ISIS is Islamic, but we should still shut up about them

Islam has never been united. For one thing, there is no Muslim pontiff who speaks for the world's 1.6 billion Muslims living on six continents. Yet even the Roman Catholic Pope speaks for only about half of the world's 2.2 billion Christians; and millions of those Catholics choose to disregard him on such crucial matters of the faith as birth control, premarital sex, divorce and gay relationships. 

If we sat down and took a deep breath, we'd all admit that there is no perfect, ideal version of Catholicism, or Christianity for that matter, that exists separately from the people who call themselves Christians. Anybody who says he is Christian and practices some form of the faith, no matter how strange, is a Christian. Attempts to label practitioners on the margins of a faith as "heretics" or "not true believers" has been tried, will continue to be tried, in vain. It only comes with conflict, violent schisms, cults and new denominations.

The same is true of Islam, with its Sufi, Sunni, Shia branches... and a bunch of sects and sub-sects that I don't know or understand. It is diverse and always changing.

ISIS in particular, with upwards of 30,000 fighters, or about 0.00002 % of the world's Muslims, is Islamic, just as they claim. A dark and evil part, but a part of Islam nonetheless. Just as violent white supremacists in the KKK or Branch Davidians are indeed part of the Christian pageant, because they profess themselves to be so. You or I can stand aloof and say they're not, but Christianity is what Christians do; Islam is what Muslims do; including all the good and bad. These religions are not what some sacred texts say. We can't just define away the behaviors -- and the believers -- that we don't accept as pure or "mainstream." (Although millions of believers will continue to do just that, to the detriment of world peace and understanding....)

Likewise, the U.S. should not -- and I'm thinking of Barack Obama specifically but before him scores of prominent conservatives -- engage in pointless, unwinnable schismatic debates about who is or isn't Islamic. It's apparent why both sides are tempted to do so: conservatives want to stoke xenophobic fear among Americans that justifies, post facto, their wars of choice in the Mideast and continued spying and infringements on our civil and constitutional liberties; and President Obama, in response, wants to calm Americans' nerves, and avoid antagonizing one-fifth of the globe, including America's peaceful 2 million+ Muslims. Conservatives' anti-Islamic argument is mean and stupid on its face; Obama is stupid for engaging seriously with stupidity.

Just as our arguing that ISIS is not Islamic does not seem to affect their appeal to disaffected recruits from all over the world, nor does our paying so much attention to ISIS hurt their cause. Just the opposite. When the most powerful nation in the history of the world -- not to mention the "Great Satan" -- declares that ISIS is scary and powerful, it's the best possible endorsement for the Islamic State's recruitment and fundraising efforts.   

Keeping a cool head and maintaining perspective on global threats are responsibilities of being a superpower. We must be serious when choosing our enemies, and more serious in how we fight them. That doesn't automatically mean all guns -- and mouths -- ablazing.

I've said it before: With all of its vast power, the U.S. shouldn't say that ISIS is an "existential threat," "clear and present danger," or anything of the kind.  It's the equivalent of a well-armed huntsman hyperventilating at a swarm of mosquitoes. 

Since 9/11, almost no leaders of any political stripe are willing to say the truth: We cannot defend ourselves against every attack on U.S. soil by extremists, especially by lone wolf terrorists inspired by the Internet and driven by deep personal resentments and/or violent mental illness. (ISIS's forte.)  And especially against those attacks on U.S. soil that require very little coordination or preparation (that could tip off domestic spies), and make use of readily available weapons of mass terror: assault-type weapons, ammunition, and bomb-making ingredients.  

In October 2002, I grasped this sad fact immediately and personally during the DC sniper attacks. The terrorists, who everyone was sure must be al Qaeda, ended up being a disgruntled, mentally disturbed Army vet (the sniper) and his impressionable teenage nephew (the spotter and getaway driver).  They were armed only with a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle. They killed 17 people and wounded 10 others, and perhaps worse, caused widespread terror in several states before they were caught, by selecting victims at gas stations and shoppers in parking lots, two of the commonest places in American life. That's how easy terrorism is. And there's nothing stopping anybody today from doing exactly the same thing. Nothing. Nowadays we just have a few more cameras around that anyway wouldn't pick up snipers tucked away in the distance.... 

Our leaders continue to lie to us that by eliminating (as in 100%!) the threat of Islamist extremism "over there," and oppressing the peaceful Muslims at home, we can keep ourselves safe "over here."  In fact, by persecuting Muslims at home, and making stupid wars of choice over there, we make Americans less safe over here, in ways that we've witnessed numerous times. (In a word: blowback).  And worse, we who usually refuse to trust our leaders, who know they tell us what we what we want to hear, choose to believe their lies. (The 240,000-employee strong Dept. of Homeland Security, which didn't exist prior to 9/11, the NSA, the Pentagon's top brass, and the military-intelligence contractors getting $285 billion a year certainly thank us for our choice!)  We should know better.

When influential bloviators like Glenn Beck, and even conservatives that I know, say that radical Islam is one of America's most dire problems, nobody dares laugh at them. Yet if I said the KKK was something every U.S. Presidential candidate should propose a plan to fight, I'd be laughed out of town. Never mind that there are upwards of 3,000 Klan members in the U.S., in all 50 states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, as opposed to 100 or fewer members of ISIS in the United States, according to the Pentagon.

Either way it's like arguing which is worse, the mosquito or the fly. The West, in particular the United States, has many more important problems to address. 

Publicly, we should ignore ISIS; outside the public eye of cameras and journalists, we should fight ISIS seriously but in proportion to the threat they pose, in the time and manner of our own choosing, and not have our actions be driven by the release of disgusting YouTube videos.

David Brooks: I'm not Charlie Hebdo

OMG, I agree with David Brooks. 


I Am Not Charlie Hebdo 
By David Brooks 
January 8, 2015 | New York Times 

URL: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/opinion/david-brooks-i-am-not-charlie-hebdo.html?hpw&rref=opinion&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=2&referrer=

A recent history of terrorist killers...

A conservative equivalent of what Bill Maher decries among Muslims is when right-wing Christians blow up abortion clinics, shoot abortion doctors, or law enforcement officers. 

The attackers against Charlie Hebdo killed 12 people, including a Muslim policeman. 

How many Americans remember the Atlanta Centennial Park anti-government bomber Eric Rudolph who in 1996 killed two people and wounded 112 others? Or Wade Michael Page's murder of six Sikhs in Wisconsin in 2012? Or Jim David Adkisson who killed two and wounded seven others in 2008? Or the guy who flew a plane into the IRS in 2010 and killed himself and one other? Or the Army of God that murdered two people? Or Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people, mostly children, in Norway with an anti-Muslim motivation? And do I really need to mention Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who murdered 168 Americans and injured over 600 others? 

I'm not recounting recent U.S. history to excuse inexcusable crimes somewhere overseas; I'm just reminding you that crazy people do crazy things, and often for reasons that "upstanding" people would generally sympathize with.

So the response is not to demonize all Arabs or Muslims, or all conservative Christians for that matter, but rather to demonize the alleged murderers, their ideology, and anybody who likewise espouses terror and/or violence against innocents as a means to a political end.

See: "10 of the Worst Terror Attacks by Extreme Christians and Far-Right White Men."

Bill Maher on Paris Attack: 'There Are No Great Religions—They're All Stupid and Dangerous'

By Travis Gettys

January 9, 2015 | Raw Story

URL: http://www.alternet.org/belief/bill-maher-paris-attack-there-are-no-great-religions-theyre-all-stupid-and-dangerous

TSA agent: We must laugh at underwear and toothpaste terrorists

This one deserves to be reposted in full, because too many Americans are susceptible to the craven U.S. media's attempts to spur us to support military action (and an anti-civil rights intelligence apparatus) ostensibly meant to keep us safe from non-existent threats -- bumbling terrorists with soggy shoes, crotches on fire, and the like.

And as a frequent international traveler let me say, I'm sick of it!  It's all because of unaccountable, CYA, security-apparatus bureaucrats in DHS and TSA whose only concern is, "Not on my watch!", statistics, facts and our comfort be damned.

Read on!

Take it from an airport security agent: it's OK to laugh at toothpaste terror threats

By Jason Edward Harrington

September 28, 2014 | Guardian

The other day in Syria, the US conducted air strikes on a relatively unknown and possibly non-existent entity called the Khorasan group, which sounds more like a job-killing consulting firm than a people-killing al-Qaida spinoff. It was a surprise plot point in the campaign against Isis that left the kind of Strangelovian headlines that have become par for the course in the War on Terror. Take this one, from the Independent: “Syria air strikes: Khorasan Group ‘were working to make toothpaste bombs and explosives that could pass through airport security’”. Or this one: “Khorasan Group plotted attack against US with explosive clothes”.

This isn’t the first time the plane-flying public has gotten word of cavity-fighting and/or sartorial threats to international airliners: the concept of the toothpaste bomb first surfaced during the Sochi Olympics earlier this year, and the clothes-dipped-in-liquid-explosives menace came to attention back in August 2013. And of course, just a few months ago, there was speculation about the need for airline passengers to fear an iBomb. The only thing that changed between then and now is that anonymous officials slapped a name on the alleged masterminds behind these absurd plots, and then dropped bombs on them.

Now that the global aviation system has been menaced by a shoe bomber, an underwear bomber, a hypothetical “Frankenbomber” and even ecologically friendly bombers, pretty much any western government could conceivably spout the results of a terror plot-generating algorithm and successfully sell it to the public as casus belli:

Common item + bomb + plot = justified military action and hassle at airports. Deodorant bomb plot? Sure, why the hell not? Sounds scary. Send in the drones, confiscate all the Old Spice.

There have been conflicting reports as to how “imminent” the Khorasan group’s aviation attack really was. But regardless of whether these alleged terrorist masterminds had their favorite sweaters weaponized and ready to blow, or were just sort of thinking about it, exactly what are we supposed to feel when confronted with news of such counter-terror campaigns carried out on our behalf? Relief and fear? Relief that our military may have neutralized a tube of toothpaste, and fear that the next Hollywood-ready plot is still imminently lurking out there?

Having worked for the Transportation Security Administration for six years, I actually think laughter is one appropriate response. It’s hard not to see the funny facets of a never-ending campaign against a nebulous enemy (Axis of Evil a decade ago, Network of Death today) in which you are issued a terror intelligence memorandum detailing the standard operating procedure for the confiscation of cupcakes. (“Cupcakes have got to have a reasonable level of icing to be allowed onto a plane,” one TSA manager advised us.)

My former co-workers and I are not the only ones who found some of this stuff funny. In 2012, the international relations scholar Charlotte Heath-Kelly argued in a paper in the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research that the War on Terror can be viewed as the lovechild of Franz Kafka and Monty Python as much as that of any vice president and foreign minister.

“The War on Terror undermines itself by narrating a liminal space where its claims of security appear ridiculous,” Heath-Kelly writes. “A failure to laugh consolidates the War on Terror discourse and the joke it is playing on us by taking it seriously.”

If we could get Catch 22 out of World War II, and Dr Strangelove out of the Cold War, it should come as no surprise if the more skeptical among us laugh when our governments inform us, with a straight face, that we just launched a unilateral air strike so as to eliminate a guy who maybe had explosives in his dopp kit. Perhaps the best way to show our leaders that we’re no longer buying the chimerical terror threats sold to us as justifications for war is by laughing those claims right out of the room.

As Thomas Jefferson said long before the TSA made you walk around barefoot and beltless with a bunch of strangers, “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.”

Many would say the plots of the supposedly deadly and ingenious terrorists upon whom we’re dropping bombs would be no laughing matter if brought to fruition. But a few people bearing analogues to these hypothetical threats have actually made it aboard planes in the past, and the results comprised a relative comedy of errors:

• In 2001, Richard Reid attempted to bring down a plane by igniting his shoes, but his foot perspiration rendered his amateur IED’s fuse soggy.

• On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a flight to Detroit with a bomb sewn into his underwear, but managed instead to burn his genitals.

• Security experts still argue whether the liquids plot of 2006 – the reason we’re not allowed to bring a container filled with more than 3.4 ounces of liquid aboard planes in the US – was even plausible: Turns out, mixing hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid and acetone is difficult even in the calm of a science lab, let alone an airplane lavatory. 

Real-life, successful terrorist plots tend to be too mundane to fit the narratives of big-budget Hollywood thrillers. Attempts at the movie-level terrorist plot end up playing out more like Benny Hill than Sergeant Brody.

I believe that it’s healthy to openly ridicule politically expedient, overblown terror threats such as this Khorasan group – that known unknowns, fashion menaces, underwear bombers and other political hobgoblins should be feared about as much, if not less, than a cab ride to the airport. But there is at least one deadly serious aspect to odd new turns and mysterious enemies in the War on Terror: real people die when missiles go flying in retaliation for absurd, hypothetical threats, and from the rubble of those missile strikes rise new waves of anti-western sentiment. The aspirations of the terrorists we bomb into existence may be grounded in gritty realism, as opposed to slapstick comedy.

And that may turn out to be no laughing matter.

Bergen: Americans fighting for ISIS will die over there

We're all gonna diiiiieeeeeeee!  Mobilize the army! Scramble the bombers!  DEFCON 1!  Kill 'em all! Kill, kill, kill!  Aaaaaaaaaaa!

Now that I've done the obligatory Scaring The Shit Out Of You, followed by the customary Let's Kill Them All First that you've become accustomed to on cable and talk radio, here's some more sober analysis of the actual threat to America posed by Islamic State, from CNN's resident Islamist terrorism expert Peter Bergen (and some other dude).

ISIS threat to U.S. is mostly hype

By Peter Bergen and David Sterman

September 5, 2014 | CNN

ISIS has Americans worried. Two-thirds of those surveyed in a recent Pew Research poll said they consider the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to be a "major threat" to this country. But are such fears really justified?

Despite the impression you may have had from listening to U.S. officials in recent weeks, the answer is probably not really.

For a start, U.S. officials have been inflating the numbers of Americans fighting for ISIS, which has muddied the issue for the public. U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, for example, told CNN's Jim Sciutto on Wednesday, "We are aware of over 100 U.S. citizens who have U.S. passports who are fighting in the Middle East with ISIL forces." (ISIS is sometimes referred to as ISIL and now calls itself the Islamic State).

But the Pentagon soon corrected Hagel's comment, saying the 100 count is the total number of Americans fighting for any of the various groups fighting in Syria, some of which are more militant than others -- and some of which are even allied with the U.S. Indeed, Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center -- the government office tasked with assessing terrorist threats -- also confirmed that 100 is the total count of the various Americans fighting in Syria and not a count of those fighting for ISIS.

Hagel's comment is only the latest inflated claim regarding the number of Americans fighting with ISIS. Last week, the Washington Times cited anonymous official sources who said there are 300 Americans fighting with ISIS, despite the Pentagon estimating the figure to be more like a dozen.

True, a dozen is still too many. But it is important to remember that just because these Americans are fighting with ISIS, it doesn't necessarily translate into a significant threat to the American homeland.

One need only look at the example of Somalia to see why.

The last sizeable group of Americans who went overseas to fight with an al Qaeda-aligned group are the 29 Americans known to have traveled to fight with the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab after the 2006 invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian army. However, none of those 29 subsequently planned or conducted a terrorist attack inside the United States, according to a survey of more than 240 jihadist terrorism cases since September 11 conducted by the New America Foundation.

Indeed, for more than a third of the American militants who fought with Al-Shabaab, going to Somalia was a one-way ticket. In 2008, a missile strike in Somalia killed Ruben Shumpert, a resident of Seattle. A year later, Burhan Hassan, a 17-year-old from Minneapolis, was killed in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Abdirizak Bihi, Hassan's uncle, reportedly said at the time, "We believe he was killed because he would have been a key person in the investigation into the recruitment (of young Somali men) here in Minneapolis."

Al-Shabaab militants also are said to have killed Alabama native Omar Hammami, who joined the group in 2006 and took a high-profile position in its media operations before his death last year.

At least two Americans fighting for Al-Shabaab died while conducting suicide attacks in Somalia.

Shirwa Ahmed, a 26-year-old from Minnesota, became the first known American to conduct a suicide bombing for an al Qaeda-associated group when he drove a car packed with bombs into a government compound on October 28, 2008.

In 2011, meanwhile, the FBI confirmed that Farah Mohamed Beledi, a 27-year-old Minnesota man who was born in Somalia and moved to the United States at age 12, was killed while attempting to detonate a suicide bomb in Somalia.

In addition to the American militants who died in Somalia, six were arrested, four when they returned to the West and two in East Africa. Kamal Said Hassan, a 28-year-old Minneapolis man who traveled to Somalia and attended an Al-Shabaab training camp before returning to the United States, was arrested and in 2009 pleaded guilty to supporting Al-Shabaab.

In another case, Mahamud Said Omar, an American resident who helped organize Al-Shabaab's recruitment pipeline and visited a training camp, was arrestedin the Netherlands in 2009. Omar was extradited to the United States and in 2012 was convicted on terrorism charges.

Of course, the fact that 13 of the 29 American militants who fought in Somalia remain at large is a reminder that the CIA and FBI also need to pay attention to the potential threat posed by American foreign fighters in Syria. But this is no reason for U.S. officials to overhype the threat posed by ISIS to the United States.

Yes, Americans should always be mindful of the threats posed by extremists. But as the case of U.S. citizens in Somalia suggests, Syria could very well end up being a graveyard for Americans fighting there rather than a launch pad for attacks on the United States. 

U.S. Amb. Power: Russia can and must end this war in Ukraine

You can read the clinical part, but this is the upshot, according to U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power:

"This war can be ended. Russia can end this war. Russia must end this war."

Unfortunately Ms. Power is speaking more strongly than President Obama himself. Why?

I understand that Mr. Obama is reluctant to involve U.S. power in yet another international conflict. The U.S. already has Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc. to deal with. And many Americans are more concerned about one Israeli killed by Hamas rockets than the American killed in MH flight 17, not to mention hundreds of others killed on the Malaysian Airlines flight from at least 11 countries, including at least 80 children.

But Ukraine is Europe.  Europe is different.  And the shooting down of this plane is international terrorism by any definition. Hopefully this will be wake-up call to the EU; but more importantly, it should be a wake-up call to President Obama and the United States. America must lead; America must bring this Russia-inspired and Russia-supplied and -supported war to an end.  

MH flight 17 showed that this war cannot be contained to Eastern Ukraine. Maybe that's how Russian president Vladimir Putin envisioned it a few months ago to boost his domestic approval rating, but no more: his heedless gorillas with guns have murdered 298  non-Ukrainians, including scores of Europeans. Russia is now at war with Europe, the West and the civilized world, in the bloodiest air catastrophe in history. (And now some of these pro-Russian militia groups are looting the bodies -- and taking some for ransom -- in what has been described as the "biggest crime scene in history.")

For my Russian-speaking friends, I urge you to read this article by Pavel Felgenhauer, a Russian military analyst who points out the obvious lies and logical inconsistencies in Russia's and the terrorists' arguments:  "Павел ФЕЛЬГЕНГАУЭР: Малайзийский «Боинг» — ошибка, которую никто не признает."

What President Obama should understand is that Russian public opinion is a non-factor. They are complete brainwashed zombies. So says prominent Russian liberal pundit Yulia Latynina:  "Юлия Латынина: Главное — чей это 'Бук'."  President Putin cannot be influenced from within Russian, only from strong outside Western pressure.

Beinart: Russia's invasion of Ukraine ended the 'War on Terror'

Interesting thesis.

For what it's worth, I've been saying all along the GWOT was a distraction for the U.S.  For the past 12 years we've been swatting mosquitoes and calling them dragons.

And, call me racist or whatever, but Europe is different. It just is. War in Europe will always get America's attention.

Finally, I want to give belated props not to Sarah Palin, but Mitt Romney, who declared during the 2012 campaign that Russia was America's "No. 1 geopolitical foe."  FOX is having a high time resurrecting that sound bite. Keep in mind though: Obama never disagreed with Romney. There are just certain obvious things that a presidential candidate can afford to say that a sitting U.S. President cannot. 

Ukraine: Is This How the War on Terror Ends?

By Peter Beinart

March 4, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/ukraine-is-this-how-the-war-on-terror-ends/284214/

U.S. intel. director: Earth is (still) a scary place

We're all gonna dieeeeeeeeeeeeee!  Aaaaaaaah!

Aw Lawdy, please save us CIA and NSA, save us!  

Let me quote Michael Cohen at length [emphasis mine] in his critique of the annual world threat assessment that the National Intelligence Director is obliged to give the Senate:

There is the habitually frightening adjective war front, "an assertive Russia, a competitive China; a dangerous, unpredictable North Korea, a challenging Iran." The sober-minded might look at these countries and conclude that a more accurate set of descriptors would be "an enfeebled and corrupt Russia, an economically slowing and environmentally challenged China, a contained and sort of predictable North Korea and an isolated and diplomatically-engaged Iran". But that would be a pretty lame threat assessment, wouldn't it?

Then there are the really scary sounding threats that aren't actually threats to Americans. Things like, "lingering ethnic divisions in the Balkans, perpetual conflict and extremism in Africa; violent political struggles in … the Ukraine, Burma, Thailand and Bangladesh." [...]  [B]ut the idea that any of these are serious "crises" or "threats" to America and its citizens is ludicrous.

This is what makes Clapper's argument – and indeed the entire process of writing a "worldwide threat assessment" so fundamentally unserious and distorting. America doesn't face a single truly serious security threat. We are a remarkably safe and secure nation, protected by two oceans, an enormous and highly effective military and dozens upon dozens of like-minded allies and friends around the world. Truly we have nothing to fear – except perhaps global climate change, which oddly merits a one-paragraph mention (pdf) in this year's threat assessment.

To listen to Clapper and others in the intelligence community one might never know that inter-state war has largely disappeared and that wars in general are in the midst of a multi-decade decline. 

And let's not forget that Clapper is the same guy who lied to Congress about not spying on U.S. citizens!:

The irony of all this is that Clapper has been under fire for months now because he allegedly lied to Congress over the extent to which the National Security Agency was collecting phone and e-mail records of individual Americans.

Yet, the yarn he spun on Capitol Hill last week was far worse than that: deceiving Americans about the nature of the world today and the threats facing the country. But in a political environment in which threat mongering and exaggeration is the norm rather than the exception, Clapper not only gets a pass – hardly anyone even noticed.

I've had enough of these obvious lies from "serious" spies protecting their administrative turf and bloated billion-dollar budgets.  There is no way that the U.S. is in more danger now than during the Cold War.  We have no enemies who can attack us, save Russia with its ICBMs. Terrorism is a mosquito on the list of actual threats to American citizens.

The James Clappers of the U.S. military-intelligence community might bamboozle and intimidate our Congressmen and journalists with their doomsday speeches, but not me.  What about you?

James Clapper might as well be called director of US fearmongering

By Michael Cohen

February 6, 2014 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3mgk3

War Nerd: Saudis use jihad as a release valve

Saudi jihadist motto: What happens outside Saudi Arabia stays outside Saudi Arabia.

I hope soon more Americans will realize that America's two greatest "allies" in the Mideast, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are doing the most of any country to get Americans killed by terrorists.

And I'm glad to see the War Nerd is back at it, edumacating us about blood, guts, war and politics.

The War Nerd: Saudis, Syria, and “Blowback”

By Gary Brecher 

December 19, 2013 | Pando Daily

URL: http://pando.com/2013/12/19/the-war-nerd-saudis-syria-and-blowback/

Attack on California's grid shows lack of 'homeland security'

I've been saying for years that terrorism in the U.S. is too easy, hence all these screenings at airports, cyber security, NSA spying and fighting the terrorists "over there" are big distractions.

You don't buy a fancy home security system and then leave your front door unlocked and the windows open.    

Partly, the lack of focus on physical security of our key infrastructure such as electrical grid, ports and bridges is that the problem is very big and yet not at all sexy; and partly because simply physical security like sheet metal screens doesn't lend itself to outsourcing to the big military-industrial contractors that charge $ billions for expensive technological solutions.  

'Military-Style' Raid on California Power Station Spooks U.S.

BY Shane Harris

December 27, 2013 | Foreign Policy 

URL: http://complex.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/12/24/power-station-military-assault#sthash.t4ESArKb.dpuf

Is it good the Saudis are mad at Obama?

I meant to post this earlier. But it's not too late because we're still seeing op-eds such as this one on Fox: "Saudis lament, 'we have been stabbed in the back by Obama'".

Just like Christianity is pretty diverse, so is Islam. Most people know there are Shiites (such as in Iran, Lebanon and Syria) and Sunnis (most everywhere else). There are further branches of each of those sects. Perhaps it's a crude analogy, but let's call Wahhabism, a branch of Sunni Islam, the Southern Baptist Church of Islam. 

And Saudi Arabia is the home and sponsor of Wahhabism. It sends billions of petro-dollars around the globe to preach this ultra-conservative brand of Islam in Islamic countries that is entirely compatible with Ismalist and terrorist ideology. And it is engaged in a religious conflict with Iran, the #1 sponsor of Shiite Muslims. As Zakaria points out, Saudi Arabia has a sizable Shiite majority located in oil-rich areas that it wants to keep down.  

Risibly, Saudi Arabia, an absolutist monarchy, calls itself the #1 Arab ally of the United States, which is supposedly engaged in a global war on Islamic terrorism.

See the disconnect?  

So kudos to Fareed Zakaria for calling a spade a spade. And if the Saudis are indeed upset with President Obama, then... maybe he's onto something.

The Saudis Are Mad? Tough!

By Fareed Zakaria

November 11, 2013 | TIME

URL: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2156259,00.html#ixzz2ojBAuFe4

We don't negotiate with terrorists

"We don't want to detonate a bomb in Washington. We really don't!  So why are you threatening to make us detonate a bomb? Just give us what we want and everything will be fine."

If a member of al Qaeda said this to President Obama trying to get his demands met, we would call it what it was: terrorism.

It's a sad attempt at nifty rhetoric (see article below) and nobody's going to fall for it. 

So think: that's just what the GOP Congress is threatening -- to shut down the federal government unless Obama agrees to de-fund a law that was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court.  

That's not "checks and balances" stuff, folks. Such tactics were not written into the Constitution or ever anticipated by the Founding Fathers. That's political terrorism.  And the hostages are you and I.

Like I said before, for Democrats' political fortunes, I hope the GOP tries to hold us hostage to nullify a law passed by Congress because it will backfire on Republicans. But for America's sake, for our economy's sake, I hope the GOP wises up and steps back from the brink. 

Cruz: Ignore Media, GOP ‘Can Win’ Defunding Obamacare Argument

By Katrina Trinko

August 21, 2013 | National Review

URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/356332/cruz-ignore-media-gop-can-win-defunding-obamacare-argument-katrina-trinko

An 'orgy of drones' in Yemen

I'm re-posting this article in full because I don't think it made front page news in the U.S. that we launched nine drones strikes in 10 days in Yemen and killed at least 36 "suspected militants."

We absolutely must know about these drone strikes in our name, ostensibly to protect us, that create fear and hatred toward the U.S.

Then we turn around and ask, incredulously, "Why do these crazy Muslims hate America?"

Yemen Drone Strikes Bring New Round Of Terror To Embattled Country

By Joshua Hersh

August 11, 2013 | Huffington Post

On Friday night, Farea al-Muslimi, a young Yemeni journalist and activist, went for a drive with a friend around the capital city of his home, Sanaa.

It was a holiday weekend, the second day of the Muslim holy festival of Eid al-Fitr, and the streets were calm. But what struck al-Muslimi the most as they crossed through the town, was that they hardly encountered any security presence.

"We didn't see a single checkpoint," he told HuffPost. "No one buys the idea that there is a security threat here. They simply don't see it -- I don't see it."

Over the previous week, the United States and other Western nations ramped up terror alerts about Yemen, a small nation on the tip of the Arabian peninsula that attracts a disproportionate amount of American attention. A recent terrorism alert prompting the closures of nearly two dozen American embassies around the Arab world was "emanating from Yemen," the U.S. said, and earlier in the week American citizens were urged to flee Yemen. The staff of the U.S. embassy there was spirited to Germany on a military cargo plane.

However, as the week progressed, signs of terror did not take the form of an attack by al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula, an increasingly powerful franchise of the feared terrorist organization, but instead, as Haykal Bafana, a Sanaa-based Yemeni lawyer, put it recently, of an "orgy of drones."

Over the past 10 days, at least nine American drone strikes have been conducted across the country's remote provinces, most recently on Saturday evening. At least 36 people, all of them immediately deemed "suspected militants" by the Yemeni government, were killed, according to wire service counts. On Thursday alone, there were three drone attacks, an unprecedented rate; Saturday's was the fifth in 72 hours.

For those left in Yemen, it has been like living in a universe parallel to the one described in American terror alerts, Bafana said on Saturday. "It's like there are two different Yemens," he said. "The one the U.S. and Yemeni government claims is always under a terrorist threat, and the one we actually live in, with drones. It's like they stepped through the looking glass."

For Farea al-Muslimi, that's meant a week of fear and anger. "You can tell how frustrated the people here are," al-Muslimi said, when reached by phone late on Friday.

Earlier in the week, he said, when an American P-3 Orion spy plane circled over Sanaa for nearly 10 hours, loudly buzzing as residents tried to celebrate the start of Eid, residents stopped in their tracks to protest. "People were standing in the street and screaming at it," he said.

Al-Muslimi became something of an American household name, at least in the relatively small circle of people who monitor America's counter-terrorism policies and drone usage, earlier this year when he live-Tweeted accounts of a drone strike from his family's village, Wessab.

He subsequently traveled to Washington, D.C., where he testified before Congress about the experience, telling lawmakers that drone strikes were destroying America's image in Yemen, and driving ordinary citizens into the arms of al Qaeda and other militants. "What violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strike achieved in an instant," he said at the time.

In the ensuing months, amid a growing atmosphere of dissent about the use and abuse of drone warfare in Washington, President Barack Obama found himself compelled to speak publicly about the policy. In a speech in May, he acknowledged America's role in drone strikes and pledged to create a legal framework for oversight of the program.

But The New York Times and others have since reported that the reality in targeted areas like Yemen shows that drone policy is anything but reformed.

In Yemen, there have already been 22 strikes this year, close to the pace in 2012 when Obama ordered a record 42 drone strikes,according to the Long War Journal. And in Pakistan, another frequent target of American drones, there were more strikes in July than in any month since January.

The history of U.S. drone wars in Yemen includes a number of tactical successes, of course, including the strike that killed feared al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen. But it's also littered with devastating failures: innocent families and children have been hit by misguided missiles, first-aid responders have found themselves targeted by a practice known as "double-tapping," and even some prominent anti-al Qaeda clerics have been assassinated.

The day after Obama was reelected for his second term, for instance, he ordered a strike that killed a tribal leader known for negotiating with al Qaeda militants to reduce their lethality. More recently, officials acknowledged that a strike last summer killed Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, a popular sheik who a few days earlier delivered a sermon on the evils of al Qaeda.

Mohammed al-Qadhi, a Sanaa-based Yemeni journalist, said that so far there is no conclusive evidence that the current attacks killed innocents. Others, including Bafana, who tracks the strikes through his own network, said the first strikes last week in Hadhramauat killed at least four civilians, including a child.

Either way, al-Qadhi said the latest strikes are producing an uptick in popular discontent and protest -- on Facebook and Twitter, in the targeted villages, and at the now-vacant American embassy in Sanaa.

"People feel they don't have a government anymore," al-Qadhi said by phone. "They feel we don't have a government to attack the militants, so the Americans are handling it for us, and they are encroaching onto the sovereignty of Yemen."

The killings, he added, "may be good for Americans but in the end it doesn't solve the problem completely, especially if some civilians are killed. It just creates a kind of sympathy with al Qaeda. And I think al Qaeda will not stop attacking. I think they will retaliate, and they will fire back again in retaliation to these attacks."

The practitioners of America's counterterrorism strategy also sometimes seem at a loss to explain the U.S. policy's objectives.

“It’s too early to tell whether we’ve actually disrupted anything,” a top U.S. official told The Washington Post this week, of the most recent round of strikes. “What the U.S. government is trying to do here is to buy time."

To al-Muslimi, the return of drone warfare almost reflects an aimlessness among American policymakers. "Just like troubled teenagers with bad parents might run to the addiction of drugs and alcohol when it has problems, Americans are running to drones when they have terrorism problems," he said. "Alcohol makes you forget your failures, and for the Americans it seems like drones are for when they want to forget their counter-terrorism failures. It's senseless."

Meanwhile, he said, this week's action may have made some Americans feel better, but it's only increasing the sense of terror in Yemen.

"When there is a normal war, people can hide, or they can stay away from the military -- they can make choices and be careful," al-Muslimi said."But when drones come, you just don't know when you'll be next. The fear is incredible."

The whistleblowers are winning

I'll say it again: I have yet to hear any American say, "I wish I didn't know about the NSA's spying on us."  And if more and more Americans are turning against the NSA's domestic spying, then that means the whistleblowers are winning:

Meanwhile, Snowden and Glenn Greenwald and Wikileaks are winning. At the outset Snowden said his biggest fear was that people would see "the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society and that 'nothing will change'". But his disclosures have already created a new debate, and political change will follow. 

Two weeks ago there was a surprisingly close call in the US House of Representatives, with the majority of House Democrats and 94 of 234 Republicans defying their House (and Senate) leadership, the White House, and the national security establishment in a vote to end the NSA's mass collection of phone records. The amendment was narrowly defeated by a vote of 205 to 217, but it was clear that "this is only the beginning," as John Conyers (D-MI), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee announced. 

A week later Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Democratic Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called a hearing where he challenged the Obama administration's claims that the NSA dragnet had been effective in disrupting terrorist plots. According to Leahy, the classified list that he had been shown of "terrorist events" did not show that "dozens or even several terrorist plots" had been thwarted by the NSA's surveillance of domestic phone calls.

It is beginning to sink in that the main target of the NSA's massive spying programmes is not terrorism but the American people themselves (as well as other non-terrorist populations throughout the world). 

Weisbrot sums it up with a few provocative questions:

And as Washington threatens to worsen relations with Russia - which together with the United States has most of the nuclear weapons in the world - over Snowden's asylum there, it's hard not to wonder about this fanatical pursuit of someone Obama dismissed as a "29-year-old hacker". Is it because he out-smarted a multi-billion dollar "intelligence community" of people who think they are really very smart but are now looking rather incompetent? 

If Snowden really leaked information that harmed US national security, why haven't any of these "really very smart" people been fired? Are we to believe that punishing this whistleblower is important enough to damage relations with other countries and put at risk all kinds of foreign policy goals, but the breach of security isn't enough for anyone important to be fired? Or is this another indication, like thegenerals telling Obama what his options were in Afghanistan, of the increasing power of the military/national security apparatus over our elected officials?

It's another matter that whistleblowers and journalists themselves may suffer personally for their revelations.  For their suffering for the sake of our liberty we can only thank them.

UPDATE (08.11.2013): Julian Assange called Obama's decision to reform Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act a victory for Edward Snowden, despite Obama's denials that it has anything to do with Snowden. Yeah, right.

Snowden, Greenwald and Wikileaks are winning

By Mark Weisbrot

August 7, 2013 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/08/201387957162873.html