Obama tells Africa to stop blaming colonialism for problems

By Alex Spillius in Washington,
Published: 09 Jul 2009













Barack Obama tells Africa to stop blaming colonialism for problems
President Barack Obama has told African leaders it is time to stop blaming colonialism and "Western oppression" for the continent's manifold problems.


Barack Obama: "Ultimately, I'm a big believer that Africans are responsible for Africa"

Ahead of a visit to Ghana at the weekend, he said: "Ultimately, I'm a big believer that Africans are responsible for Africa.

"I think part of what's hampered advancement in Africa is that for many years we've made excuses about corruption or poor governance, that this was somehow the consequence of neo-colonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racism – I'm not a big – I'm not a believer in excuses...

..."

Obama, Ghana, and African oil, July 10, 2009,Ann Garrison - SF Energy Policy Examiner

The West African Gulf of Guinea is not only oil rich, but also the corridor for transporting West African oil to the rest of the world. Controlling the Gulf of Guinea is a principal goal of AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command.

Barack Obama's visit to Ghana is, most fundamentally, about West African oil and natural gas, and control of the corridors for transporting it through the Gulf of Guinea, on the West African Coast. Nigeria, the greatest source of African oil for export, is at the center of the African oil producing states bordering the Gulf, and the Niger River is the corridor for transporting Nigerian oil and gas, and now, oil and gas from landlocked Niger, as well.

Today, on 07/10/2007, at 10:18 A.M., PST, a Web search for “Obama in Ghana,” yielded 8,820,000 hits.

A Web search, one minute later, for “Obama in Ghana Oil,” yielded 1,100,000.

These numbers will no doubt continue to fluctuate today, and in coming days, but I expect the proportion of fluff reporting to honest reporting to remain roughly the same.

Notable on the side of honesty are:

Obama's Ghana Trip Linked to New U.S. Oil Strategy, produced by Canada Newswire and posted to Fox Business News via Comtex.

Media Briefing Booklet on the Occasion of Obama's Visit to Ghana, 07.10.2009, produced by the Africa Faith and Social Justice Network, Friends of the Congo, Africa Action, the Integrated Social Development Centre, transAfrica, and, Foreign Policy in Focus, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which encourged press press to pose this question to President Obama:

“Ninety percent of U.S. Africa trade is in oil, gas, and mining industries. Much of the trade in these extractive industries has been exploit­ative, bringing little value to those on whose land the resources lie. Ghana has discovered oil just in 2008. How will the Obama administration advance trade policy with Ghana and other African countries that are mutually beneficial?”

The other most important research documents for understanding Obama in Ghana, which is to say, Obama in Ghana, and Oil are:

African Oil: a Priority for U.S. National Security and African Development, a "National Energy Policy Report" produced by the Office of Richard Cheney, and publised on May 16, 2001. For whatever reason, its URL is: http://www.israeleconomy.org/strategic/africawhitepaper/pdf.

AFRI(OIL)COM, by Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, and, Resist Africom, the video, also produced by the Institute for Policy Studies:


Author
Ann Garrison is an Examiner from San Francisco. You can see Ann's articles at: "http://www.Examiner.com/x-8257-SF-Energy-Policy-Examiner"
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"Changing Obama's Mindset", Written by Howard Zinn, The Progressive, Sun, 17 May 2009

http://www.progressive.org/zinn0509.html

We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he's a politician. He's other things, too - he's a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he's a politician.

If you're a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you -the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don't have to do, if you make it clear to them they don't have to do it.

From the beginning, I liked Obama. But the first time it suddenly struck me that he was a politician was early on, when Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006.

Lieberman - who, as you know, was and is a war lover - was running for the Democratic nomination, and his opponent was a man named Ned Lamont, who was the peace candidate. And Obama went to Connecticut to support Lieberman against Lamont.

It took me aback. I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.

Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it's not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past.

I had a teacher at Columbia University named Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a book called The American Political Tradition, and in it, he examined presidents from the Founding Fathers down through Franklin Roosevelt. There were liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And there were differences between them. But he found that the so-called liberals were not as liberal as people thought-and that the difference between the liberals and the conservatives, and between Republicans and Democrats, was not a polar difference. There was a common thread that ran through all American history, and all of the presidents-Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative-followed this thread.

The thread consisted of two elements: one, nationalism; and two, capitalism. And Obama is not yet free of that powerful double heritage.

We can see it in the policies that have been enunciated so far, even though he's been in office only a short time.

Some people might say, "Well, what do you expect?"

And the answer is that we expect a lot.

People say, "What, are you a dreamer?"

And the answer is, yes, we're dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don't want war. We don't want capitalism. We want a decent society.

We better hold on to that dream - because if we don't, we'll sink closer and closer to this reality that we have, and that we don't want.

Be wary when you hear about the glories of the market system. The market system is what we've had. Let the market decide, they say. The government mustn't give people free health care; let the market decide.

Which is what the market has been doing - and that's why we have forty-eight million people without health care. The market has decided that. Leave things to the market, and there are two million people homeless. Leave things to the market, and there are millions and millions of people who can't pay their rent. Leave things to the market, and there are thirty-five million people who go hungry.

You can't leave it to the market. If you're facing an economic crisis like we're facing now, you can't do what was done in the past. You can't pour money into the upper levels of the country -and into the banks and corporations - and hope that it somehow trickles down.

What was one of the first things that happened when the Bush Administration saw that the economy was in trouble? A $700 billion bailout, and who did we give the $700 billion to? To the financial institutions that caused this crisis.

This was when the Presidential campaign was still going on, and it pained me to see Obama standing there, endorsing this huge bailout to the corporations.

What Obama should have been saying was: Hey, wait a while. The banks aren't poverty stricken. The CEOs aren't poverty stricken. But there are people who are out of work. There are people who can't pay their mortgages. Let's take $700 billion and give it directly to the people who need it. Let's take $1 trillion, let's take $2 trillion.

Let's take this money and give it directly to the people who need it. Give it to the people who have to pay their mortgages. Nobody should be evicted. Nobody should be left with their belongings out on the street.

Obama wants to spend perhaps a trillion more on the banks. Like Bush, he's not giving it directly to homeowners. Unlike the Republicans, Obama also wants to spend $800 billion for his economic stimulus plan. Which is good - the idea of a stimulus is good. But if you look closely at the plan, too much of it goes through the market, through corporations.

It gives tax breaks to businesses, hoping that they'll hire people. No - if people need jobs, you don't give money to the corporations, hoping that maybe jobs will be created. You give people work immediately.

A lot of people don't know the history of the New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal didn't go far enough, but it had some very good ideas. And the reason the New Deal came to these good ideas was because there was huge agitation in this country, and Roosevelt had to react. So what did he do? He took billions of dollars and said the government was going to hire people. You're out of work? The government has a job for you.

As a result of this, lots of very wonderful work was done all over the country. Several million young people were put into the Civilian Conservation Corps. They went around the country, building bridges and roads and playgrounds, and doing remarkable things.

The government created a federal arts program. It wasn't going to wait for the markets to decide that. The government set up a program and hired thousands of unemployed artists: playwrights, actors, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers. What was the result? The result was the production of 200,000 pieces of art. Today, around the country, there are thousands of murals painted by people in the WPA program. Plays were put on all over the country at very cheap prices, so that people who had never seen a play in their lives were able to afford to go.

And that's just a glimmer of what could be done. The government has to represent the people's needs. The government can't give the job of representing the people's needs to corporations and the banks, because they don't care about the people's needs. They only care about profit.

In the course of his campaign, Obama said something that struck me as very wise-and when people say something very wise, you have to remember it, because they may not hold to it. You may have to remind them of that wise thing they said.

Obama was talking about the war in Iraq, and he said, "It's not just that we have to get out of Iraq." He said "get out of Iraq," and we mustn't forget it. We must keep reminding him: Out of Iraq, out of Iraq, out of Iraq-not next year, not two years from now, but out of Iraq now.

But listen to the second part, too. His whole sentence was: "It's not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq." What is the mindset that got us into Iraq?

It's the mindset that says force will do the trick. Violence, war, bombers-that they will bring democracy and liberty to the people.

It's the mindset that says America has some God-given right to invade other countries for their own benefit. We will bring civilization to the Mexicans in 1846. We will bring freedom to the Cubans in 1898. We will bring democracy to the Filipinos in 1900. You know how successful we've been at bringing democracy all over the world.

Obama has not gotten out of this militaristic missionary mindset. He talks about sending tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.

Obama is a very smart guy, and surely he must know some of the history. You don't have to know a lot to know the history of Afghanistan has been decades and decades and decades and decades of Western powers trying to impose their will on Afghanistan by force: the English, the Russians, and now the Americans. What has been the result? The result has been a ruined country.

This is the mindset that sends 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and that says, as Obama has, that we've got to have a bigger military. My heart sank when Obama said that. Why do we need a bigger military? We have an enormous military budget. Has Obama talked about cutting the military budget in half or some fraction? No.

We have military bases in more than a hundred countries. We have fourteen military bases on Okinawa alone. Who wants us there? The governments. They get benefits. But the people don't really want us there. There have been huge demonstrations in Italy against the establishment of a U.S. military base. There have been big demonstrations in South Korea and on Okinawa.

One of the first acts of the Obama Administration was to send Predator missiles to bomb Pakistan. People died. The claim is, "Oh, we're very precise with our weapons. We have the latest equipment. We can target anywhere and hit just what we want."

This is the mindset of technological infatuation. Yes, they can actually decide that they're going to bomb this one house. But there's one problem: They don't know who's in the house. They can hit one car with a rocket from a great distance. Do they know who's in the car? No.

And later-after the bodies have been taken out of the car, after the bodies have been taken out of the house-they tell you, "Well, there were three suspected terrorists in that house, and yes, there's seven other people killed, including two children, but we got the suspected terrorists." But notice that the word is "suspected." The truth is they don't know who the terrorists are.

So, yes, we have to get out of the mindset that got us into Iraq, but we've got to identify that mindset. And Obama has to be pulled by the people who elected him, by the people who are enthusiastic about him, to renounce that mindset. We're the ones who have to tell him, "No, you're on the wrong course with this militaristic idea of using force to accomplish things in the world. We won't accomplish anything that way, and we'll remain a hated country in the world."

Obama has talked about a vision for this country. You have to have a vision, and now I want to tell Obama what his vision should be.

The vision should be of a nation that becomes liked all over the world. I won't even say loved - it'll take a while to build up to that. A nation that is not feared, not disliked, not hated, as too often we are, but a nation that is looked upon as peaceful, because we've withdrawn our military bases from all these countries. We don't need to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on the military budget. Take all the money allocated to military bases and the military budget, and - this is part of the emancipation - you can use that money to give everybody free health care, to guarantee jobs to everybody who doesn't have a job, guaranteed payment of rent to everybody who can't pay their rent, build child care centers.

Let's use the money to help other people around the world, not to send bombers over there. When disasters take place, they need helicopters to transport people out of the floods and out of devastated areas. They need helicopters to save people's lives, and the helicopters are over in the Middle East, bombing and strafing people.

What's required is a total turn­around. We want a country that uses its resources, its wealth, and its power to help people, not to hurt them. That's what we need. This is a vision we have to keep alive. We shouldn't be easily satisfied and say, "Oh well, give him a break. Obama deserves respect."

But you don't respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you, and as somebody you can talk to and somebody who will listen to you.

Not only is Obama a politician. Worse, he's surrounded by politicians. And some of them he picked himself. He picked Hillary Clinton, he picked Lawrence Summers, he picked people who show no sign of breaking from the past.

We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the world from their eyes and say, "Well, we have to compromise, we have to do this for political reasons." No, we have to speak our minds.

This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, "Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln's point of view." Lincoln didn't believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, "We're not going to put ourselves in Lincoln's position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us."

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That's how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

That's been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it's been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn't just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that's what we have to do today.

Obama in Cairo — a profound message for Americans By: Susan Webb, People's Weekly World Newspaper, 06/09/09

Obama in Cairo — a profound message for Americans
By: Susan Webb
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 06/09/09


“Americans have been constantly redefining their national identity from the moment of first contact on the Virginia shore,” historian Ronald Takaki wrote in his landmark 1993 book, “A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.”

“Our diversity has been at the center of the making of America,” Takaki said. “America’s dilemma has been our resistance to ourselves — our denial of our immensely varied selves. But we have nothing to fear but our fear of our own diversity.”

What we need to do today, he wrote, “is to stop denying our wholeness as members of humanity as well as one nation.”

Takaki, a founder of multicultural and ethnic studies, died on May 26, just 9 days before our first African American president addressed the Arab and Muslim peoples of the world in, as the president noted, “the timeless city of Cairo.” I think the Japanese American historian would have been deeply moved by the president’s compelling “redefinition” of America’s identity.

Most of the commentary about President Obama’s June 4 speech at Cairo University — a speech televised and YouTube-ized across the globe — has focused on its immediate foreign policy implications and what Obama or others are going to do next week or in the coming months about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

But equally and perhaps more noteworthy for its longer-term implications was what Obama said about America itself.

As he did in March 2008 in his extraordinary speech on race in America, delivered at Philadelphia’s Constitution Center, President Obama in Cairo deepened and broadened what it means to be an American. It was a message of enormous significance, not just for the people of the Middle East and Muslims around the world, but also for Americans.

In Philadelphia last year, then-candidate Obama said, “I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.”

In Cairo, President Obama added another dimension. “Islam has always been a part of America's story,” he said. “And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, they have served in our government, they have stood for civil rights, they have started businesses, they have taught at our universities, they've excelled in our sports arenas, they've won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch.”

There are nearly 7 million American Muslims in our country today, he noted.

Citing the 2006 election of Keith Ellison, an African American Muslim, to represent Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, Obama continued, “And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson — kept in his personal library.”

“As a student of history,” Obama said, “I also know civilization's debt to Islam. It was Islam … that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”

As he has so many times, Obama on the world stage redefined America and American patriotism much as Ronald Takaki did, as historians Boyer and Morais did in their “Labor’s Untold Story” and Howard Zinn did in “A People’s History of the U.S.,” as the American Social History Project did in “Who Built America?”:

“Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype,” the president said, “America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words — within our borders, and around the world. We are shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E pluribus unum — ‘Out of many, one.’”

Like those historians, he defined America’s history as an ongoing struggle for equality and social justice.

Last year in Philadelphia, Obama rejected “a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism.” He declared, “The real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.”

In Cairo last week, the president linked Americans’ fears with those of people around the world. “I know that for many, the face of globalization is contradictory,” Obama told his worldwide audience. “The Internet and television can bring knowledge and information, but also offensive sexuality and mindless violence into the home. Trade can bring new wealth and opportunities, but also huge disruptions and change in communities.”

“In all nations — including America — this change can bring fear,” he said. “Fear that because of modernity we lose control over our economic choices, our politics, and most importantly our identities — those things we most cherish about our communities, our families, our traditions, and our faith.”

“But I also know that human progress cannot be denied,” he said. “There need not be contradictions between development and tradition.”

Development, he said, cannot be “sustained while young people are out of work.”

If he did nothing else with his Cairo speech, if these observations — and the words and images of the American president paying respect to the ancient civilizations and cultures of the Arab and Muslim peoples, a tall skinny American standing dwarfed by the Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza — cause Americans to come to a wider and deeper view of what it means to be American and our place in the world, then his speech will have accomplished something quite profound.

suewebb @ pww.org

Netanyahu convinced Obama seeks clash with Israel to appease Arabs

By Aluf Benn
Source: http://www.haaretz.com/











Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes that U.S. President Barack Obama wants a confrontation with Israel, based on Obama's speech in Cairo last week, Netanyahu's confidants say.

In Netanyahu's opinion, the Americans believe an open controversy with Israel would serve the Obama administration's main objective of improving U.S. relations with the Arab world, the aides say.

In his speech, Obama called for a "new beginning" in relations between America and Islam, and spoke at length about the Israeli-Arab conflict.


He demanded that Israel recognize the Palestinians' right to a state and freeze construction in the West Bank settlements.

Netanyahu objects to a complete suspension of construction beyond the Green Line. This is Netanyahu's main bone of contention with the Obama administration.

Netanyahu expects Obama to present his plan for peace in the Middle East next month. He fears that the president will present positions that will not be easy for Israel to accept, such as a demand to withdraw to the lines of June 4, 1967. These lines, before the Six-Day War, are at the basis of both the Arab peace initiative and previous American presidents' peace forays.

By telephone yesterday, Netanyahu told Obama of his intention to give a key policy speech on Sunday, in which he would outline his policy to achieve peace and security. Obama promised to listen to the address closely, and the two "agreed to maintain open and continuous contact," the Prime Minister's Bureau said.

Today Netanyahu is to meet the special U.S. envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell.

Political sources close to Netanyahu say that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama's senior political consultant David Axelrod are behind the clash between the administration and Israel.

Israel historically has depended on the White House to balance the consensus of officials in the state and defense departments; this consensus usually leans toward the Arab side.

Israeli officials say that under Obama, the White House has become the main problem in relations.

Israel is also having difficulty mustering the support of Congress and the American Jewish community for its demand to continue expanding the settlements.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who visited Washington last week, says the Obama administration has no personal problem with Netanyahu and that the Americans do not not seek to undermine the Israeli coalition and topple the government.

Barak says Obama's positions are guided by strategic considerations - he has undertaken to withdraw from Iraq and is striving to end the war in Afghanistan and needs the moderate Arab states' support. This, rather than "political persecution," is behind the administration's attitude toward Israel, he says.

Late-term abortion doctor shot dead inside US church (excerpt)

By: Damien Pearse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/31/abortion-doctor-george-tiller-killed
Sunday 31 May, 2009






A doctor who was one of the few in the US to continue carrying out late-term abortions was shot dead in a church today.

George Tiller, 67, who had been picketed, bombed and shot in the arms in previous incidents, was killed at his church in Kansas, according to police sources.
Tiller was a controversial man, whose clinic has been the site of protests for two decades. He was shot and wounded by a protester in 1993 and someone placed a bomb on the roof of the clinic in 1986, seriously damaging the building.

Police spokesman Gordon Bassham would not confirm the victim's identity but said a 67-year-old "high-profile individual in the community" was shot and killed. He was shot at 10am in the lobby of Reformation Lutheran church in Wichita, police and city officials said.

According to the reports a white man carrying a handgun shot the doctor and then fled in a blue Ford Taurus.

"It's an unfortunate incident to happen on a Sunday morning," Wichita police ¬captain Brent Allred told reporters. "These things should not occur at any time."

The FBI and state police were called in to help search for the gunman, whose licence plate was registered to a home in a suburb of Kansas City, 200 miles away.
The shooting came just two weeks after Barack Obama sought "common ground" over the divisive abortion debate in a ¬controversial speech at one of America's leading Catholic universities.

The president has attempted to defuse one of the most emotive issues in US public life by arguing that while abortion should remain legal, the government should do all it can to limit unwanted pregnancies.

Obama’s New Commander In Afghanistan Was Cheney’s Chief Assassin

Obama’s appointment of General Stanley McChrystal reflects a grave new military escalation of his Afghanistan war.


http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2009/05/18/obamas-new-commander-in-afghanistan-was-cheneys-chief-assassin/#more-12075







“The Deltas are psychos…You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan.

McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT’s ‘counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance. McChrystal’s SOT targeted local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through commando raids and air strikes. During the last 5 years of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld period the SOT were deeply implicated in the torture of political prisoners and suspects.

McChrystal was a special favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney because he was in charge of the ‘direct action’ forces of the ‘Special Missions Units. ‘Direct Action’ operative are the death-squads and torturers and their only engagement with the local population is to terrorize, and not to propagandize. They engage in ‘propaganda of the dead’, assassinating local leaders to ‘teach’ the locals to obey and submit to the occupation. Obama’s appointment of McChrystal as head reflects a grave new military escalation of his Afghanistan war in the face of the advance of the resistance throughout the country.

The deteriorating position of the US is manifest in the tightening circle around all the roads leading in and out of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul as well as the expansion of Taliban control and influence throughout the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Obama’s inability to recruit new NATO reinforcements means that the White House’s only chance to advance its military driven empire is to escalate the number of US troops and to increase the kill ratio among any and all suspected civilians in territories controlled by the Afghan armed resistance.

The White House and the Pentagon claim that the appointment of McChrystal was due to the ‘complexities’ of the situation on the ground and the need for a ‘change in strategy’. ‘Complexity’ is a euphemism for the increased mass opposition to the US, complicating traditional carpet ‘bombing and military sweep’ operations. The new strategy practiced by McChrystal involves large scale, long term ’special operations’ to devastate and kill the local social networks and community leaders, which provide the support system for the armed resistance.

Obama’s decision to prevent the release of scores of photographs documenting the torture of prisoners by US troops and ‘interrogators’ (especially under command of the ‘Special Forces’), is directly related to his appointment of McChrystal whose ‘SOT’ forces were highly implicated in widespread torture in Iraq. Equally important, under McChrystal’s command the DELTA, SEAL and Special Operations Teams will have a bigger role in the new ‘counter-insurgency strategy’. Obama’s claim that the publication of these photographs will adversely affect the ‘troops’ has a particular meaning: The graphic exposure of McChrystal’s modus operendi for the past 5 years under President Bush will undermine his effectiveness in carrying out the same operations under Obama.

Obama’s decision to re-start the secret ‘military tribunals’ of foreign political prisoners, held at the Guantanamo prison camp, is not merely a replay of the Bush-Cheney policies, which Obama had condemned and vowed to eliminate during his presidential campaign, but part of his larger policy of militarization and coincides with his approval of the major secret police surveillance operations conducted against US citizens.

Putting McChrystal in charge of the expanded Afghanistan-Pakistan military operations means putting a notorious practitioner of military terrorism - the torture and assassination of opponents to US policy - at the center of US foreign policy. Obama’s quantitative and qualitative expansion of the US war in South Asia means massive numbers of refugees fleeing the destruction of their farms, homes and villages; tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and eradication of entire communities. All of this will be committed by the Obama Administraton in the quest to ‘empty the lake (displace entire populations) to catch the fish (armed insurgents and activists)’.

Obama’s restoration of all of the most notorious Bush Era policies and the appointment of Bush’s most brutal commander is based on his total embrace of the ideology of military-driven empire building. Once one believes (as Obama does) that US power and expansion are based on military conquests and counter-insurgency, all other ideological, diplomatic, moral and economic considerations will be subordinated to militarism. By focusing all resources on successful military conquest, scant attention is paid to the costs borne by the people targeted for conquest or to the US treasury and domestic American economy. This has been clear from the start: In the midst of a major recession/depression with millions of Americans losing their employment and homes, President Obama increased the military budget by 4% - taking it beyond $800 billion dollars.

Obama’s embrace of militarism is obvious from his decision to expand the Afghan war despite NATO’s refusal to commit any more combat troops. It is obvious in his appointment of the most hard-line and notorious Special Forces General from the Bush-Cheney era to head the military command in subduing Afghanistan and the frontier areas of Pakistan.

It is just as George Orwell described in Animal Farm: The Democratic Pigs are now pursuing the same brutal, military policies of their predecessors, the Republican Porkers, only now it is in the name of the people and peace. Orwell might paraphrase the policy of President Barack Obama, as ‘Bigger and bloodier wars equal peace and justice’.

By James Petras
Posted May 18, 2009.

Communist Party USA Statement on North Korean Nuclear Test

Andrew Taylor's Note:

I publish this Statement in order to educate my readers on the current line of the cpusa. I do not endorse it and in my Op-Ed below provide my reasons for principled dissent from this political line. I do not agree that "The general direction of the Obama administration's foreign policy is at odds with that of any administration in the past 30 years, if not longer". If that were so why are 2 million Pakistanis currently displaced in an Obama-ordered Pakistani Civil War? Why is Obama sending 30,000 additional US troops to secure the occupation of Afghanistan? I do not agree that "the movement for peace and against imperialism is that much more difficult" because of N Korea. The primary locus of world imperialism was and is American imperialism with its reckless domestic war-mongering and aggressive, inhuman foreign war-making.
_____________ ________________________ ____________________
By Communist Party USA
Original source: CPUSA.org

The Communist Party USA is shocked and appalled at North Korea's recent nuclear test, as well as its subsequent test firing of at least two missiles.

We see these acts as incredibly provocative and irresponsible. Unfortunately, they are not a surprising departure from the way the DPRK leadership has handled itself in recent years. Even North Korea's most important ally, China, was horrified by, and condemned, the tests.

Of course, North Korea is right to say that it has been, and still is, the victim of imperialist aggression, specifically from the US. It is true that the United States has never made reparations for the destruction of the Korean War, has repeatedly threatened North Korea, and encroached upon its right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to peacefully use nuclear power.

In addition, the United States has helped to isolate North Korea from the rest of the world, encroaching upon its sovereign rights and hindering its economic development, and therefore providing the basis for the problems afflicting the region.

It was the United States that fought the Korean War, and partitioned the nation into two separate states. The line of demarcation between north and south is one of the most militarized in the world. Currently, tens of thousands of US troops remain in South Korea, and the US routinely practices joint military drills with south Korea, simulating a ground invasion of the North.

Nonetheless, we are resolutely opposed to the use or development of any nuclear weapons by any nation.

Nuclear weapons threaten the very existence of humanity itself. The tests heighten tensions in the region: The sections of Japan's leadership that want to see Japan change its “peace constitution” so that Japan can maintain a standing army have seized upon these provocative tests to push forward the changes they want.

Further, the results of the tests are in direct contradiction to the stated aims of battling imperialism. The general direction of the Obama administration's foreign policy is at odds with that of any administration in the past 30 years, if not longer. While Obama has to navigate the political realities of the US, his administration has sought to reduce the nuclear threat, as well as the threat that the US poses to other, oppressed nations. Consequently, powerful sections of the U.S. ruling class have made their aim to derail the Obama administration altogether.

The fight for progressive forces is to make sure that Obama, and the social strata that are part of the Obama movement – the working class, women and the racially and nationally oppressed especially – meets success.

The ultra-right has already seized upon North Korea's nuclear tests to attack Obama, Obama has been forced to respond sharply, and the movement for peace and against imperialism is that much more difficult. We believe peace is possible in today’s world, but this nuclear test, on the contrary, strengthens the ultra-right and imperialism, not the cause of peace.

The Communist Party USA, along with North Korea's neighbors, including socialist China and Vietnam, and many other progressive forces around the world, condemn these tests and urge the North Korean leadership to abandon its policy of brinkmanship.

Further, we urge all parties, including the United States and Japan, to exercise restraint in response. As we have always said, the main way to solve the nuclear issue, as well as the problems of Northeast Asia more generally, is through good-faith dialogue, through the six-party talks or some other mechanism, and not through military saber-rattling and brinkmanship from any quarters.

We wouldn't want to inflame anti-American sentiment (that suppression of evidence of detainee abuse story won't die)

We wouldn't want to inflame anti-American sentiment (that suppression of evidence of detainee abuse story won't die)

Glenn Greenwald
Thursday May 14, 2009 09:39 EDT


(updated below - Update II - Update III)

There are many bizarre aspects to Obama's decision to try to suppress evidence of America's detainee abuse, beginning with the newfound willingness of so many people to say: "We want our leaders to suppress information that reflects poorly on what our government does." One would think that it would be impossible to train a citizenry to be grateful to political officials for concealing evidence of government wrongdoing, or to accept the idea that evidence that reflects poorly on the conduct of political leaders should, for that reason alone, be covered-up: "Obama and his military commanders decide when it's best that we're kept in the dark, and I'm thankful when they keep from me things that reflect poorly on my government because I trust them to decide what I should and should not know."
...

Up to 100 civilians, including women and children, are reported to have been killed in Afghanistan in potentially the single deadliest US airstrike since 2001. The news overshadowed a crucial first summit between the Afghan President and Barack Obama in Washington yesterday. . . .

This week’s airstrikes took place in the Taleban-controlled area of Bala Baluk, in Farah province. US military officials in Kandahar said that the number of fatalities was nearer 30, but the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that the death toll was far higher.

Jessica Barry, an ICRC representative, said that an international Red Cross team in Bala Baluk saw “dozens of bodies in each of the two locations” on Tuesday. “There were bodies, there were graves, and there were people burying bodies when we were there,” she said. “We do confirm women and children.”

And doing this:

The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.

In a two-sentence filing late Friday, the Justice Department said that the new administration had reviewed its position in a case brought by prisoners at the United States Air Force base at Bagram, just north of the Afghan capital. The Obama team determined that the Bush policy was correct: such prisoners cannot sue for their release.

And this:

American soldiers opened fire and killed a 12-year old boy after a grenade hit their convoy in Mosul on Thursday. . . .

"We have every reason to believe that insurgents are paying children to conduct these attacks or assist the attackers in some capacity, undoubtedly placing the children in harm's way," a U. S. military spokesman wrote in an email on Saturday.

But eyewitnesses said the boy, identified as Omar Musa Salih, was standing by the side of the road selling fruit juice - a common practice in Iraq -- and had nothing to do with the attack.

And this:

The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil -- indefinitely and without trial -- as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

And this:

In a federal court hearing in San Francisco this morning, a representative of the Justice Department said it would continue the Bush policy of invoking the 'state secrets' defense, which has been used in cases of rendition and torture.

And this:

The Israel Air Force used a new bunker-buster missile that it received recently from the United States in strikes against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, The Jerusalem Post learned on Sunday. . . .

Israel received approval from Congress to purchase 1,000 units in September and defense officials said on Sunday that the first shipment had arrived earlier this month ..

We're currently occupying two Muslim countries. We're killing civilians regularly (as usual) -- with airplanes and unmanned sky robots. We're imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims with no trial, for years. Our government continues to insist that it has the power to abduct people -- virtually all Muslim -- ship them to Bagram, put them in cages, and keep them there indefinitely with no charges of any kind. We're denying our torture victims any ability to obtain justice for what was done to them by insisting that the way we tortured them is a "state secret" and that we need to "look to the future." We provide Israel with the arms and money used to do things like devastate Gaza. Independent of whether any or all of these policies are justifiable, the extent to which those actions "inflame anti-American sentiment" is impossible to overstate.

And now, the very same people who are doing all of that are claiming that they must suppress evidence of our government's abuse of detainees because to allow the evidence to be seen would "inflame anti-American sentiment." It's not hard to believe that releasing the photos would do so to some extent -- people generally consider it a bad thing to torture and brutally abuse helpless detainees -- but compared to everything else we're doing, the notion that releasing or concealing these photos would make an appreciable difference in terms of how we're perceived in the Muslim world is laughable on its face.
...

Cambodia Déjà Vu: the Invasion of Pakistan (excerpt)

Predator drone









Cambodia Déjà Vu: the Invasion of Pakistan
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090513_cambodia_deja_vu_the_invasion_of_pakistan/
Posted on May 13, 2009

By William Pfaff

Last September, during the American presidential campaign, I wrote a column declaring that the United States had again invaded Cambodia, only this time “Cambodia” was Pakistan. President George W. Bush had ordered U.S. ground attacks on the Taliban inside Pakistan’s Tribal Territories, without Pakistan’s authorization.

That was also when Barack Obama’s foreign policy campaign platform was promising withdrawal from Iraq and military emphasis on Afghanistan and Pakistan, location of the “real” problem in the great war on terror.

A younger generation than mine, including senior military officers (not to speak of Barack Obama), may not know exactly why the United States and the South Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia in 1970, and what the result was. The invasion was a failure, and the result a humanitarian catastrophe.

Washington, frustrated in its war against the Communist Viet Cong in South Vietnam, which eventually included bombing on a scale greater than the bombing of Germany in the Second World War, decided it could solve its problem by an invasion to cut the Communist supply routes inside neutral Cambodia (which it nonetheless was also bombing: dropping 540,000 tons of explosive on Cambodia over four years).

The invasion accomplished nothing except further destruction in Cambodia. It destroyed the U.S.-supported military government in Cambodia and empowered the native Cambodian Communist resistance, known as the Khmer Rouge, which eventually, in order to create a utopian society, killed some 2 million of its fellow Cambodians.

...

The invasion was occasion for Richard Nixon to declare that the U.S. was not “a second-rate power” nor “a pitiful helpless giant” standing by while “the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy ... threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”

How long ago it seems—39 years! And here we are again.

The United States, despite its plan to deploy nearly 70,000 troops this year in Afghanistan, finds itself and its NATO allies in danger of defeat by the Taliban guerrillas.

U.S. bombing, with remote-controlled “drones,” of the Pakistani Tribal Territories, where the Taliban take refuge among their Pathan tribal kinsmen, has killed many people but has had no decisive effect on the fighting in Afghanistan.

American bombing inside Afghanistan is protested by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who says the airstrikes are fast turning the Afghans against the U.S., which risks “losing the moral battle” against the Taliban. Gen. James L. Jones, U.S. national security adviser, says, “We can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back.”

Karzai says, “How can you expect a people who keep losing their children to remain friendly?” Jones says of Karzai, “I think he understands that we have to have a full complement of our offensive military power when we need it.”

The former Pakistani military government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf was unwilling to send the Pakistan army into the Tribal Territories to attack the Taliban and al-Qaida.

He is now ousted, and the civilian government led by President Asif Ali Zardari, put under immense pressure by Washington, and frightened by the success of the Taliban in operations outside the Tribal Region, has agreed to the ground offensive now going on, in which Pakistani commanders are accompanied by U.S liaison officers and air controllers.

U.S. command in “Af-Pak” now has been transferred, in obvious urgency, to former Joint Special Operations commander Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Will a Special Forces officer think that guerrillas—with refuge in an inaccessible and unconquered region, amid a tri-national ethnic population of some 40 million fellow Pathans—can be beaten by guided bombs or Special Forces raids? Or that an unenthusiastic Pakistani army will do the job? Or 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, when the Taliban can always refuse battle and pull back into the mountains?

Moreover, what is supposed to be accomplished by this war against the Taliban, which threatens to leave Afghanistan in ruins, and to tear Pakistan apart? Do the Taliban threaten the United States? Most of them could not find the United States on a map.

What have they ever done to the United States? What if the United States would just go away and leave the Pakistanis, Afghans and Pathans to settle this among themselves?

President Obama says the war will not be won by military means but by a “surge” of civilian development experts, reconstruction leaders and democracy teachers, just as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently told Congress that the U.S. is training. Will this “surge” get there in time? My own feeling is that President Obama is in over his head; and that American military command, not knowing what else to do, is reverting to Vietnam, which most of its members were too young to experience.

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.

© 2009 Tribune Media Services Inc.
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Russia warns U.S. stepping up shield plans Tue Apr 21, 2009, Reuters UK

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia on Tuesday accused the United States of stepping up plans to install an anti-missile system in Europe, according to Interfax news agency.

The comments from Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov mark a sharper tone from Moscow after a series of conciliatory comments on U.S. plans to deploy elements of the system in Central Europe.

Moscow said it had hoped the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama would revise plans initiated under former President George W. Bush to construct the system and welcomed calls initiated by the U.S. side to "reset" relations.

"The U.S. has not revised its plans. I do not think that this could happen. On the contrary, we can see that work in missile defence has intensified, including in the NATO format," Ryabkov was quoted by Interfax as saying.

Washington says deployment of interceptor missiles to Poland and a radar system in the Czech Republic does not target Russia, but future potential attacks from countries like Iran.

The new U.S. administration has been less assertive in pushing the plan, insisting it would be reviewed for cost-effectiveness and viability, although Obama stood by the overall scheme during a speech in Prague earlier this month.

Ryabkov repeated Moscow's threat that if the United States does go ahead with the anti-missile system, that Russia will respond by placing its short-range Iskander missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave, nestled between NATO members Poland and Lithuania.

"Nobody has changed this position. I would only add that ... if there is no third phase (the European element of the anti-missile system), then there will be no Iskanders," Ryabkov told Interfax on Tuesday.

"We are not seeking to put them there. We really do not want to do that," Ryabkov was quoted as saying.

Ryabkov also criticised planned NATO exercises in Georgia next month, which Russian President Dmitry Medvedev last week said was "muscle-flexing" by the Western military alliance.

(Reporting by Conor Sweeney)