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November 06, 2009 C-SPAN

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October 27, 2009 C-SPAN

Congressman Walter Jones lays out an impassioned plea for his colleagues to "please move very carefully with a fully defined plan on what the military is supposed to accomplish in Afghanistan"--a great speech.

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From Democracy Now--Judge Rejects Blackwater Attempt to Dismiss Cases Filed by Iraqi Victims:

A federal judge has rejected a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince. We speak to award-winning investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent, Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about Sudan in a minute, but right now we turn to a major decision here in the United States. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, a federal judge has rejected a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince. At the same time, the judge ruled that lawyers for the Iraqi plaintiffs need to amend and re-file their cases to provide more specific details on the alleged crimes before a decision can be made on whether the lawsuits will proceed.

Susan Burke, the lead attorney for the Iraqi victims, told The Nation magazine she was “very pleased with the ruling.” While Blackwater’s spokesperson, Stacy DeLuke said, quote, “We are confident that [the plaintiffs] will not be able to meet the high standard specified in [the judge’s] opinion.”

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Democracy Now! video stream by award-winning investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent, Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His article on the ruling is available online at TheNation.com.

Jeremy, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s being played by the mainstream media as a huge defeat for those who are taking on Blackwater, but you have a very different take. Explain.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, when I got up yesterday morning and saw all these headlines from the Associated Press and other media outlets saying that a federal judge had tossed out all of the lawsuits against Blackwater, I was actually quite stunned. I mean, that would have been a devastating development for the Iraqi victims of the company.

But then I actually got the fifty-six-page ruling from Judge T.S. Ellis, who, by the way, is a Reagan appointee, and I read it. And actually, what you see in this document is that it’s a very well-thought-out legal argument by Judge Ellis, where he’s essentially saying to Blackwater, “Your argument that you can’t be sued as a private company under the Alien Tort Statute is false. Your argument that private individuals or companies cannot commit war crimes is false.”

AMY GOODMAN: Whoops. Looks like we just lost Jeremy. Jeremy is speaking to us by video stream. We’re going to try to get him back on, and we’ll try to get him on the phone. But right now—we’ll do that for the end of the show—we will turn to our next guest. That, consider just a tease for the rest of that subject.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: We go back right now to Jeremy Scahill to try to complete that conversation on the issue of a federal judge rejecting a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater, who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince.

Jeremy, we’ve got you back on the Democracy Now! video stream. Very quickly, explain the significance of the case.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, basically, these are five cases brought by Iraqi civilians that were allegedly wounded by Blackwater and the families of Iraqis that were killed by Blackwater. These are very high-stakes cases. Blackwater is fighting passionately to have them thrown out. They’ve made arguments that they, as a company, can’t be sued, that it would violate the rights of the President of United States to make battlefield decisions, and if Blackwater was prosecuted, that would infringe upon the President’s rights. They’ve said that they, as a company, can’t be sued for war crimes, because war crimes can only be committed by state actors or nations. And what we saw here is that this conservative Judge Ellis said to Blackwater, “No, none of that is valid.”

What he did do, though, is he referenced a Supreme Court decision in May, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which really reversed decades of case law and made it very, very difficult, more difficult, for plaintiffs to have their cases moved to the trial phase. In other words, the bar was set much higher to proceed to trial. So what the judge said to Susan Burke and the Center for Constitutional Rights, the lawyers representing these Iraqis, “You need to re-file your cases with more evidence, and then we’ll take it from there.”

So, while it’s being portrayed by the corporate media as a judge tossing out these cases, that quite clearly is not the case. This was actually a pretty significant defeat for Blackwater and a victory not only for the Iraqis in this case, but also for those lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights that have spent decades trying to apply US laws to crimes committed abroad.

Blackwater remains in very, very hot water, not only because of this case, but also the US Justice Department is going to begin its prosecution of five Blackwater operatives for manslaughter charges relating to the Nisoor Square massacre in September of ’07. This is very high-stakes stuff, and the corporate media got it basically absolutely wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, we’ll leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning journalist.

Seemingly with each passing day, General Stanley McChrystal grows in the esteem of President Obama's conservative foes. After having savaged General Eric Shinseki for his pre-Iraq war testimony that the occupation would require "several hundreds of thousands" of American troops, Republicans have seized on McChrystal's public demands for more forces in Afghanistan as their latest battering ram to bludgeon Obama on national security. And as it turns out, McChrystal's inadvertent leak earlier this month regarding a classified CIA analysis puts him in the same company as Republicans John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, Pat Roberts and, of course, Dick Cheney.

McChrystal in his leaked report and unprecedented public speech in London has put tremendous pressure on President Obama to quadruple the Bush-era commitment to the Afghan conflict. General McChrystal didn't merely announce that short of deploying as many as 60,000 more troops, the U.S. effort in Afghanistan "will likely result in failure." He also set out to demolish straw man alternatives to his escalated counterinsurgency plan, including:

"A paper has been written that recommends that we use a plan called 'Chaosistan', and that we let Afghanistan become a Somalia-like haven of chaos that we simply manage from outside."

But as Newsweek reported, that "paper" to which General McChrystal casually referred is almost surely a classified CIA assessment:

Two U.S. intelligence officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive matter, say that the reference almost certainly comes from a recently published, and secret, CIA analysis titled "Chaosistan" (not "Chaostan"). Prepared by a "red team" of CIA analysts, the document, says one official, picks apart conventional analyses of the war and explains how forces inside Afghanistan--from hostile ethnic groups to intrusive neighbors to societal damage caused by past Taliban rule--work against the notions of a central Afghan government. The paper is not quite the policy proposal McChrystal implied it was, say the officials, since intelligence analysts don't generally recommend policy options.

Of course, the same Republican voices which lauded the leak of McChrystal's report and his UK grandstanding will doubtless remain silent now. Because while many in the GOP called for the prosecution of those behind the publication of the NSA domestic surveillance story, they themselves selectively leaked classified national security information for partisan political purposes.

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Is there a more perfect example of why Republicans should never be at the table when discussing our next moves in Afghanistan? Watch how Sen. John "On Any Sunday" McCain glosses over the constant cheerleading he and his GOP cohorts did in Iraq, despite there never being a connection between Saddam and 9/11, despite there never being any real WMDs, despite the fact that we created a vacuum in the country that enabled the burgeoning of al Qaeda in Iraq.

KING: Many see a parallel to Iraq, in the sense that it’s been eight years in Afghanistan, now it’s been billions of dollars, we have shed American blood there and yet, a European commission report out just this past week says for all the efforts to train the Afghan National Army, there’s a 24% rate of attrition. And others have said that not only do they leave, but they take their weapons with them and some of them still get paid. What has gone wrong and what is the United States doing wrong when it comes to the fundamental challenge of getting the Afghans ready to do this themselves?

McCAIN: First of all, rightly or wrongly, we were focused on Iraq. I happened to believe we had to win there. Whether we should have gone in or not, weapons of mass destruction, you’ve covered on other days. But I think the important point here is that again, if the military of a country does not think they’re going to succeed, you have all kinds of problems. Look at the total collapse of the Iraqi Army at one point after we had…we had built them up.

Um, hello? Do you not get that what YOU think is important is highly questionable when you can't get the fundamentals right? Honestly, you think the problem of attrition in the Afghan army has to do with them worried that they won't succeed? Do you even know what success looks like in Afghanistan? Do you have the hubris to assume that it looks the same for the Afghanis?

As Frank Rich says, Two Wrongs Makes Another Fiasco:

Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess — even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.

But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.

To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

All I can say is if John McCain is pushing for troop surges in Afghanistan, that's all the more reason for me to consider withdrawal.

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October 01, 2009 C-SPAN

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From Saturday Night Live Oct. 3, 2009.

The Mudflats: The real story behind the "rogue" in Palin's new book

digby: The right may be confused but they are thrilled to be wallowing in their domestic paranoia once again.

Pam's House Blend: Facebook poll - "Should Obama be killed?"

Taylor Marsh: In Iraq, General Ray Odierno and Ambassador Christopher Hill are at loggerheads

The Peking Duck: World Bank Head: The dollar will lose its place to the euro and reninbi

The Satirical Political Report: Forget Chicago as Host City. here's what Obama should really pitch to the IOC

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From Democracy Now:

A group of Iraqi labor leaders are here in the United States trying to bring international attention to the lack of a basic labor law in Iraq guaranteeing the right to unionize without repression. Although the United States has scrapped several Saddam Hussein-era laws since the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, a 1987 law banning unions in all public-sector workplaces remains in place. Last week the AFL-CIO adopted a resolution defending Iraqi labor rights. We speak to Iraqi labor leaders Rasim Awadi and Falah Alwan.

Once again, Amy Goodman is covering the stories the mainstream media won't touch. Most of their coverage of Iraq has fallen completely off the map. I'm glad to see the AFL-CIO getting involved in trying to do something to make these people's lives better after we went over there and blew up their country.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Iraq, where Vice President Biden recently pressed Iraqi leaders to enact further regulatory and financial protections to make Iraq more attractive to foreign investors. Speaking to Iraqi officials in Baghdad’s Green Zone last week, Biden called for the Iraqi Parliament to adopt laws to offer more incentives on oil concessions. He also noted the Iraq Business and Investment Conference in Washington next month could encourage private US investment in the country.

Well, as the Vice President was in Iraq promoting privatization last week, a group of Iraqi labor leaders were here in the United States attending the AFL-CIO convention, trying to bring international attention to the lack of basic labor law in Iraq guaranteeing the right to unionize without repression.

Although the United States has scrapped several Saddam Hussein-era laws since the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, a 1987 law banning unions in all public-sector workplaces remains in place.

The AFL-CIO adopted a resolution defending Iraqi labor rights last week, and US Labor Against the War is urging Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to press the Iraqi government to protect labor rights.

You can watch the rest of the interview and read the transcript at Democracy Now's web site.

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September 08, 2009 CBS The Late Show

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Two political pundits on opposite sides of the aisle found themselves agreeing Sunday on ABC's "This Week." Both George Will and Katrina Vanden Heuvel favor a withdrawal from Afghanistan. In his Washington Post column, George Will said it was time to get out of Afghanistan. In another column, Will said that that US work in Iraq is done.

Vanden Heuvel agreed. "I think there's a coalition, George. We can go on the road. A coalition for realistic foreign policy. But for these neocons attack you, these people should not be in our political life. They have no credibility. They should be held accountable for the Iraq debacle."

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Rachel Maddow doesn't back down an inch in what was really a pretty amazing interview with Tom Ridge. Amazing in that we haven't seen enough of them and how sad it was these kind of questions weren't asked of the Bush administration by anyone in the press before we invaded that country. At the end of what was a three part interview, Rachel calls Ridge out for his attempt at revisionist history.

Rachel asks him if he still believes that Iraq had WMD and Ridge says he does not. She asks him if he really doesn't believe that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld "had any role in skewing the intelligence to a foregone conclusion" and "an intelligence community error and not a politicized decision". Ridge of course says that no one in the Bush administration would have done something like that and that he believed that they just wanted to keep the country safe.

Maddow: I think that is an eloquent argument and I have to tell you….I think you making, I think you making that argument right now is why Republicans after the Bush and Cheney administration are not going to get back the country’s trust on national security. To look back at that decision and say we got it wrong but it was in good faith and not acknowledge the foregone conclusion that we were going to invade Iraq that pervaded every decision that was made about intelligence, looking back at that decision making process, it sounds like you’re making the argument you would have made the same decision again.

Americans need to believe that our government would not make that wrong a decision, would not make such a foregone, take such a foregone conclusion to such an important issue that the counter, the intelligence that proved the opposite point was all discounted, that the intelligence was combed through for any bit that would support the foregone conclusion of the policy makers. The system was broken and if you don’t see that the system was broken and you think that it was just that the Intel was wrong, I think that you’re one of the most trusted voices on national security for the Republican Party, and I think that’s the elephant in the room.

I don’t think you guys get back your credibility on national security until you realize, that was a wrong decision made by policy makers, it wasn’t the spies fault.

Ridge: Well, I think you’re suggesting that it was only being driven by quite obviously, the people who made the decision knew more about the threat than you and I do, and again I think it’s a, it’s a pretty radical conclusion to suggest the men and women entrusted with the safety of this country would predicate a decision upon any other basis than to keep America safe. Late on it may have proven that some of the information was inaccurate, but there were plenty of reasons to go into Iraq at the time, the foremost were the weapons of mass destruction. That obviously had proven to be faulty. But the fact of the matter is at that time, given what they knew, they knew more than you and I did, it seemed to be the right thing to do and the decision was made in what they considered to be the best interest of our country.

We’ve been litigating it now for about five or six years. I guess we’re going to continue to litigate it and historians and the final history hasn’t been written because of Iraq. If some form of self government, some form of democracy ultimately is achieved in Iraq and it’s not going to look exactly like ours, but you know, the Muslim world does admire freedom of speech. The Muslim world does admire democracy. As difficult as it is over there, the notion that we went in improperly will be obviously reversed and the history is yet to be written. Democracy in Iraq…

Maddow: Reversed?

Ridge: Well, yeah. Democracy in Iraq will make a huge difference not just for the men and women and the people and the families in Iraq, but for the entire region for a lot of reasons.

Maddow: If you can go back in time and sell the American people on the idea that 4000 Americans ought to lose their lives and we ought to lose those trillions of dollars for democracy in Iraq, you have a wilder imagination than I do. We were sold that war because of 9-11. We were sold that war because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction and this guy didn’t have them and our government should have known it and frankly, a lot of people believe that our government did know it and that it was a cynical decision and maybe everybody wasn’t in on it and maybe that is a radical thing to conclude...

Ridge: Well, I don’t share that point of view. I know you do. I’m not going to convince you and you’re not going to convince me, but I really appreciate the civil way we’ve had this discussion. In frankly I think it would advance our interest as a country a lot further and a lot faster if we could have the discussion such as this.

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September 01, 2009 PBS Newshour

MARGARET WARNER: Just two weeks ago, outside NATO headquarters in Kabul, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-filled car at a checkpoint. The blast killed seven people and wounded 91.

But the real target, said a Taliban spokesman, was not the NATO mission, but the U.S. Embassy, part of the same huge installation just down a closed road from the NATO site. As more American troops and treasure pour into Afghanistan, there are new questions about whether one of the most tempting U.S. targets for terrorists, the American Embassy, is being adequately protected.

Today, the Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog group, laid out allegations of serious misconduct and security lapses by ArmorGroup. That's the private security company that guards the Embassy, under a $189 million contract with the State Department.

ArmorGroup, which is owned by a Florida-based firm called Wackenhut deploys a force of 450 men in Kabul. One hundred and fifty are so-called expats, former military and policemen from English-speaking countries. Three hundred are so-called Gurkhas from Nepal or Northern India.

The watchdog group's letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today detailed allegations from more than a dozen current and former expat ArmorGroup guards.

It said: "The evidence collected calls into question ArmorGroup and Wackenhut's ability to provide effective security of the embassy" -- among the allegations, routine 14-hour days, causing severe sleep deprivation for guards, chronic understaffing, causing frequently revoked leave time, inability to communicate between English-speaking expats and Nepalese Gurkhas, ritual hazing, lewd activity, prostitute use, and alcohol abuse by some expat guards and their supervisors, and low morale, causing 90 to 100 percent annual turnover in the guard force.

Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project, said the security implications are enormous.

DANIELLE BRIAN, executive director, Project on Government Oversight: We are tremendously concerned because we have a guard force that is sleep-deprived. They are working 14-hour days for weeks on end, with no leave.

They are tremendously demoralized, seeing their supervisors engaged in really bizarre and deviant misconduct. So, it's ruining the -- the chain of command and the level of trust. You have guards that can't actually speak the same language to each other. So, if there were an incident, the capacity to respond quickly is -- is -- is practically zero.

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(Periodically getting up close and personal, even in the 1950's)

Most people lately have assumed our involvement in the Middle East (other than Israel), has been a thing of recent vintage. It goes back a long, long ways, certainly our military involvement extends back at least to the Lebanon situation of July 31, 1958 where religious and political factions lead to an overthrow of the government in Lebanon. Similarly, a wave of assassinations and overthrows also took place between Jordan and Iraq (the assassination of King Faisal of Iraq, leading to a series of military regimes, ending with Saddam Hussein in the 1960's). Cold War tensions, brought on by military maneuvers on the USSR/Iranian border and the rise of Gamel Abdul Nasser of Egypt and just a general shift in the political landscape of the Middle East, brought about considerable nervousness in some quarters, particularly in Britain, France and the U.S.

UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was quick to point out these tensions in a news conference during a quickly called UN Security Council session.

Henry Cabot Lodge: “What is really happening is plain for all to see if you but lift up our eyes. The overthrow of the lawful government of Iraq, beginning with the assassination of the Crown Prince, and which was followed by a wave of assassinations throughout that unhappy country, is one dreadful fact. Then the attempt to subvert and overthrow Jordan, of which we have just heard, is another. And of course the effort directed from without to subvert Lebanon is familiar to everyone. That there is in the Middle East a common purpose to take over, everywhere. All at once. Clearly, there is a purpose, masterminded from one source. You can read all about it in the Cairo newspapers, or listen to the incessant radio broadcasts from Cairo to other Arab countries.”

The culprit in this case appeared to be Egypt, as Nassar was emerging as a potent leader in the Arab world. Of course, underneath all of it was the question of oil. Wouldn't you know?

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After doing another hit piece on Tammy Duckworth and editing her comments from the previous show, Chris Wallace ends the show by reading some viewer emails, one of which praises him for "holding Secretary Duckworth's feet to the fire". Tammy Duckworth is a double amputee who lost both of her legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq. Way to stay classy Wallace.