The Idiom of Political Violence: a Language Betrayed

by JASON HIRTHLER

The Chinese philosopher Confucius famously explained to his disciples that social disorder could be repaired beginning with the “rectification of names.” The principle was described by the Master this way, “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.” Laborious translations aside, Confucius had a point some 2500 years ago. One of the many consequences of an errant idiom, he said, was that punishments wouldn’t be properly distributed. In other words, the guilty would go free, while the innocent would be punished, perhaps—in a pique of cruel irony—by the oppressors that had victimized them in the first place. Think here of President Barack Obama soullessly admonishing the nation that it was better to look forward than to look back, as he let Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld slip out the back door of the White House, unpunished for their depravity. Confucius would surely have loathed the facile casuistry with which American leaders manipulate the lexicon of power. It calls to mind iconic Swedish actor Max Von Sydow, who played a memorably cranky artist manqué in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. In one scene, after ranting about the decay of modern society, he informs his listener, “If Jesus came back and saw what’s going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.” Add the Eastern sage to the list of posthumously ill.

Probably no nation has harnessed language more skillfully and insidiously than the American empire. Listening with a modern ear, Nazi propaganda sounds appallingly crude today (laughably so, were it not for the horror which that pastiche of prejudices engendered). At any rate, much of Goebbels’ fearmongering narrative would stand little chance of slipping through the editorial net of the American doctrinal system without extensive revision. The practice of inversion, when outright mendacity won’t suffice, has reached a pinnacle in Western propaganda. Everywhere one looks along the horizon of American political discourse, words have come untethered from their meanings, having been set adrift on a sea of inverted allusions.

Murder By Any Other Name

From every corner of the talk spectrum—from foreign policy to finance—the language of the Mainstream Media (MSM) is failing us. Consider some of the refashioned vocabulary of the War on Terror, changes wrought to affect exactly the kind of passivity with which they are now received. Just last week, The Intercept published insiderinformation about the President’s drone program. We learned, among other things, the essential difference between “targeted killings” and “assassination”. Namely, nothing. They are one in the same. For what is an assassination but a summary execution the victim of which is stripped of his or her right to habeas corpus or the right to a fair trial.The Intercept article demonstrated that in many instances, the Pentagon did not know whom it was killing. Those slain with a double tap hit—one following the initial strike—were said to be “enemies killed in action” by virtue of their proximity to the strike.

Water Torture

Likewise, what is the difference between waterboarding and “water dousing”? In an effort to limit its culpability for waterboarding, the CIA evidently drew mincing distinctions between waterboarding and water dousing, the latter of which adds hypothermia to the sense of suffocation induced by water torture. The Senate’s report on torture, released last year, included a quote from a CIA linguist about a “shower” given to Gul Rahman, the only detainee said to have died in CIA “custody”. The reference was to water dousing.

On the Defensive

Last week, the Maritime Theater Missile Defense Forum successfullytested the long-heralded missile defense system in Europe for the first time. The system proposes to use anti-ballistic missiles to intercept ballistic missiles presumably carrying nuclear warheads, or possibly chemical weapons. Sounds defensive enough, but in reality the ABM system has long been an element of a first-strike strategy. Anti-Ballistic Missiles were evidently the first weapons that led the U.S. to believe they could win a nuclear war, an innovation that ended the long-standing “mutually assured destruction” consensus during the Cold War. It was Donald Rumsfeld who made anti-ballistic missiles part of a first-strike outline back in 1977. No surprise that George W. Bush—with Rumsfeld perhaps as an eminence grise whispering neoconservative fairy tales in his ear—who withdrew the U.S. from the long-standing ABM treaty in 2002. Soon after, NATO established its Rapid Response Force, which it has expanded, with up to 40,000 troops and new bases in Hungary and Slovakia. Then last year President Obama committed a billion dollars to upgrading tactical nukes in Europe.

No wonder Moscow is nervous. Not least because it has always suspected the missile defense system was aimed at its borders, no matter how vociferously Washington lackeys insisted it was intended to defend Europe from imminent Iranian threats. Now with an Iranian nuclear deal in place, the system’s ostensible purpose has simply collapsed. Perhaps now more than ever, Russia sees such a system on its borders as a threat to its deterrent arsenal.

This concern is due in no small part to Washington’s pugnacious behavior since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Namely, the inflation of American audacity in relation to interventionism, its insolent disregard for international law, and a growing presumption of its exceptional role in the world. A quarrelsome empire puts every nation in its crosshairs on high alert, fatuous self-defense apologetics aside.

Anti-Zionism

In some cases, the definition changes rather than the word. Anti-Semite, for instance, has been claimed by the Zionist movement to indicate anti-Israeli attitudes rather than anti-Semite attitudes, deliberately ignoring the obvious fact that one can oppose Israeli foreign policy without being an anti-Semite, and the slightly less obvious fact that Palestinians and Arabs generally are also Semitic-speaking peoples. If each time someone was compelled to respond to “anti-Semitic” charges, he or she corrected his or her accusers with this knowledge, perhaps it would help rectify the language (to add the Confucian mantra to a Middle Eastern farrago).

We continually hear about the growth of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. References are always made to the “settlers”. But are they not first and foremost occupiers, some behaving as racist vigilantes backed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)? Should inhabitants of the gargantuan, 10-kilometer Green Zone in Baghdad have been called “settlers” during the occupation, since we knew many of them would never leave? (The largest and costliest “embassy” in the world now bears witness to this abject fact.) Likewise, shouldn’t the IDF be consistently referred to in news reportage as the “occupying force”? Anything less is likely an intentional disregard for international law. Stone throwers, too, have become terrorists worthy of a bullet in the eyes of Tel Aviv, though in fact they are lawfullyresisting an unlawful occupation, not least according to the Fourth Geneva Convention.

It might also be worth noting that just this week the House of Representatives suspended aid to the Palestinian Authority on the pretext that it couldn’t be sure the monies would be used to fight terrorism. Of course, House members were thinking of Palestinians legally resisting occupation, rather than the true terrorism in the territories, that of the IDF’s ongoing brutalization of the Palestinian community, a program to which adolescent stone flingers have now been cruelly appended.

War Trauma

The idiom of trauma too has been muted with time. Last year a coterie of physician organizations released a study that estimated, rather conservatively by their own admission, that the War on Terror has caused approximately 1.3 million deaths since 9/11. The study confined itself to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It is a staggering figure. Yet many of those who inflicted those casualties—including young American service men and women lured into the slaughterhouse of imperial conquest—may never truly escape the horrors of the wars they fought in.

Mental disorders caused by exposure to explosive violence in World War I was called “shell shock,” a term eventually deemed too graphic for the delicate public. It was replaced by “combat stress reaction,” “combat fatigue,” and “postconcussional syndrome,” supposed precursor conditions to the longer-term illness of the modern lexicon, post-traumatic stress disorder, or simply and elusively PTSD. Depression and other cognitive and physical ailments often proceed from PTSD. Half of Vietnam War veterans experienced “clinically serious stress reaction symptoms.” Percentages are smaller for the Gulf Wars and the Afghanistan campaign, but still statistically—and individually—significant.

Moderating Influences

The latest among Washington’s criminal enterprises, the entire Syrian fiasco has been fobbed off on the American populace with a single phrase: “moderate rebels.” This phrase was sufficient to satisfy the vague curiosities of the public mind, busy as it is coping with our low-wage economic recovery. Hillary Clinton too will be required to sound but a few progressive notes during her campaign in order to inter Bernie Sanders’ fledging run for the presidency. A precisely formulated lie, endlessly rehearsed, is the standard trick of the trade. In this case, it was the pretense that American was merely supporting—with nonlethal assistance at first—proper warriors of conscience rising up against a brutal dictator in Bashar al-Assad.

Forget that these were rather violent sectarian Islamists willing to partner with an imperial state to overthrow a secular one. Forget that very quickly the “rebel” community was principally comprised of ISIS fanatics and slightly less cretinous al-Qaeda affiliates in Jabhat al-Nusra. Or that the United States and its roguish mélange of fundamentalist allies abetted their opportunism with weapons, cash, and training. Or that the entire venture was fueled by jihadists drawn from Washington’s demolition job in another secular state in Libya, and from other zones of imperial conflict. It is this nasty confection of “moderate rebels” that likely launched the infamous chemical attack against a Damascan suburb, and have since threatened suicide attacks against Russian soldiers, and freely fight against a Syrian government overwhelmingly supported in its last election. Nor should we overlook the shift in the Pentagon’s training program for fighters in Syria. Sounds as though Washington may be escalating the conflict in response to Russian involvement. In any event, the new plan offers a “crash course in human rights” to jihadists; a farcical concession to principles it confesses to exalt but in practice deprioritizes, to put it mildly. “Moderation” is a term that hardly applies, in any sense, to the Syrian conflict.

Others have noted with suspicion the so-called “safe zones” along the Turkish border, supposedly intended to offer sanctuary to those fleeing the Assad regime and for “moderate” rebels to refurbish their munitions. In actuality, it is far more reasonable to suspect these “buffer zones” are simply supply lines for radical Islamists to receive their once-clandestine support from NATO coffers. Tony Cartalucci ofNew Eastern Outlook calls them “ratlines,” an fitting reference to the escape routes charted for fleeing fascists after World War Two.

You might convincingly argue that U.S. involvement in the escalation of the Syrian struggle is an act of state terrorism. Some 220,000 people have been killed, four million are refugees, and another 13 million are internally in need of humanitarian assistance. How much of this harm would never have happened had not Washington cynically intervened to advance its neoconservative game plan of capsizing the Shia Crescent? But of course, language intervenes. According to the U.S. State Department, a state can’t commit acts of terrorism, by definition. Only “subnational” groups can descend to such levels of depravity.

And there you have it, a tidy glossary of plausible deniability, blaming the victim, framing aggression as self-defense, and all manner of premeditated deceit cloaked in the patois of patriotism. If the current state of our union is in any way reflective of the wanton use of our language, Confucius is a modern Cassandra, ignored at our peril.

Jason Hirthler is a veteran of the communications industry and author of The Sins of Empire: Unmasking American Imperialism. He lives in New York City and can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/30/the-idiom-of-political-violence-a-language-betrayed/

The Billion-Dollar World Bank Experiment in Afghanistan

by MATEO PIMENTEL

A Checkered Past

Thanks to research and the minds behind it, a great deal of human progress is undeniable. Yet, equally undeniable is the fact that research has the potential to fuel awful social transgressions. Consider Amy Maxmen’s writing on genetics. She broaches a handful of research Frankensteins like human radiation experiments, Tuskegee, and Nuremburg. Although such reprehensible instances happened years ago, research’s checkered past is by no means distant.

In recent years, the World Bank funded a billion-dollar experiment in Afghanistan. Policy Research Working Paper 6129 details the bank’s findings and the efforts behind the hefty price tag. One of the experiment’s most important aspects was the so-called National Solidarity Programme (NSP)—“the largest single development program in Afghanistan.” Notwithstanding its ambitious scale and certain rigor, the experiment’s true purpose is painfully evident: The World Bank wanted to investigate the wartime utility of NSP-esque development programs in the war-torn corners of the world. More explicitly, the bank wanted to test whether development programs effectively supplement US counterinsurgency efforts in the wake of war.

The researchers responsible for the World Bank experiment tested many simple assumptions. Most likely, they sought to give their experiment an air of robustness. Nevertheless, by the time the World Bank got around to testing whether development programs make US counterinsurgency easier, the notion was already a fixture in American counterinsurgency doctrine (and calls to mind the failed or rejected development programs of at least the Vietnam era, beginning, perhaps, with President Johnson’s failed billion-dollar Mekong River development proposal).

Indeed, situated right within the pages of the US Army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual, development projects constitute one of the basic tenets. Beath, Christia and Enikolopov – the 6129 research paper’s authors – add that the US military increasingly uses such development projects as “strategic weapons” in counterinsurgency. This yet applies to sustained efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the world.

Institutional Accountability and Transparency

Discerning the ethical side of the World Bank’s research in Afghanistan is not small potatoes. Sadly, we can rest assured that similar research praxis plays out everyday and on many scales, ruining many lives the world over. One crucial factor is that there is very limited empirical evidence apropos the counterinsurgency effectiveness of development projects like the one created by World Bank in Afghanistan. But we should seriously ask if a paucity in empiricisms (i.e., the seeming “need” to test such development projects) is enough to warrant experimentation in the first place.

Perhaps it is enough for people outside the ethics-in-research debate to condemn the US military for its violent and disruptive invasion of nations across the world. Nevertheless, it is fundamentally important to understand why the US military values World Bank experiment projects like NSP. After all, military interest is a large part of why such experiments even exist: they pose as legitimate and justifiable research, and they pretend the power necessary to uncover the “mechanisms by which development projects can potentially affect counterinsurgency outcomes.”

In fact, this research presupposes the potential for answering whether development projects “improve economic outcomes, build support for the government, and reduce violence as sympathies for the insurgency wanes”—or not. Hence, the World Bank handsomely funds researchers to implement development projects amongst unwitting research subjects like the peoples of Afghanistan. Researchers then observe and document what happens. And it goes without saying that powerful institutions like the US military use the resultant information to their advantage, especially when warring against groups who just so happen to participate in such experiments—and, it seems, without their informed consent!

A Call to Reflection

Without a doubt, “ethical research” is not merely predicated on available World Bank billions or the US military’s interest in answering questions of counterinsurgency. For this reason, research must at the very least be subject to public debate in order to ensure transparency. And if the public decides that the ethics of a given experiment are lacking, it is up to the public to dissent as vocally as necessary.

Ethical research does not happen by itself. Ideally speaking, it is the people responsible for producing research who must answer for the ethical side of their work. To be clear, institutions like the World Bank must answer for the ethics, or lack thereof, in their research. But if there is no accountability, then we become a party to institutions whose mission is to spread empire and further wars through successful accounts of counterinsurgency and “development” projects.

Mateo Pimentel lives on the Mexican-US border. You can follow him on Twitter @mateo_pimentel.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/30/the-billion-dollar-world-bank-experiment-in-afghanistan/

Benghazi Smokescreen: Hiding Western War Crimes in Libya

by THOMAS MOUNTAIN

The recent Benghazi smokescreen produced by the US Congress may have tried to hide the war crimes committed by the USA and its western vassals in Libya but reality on the ground has blown all the smoke away bringing to light who the west really empowered once again, the Islamic State a.k.a. Da’esh.

Through out the Benghazi hearings no mention was made of the tens of thousands of Libyans that were massacred by the over 10,000 bombing raids flow by western pilots, part of a no fly zone enacted even though there was not a single aerial raid by Gaddafi prior to the imposition of such. No mention of this at the hearings of course, the fact that there was absolutely no need for a no fly zone because there never had been any bombings by Gaddafi of anyone in Libya during the entire rebellion.

The fraudulent no fly zone was part of a trio of fabricated charges used to incite international support for a particularly criminal war that destroyed a country whose people enjoyed a life that was the envy of their neighbors.

During the golden age of Libyan peace and prosperity under Muammar Gaddafi and his peoples movement Libya was generally an island of religious moderation surrounded by neighbors fighting powerful extremist movements that were the forefathers of today’s Islamic State takfiri/wahabists.

Today’s Islamic State leader in what used to be Libya is one Bel Haj, infamous for his role in recruiting suicide bombers to slaughter untold thousands of Iraqi Shi’ite during his reign over Al Queda in Iraq after the US invasion.

During the Libyan rebellion he was recast as an anti Gaddafi patriot fighting a despotic regime in Libya. Tens of thousands of US made bombs later and the death of Gaddafi, the man who released him from prison, Bel Haj is now Caliph of a large chunk of north Africa, once part of Gaddafi’s Jammahariya.

Where do you think Boko Haram in Nigeria is getting its weapons from?

The other two lies used to whip up international opinion against the Gaddafi government where so intertwined in an historic racism rooted deep in the Arab psyche that all it took were broadcasts alleging Black, African mercenaries were raping Arab women to send hundreds of thousands of Libyan families fleeing their homes. Yet not one case of rape has ever been proven never mind Hillary Clinton’s viagra fueled mass rape charges. Of course, this question will never be raised in the likes of the Benghazi hearings, though an Amnesty International senior investigator was in Benghazi a week after the rebellion broke out in 2011 and reported that there had been no rapes,, no African mercenaries and only 110 dead total, including both sides, before the No Fly Zone was launched under fraudulent pretexts.

No black mercenaries, no rapes, and no aerial bombardments, the war against Libya was based entirely on lies. No wonder Pax Americana had to try so hard to divert attention from anything resembling scrutiny of what they created, the lawlessness and terrorism in what was once the state of Libya.

With a homeland under the Islamic State and its Caliph, Bel Haj, fanatics from the entire region have a haven to rest and recuperate, and rearm, before returning to the front lines to commit more murder against apostates and infidels where ever they may be. Boko Haram has certainly benefited from Libyan arms and Bel Haj’s support.

All the smoke used to dress the Benghazi melodrama and punditry has blown away  for now, and no one in the USA is any wiser about what really happened in the destruction of a once proud nation, Libya. For this we can thank the Benghazi smokescreen and those behind the fog machines, the ever faithful media in the West.

Thomas C. Mountain attended Punahou School for six years some half a dozen years before “Barry O’Bombers” time there. He has been living and writing from Eritrea since 2006. He can be reached at thomascmountain at g_ mail_ dot _com

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/30/benghazi-smokescreen-hiding-western-war-crimes-libya/

U.S. Stopped Syria Air Strikes While Nusra And IS Prepared Attack On Government Supply Route

By Moon Of Alabama Moon Of Alabama" -  -  During the last days a large attack on the Syrian government supply line to Aleppo city was carried out by Jabhat al-Nusra (aka al-Qaeda in Syria) and the Islamic State seemingly in coordination with the U.S. military. During September the U.S. anti-IS coalition carried out an average of 4.2 airstrikes on IS in predominately east Syria. This after an average of 6.8 per day in August. The rate in October was about the same as in September until Thursday October 22. Then, according to the U.S. Military Times, the strike rate decreased markedly: ~4 strikes per day up to Oct 20 4 - Oct 20 Tuesday 8 - Oct 21 Wednesday 1 - Oct 22 Thursday 0 - Oct 23 Friday 0 - Oct 24 Saturday 0 - Oct 26 Sunday 1 - Oct 27 Monday 0 - Oct 28 Tuesday 0 - Oct 29 Wednesday The Islamic State used the lull in airstrikes in east Syria to move hundreds of fighters and heavy equipment towards the supply line that connects Damascus with the government held areas (green) of Aleppo.   After two days of no U.S. airstrikes in east Syria the Islamic State (purple) attacked the government supply corridor from the east while at the same time and at the same main point Jabhat al-Nusra (orange) attacked the supply corridor from the west. The attacks started with suicide car bombs against Syrian army checkpoints which suddenly had to defend themselves to the front and the rear. On Saturday October 24 Almasdar news reported: For the first time in three months, the Syrian Arab Army’s (SAA) main supply route along the Khanasser Highway was closed due to an obstruction by the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS); this chaotic situation forced the pro-government forces to call on hundreds of reinforcements from the Aleppo Governorate to help push back the encroaching terrorists.Initially, the Syrian Armed Forces were successful in repelling both ISIS and the Syrian Al-Qaeda group “Jabhat Al-Nusra” after they attacked from different axes in the Hama Governorate; however, ISIS regrouped near the Al-Raqqa Governorate border in order to launch another massive assault on the Khanasser Highway. ISIS’ second assault on the Syrian Armed Forces’ defensive positions proved successful, as they cutoff the Khanasser Highway and pushed further west towards the strategic city of Ithriyah in east Hama. The Islamic State fighters killed about a dozen government troops and captured several armed vehicles (gruesome photos here). The Syrian army send reinforcements from the Palestinian resistance militia Liwaa Al-Quds to help clear the road. This was only somewhat successful as bad weather and a sandstrom on the 25th prevented air support. The operations room in Damascus was not too unhappy with the situation even though the road was still cut. The thought was that having IS and Nusra fighters concentrated in an otherwise wide open rural area would help to eliminate them. On the 26th and 27the Russian and Syrian air forces flew some 90 attacks within 24 hours against the enemy held parts of the road. These attacks cleared the IS held parts of the road but the Islamic State concentrated more forces on another part of the road further north and on October 27 it suicide-bombed another government checkpoint and again blocked the road. Additional support from Hizbullah arrived during the next days and the road is now mostly cleared though still endangered. The closed supply route led to hardship for the nearly two million people in the government held parts of Aleppo as prices for produce and gasoline exploded. The operations room in Damascus where Syria, Iran, Russia and Hizbullah coordinate the intelligence and operations in Syria suspectsthat the attack on the supply corridor was coordinated at a higher level than just between Nusra and the Islamic State. The total cessation of U.S. air attacks on east Syria allowed the Islamic State to move hundreds of fighters and heavy equipment like tanks and cannons from its stronghold in Raqqa city to the west of Syria. At the same time Jabhat al-Nusra brought hundreds of fighters from other fronts south-eastward for its part of the attack. It is difficult to believe that these were just unrelated coincidences. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43292.htm

Italy Rushes More Bombs as Saudis Continue to Pound Yemen

Amnesty: Saudi-Led Coalition Using Banned Cluster Bombs

by Jason Ditz, 

Throughout the Saudi war against Yemen, now in its seventh month, there have been a few shipments, by sea, of additional bombs and other equipment to the Saudi military. Suggesting the ever-escalating war may finally be taxing their inventories, Italy is reported to have shipped a large amount of additional bombs to the Saudis via commercial airline.

The shipment raises inevitable questions about the human rights consequences, particularly with the Saudis killing Yemeni civilians by the thousands over the course of this war, and seemingly making no serious effort to reduce the frequency of such incidents.

Though it’s impossible to know which of the bombings are carried out with which type of bombs, in recent weeks Saudi warplanes have hit multiple civilian targets, including a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders and a busload of civilians, adding to concerns about war crimes.

Amnesty International also reported the discovery of a Brazilian variant of the banned cluster bomb has been used in several airstrikes by some member of the Saudi-coalition, saying they’d wounded at least four civilians in Saada Province and had left unexploded bomblets strewn around farmland nearby.

Saudi Arabia previously denied using certain types of cluster bombs in the war, but has insisted that their use is not necessarily “illegal under international law.” This is indeed likely the case, though the use in civilian areas, which is seemingly every incident occurs, would definitely be banned.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/10/30/italy-rushes-more-bombs-as-saudis-continue-to-pound-yemen/

Police Use Terrorism Act to Seize a Journalist’s Computer

John Vibes

 

A BBC journalist recently had his computer confiscated by British police because he was conducting interviews with people the government suspected were terrorists. Journalist Secunder Kermani has been working with BBC’s Newsnight for just over a year and has developed a reputation for obtaining exclusive interviews with Western-born ISIS fighters. This reputation caught the eye of the British government, which used powers granted through the Terrorism Act to confiscate the reporter’s property.

According to a statement from the BBC: “Police obtained an order under the Terrorism Act requiring the BBC to hand over communication between a Newsnight journalist and a man in Syria who had publicly identified himself as an IS member. The man had featured in Newsnight reports and was not a confidential source.”

Newsnight editor Ian Katz said these types of confiscations could prevent reporters from being able to cover related issues.

“While we would not seek to obstruct any police investigation we are concerned that the use of the Terrorism Act to obtain communication between journalists and sources will make it very difficult for reporters to cover this issue of critical public interest,” Katz said.

Thames Valley Police responded: “The BBC attended the hearing in August and did not contest the application or decision of the court. Police have since returned the laptop that was the subject of this order,”  they said.

The government’s use of these these powers to target the press has far reaching implications for journalists and their sources. It will now be even more difficult for reporters to work with whistleblowers and other confidential sources because it could be a liability to end up on a reporter’s hard drive. Just because the ISIS members in question were not confidential sources does not mean legitimate confidential sources were not exposed when the government confiscated the hard drive.

“There’s a chilling effect – I know material has not been published or broadcast because of anxiety to protect sources. We are talking notes, emails, video footage, audio [being seized]. I don’t think we are hearing the accounts of why young people are going [to Syria]. The debate has not been advanced by informed coverage because the media is in fear of the Terrorism Act,”media lawyer Gavin Millar told the Independent.

“It [sic] think it makes it very difficult to do proper reporting in this territory when the cops can come in and get orders for material as easily as they can. The police have the authority to seize anything that they think will be of use to them in a terror investigation and that’s quite a wide net,” another BBC source said.

A similar situation occurred two years ago when David Miranda, partner of Glenn Greenwald, was detained at Heathrow Airport under counter-terrorism powers. Miranda is still in the process of appealing the use of counter-terrorism authority during his detention.

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This article (Police Use Terrorism Act to Seize a Journalist’s Computer) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under Creative Commons license with attribution toJohn Vibes and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm /8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

http://theantimedia.org/police-use-terrorism-act-to-seize-a-journalists-computer/

Saudi Airstrike Destroys Bus in Yemen’s Taiz, Kills 10 Civilians

Medics: Slain Were Workers Heading to a Factory

by Jason Ditz, 

Adding to concerns about the Saudi military’s large civilian death toll in the Yemen war, warplanes attacked and destroyed a civilian bus in the city of Taiz today, killing at least 10 civilian workers, who medics said were heading to a local factory.

The bus was identified as belonging to a local company active in Taiz, and the company identified the slain as employees. Medics went on to say they were all heading to a factory, though it is unclear why they were attacked.

The city of Taiz is on the main highway between the pro-Saudi southern port of Aden and the Houthi-held capital city of Sanaa, and has been the center of a major military offensive for weeks, with both sides often hititng residential neighborhoods in the fighting.

Pro-Saudi government officials confirmed the incident earlier in the day, which is unusual as the Saudis have tended to respond to credible reports of civilian casualties with blanket denials in recent weeks. This may not preclude future denials, however.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/10/29/saudi-airstrike-destroys-bus-in-yemens-taiz-kills-10-civilians/

Lack of Syrian Involvement in Vienna’s Syria Talks

Rebels Pan Lack of Invitations as Proof Talks Aren't Serious

by Jason Ditz, 

The ongoing Vienna talks on Syria have made headlines this week for being the first to include the Iranian government. Still absent, however, is anyone from inside Syria, as neither the Assad government nor the rebels appear to have sent representatives or even been invited.

The Syrian National Coalition issued a statement saying they believe the talks show a “lack of seriousness” for not inviting anyone from their coalition, which styles itself as the official “government-in-exile” of Syria. They also objected to Iran’s involvement.

Free Syrian Army (FSA) officials further affirmed that there was no invite made to any armed rebel force, and the Assad government, while not making any statements as such, appears to have simply been resigned to not being invited, what with these talks occurring so often and seemingly never including them.

Such meetings have been happening on and off for years throughout the war, but the recent incarnations have mostly centered on the US and Russia debating what they intend to impose on post-war Syria, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and most recently Iran being allowed to provide some input, but the Syrians themselves treated as all but irrelevant to the process.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/10/29/lack-of-syrian-involvement-in-viennas-syria-talks/

Syria Is a Clusterf*ck, and It's About to Get Worse for the U.S.

The mission creep parallels to Vietnam should be cause for concern.

Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children

I am getting ominous 1965 flashbacks again. Robert McNamara and Creighton Abrams are starting to appear in my mind's eye, pointing down a long, dark tunnel at the lights of an oncoming train.​

The debate over the proposed steps, which would for the first time position a limited number of Special Operations forces on the ground in Syria and put U.S. advisers closer to the firefights in Iraq, comes as Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter presses the military to deliver new options for greater military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The changes would represent a significant escalation of the American role in Iraq and Syria. They still require formal approval from Obama, who could make a decision as soon as this week and could decide not to alter the current course, said U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are still ongoing. It's unclear how many additional troops would be required to implement the changes being considered by the president, but the number for now is likely to be relatively small, these officials said.

​"The number for now…"

Those are two words—"for now"—that could be full of blood. There could be hundreds of American kids interred in those two words—"for now"—along with god knows how many Syrians and Iraqis. Once, we allegedly learned the folly of involving ourselves in a distant civil war. Now, we seem primed to involve ourselves in two of them. Our role seems to have been designed in a funhouse mirror.

The biggest problem facing Carter, and Obama, is that the increase in American military commitment would be unlikely to produce any major changes to the political situations in Iraq and Syria that have given rise to the Islamic State. In Iraq, the United States is fighting the Islamic State alongside Shiite militias—some of which are backed by Iran. Just across the border in Syria, Iran-backed Shiite militias are fighting in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is barrel-bombing civilians and battling the moderate rebel groups that the United States is supporting. Obama has said that Assad, who depends on Iranian and Russian military backing for his regime's survival, must go for there to be any hope of peace.

​If you're keeping score at home, in Syria, we'll be fighting alongside the people against whom we'll be fighting in Syria. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the friend of my friend is the enemy of the enemy of my friend. And the friend of the devil is a friend of mine. This isn't foreign policy. It's a Lewis Carroll poem, and it's getting to be a longer one.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39196/mission-creep-iraq-syria/

Mission Impossible: Afghanistan

by VIJAY PRASHAD

On October 15, United States President Barack Obama stepped away from his campaign pledge to remove all U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan. He said that the nearly 10,000 troops that were now in the country would remain and that by the end of the year they would be reduced to half that number. During Obama’s tenure, in other words, U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan. To be fair to Obama, he has cut the U.S. troop presence from 1,00,000 in 2010 to a mere 5,000 at the end of 2015. This is as close to a withdrawal as one might expect from the U.S.

One of the main reasons to retain a military force is that it provides the lever for the U.S. to expand its troops in Afghanistan if necessary. A total withdrawal would give it no standing to increase troop levels without new authorisations from the Afghan government. As it is, these 5,000 troops will provide the basis for an extension as and when the U.S. government wishes. Already the longest war in U.S. history, the Afghan campaign is not to end in the short term. It will extend for at least another few years.

The U.S. has two main strategic goals in Afghanistan—to prevent the return of Al Qaeda and to train the Afghan National Army (ANA). Nothing more is to be expected from the U.S., neither “nation-building” nor an anti-narcotics programme. If these latter form part of the U.S. brief, they only do so marginally. Investment in infrastructure and in social welfare of the population has been minimal. What are colloquially known as the Kabul Kleptocracy and the Poppy Mafia will be untouched by the U.S. presence. In fact, they have established themselves as major players in the very government that the ANA—trained by the U.S.—is pledged to protect.

How does one measure victory or defeat when an occupation force withdraws? If it leaves behind a friendly government and a vanquished enemy, then it is easy to see its occupation as a success. The U.S. occupation of Japan after the Second World War is a case in point. Japan remains a major strategic ally of the U.S. If the occupation force leaves only to find that its friendly government is weakened and its enemies return to power, then it is fair to consider the war a failure.

The United Nations now suggests that the Taliban at present fights for power in over half of the districts of Afghanistan. The seizure of Kunduz in the north-east comes alongside the failure of the ANA to secure Helmand province in the south through its Operation Zulfiqar. In both areas, north and south, the Taliban continues to be a serious force. The U.S. will withdraw its troops slowly, but nonetheless without a decisive defeat to the Taliban. In that case, the U.S. has been defeated in its Afghan war.

Two goals

Obama’s approach in Afghanistan went in two directions —a surge in 2010 that was poised to destroy the morale of the Taliban and a drone policy that was intended to kill Al Qaeda members and affiliated terrorists as well as key Taliban leaders who provided assistance to Al Qaeda. The surge initially cleared large tracts of southern Afghanistan, but the U.S. was not able to pacify the Taliban. As U.S. troops went back to their bases, the Taliban reasserted its positions. Like phantoms its forces emerged at night, able to hold their ground among pockets of the country that support their insurgency.

Two years after the surge, General John Allen looked back at data on Taliban attacks and found that they were down by 3 per cent. This was not “statistically significant”, he admitted. What was the Taliban doing just as the surge ended? Its most active operations were in Panjwai and Zhare in Kandahar and Nad Ali in Helmand. Nad Ali sits beside Marja, where the U.S. troops had begun their surge in 2010, and it is where, this year, the Taliban has made regular attacks at the ANA posts. The long-term effects of the surge have been minimal. Operation Zulfiqar conducted by the ANA in northern Helmand this year also failed to meet its objectives. This means that the first goal of the U.S. mission—to defeat the Taliban and to train the ANA to continue the fight against the Taliban—has not been reached.

The second goal—to vanquish Al Qaeda and its allies —seemed to have been met early in the 2001 bombing campaign. Al Qaeda members either were killed and captured or they fled to their countries of origin. The network appeared broken, with Osama bin Laden on the run and operational ties with its terrorists totally frayed. An intelligence analyst from one of the U.S.’ 17 agencies told me in 2004 that one of the outcomes of the heavy bombardment of Afghanistan was that it would scatter Al Qaeda members around the world. “If you smash the thermometer,” he said, “the mercury will spread everywhere.”

This is precisely what happened as Al Qaeda members got scattered over an extensive geographical range from the Philippines in east Asia to Libya in northern Africa. They brought mayhem to their home countries, particularly in Libya after 2011. Even within the region, Al Qaeda was not easy to defeat. Its members headed to northern Pakistan, where they got involved in local conflicts. The black flag of Al Qaeda could be regularly spotted in small hamlets in northern Waziristan.

The Obama administration built on the George Bush administration’s drone programme as the hammer to beat down the mercury. Between 2011 and 2013, the U.S. conducted Operation Haymaker to take out the main Al Qaeda and associated terrorists in northern Pakistan and in southern Afghanistan.

According to documents leaked to The Intercept, this programme killed few real targets and produced more bitterness and anger. Firstly, about nine of every 10 people killed in these strikes were not the intended targets. This was perhaps through poor intelligence. The source that leaked these documents explained that the U.S. designated “military age males” (MAMs) as reasonable targets and designated those hit as “enemy killed in action” (EKIA). Ryan Devereaux, who wrote one of the stories for The Intercept, said that the targets that did get hit in most cases were neither Taliban nor Al Qaeda “but also local forces with no international terrorism ambitions, groups that took up arms against the U.S. after American air strikes brought the war to their doorsteps”. In other words, according to the U.S. government’s own assessment, the drone wars had no positive strategic effect. In fact, they had the opposite—producing the conditions for the creation of more insurgents.

Kunduz hospital bombing

The prestige of the U.S. fell further with the targeted bombing of a charity hospital in Kunduz during the fightback against the Taliban. The hospital, run by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, was hit over a considerable period. The U.S. admitted that it had hit the hospital knowing it was a hospital. That this is itself a war crime did not appear to bother the Pentagon officials, who seem oblivious to considerations of international law. MSF called for an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (established by the Geneva Conventions), but this was not to be.

A U.S. tank lumbered into the destroyed hospital, essentially contaminating the evidence that should have been studied by a forensic team. The U.S. military later said that the tank contained its investigators. A U.S. State Department analyst, on condition of anonymity, said that this claim was specious. There is no unanimity in the administration on how to handle the bombing in Kunduz. It will wait until the next leak to The Intercept to establish the chatter inside the Pentagon and the White House over this bombing.

Obama’s team believes that the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq allowed the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to emerge as a serious threat to the region. If the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, the view goes, not only the Taliban but also the ISIS will emerge as a serious contender in the country. Obama does not want to preside over that fiasco. It is far better to settle in for an endless war than have to declare defeat.

This article originally appeared in Frontline (India).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/30/mission-impossible-afghanistan/