[For more on Nick Turse's Kill Anything That Moves, see this recent Firedoglake Book Salon. --MyFDL Editor]

Do the Vietnam-era policies Nick Turse uncovered in Kill Anything That Moves apply to Obama's modern wars?

Meet the new boss who, upon his inauguration, declared that the right to life is unalienable.  Let me be clear, that doesn’t mean he can’t take yours.

In fact, he runs through a list of men, women, and children on Tuesdays, hung over from inaugurations or not, and picks whom to murder and murders them.

We’re not supposed to call it murder, of course, because it’s properly assassination.  Except that no public figures are being assassinated; 98% of those killed are not targeted at all; some are targeted for suspicious behavior without knowing their names; one type of suspicious behavior is the act of retrieving the dead and wounded from a previous strike; and those targeted are not targeted for politics but for resisting illegal occupations.  Moreover, an assassination is a type of murder.

We’re not supposed to call it murder, nonetheless, because it sounds more Objective to call it killing.  But murder is a type of killing, specifically unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought.  Killing by accident is not murder and not what the president is doing.  Killing legally is not murder and not what the president is doing — at least not as far as anyone knows or according to any interpretation of law put forward.  Killing indirectly by encouraging poverty or environmental destruction or denial of healthcare may be things the president is doing, but they are not murder and not drone wars.

Imagine if a non-president went through a list of everyone in your local elementary school, picked out whom to kill, and ordered them killed.  You would call it murder.  You would call it mass-murder.  You would call it conspiracy to commit mass murder.  Why would electing that mass murderer president change anything?  Why would moving the victims abroad change anything?

KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES

“Kill Anything That Moves is the title of an important new book from Nick Turse, covering the mass-murdering enterprise known in Vietnam as the American War, and in the United States as the Vietnam War.  Turse documents that policy decisions handed down from the top led consistently, over a period of years, to the ongoing slaughter of millions of civilians in Vietnam.  Much of the killing was done by hand or with guns or artillery, but the lion’s share came in the form of 3.4 million combat sorties flown by U.S. and South Vietnamese aircraft between 1965 and 1972.  Air strikes are President Obama’s primary instrument of foreign relations as well; he ordered 20,000 air strikes in his first term.

The well-known Mylai massacre in Vietnam was not an aberration, but an almost typical incident and by no means the worst of them.  Turse documents a pattern of ongoing atrocities so pervasive that one is compelled to begin viewing the war itself as one large atrocity.  Something similar could be done for the endless war on everywhere that we are currently living through.  Scattered atrocities and scandals in Afghanistan and Iraq are interpreted as freak occurrences having nothing to do with the general thrust of the war.  And yet they are its essence.

“Kill anything that moves,” was an order given to U.S. troops in Vietnam indoctrinated with racist hatred for the Vietnamese.  “360 degree rotational fire” was a command on the streets of Iraq given to U.S. troops similarly conditioned to hate, and similarly worn down with physical exhaustion.

Dead children in Vietnam resulted in comments like “Tough shit, they grow up to be VC.”  One of the U.S. helicopter killers in Iraq heard in the Collateral Murder video says of dead children, “Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

In Vietnam anyone dead was the enemy, and sometimes weapons would be planted on them.  In drone wars, any dead males are militants, and in Iraq and Afghanistan weapons have often been planted on victims.

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Will Obama cave? How deeply will Obama cave?  Why did Obama cave again?  Were you hoping Obama would change his caving ways?  President Barack Obama, one begins to understand, must be our spelunker in chief.

But look closely into the darkness of the executive cave and the act of “caving” vanishes.  Obama never did quite swear he wouldn’t keep the “Bush” tax cuts for people with $200,000 incomes.  Obama never exactly promised to protect Medicare or Social Security.  In fact, he went out of his way to make clear he’d be “forced” to cut them.  He looks upset by gun violence, when it’s not in Afghanistan or Pakistan or any of some 75 other countries where he sponsors it, but he speaks of “trying,” not of doing anything about it.  He has no interest in eliminating the filibuster rule, no desire to pass serious legislation, not on the climate, not on the budget, not on Pentagon pork, not on any of the things his followers hope against hope that he won’t “cave” on.

A caver is, by definition, someone who leaves the cave.  Obama never does.  He lives in the cave, night and day.  He sees his eager-eyed supporters only as shadows flickering behind a light, never comprehending that they are outside the cave or that the cave has an outside.

Will he sell out?  What will Obama sell out for?  How quickly will he sell out?  Did you know he was going to sell out again?  I saw this sell out coming a mile away.  President Obama, we come to discover, is quite the salesman.

But look closely into the presidential warehouse and you’ll discover that it’s completely out of stock.  The shelves are bare.  Santa’s moved every single child over to the Naughty column.  There’s no there there. And so, lacking any products to sell, the President is completely unaware of selling out.  He honestly denies he’s done so.  His despairing devotees appear bewildered until his sincerity wins them over for the umpteenth time.  Obama never intended to prevent climate catastrophe.  He never wanted to end the mindset that gets us into wars. He never imagined creating a non-profit universal health system.  His deepest vision of change is to pile as much cash as possible on the bankers’ and weapons makers’ desks and let everybody else scramble should there fall to the floor any change.

But why, oh why, is he caving and selling out and betraying our imaginary idol of himself?  We won.  Doesn’t he realize we won?

Who is this “we”?  Did you run for office?

Oh, no, but I funded him.  I and people just like me forked over 0.0003% of his campaign funding.  So we’re part of the movement.  We won the victory.  We’re in the land of milk and honey now, and he’s pissing in it for no reason.

Let’s back up a minute.  The role of citizens in a government of, by, and for the people is not to imagine that we are an elected representative.  This would make exercising the First Amendment a symptom of schizophrenia.  The role of citizens is to push elected officials to represent us.  Virtually all major decisions made by the U.S. government go against the views of the majority of the public and the majority of self-identified Democrats.  There is no “we” here.

No “we” can simply or easily encompass in the same identity both those living in the light and cave dwellers.

Let’s drop the cave-talk.  Obama is trying to keep the Obama tax cuts in place for as many rich people as he can.  To end them he need only do nothing.  They will automatically end if he does nothing.  This will enrich the government’s treasury, not push it off a cliff.  If he wants to lower taxes on actual working people, he can come back and work for that the next day.  Obama intends to leave gun laws just about exactly where they are right now.  If he does otherwise it will be because we compel him to, because we drag him out of his cave by the scruff of his neck.

Let’s talk about enlightening our government, opening the curtains on the Congressional office buildings and shining some reality into those labyrinths of ignorance and delusion.  Let’s talk about “we the people” not “we the cheerleaders.”  Lets examine whether we ourselves haven’t perhaps been selling something out or spending a bit of time beneath the ground.

Dear Dan,

Dear Daniel Ellsberg (Photo: Jacob Appelbaum / Wikimedia Commons)

You and I are getting ready to tape a debate on the question of whether to vote for Obama (in “swing states”). It will air on Lila Garrett’s “Connect the Dots” show on KPFK next Monday. I’m looking forward to it, if for no other reason, because I think our public discourse lacks much serious debate between people who respect each other’s intentions. I have nothing but respect for you and believe you mean nothing but the best in advocating votes for Obama. You honestly believe I was catastrophically wrong to vote for Jill Stein in Virginia, as I’ve done, and I honestly believe you are horrendously misguided to be expending your valuable energy trying to get others to vote for Obama. And yet we’ll be friends through this and regardless of whether one or both of us ever change our minds.

An hour debate will also be a refreshing change from the usual sound byte simplification of the media, and yet not necessarily sufficient. So, let me tell you a couple of stories.

I wandered over to the Obama campaign office here in Charlottesville, Va., on Wednesday when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was scheduled to visit. She showed up, in fact, and told everyone how terrific Obama is.

I asked Albright whether she still believed that killing a half a million young Iraqi children was “worth it.” She said that she very much regretted having made that remark. But did she regret having enacted the sanctions that killed those children? I asked if she opposed the current “crippling sanctions” on Iran, and she said that she did not.

Here’s the video.

I’m not so much troubled by Albright’s sanctioning of mass murder, as by the agreement with her on the part of the many people gathered to applaud her comments. Not a single person present expressed the slightest concern over Albright’s having taken part in the murder of so many young lives and many more older ones. Not a single person expressed an interest in learning about a history they were perhaps ignorant of. Not a single person offered an argument for what the positive “it” was that could have made such slaughter “worth it.” Not a single person offered a claim that George Bush Sr. or Bob Dole would have killed even more children.

I don’t mean to give the impression that Albright’s audience was comatose. On the contrary, numerous individuals began grabbing me, shouting at me, pushing me, grabbing my camera, twisting my arm, and spitting out the most vicious hatred. In theory they would all, no doubt, agree that in a system of self-governance people should be able to question their elected officials, former elected officials, and at-large mass-murdering former elected officials. But in this case, this official was playing for the Good Team. The proper role, they believed, therefore, was that of cheerleaders, the highest value deferential respect.

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Madeleine Albright questioned by David Swanson on October 31, 2012, in Charlottesville, Va., Obama campaign office. Albright says she is sorry for having said that killing a half million Iraqi children was worth it (whatever ‘it’ was) — not for her participation in their deaths, but only for having answered the sort of question conveniently almost never asked anymore. Asked about the current sanctions on Iran, she said that was not the same at all.

Virginia Senate candidate Tim Kaine spoke prior to Obama’s speech on Wednesday in Charlottesville, Va.  He had praise for anyone signing up to go to war in Afghanistan.  “We can still put our positive thumbprint on that nation,” he said, to wild cheers.  Imagine the competition among the world’s nations to get our thumbprint next!  Imagine what it costs to get our assprint.

“So, who are you voting for?” an Obama follower asked me prior to the event.  I was holding posters with 12 friends and handing out hundreds of flyers that looked like Obama material until you read them. (PDF).

The posters objected to the tripling of weapons sales to foreign dictators last year, Obama’s willingness to cut Social Security and Medicare, the kill list, imprisonment without trial, warrantless spying, corporate trade agreements, the continued so-called “Bush” tax cuts, the war on Afghanistan, the drone wars, the increased military budget, the murder of Tariq Aziz and of Abdulrahman al Awlaki, the weak auto efficiency standards in the news that day, the refusal to prosecute torturers, Obama’s sabotaging of agreements to counter global warming, etc.

“So, who are you going to vote for?”

“Well,” I said, “you know, you can vote for someone good like Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson, or you can vote for Obama, but today is not election day.  If you vote for the lesser evil candidate on election day, that’s great.  Knock yourself out.  But that does not begin to produce an argument for being his apologist and cheerleader throughout the year.  If you push the culture and the government in a better direction, both evil candidates will get a little less evil.  One guy wants to trash Social Security, and the other guy brags about his willingness to make huge compromises with that agenda — that is, to partially trash Social Security.  So, is your job to demand that not a dime be cut (regardless of how you vote), or is your job to cheer for the partially trash it guy, thereby guaranteeing that he and the other guy both get even worse?”

“Yeah, I see, but I’m trying to understand who you think we should vote for.”

“Let me try again.  Take Obama’s kill list for . . . ”

“His what?”

“President Obama keeps a list of the people he wants to kill.  It was a frontpage New York Times story three months ago that made a lot of news but was carefully avoided by Democrats even more assiduously than you would have sought it out and trumpeted your outrage were the president a Republican.  Anyway, take the kill list, which includes Americans and non-Americans, adults and children.  Is it your job to ignore it, to celebrate it, or to protest it?  I don’t mean your job as a voter, but your job as a citizen.  What are you supposed to do in such a case?”

“Well what’s the alternative?”

“The alternative to murdering people?  Well, I don’t know how to put this.  The alternative is essentially not murdering people.”

“No, what’s the alternative to Obama? Isn’t the other guy worse?”

“Let me try again.  You’ll grant me that women didn’t vote themselves the right to vote.  Will you go along with that?  They didn’t get the right to vote by voting for it?”

“Yes.”

“And the civil rights movement didn’t end the sit ins and marches and endorse Democrats and pack events like this one to cheer loudly?  That wouldn’t have worked as well and wouldn’t have been required in order for those activists to be serious activists, right?  We don’t accuse Martin Luther King of not being a serious activist because he didn’t endorse candidates, right?  And if you’d asked him what the alternative was to your candidate, would you be shocked if he had replied that the alternative was educating, organizing, mobilizing, and engaging in nonviolent resistance to evil?”

“So, you’re not going to vote for anybody?”

“I’m not sure I’m being very clear here.  70% of the country wants the war in Afghanistan ended.  Neither candidate is willing to end it.  Obama pretends he’s ending it.  Romney doesn’t mention it.  Should 70% of the country keep quiet while large numbers of people are killed?  Or should we approach both branches of our government, the two parties, with our just and moral demand until we’re satisfied — regardless of who we’re going to vote for?”

“Well, you can have your opinion about Afghanistan, but that’s no reason to character assassinate the President.”

“Seventy percent of the country is character assassinating the president by wanting to get out of Afghanistan?  Or only if you mention it out loud?  How do you character assassinate someone?  Did you catch the part where I pointed out that Obama actually assassinates people?”

Three of us went into the event.  I had tickets, which were free and which the campaign could barely give away, while back in 2007 Obama had sold out the same venue.  We didn’t go in so as to spend hours in the hot sun just to hear an Obama speech like the one he’d given the day before in another town which we could have watched on Youtube.  Thousands of people did that.  We went in to disturb the war.

We wanted to shout.  But what could we shout?  We were only three.  We were not near the front.  (I recommend taking 10 to the front of one of these events if you can. You’ll own the place.)  We would have to be loud and clear.  We couldn’t mention the kill list which would be like mentioning UFOs to these people.  We couldn’t mention Social Security because they pretend Obama’s not threatening it.  We couldn’t mention peace because people would think it was a pro-Obama chant.  We decided to say this: Get out of Afghanistan! End the sanctions on Iran!

Here’s how the Washington Post’s blog reported on that:

“Protesters drown out Obama

“Posted by Amy Gardner on August 29, 2012 at 3:58 pm
“CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — An outdoor political rally erupted into a moment of chaos as protesters drowned out President Obama’s speech at a downtown amphitheater here — and then the rest of the crowd drowned out the protesters. It was unclear what the protesters were saying, but several members of the crowd said a few minutes later that they heard ‘Get out of Afghanistan!’ The shouts prompted a flurry of Secret Service activity, and they also prompted an enthusiastic crowd of more than 7,000 to shut down the protesters with two cacophonous chants: ‘Four more years!’ and ‘O-ba-ma!’ Obama couldn’t continue for a long moment, but when the noise finally died down, he said: ‘I couldn’t hear what those young people had to say, but that’s good that they got involved.’ To the rest of the crowd, he said: ‘Don’t just chant! Vote!’”

Obama was pretending the crowd was all young people.  He’d tried to speak at the University of Virginia which had turned him down, but he gave his speech as if he were there.  The crowd didn’t shout us down till we’d run out of breath.  They were not nearly as fast as Republicans are with their “U-S-A! U-S-A!”  In fact, they seemed tremendously proud of themselves when they managed to discover that they could yell “O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA!”  Voting, in the pretense of those in power, constitutes more activism than chanting or any other activity.  Don’t just hold teach-ins, vote! Don’t just occupy the square, vote! Don’t just risk your life to expose injustice, vote! If Bradley Manning had just voted, that would have been the last full measure of devotion.

As to the flurry of Secret Service activity, an Obama campaign guy started standing next to us, and a mean possibly drunk guy started shoving and threatening us.  After various additional disruptions of the war (not the peace) by us, the Obama guy called the local police over who asked us to leave, and asked for our names, etc., to tell them to the Secret Service.  The police had earlier refused numerous requests by the Obama staff and volunteers to evict our poster demonstration.  The police had mentioned freedom of speech.  The local media, as well as the police, were surprisingly decent.  The Obama campaigners, on the other hand, would have exiled us all to Gitmo if they’d been able, and if they weren’t suffering under the misconception that it’s been closed.

A drone (Photo: Charles McCain / Flickr)

Wow, it’s been a while, but protests of war makers in Charlottesville will be back big time next Wednesday. It seems like ages since we protested John Yoo, or even since our threatened protest of Dick Cheney scared him out of coming to town. But opportunity is knocking and a massive nonviolent protest is sure to answer.

How could it not? On Wednesday, Charlottesville will host a man who has escalated war in Afghanistan and continued it in the face of overwhelming public opposition. He’s invented a new kind of war using drones and launched such wars in numerous nations, building intense hostility toward the United States. He keeps a list of “nominees” for murder. On the list are adults and children, Americans and non-Americans. He holds meetings with his staff on Tuesdays to decide whom to kill next, and then kills them. He’ll have one of these Terror Tuesday meetings the day before his visit to our town.

We’re dealing here with someone who has launched a war on Libya against the will of Congress, presumably an act even worse than telling Congress obvious lies and getting its approval, as Bush did on Iraq. This new war maker campaigned for office on expanding war in Afghanistan, expanding the size of the U.S. military, and using the U.S. military broadly. He’s kept his promises. The military is larger and more expensive than it ever was under Bush. It’s more secretive, with the CIA fighting some of the wars. It’s more privatized. It’s more profitable. It’s in more nations. And it’s sucking down a greater share of government spending.

Having replaced imprisonment and torture with murder, this new warmonger has established as open policy, no longer illicit, process-free imprisonment, rendition, and the option to use torture “if necessary.” He has forbidden the prosecution of CIA torturers. He has created a legal and bipartisan acceptance of what we recently protested as scandalous outrages. He has launched a campaign of unprecedented retribution against whistleblowers. And now he has announced that the United States, without Congressional authorization or public approval, is engaged in assisting one side in a civil war in Syria — even while continuing to threaten war on Iran.

I could go on. This new official has outdone others in the areas of corporate trade agreements, fossil fuel subsidies, tax breaks for the rich, bailouts for Wall Street and for health insurance corporations, and on and on. But just on the issue of militarism I’ve clearly said enough to mobilize those who have protested war makers in recent years.

Unless there’s something different this time.

Perhaps it’s more important to cheer for and apologize for one half of a corrupt government than it is to push that government in a democratic direction. Maybe the world is changed most effectively by behaving as spectators rooting for one side of a surface-level dispute between two corrupt forces mutually agreed on our destruction. Maybe the civil rights movement should have shut up and campaigned for Democrats. Maybe women voted themselves the right to vote. Perhaps the labor movement was really built through the electoral tactics that are currently destroying it.

You know, on second thought, I think I’ll buy an Obama shirt and speak only when spoken to. He’s the candidate of change, and I want to do whatever is most likely to change things.

Are you aware, I asked a friend, that the guy you’re registering new voters to vote for keeps a list of people he intends to kill? Oh well, he replied, you know.

Do I, now?

Weaponized drones should be banned, I tell a group of progressives. What? Oh no, drones are better than armies, because with drones nobody gets killed.

Is that so? Just how far do progressives have left to progress exactly?

How can we shake people out of their acceptance of murder, I ask peace activists. Easy. We’ll trumpet the news of the 2,000th U.S. death in Afghanistan.

We will?

Can you imagine the response of Afghans who’ve lost many, many times that number of lives, who’ve seen many, many times THAT number made refugees, who’ve watched their nation be destroyed, their people traumatized, their families ripped apart, their children’s bodies ripped apart? Hell, can you imagine the response of a human being who cared about other human beings even if they were Afghans, to the news that the war is objectionable because 2,000 people had now died?

People?

Who gets to be people?

And what the fuck are those of us who believe this entire cultural direction is as depraved as anything yet seen on earth? Are we people too?

We, some of us, headed over on Flag Day to protest a pro-war rally with messages of peace. And what did most of our group want? Good patriotism. Benevolent nationalism. Reclaiming of the flag for what it’s never been. Privileging nation over family, neighborhood, town, county, region, or continent because we should never allow the warmongers and xenophobes to appropriate the symbols of warmongering and xenophobia. Those are OURS dammit!

Where do I hop out of this handbasket, and has anyone noticed that the frogs we keep slandering felt the heat and hopped out long ago?

Every one of those 2,000 dead Americans is a tragedy and a murder. What of the far greater number of U.S. troops dead from suicide, the far greater number alive but ruined, the 3 million Americans locked up in cages, the 136,000 of those — at a minimum — who are innocent of the crimes for which they’ve been locked up? Why in the world is the United States not bombing itself to improve its human rights record? What of the 24,000 people in the United States dying from the burning of coal every year? What of the far greater numbers dying from unsafe work conditions, from automobiles, from senseless small-scale violence, from a broken but marvelously profitable healthcare system? What of the horrors facing the other 95% of humanity, including those living under our wars and those living under our banks?

Obama’s drones are killing people in nations where the United States had no troops on the ground, contemplated no troops on the ground, declared no war, but may soon have to put troops on the ground to follow through on the logic of and confront the damage and hostility created by the drones. Drones are facilitating seemingly easy and consequence-free murder in numerous nations. They are an escalation, not a de-escalation, of violence. The choice is between law enforcement and murder, not murder that risks U.S. deaths and murder that only kills foreigners and kills fewer of them.

In fact, drones do risk U.S. deaths. They are likely to produce blowback in a major way. They have produced blowback already. The future almost certainly holds foreign strikes of retaliation for U.S. drones conducted under the same legal standard, or absence thereof, established by the U.S. but against the U.S. with foreign drones. If drone murders become the new normal, expect to see them where you don’t want them as well as where you do. Expect our militarized police to use drones at home in ways established abroad as doable without serious objection from us. And expect to see even more U.S. military suicides. Drone “pilots’” PTSD rates are shooting through the roof, because they see their victims.

U.S. wars are one-sided slaughters. They’re murder by drone or mass-murder by army. A tiny fraction of the deaths, under 5 percent, are treated by the U.S. media as the entire death count. Who wouldn’t want to eliminate those deaths with drones, other than someone who gave a rat’s ass about the killing of human beings? Or someone who’d been part of the killing, stopped and thought about it, and had a break down?

At Flag Day, a giant inflatable soldier palled around with cub scouts, while boy scouts, ROTC child-soldiers-in-waiting, fresh recruits, and veterans all the way up to the very old listened to a Brigadier General talk about the glory, honor, and legality of war. Then a Marine hacked a cake in half with a sword, exactly as if slicing through a prisoner’s neck. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers for wars.

But where are the non-murder jobs for those kids? Non-killing jobs cost less than military jobs. Military spending is hollowing out our economy to the point where we spend enough on recruitment efforts per new recruit to have given a crowd of young people jobs just with the money spent convincing one of them to take a gig as an assistant assassin. Call it something else if you want, but look at who your commander in chief is when you take that oath to perform the utterly impossible task of simultaneously obeying the Constitution, the President, and whoever gives you an order.

Senator Carl Levin says that cutting 0.05% of a military budget that has doubled this decade will endanger us all. His funders smirk. His pimp nods. And good progressives look at each other uncertainly. We wouldn’t want to endanger our non-xenophobically defined Homeland, would we? Maybe we should stick to promoting Elizabeth Warren for Senate, along with her lies pushing war with Iran, and her claims that the Pentagon and the spy agencies have it wrong, that Iran really is building nuclear weapons and threatening our sacred patria. And I say that with good patriotism.

Let the bankers pay for part of the next war. That should set things right. The important thing is to register more voters. Shifting to an election campaign focus has worked out so well in Wisconsin and Egypt that anybody would be crazy not to jump on board. And if you end up working your tail off for a sociopath with a kill list, oh well, you know?

In the words of the great John Lennon, imagine all your tiny little country treating the rest of the world as expendable.

The New York Times chose this “terror Tuesday” to publish an article called “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” a bizarre article that never explains what Obama’s principles or will are or even offers any evidence that Obama has any principles or will.

There is one section in which the authors point out that Obama went out of his way to sneak the despicable John Brennan into his White House despite Congressional opposition, and that none other than Harold “these bombs are not hostilities” Koh swears Brennan is a moral man. Perhaps we should assume that Brennan’s morality oozes upward from his “cave-like office in the White House basement” since his support for Bush’s crimes is redeemed by Koh who only supports Obama’s crimes.

Early on the article refers to “American values,” suggesting that Obama’s royal dilemma has been to defend not his principles, but America’s principles. The trouble, of course, is that the New York Times never explains what those are. This being the New York Times, one would naturally assume that wars and killing and lies about wars and killing form the core of those values, but this goes unstated.

Obama is depicted as “keeping the tether short” by personally deciding on each and every drone kill. And yet, despite this personal care and attention, Obama has dramatically increased drone kills. The New York Times writes that Obama’s role of “personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda” is “without precedent in presidential history.” This is either because whatever the “shadow war with Al Qaeda” is has been created by Obama, or it’s because Bush let subordinate(s) oversee it. This meaningless claim immediately follows bragging about how many of Obama’s advisers the New York Times interviewed in order to produce it, and yet somehow the underwhelmed reader is still left to simply guess what is supposed to be meant. Presumably it is that Obama has created a new form of murder.

In fact, Obama has created drone wars, and an insider picture of how he runs them is found at the end of the article:

“Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die. This secret ‘nominations’ process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.”

How do Obama’s principles and will manifest themselves in this “due process” as he bestows it upon his victims? Well, according to the New York Times, he kills “without hand-wringing” and calls the decision to kill a U.S. citizen “an easy one.” (Killing the same man’s teenage son is so easy it goes unmentioned.) Obama is “a realist,” who is “never carried away” by any campaign promises he may have made. He shrewdly maneuvers to keep in place Bush’s powers of rendition, detention, and war, not to mention (and the New York Times doesn’t) torture — not to mention his huge leaps forward in formalizing and legitimizing those abuses.

Now, the New York Times does repeatedly claim that Obama is following “just war” theories, but such theories have always led to any desired interpretation, and the New York Times doesn’t even hint at where it thinks they lead, or where it thinks Obama thinks they lead. The job of the Times, however, in its defense, is not to think.

After this observation,

“And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the ‘single digits’ — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants,”

one might naively expect the New York Times to look into some of those independent counts. Instead, the New York Times finds some accaptable (i.e. U.S. government) skeptics to quote briefly before moving on:

“But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it ‘guilt by association’ that has led to ‘deceptive’ estimates of civilian casualties.”

Much later in the article, the New York Times gets around to mentioning Obama’s practice of targeting individuals without being able to identify them at all. This technique of “signature strikes” was recently expanded by Obama to Yemen.

The same article, despite this unanswered debate over who is being killed, gratuitously refers to drones as “a precision weapon.”

Much earlier, we’re told, with no evidence, that Obama’s droning has “eviscerated Al Qaeda,” even though the next sentence notes that the drone strikes have become Al Qaeda’s best recruiting tool.

We’re also told, with no evidence, that Obama has a “distaste for legislative backslapping and arm-twisting.” Ha! Tell that to Democrats who tried to vote against military appropriations in 2009. Rarely has such vicious arm-twisting and extensive backslapping and rewarding been witnessed. How do we know that Obama doesn’t have a “distaste” for pushing for only those measures that don’t violate his principles? How do we know that murdering lots of people with high-tech equipment in great secrecy isn’t perfectly in line with his principles? How can we be sure that isn’t why he created it? And why should we care, as long as he’s getting away with it, whether it has anything to do with his principles or not?

You’d never know it from watching television, but there are many thousands of people in the United States who take peace, justice, environmental protection, and government of the people so seriously that they don’t censor themselves whenever the president is a Democrat.

While many others are still debating whether it would be appropriate to criticize or protest President Obama after a mere three and a half years of disaster, the people I have in mind have been openly and honestly resisting the latest Wall Street war monger since before he was elected.

Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank have collected 56 essays from prior to, from early on in, and from quite recently during the Obama presidency.  The collection, just published as Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, has a consistent approach to its topic.  The authors, including Kevin Alexander Gray, Jeremy Scahill, Chris Floyd, Sibel Edmonds, Franklin Spinney, Kathy Kelly, Marjorie Cohn, Chase Madar, Michael Hudson, Medea Benjamin, Charles Davis, Ray McGovern, Dave Lindorff, Bill Quigley, Tariq Ali, Andy Worthington, Linn Washington, Jr., and many more, don’t agree on everything.  A few try to urge serious progressive plans on Obama that they would never have proposed that Bush champion, not even rhetorically, not even for laughs.  The book is not organized by topic; it’s a random, if chronological, ride through a catalog of catastrophes.  But it’s united by the theme of horrendously bad government in the age of Obama.  It ignores the mythology and treats Obama based on his actual performance.

Reducing the charges against Obama developed in detail in this book to a Declaration of Independence-like list of grievances might look something like this:

Obama has taken massive funding from Wall Street, appointed Wall Streeters to top positions, and followed their lead, to the benefit of banksters and the detriment of the rest of us.  Obama, despite promises the contrary, has put lobbyists in positions of power in his administration.  Senator Obama’s corporatist vote for the Class Action Fairness Act was in line with the rest of his performance as senator and later president.

Obama has taken massive funding from war profiteers and worked in their interest, empowering a collection of war hawks from the George W. Bush and Bill Clinton eras, and including no opponent of militarism in any high office.

Obama abandoned the people of Gaza to their fate beneath Israeli bombs.

Obama bailed out AIG, but not you or me.

Obama delayed de-escalation in Iraq and tried every way he could to avoid complete withdrawal.

Obama has expanded secrecy, sought retribution against whistleblowers, expanded warrentless spying, protected confessed torturers, revived military commissions, and expanded the military.

Obama has made anti-environmentalist corporate tools the heads of the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture.

Obama’s administration facilitated and accepted a military coup in Honduras.

Obama has continued and expanded upon aggressively inhumane immigration policies.

Obama championed corporate health coverage over Medicare for All.

Obama tripled the size of the war on Afghanistan.

Obama has championed nuclear power.

Obama has backed murderers in Colombia and put U.S. troops into that country in the interests of big oil.

Obama has dramatically escalated drone killings, developing a new type of war.

Obama has continued pointless killing in Afghanistan on the basis of false pretenses.

Obama has appointed a deeply flawed candidate to the Supreme Court.

Obama has expanded the weaponization and the use of nuclear power in space.

Obama facilitated the kind of drilling that created the BP oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, and then sought to cover up the extent of the damage.

Obama has kept tax breaks for billionaires in place, persuading his followers to continue calling them “the Bush Tax Cuts.”

Obama has claimed the power to torture and to “rendition” prisoners and kidnap victims to other countries that torture.

Obama has promoted corporate culture and CEO heroes, while failing to promote nonprofit groups — a fantasy that contributing author Ralph Nader proposes for Obama while never having proposed it for Bush.

Obama has pushed deregulation as a solution to the problems caused by deregulation.

Obama has served Israel at the expense of human rights, peace, and democracy.

Obama has gone around Congress and courts to approve of Monsanto’s GMOs.

Obama has tortured Bradley Manning.

Obama has pushed U.S. weapons sales on foreign nations.

Obama has punished Iranians with sanctions while threatening war.

Obama has expanded nuclear weapons spending.

Obama has worked largely against the interests of organized labor.

Obama has sabotaged efforts to protect the earth’s climate.

Obama has thrown Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block.

Obama has extended the worst parts of the PATRIOT Act, plus secret parts we haven’t seen yet but which are somehow nonetheless “law.”

Obama has militarized police forces, expanded wiretaps, prosecuted Muslims for speech, raided activists’ homes, preemptively detained journalists, and supported the prison industrial complex and the widespread use of solitary confinement.

Obama has launched a fraudulent war on Libya as a “humanitarian” effort, while aiding human rights abuses in Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.

Obama has abandoned his effort to close Guantanamo, which was only ever — in reality — an effort to move one of the United States’ lawless concentration camps to Illinois from Cuba.

Obama chose to pursue an insufficient economic stimulus bill, not to mention increasing economically damaging military spending each year thus far.

Obama has continued the “war on drugs.”

And Obama has shut down activism in this country by appearing to be what he is not and by virtue of the malady that causes millions of people to believe that self-governance consists of cheering for one team in a sporting competition.

St. Clair and Frank describe Obama as “so innately conflict-averse that even when pummeled with racist slurs he wouldn’t punch back.”  But Obama does not appear to try to minimize conflict across the board.  He avoids conflict with those on the right — and often there is little basis for, or value in, supposing that his mental state is one of surrender as opposed to agreement.

There are two things that Obama is able to count on.  First, no matter how seriously he attacks the interests of ordinary people, major liberal groups will support him.  Second, no matter how much he supports the agenda of the right, major rightwing groups will attack him while demanding more.  These two states of affairs feed each other.  Attacks on Obama from the right are absolutely essential to generating his liberal support.  Obama is the Not-Romney candidate.  And that liberal support helps produce attacks from the right.  Hopeless could help some to break out of this cycle of guilt or innocence by association.

I’ll leave you with a slightly modified verse from Paul Simon:

Hopeless, hopeless
Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake
We are hopeless, we are hopeless
The moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake

Somebody say ih hih ih hih ih
Somebody sing hello, hello, hello
Somebody say ih hih ih hih ih
Somebody cry why, why, why?

War for Sale (image: cheesebikini/flickr)

When President George W. Bush was pretending to want to avoid a war on Iraq while constantly pushing laughably bad propaganda to get that war going, we had a feeling he was lying.  After all, he was a Republican.  But it was after the war was raging away that we came upon things like the Downing Street Minutes and the White House Memo.

Now President Barack Obama is pretending to want to avoid a war on Iran and to want Israel not to start one, while constantly pushing laughably bad propaganda to get that war going.  We might suspect a lack of sincerity, given the insistence that Iran put an end to a program that the U.S. government simultaneously says there is no evidence exists, given the increase in free weapons for Israel to $3.1 billion next year, given the ongoing protection of Israel at the U.N. from any accountability for crimes, given the embrace of sanctions highly unlikely to lead to anything other than greater prospects of war, and given Obama’s refusal to take openly illegal war “off the table.”  We might suspect that peace was not the ultimate goal, except of course that Obama is a Democrat.

However, we now have Wikileaks cables and comments from anonymous officials that served as the basis for a report from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu requested the United States approve the sale of advanced refueling aircraft as well as GBU-28 bunker-piercing bombs to Israel during a recent meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a top U.S. official said on Tuesday.  The American official said that U.S. President Barack Obama instructed Panetta to work directly with Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the matter, indicating that the U.S. administration was inclined to look favorably upon the request as soon as possible. During the administration of former U.S. President George Bush, the U.S. refused to sell bunker-penetrating bombs and refueling aircrafts to Israel, as a result of American estimates that Israel would then use them to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.  Following Obama’s entrance into the White House, however, the United States approves a string of Israeli requests to purchase advance armament.  Diplomatic cables exposed by the WikiLeaks website exposed discussion concerning advanced weapons shipments. In one cable which surveyed defense discussions between Israel and the United states that took place on November 2009 it was written that ‘both sides then discussed the upcoming delivery of GBU-28 bunker busting bombs to Israel, noting that the transfer should be handled quietly to avoid any allegations that the USG is helping Israel prepare for a strike against Iran.’”

Why supply Israel with the weapons to attack Iran more forcefully if you don’t want Israel to attack Iran?  The Israeli newspaper Maariv claims to have the answer.  Apparently people in the know are spilling the beans earlier this war cycle: Read the rest of this entry →