kerkko.fi

The Obama administration's pattern of targeted killings in the war on terror establishes an important conceptual point. It is now clear beyond dispute that the United States, on a bipartisan basis, fully embraces the paradigm that the threat of international terrorism is a matter of war, not a matter of law enforcement. And rightly so.

That Obama presided over the killing of an American citizen like Anwar al-Awlaki marks a major advance in solidifying and legitimising the war paradigm. [Awlaki's] terrorist sandals may momentarily seem hard to fill, but as history demonstrates, not impossibly so. Lenin's death did not bring the end of Bolshevism; it brought Stalin.

Numerous prominent politicians from both major political parties in the United States have not only been enthusiastically promoting and advocating on behalf of a designated terrorist organization, the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK/MKO/PMOI), but they have been receiving substantial amounts of cash from that terrorist group as they do so. There is only one list of "designated terrorist organizations" under the law, and MEK is every bit as much on that list as Kashimiri Lashkar-e-Taiba or Al-Qaeda are. Yet you will never, ever see those politicians being indicted by Obama's Department of Justice for their far more extensive -- and paid -- involvement with MEK.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/04/speech/

Juan Cole sets the record straight on the revolution in Libya:

I have taken a lot of heat for my support of the [Libyan] revolution and of the UN-authorized intervention by the Arab League and NATO that kept it from being crushed. [...] I agree with President Obama and his citation of Reinhold Niebuhr: You cannot protect all victims of mass murder everywhere all the time. But where you can do some good, you should do it, even if you cannot do all good. [...] Given the controversies about the revolution, it is worthwhile reviewing the myths about the Libyan Revolution that led so many observers to make so many fantastic or just mistaken assertions about it.

The Obama administration is unable to show that the billions of dollars spent in the war on drugs have significantly stemmed the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States, according to two government reports and outside experts. "We are wasting tax dollars and throwing money at a problem without even knowing what we are getting in return," said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who chairs the Senate subcommittee that wrote one of the reports. "I think we have wasted our money hugely," agreed Bruce Bagley, who studies US counter-narcotics efforts and chairs international studies at the University of Miami. "The effort has had corrosive effects on every country it has touched."

The reports criticize the government's growing use of contractors, which were paid more than USD 3 billion to train local prosecutors and police, help eradicate fields of coca, operate surveillance equipment, and otherwise battle the widening drug trade in Latin America. The majority of US counter-narcotics contracts are awarded to five companies: DynCorp, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, ITT, and ARINC. DynCorp received the largest total, USD 1.1 billion. Among other jobs, the US contractors train local police and investigators, provide logistical support to intelligence collection centers, and fly airplanes and helicopters that spray herbicides to eradicate coca crops grown to produce cocaine.

Shortly after taking office oin January 2005, US President Barack Obama ordered CIA director Leon Panetta to make the killing or capture of Osama bin Laden, leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, the top priority of the US war against Al-Qaeda.

Last week, President Obama authorised an operation to "get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice," the President said in a speech on 1 May 2011. A small team of Americans carried out the operation, and after a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden.

Despite President Obama's assertion that "justice has been done," the operation failed to capture bin Laden and bring him to a court of law. Bin Laden was thus never tried or found guilty of the crimes he was accused of and took responsibility for.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-dead

America is caught in a confidence or credibility trap, in which the changes, investigations, and reforms necessary to restore trust to an economy or market are rendered unlikely because doing so would expose a pervasive corruption that the principals fear would destroy any remaining trust. It could also endanger the careers of politicians and business people who may have permitted and even appeared to facilitate the control fraud that caused the financial crisis in the first place. Personal risk trumps public stewardship.

The American government is indeed acting as if it is involved in a massive cover-up of a control fraud and corruption that could perhaps be the worst in its history. Many who are looking at this know that all is not well, that there is something not quite right in the current situation. How else can we explain such massive and widespread financial fraud, with so few meaningful indictments, or even ongoing investigations with credible disclosures? And the worst perpetrators appear to be dictating the remedies and reforms to the system.

Liberals have always served a vital function within American democracy, which is: they have provided channels and mechanisms within the power structure by which the grievances of citizens can be heard and addressed.

[Yet] those members of the establishment who identify themselves as liberals have walked out on the basic tenets, the core values of liberalism: a concern for the condition of citizens outside the narrow power elite, a fierce protection of civil liberties, a promotion of individualism and of rule of law.

The only thing that kept the liberal class honest was the radical Left. Once you destroyed and gutted the radical Left, the liberal class evolved into a class of courtiers, hedonists of power, people who speak in one way and act in another.

There were two reactions to the global crisis of the 1930s: one resulted in fascism and the other resulted in the New Deal. The reason we got the New Deal is because we had powerful radical social movements with broad social visions and the guts to stand up and fight back. Those movements -- with the complicity of the liberal class -- were destroyed.

The New Deal was the product of militant labour unions, including Communist union leaders, anarchists, the Wobblies, and a vigorous and independent press. Those social movements kept the liberal class honest.

When we saw the rise of globalism and the dismantling of the regulations (that had served as bulwarks not only to protect the marketplace but, ultimately, to protect democracy) lifted, the liberal class did not have the fortitude to fight back.

We are certainly headed for a similar social meltdown [as in the 1930s], but without the aid of those movements and led by a liberal class that is utterly bankrupt.

Dostoyevsky was obsessed with those [people] -- that is what Notes from Underground is about: it is about the defeated dreamer, it is about the person who went to all the Barack Obama rallies and chanted "Yes we can!", and then realised that it does not make any difference.

And so they withdrew underground and laughed at all the idiots and buffoons of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, and nursed their cynicism and self-indulgence. Dostoyevsky writes that when that happens, you enter an age of moral nihilism. I think that is where we are headed.

We have a choice: you can either be complicit in your own enslavement or you can lead a life that has some kind of integrity and meaning; [to have] the capacity to rebel, the capacity to stand up and have the moral autonomy to say no.

Let us not be naive: you are not rewarded in this kind of system for virtue -- and probably in any kind of a system; that is the price of having a life worth living.

Hope -- as Augustine said -- has two beautiful daughters: courage and anger; anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are. If you do not have anger and courage, then hope is not a possibility.

Many liberals and progressives are disappointed in Obama’s continuing business-friendly direction. They accuse him of “moral collapse” and criticize his “spineless” failure to “act on his [supposedly progressive] convictions." But "collapse" from what progressive convictions? Obama is acting boldly in accord with his longstanding “deeply conservative” instincts, and giving the finger to “the left.” The sort of thing you might expect from a guy who could make a speech in defense of war while (absurdly) receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

Obama is not being cowardly in his tax “deal for the American people” (for plutocrats) anymore than he is been spineless while advancing an auto-restructuring plan that raided union pension funds and rewarded capital flight, pushing through a health “reform” bill that only insurance and drug companies could love, undermining serious global carbon emission reduction efforts at Copenhagen, prosecuting whistleblowers and harassing antiwar activists, and prosecuting and expanding criminal overt and covert wars in South Asia and around the world.

Centrism is something of a cult here in Washington, D.C. Its adherents pretend to worship at the altar of the great American middle, but in fact they stick closely to a very particular view of events regardless of what the public says it wants. [...] What the Beltway centrist characteristically longs for is not so much to transcend politics but to close off debate on the grounds that he -- and the vast silent middle for which he stands -- knows beyond question what is to be done. [...] The real-world function of Beltway centrism has not been to wage high-minded war against "both extremes" but to fight specifically against the economic and foreign policies of liberalism.

Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy had told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Paris that "there was a single door [in the peace process] and that it was imperative to move through it now." French diplomats said Sarkozy had three things to say to Netanyahu: "you think you have time, but you do not"; "you think you have an alternative solution, but you do not"; and "you think you are stronger than the Palestinians, but you are not".

http://wikileaks.fi/cable/2009/06/09PARIS827.html