, solvable only through the reassertion of order through the market and the police.… 

As James Q. Wilson explained in the 1982 Atlantic Monthly article that popularized the topic, “the police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community.” 

Before the modern liberal state of accountability and due process, the police force wasn't judged by “its compliance with appropriate procedures” but instead by its success in maintaining order. Since the 1960s, “the shift of police from order maintenance to law enforcement has brought them increasingly under the influence of legal restrictions… The order maintenance functions of the police are now governed by rules developed to control police relations with suspected criminals,” writes Wilson. According to this theory, order is preserved by the police out there, acting in the moment against minor infractions with a strong display of force, not by liberal notions of accountability and fairness.  

This neoconservative vision that started in the 1960s and continues into today doesn’t just inform local arguments about policing, but rather the entire policy debate. So much of the debate over the (neo)conservative movement emphasizes suburban warriors, or evangelicals, or the Sun Belt, or the South. But as Alice O’Connor demonstrates in her paper "The Privatized City: The Manhattan Institute, the Urban Crisis, and the Conservative Counterrevolution in New York," there was a distinct urban character to this thinking as well. Rather than a crisis of race relations, police violence, poverty, or anything else, rioting and the broader urban crisis were framed by the neoconservative movement as a crisis of values and culture precipitated by liberalism.

The broader urban crisis, in this story, hinges not on structural issues but on personal morality and behavior that can be restored by the extension of the market. Crime and urban “disorder” fit right next to social engineering and failing state institutions as a corrupt legacy of the liberal project and its bureaucratic, administrative governing state. Only the conservative agenda, as O'Connor puts it, of “zero-tolerance law enforcement, school ‘choice,’ hard-nosed implementation of welfare reform, and the large-scale privatization of municipal and social services” is capable of dismantling it. Only through the market, individual responsibility, and freedom from government “interference” can order result from the restoration of “political and cultural authority to a resolutely anti-liberal elite.” This legacy harnesses police excess to the triumph of the market. And as we see, it will be hard to dislodge one while the other reigns supreme.

Jonathan Turley — Perpetual War And America’s Military-Industrial Complex 50 Years After Eisenhower’s Farewell Address

Below is my article this weekend in Al Jazaerra on the powerful lobby and industry supporting our various conflicts abroad as well as counterterrorism efforts. I previously testified before Congress on this industry and the government’s inflation of counterterrorism numbers to justify huge domestic budgets at the Justice Department FBI, and other agencies. I wrote the article for the anniversary this month of Eisenhower’s famous Military-Industrial Complex speech.

Jonathan Turley
Perpetual War And America’s Military-Industrial Complex 50 Years After Eisenhower’s Farewell Address
Jonathan Turley | Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University

One thing that Turley does not mention is that the shift to counterterrorism has shifted the priority of  domestic security away from crime to counterterrorism. Moreover, it has publicly admitted this, altering criminals that the barn door is now open for them.

Al Jazeera interview — Glenn Greenwald: U.S. uses terrorism as excuse to do almost everything

See also Greenwald Reveals 'Crux' of NSA Spying: The 'Elimination of Individual Privacy Worldwide' at Common Dreams.

Cold War On — M K Bhadrakumar: Obama's Monica moment

The United States may have administered one of the biggest-ever snubs to the Kremlin in the post-Cold War era with the White House announcement on Thursday that it will provide military support to the Syrian rebels....

The US President Barack Obama is scheduled to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit scheduled to begin in Northern Ireland this coming Monday. This was to have been the first meeting for the two presidents after their respective re-election to the high office.
As a token courtesy to Putin at a personal and public level, Obama should have deferred the announcement until after meeting Putin. Syria was expected to figure on top of their agenda and Obama and Putin have been closely in touch over Syria....

A senior state department official, Frank Rose, deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Arms Control, gave the bottom line on Wednesday that Obama has nothing to offer Putin on missile defense....

All in all, Obama's momentous decision on military intervention in Syria, which could well launch a new Cold War, is a desperate diversionary move when his administration is caught up deep in the cesspool over the Snowden controversy. 

The entire moral edifice on which Obama built up his presidency and the values he espoused at the core of his "audacity of hope" when he began his long march to the White House five years ago - transparency, accountability, legitimacy, multilateralism, consensus - lie exposed today as a pack of lies. 

Syria is now "officially" a proxy war, and the Cold War is back on. Three cheers for military Keynesianism. Now the ruling elite can breath easily again.

Asia Times Online
Obama's Monica moment
M K Bhadrakumar

If you are not paying attention to geopolitics and geo-strategy, you should be. It is taking some interesting turns of late that are portend potentially enormous social, political and economic consequences. The direction toward war is increasing as the global economic situation deteriorates and beggar-thy neighbor replaces international coordination.

Glenn Greenwald — Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent

Complete with a newly coined, creepy Orwellian euphemism - "disposition matrix" - the administration institutionalizes the most extremist powers a government can claim

A primary reason for opposing the acquisition of abusive powers and civil liberties erosions is that they virtually always become permanent, vested not only in current leaders one may love and trust but also future officials who seem more menacing and less benign. The Washington Post has acrucial and disturbing story this morning by Greg Miller about the concerted efforts by the Obama administration to fully institutionalize - to make officially permanent - the most extremist powers it has exercised in the name of the war on terror.

The Guardian (UK)
Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent
Glenn Greenwald

Clenching the grip of fascism on the US.

It doesn't requiring any conspiracy theorizing to see what's happening here. Indeed, it takes extreme naiveté, or wilful blindness, not to see it. 

What has been created here - permanently institutionalized - is a highly secretive executive branch agency that simultaneously engages in two functions: (1) it collects and analyzes massive amounts of surveillance data about all Americans without any judicial review let alone search warrants, and (2) creates and implements a "matrix" that determines the "disposition" of suspects, up to and including execution, without a whiff of due process or oversight. It is simultaneously a surveillance state and secretive, unaccountable judicial body that analyzes who you are and then decrees what should be done with you, how you should be "disposed" of, beyond the reach of any minimal accountability or transparency. 

The Post's Miller recognizes the watershed moment this represents: "The creation of the matrix and the institutionalization of kill/capture lists reflect a shift that is as psychological as it is strategic." As he explains, extra-judicial assassination was once deemed so extremist that very extensive deliberations were required before Bill Clinton could target even Osama bin Laden for death by lobbing cruise missiles in East Africa. But 


"Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it."

Tom Engelhardt — "The United States of Fear"

About the Program
Tom Engelhardt, creator and editor of TomDispatch.com, argues that the U.S. government successfully used the threat of terrorism to scare the public into supporting increased spending on war, the military, and homeland security, leading the country down the same path the Soviet Union took just prior to its collapse.  During this event, Mr. Engelhardt is in conversation with journalist and author Jeremy Scahill.  Hosted by New York University. 

About the Author     
Tom Engelhardt, senior editor at Pantheon from 1976 to 1990, is currently a consulting editor at Metropolitan Books and a fellow at the Nation Institute. His books include "The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation" and "Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters." Over the years, Mr. Engelhardt has edited such authors as John Dower ("Embracing Defeat"), Art Spiegelman ("Maus"), Eduardo Galeano ("Upside Down World"), Ariel Dorfman ("The Empire's Old Clothes"), Robert Jay Lifton ("Superpower Syndrome"), Adam Hochschild ("King Leopold's Ghost"), Susan Faludi ("Stiffed"), Mike Davis ("Ecology of Fear"), Chalmers Johnson ("The Sorrows of Empire"), Studs Terkel ("Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"), and Jonathan Schell ("The Unconquerable World").

Watch it at booktv.org
"The United States of Fear" (1 hr 40 min)
Tom Engelhardt

Funding the militarization of US domestic security

If terrorists ever target Fargo, N.D., the local police will be ready.In recent years, they have bought bomb-detection robots, digital communications equipment and Kevlar helmets, like those used by soldiers in foreign wars. For local siege situations requiring real firepower, police there can use a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret. Until that day, however, the menacing truck is mostly used for training runs and appearances at the annual Fargo picnic, where it’s been displayed near a children’s bounce house. 

“Most people are so fascinated by it, because nothing happens here,” said Carol Archbold, a Fargo resident and criminal justice professor at North Dakota State University. “There’s no terrorism here.” 

Fargo, like thousands of other communities in every state, has been on a gear-buying spree with the aid of more than $34 billion in federal government grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

The federal grant spending, awarded with little oversight from Washington, has fueled a rapid, broad transformation of police operations in Fargo and in departments across the country. More than ever before, police rely on quasi-military tactics and equipment, the Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

******

The homeland security market for state and local agencies is projected to reach $19.2 billion by 2014, up from $15.8 billion in fiscal 2009, according to the Homeland Security Research Corp. 

******
Gnagey, of the tactical officers association, said there’s a sense among some local police that the price increases when makers know it’s being paid for with federal funds. The minute new equipment arrives, he joked, “if it’s painted black and called SWAT, the price doubles.”

******
Some 1,500 beat cops in Philadelphia have been trained to use AR-15 assault rifles – akin to the high-powered weapons issued to war fighters.
“We have a lot of people here, like most departments, who are ex-military,” Ramsey said in an interview. “Some people are very much into guns and so forth. So it wasn’t hard to find volunteers.”    

 Read the rest at America's War Within
Local police stockpile high-tech, combat-ready gear
By Andrew Becker, Center for Investigative Reporting | G.W. Schulz,Center for Investigative Reporting

This is a form of insanity. Profitable insanity.

Agentina heading down the slippery slope to authoritarianism?

Human rights groups and legal experts are concerned that a law passed by the Argentine Congress in the early hours of Thursday morning to crack down on terrorism could be used to criminalise social protest.

Read the rest at IPS
Anti-Terrorism Law Upsets Harmony Between Government and Activists
By Marcela Valente

The authoritarian disease seems to be contagious.

Moreover, Argentina has a history of being a police state and still has a hangover from the seven year dictatorship.

Law prof looks a NDAA and indefinite detention of US citizens on US soil

The National Defence Authorisation Act continues the onward march of the 'war on terror' through the American homeland.

To be clear, the NDAA does not institute martial law for all in the US. But it would be foolish not to see that it lays a potential foundation for it in the future. Students of history, and those of us new Americans who have lived under military or militarised regimes - and that includes many Muslim Americans - will spot the kinship and recognise in this law some of the markers of authoritarian rule. 

Read it at Al Jazeera

The militarisation of 'war on terror' in the US

by Ramzi Kassem - Associate Professor of Law at the City University of New York

Read the tea leaves.

Hopefully, this is something that left and right libertarians can agree upon, as well as anyone else that sees a danger in authoritarian rule.

t seems that no one wants the NDAA, except the politicians who have staked their careers on a war the public might think has ended with the death of Osama bin Laden. At a time when the US economy teeters on the brink of collapse, those elected officials want to ensure they can continue to score cheap political points by stoking the fires of fear, paranoia and prejudice.

Further enabling such legislation, on a deeper level, is its tacit subtext. What is understood by many, but left mostly unspoken, is that these laws would apply only to the most unpopular and reviled minority in post-9/11 America: Muslims. Acknowledging the danger looming ahead, a large coalition of Muslim American groups wrote a letter last week to the White House, urging a presidential veto of the legislation. Alas, it now appears inevitable that Obama will sign the NDAA into law, perhaps with a signing statement, an official interpretation of the law that would only bind his administration, rather than take political risks in an election cycle by vetoing the law altogether.

In the infamous Korematsu case, where the US Supreme Court approved the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, Justice Robert Jackson dissented, warning about the decision's potentially long-lasting reverberations in terms that ring equally true in our context today. Regardless of how long they are left unused, or how selectively they are applied at first, laws such as section 412 of the USA PATRIOT Act, and now the NDAA provisions, "[lie] about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need". While it may well be inescapable that the brunt of the NDAA will be borne initially by Muslims in the US, make no mistake: the threat in the long run is to the very nature of American government and to all who are subject to its authority.

Et tu, Joe?

Read it at Washington's Blog
Joe Biden Drafted the Core of the Patriot Act in 1995 … Before the Oklahoma City Bombing

Gives new meaning to "Reality has a liberal bias."