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Monday, 15. February 2010 by Sibel Edmonds

Perpetual Wars & the Permanent Wartime Presidency

With almost a decade under its belt, our multi-front war on a vaguely defined notion of terrorism targeting never-really-defined enemies across the world and here in the newly rephrased ‘homeland’ has come to define the state of our nation. Even the meager limitations on presidential powers of the last six decades have in effect been nullified and replaced with a newly declared and interpreted authority mirroring those of past emperors and kings, and of any classic authoritarian regimes’ rulers. One look at the last decade’s successfully won legal arguments on behalf of the executive, the presidency, is enough to establish the common theme that ‘the war on terror is global and indefinite in scope, and that it effectively removes all traditional limits of wartime authority to the times and places of imminent or actual battle.’

Whether it is illegal domestic eavesdropping or unlawful detention and torture, these newly claimed and boldly practiced presidential entitlements rely on one factor, and that is the extraordinary claims of presidential war-making power. Here is a perfect example of the new permanent wartime presidency in action; boldly, loudly, and unfortunately thus far successfully:

On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president’s war-making powers in legal briefs as “plenary” — a term defined as “full,” “complete,” and “absolute.”

The current status of our nation’s president’s war-making powers is defined, recognized, and has been practiced as ‘plenary;’ complete and absolute. Now, let’s add to this the fact that our multi-fronted war on terror is global and indefinite, a war open-ended in time and with no national boundaries. What do we have with this equation? A permanent wartime presidency with absolute powers. The Constitution indeed granted the president the power to fight with any resources Congress makes available in wartime, and accordingly the executive is expected to do whatever it takes to protect the nation, even if it leaves some room for abuse of this power. But did our founders factor in the notion of indefinite, open-ended, perpetual wars, and with them, a permanent wartime presidency status? The Constitution gave presidents the freedom to defend the nation, but what about the nation’s need to protect itself against the abuses of this freedom, including the creation of perpetual wars accompanied with indefinite and absolute presidential powers?

The following excerpts are from the Devil’s Advocate, John Yoo:

Critics of presidential war powers exaggerate the benefits of declarations or authorizations of war, and they also fail to examine the potential costs of congressional participation: delay, inflexibility, and lack of secrecy. Legislative deliberation may breed consensus in the best of cases, but it also may inhibit speed and decisiveness. In the post-Cold War era, the United States confronts several new threats to its national security: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the emergence of rogue nations, and the rise of international terrorism. Each of these threats may require pre-emptive action best undertaken by the president and approved by Congress only afterward.

…

The Constitution creates a presidency that can respond forcefully and independently to pre-empt serious threats to our national security. Instead of demanding a legalistic process to begin war, the framers left war to politics. Presidents can take the initiative and Congress would use their funding power to check him. As we confront terrorism, rogue nations, and WMD proliferation, now is not the time to engage in a radical change in the way our government has waged war for decades.

…

Mr. Yoo considers a thorough congressional review and authorization based on findings and careful review as tending to ‘exaggerate the benefits of declarations or authorizations of war.’ If put in an appropriate context, this exaggeration could probably have prevented a preemptive attack on Iraq based on false and made-up intelligence on nonexistent WMD, and we may have saved thousands of American soldiers’ lives, tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ hard-earned money, and would have prevented the loss of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians’ lives. Only in John Yoo’s book of ‘cost & benefits analysis’ would this make it to the ‘exaggerated cost column.’

As for ‘Congress would use their funding power to check him,’ his pretend innocence would not get a pass from even the most naïve or ignorant. Considering where the real funding of the inhabitants of our congress comes from, taking into consideration the old adage ‘thou shall not bite the hand that feeds you,’ and understanding the power of ‘bacon sent home,’ who is Mr. Yoo kidding here; really?

Let’s look at it from the other side of the fence. What executive office wouldn’t want to possess this level of power? How many presidents would resist gravitating towards the enormous powers granted to a Commander in Chief in practice? How many of today’s ‘viable’ presidential candidate’s bread is heavily buttered by the war industry? Here is how Richard Norton Smith put it during an interview:

However you define national emergency, whether it’s a foreign war, whether it’s a civil war, whether it’s an economic depression, whether it’s a Cold War or the current war on terror, the fact is power gravitates towards the president…It’s a tug of war, Jim, that’s been going on, a constitutional tug of war between the executive and the legislative branch. And what I was picking up off what Ellen said I think the last 75 years has, if anything, distorted what the founders intended. Because of the Great Depression, because of World War II, because of the Cold War, now the war on terror, the fact is that that tug of war has actually been very one-sided. I don’t think this is the presidency that the founders really envisioned.

…

A Little Bit of History

On November 19, 1973, the Special Committee on the Termination of the National Emergency presented Senate Report 93-549 at the first session of the 93rd Congress. The Introduction to the report, an examination of existing War and Emergency Powers Acts, states:

Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency. In fact, there are now in effect four presidentially-proclaimed states of national emergency: In addition to the national emergency declared by President Roosevelt in 1933, there are also the national emergency proclaimed by President Truman in 1950, during the Korean conflict, and the states of national emergency declared by President Nixon in1970 and 1971.

These proclamations give force to 470 provisions of Federal law. These hundreds of statutes delegate to the President extraordinary powers, ordinarily exercised by the Congress, which affect the lives of American citizens in a host of all-encompassing manners. These vast ranges of powers, taken together, confer enough authority to rule the country without reference to normal Constitutional processes.

Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may: seize property; organize and control the means of production; seize commodities; assign military forces abroad; institute martial law; seize and control all transportation and communication; regulate the operation of private enterprise; restrict travel; and, in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all American citizens.

With the melting of the Cold War-the developing détente, with the Soviet Union and China, the stable truce of over 20 years duration between North and South Korea, and the end of U.S. involvement in the war in Indochina-there is no present need for the United States Government to continue to function under emergency conditions.

As we all know the establishment did not let the ‘melting Cold War’ argument stand. During the Reagan era the Cold War reached new heights, with a massive military buildup in an arms race with the USSR, before it came to an end. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine the panic experienced by the real powers as the Berlin wall and with it the several-decade Cold War came crumbling down. How could the massive Military Industrial Complex, and those feeding upon it, survive this ‘ending,’ and find a way to sustain itself? How about maintaining the role and power of the Executive Intelligence Complex? The creation, existence, and practices of these agencies were based on and justified by the ‘Evil Empire,’ and with it gone, so was the justification sold to the public for the existence of many dependent upon it here in the States.

Sure there were other wars; Gulf War, Kosovo… But those were mini-wars; peanuts. What was needed, that is for the sustainability, survival, and even the fantasy of expansion, was another long-lasting war. Not a dingy little country or two, and certainly not a clear-cut enemy and pinpointable target to hit and be done with. No. In fact, learning from experience, it had to be something that could not end with some darn wall coming down, or a massive regime being taken out. An open ended war; a war with undefined enemies in many colors, with many tongues, and scattered across the world; a war that could be pointed at one place, then at another, and yet another without having to fit any military definition of target or strategy; a war with no boundaries; a war with no possible end. A war that couldn’t even be defined as a war, yet could act as the mother of all wars – a Perpetual War.

If anyone laughed at even the fantasy of such an absurd objective, they certainly weren’t the ones who had the last laugh. All that was needed to make it happen was the creation of a state of emergency. After all, it had been done for a long time, and done so very successfully. People were used to it – living under various degrees of a state of emergency for many decades. Just take it up a notch or two, then sit back and watch the panic take root and spring into full bloom. Jazz it up with a disaster-loving and panic-driving media, and the state of emergency will go into full effect. And from there – hello Perpetual War.

Here is more on the report by the Special Committee on the Termination of the National Emergency:

A majority of the people of the United States have lived all of their lives under emergency rule. For 40 years, freedoms and governmental procedures guaranteed by the Constitution have, in varying degrees, been abridged by laws brought into force by states of national emergency. The problem of how a constitutional democracy reacts to great crises, however, far antedates the Great Depression. As a philosophical issue, its origins reach back to the Greek city-states and the Roman Republic. And, in the United States, actions taken by the Government in times of great crises have-from, at least, the Civil War-in important ways, shaped the present phenomenon of a permanent state of national emergency.

…

Because Congress and the public are unaware of the extent of emergency powers, there has never been any notable congressional or public objection made to this state of affairs. Nor have the courts imposed significant limitations … the temporary states of emergency declared in 1938, 1939, 1941, 1950, 1970, and 1971 would become what are now regarded collectively as virtually permanent states of emergency (the 1939 and 1941 emergencies were terminated in 1952). Forty years can, in no way, be defined as a temporary emergency.

‘Forty years can, in no way, be defined as a temporary emergency;’ really? Obviously it can, and it was. Not only that, it actually got worse. Today they don’t even bother adding ‘temporary,’ and leave it out completely. How could you win or lose, and declare the end of the ‘war on terror’? Is it possible to capture and neutralize that one last boogie man, announce that the last of the terrorists has been terminated, and then go about dissolving Homeland Security, Motherland Security, Fatherland Agency, Intelligence Czars, Domestic Eavesdropping…? How about the entire industry, the thriving many trillion dollar industry, with the ‘war on terror’ as their sole reason for existence? Obviously this would not fit the vision put in place by the few who matter, and the many grown dependent on them.

The Mother of all perpetual wars, War on Terror, followed by unjustified and undeclared wars: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iran… Who are the enemies? Bad Taliban, Semi-bad Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda Supporters, Possible Al-Qaeda, Islamists, Fanatics, semi-fanatics, fanatic-looking dudes, Iran-ists, and with them all the civilians ‘just our collateral damage.’; babies, women, elderly…Kidnapping, torture, assassinations, black sites, black operations, black budgets…

Here at home: airport security check-points, no-fly list, semi-no-fly-list, many secret lists, tapping all phone calls, monitoring all e-mails, billions of secret documents, thousands of secret operations & plans.

For the winners in the Perpetual War, the military-intelligence-surveillance industrial complexes, the empire presidency and its advocates, and the parasitic class who lives beneath and off of them…the state of Perpetual War is a long-held dream coming true.

For the losers, we, the public majority, the mothers losing their sons and daughters to wars, the spouses left to deal with their returning amputated loved ones, many in need of medical care but with no coverage or assistance, the hard-working class dutifully parting with needed dollars and foregoing all expectations, the seekers of liberties…the realities of these made-up emergencies, and the real consequences of these vague wars are either not registering, or are being accepted and paid for silently.

This applicable quote comes to mind: “Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the laws are silent.” And, I feel like extending the line by adding”…for as long as the people wish to remain silent.”

# # # #

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Monday, 15. February 2010 by Sibel Edmonds

Perpetual Wars & the Permanent Wartime Presidency

With almost a decade under its belt, our multi-front war on a vaguely defined notion of terrorism targeting never-really-defined enemies across the world and here in the newly rephrased ‘homeland’ has come to define the state of our nation. Even the meager limitations on presidential powers of the last six decades have in effect been nullified and replaced with a newly declared and interpreted authority mirroring those of past emperors and kings, and of any classic authoritarian regimes’ rulers. One look at the last decade’s successfully won legal arguments on behalf of the executive, the presidency, is enough to establish the common theme that ‘the war on terror is global and indefinite in scope, and that it effectively removes all traditional limits of wartime authority to the times and places of imminent or actual battle.’

Whether it is illegal domestic eavesdropping or unlawful detention and torture, these newly claimed and boldly practiced presidential entitlements rely on one factor, and that is the extraordinary claims of presidential war-making power. Here is a perfect example of the new permanent wartime presidency in action; boldly, loudly, and unfortunately thus far successfully:

On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president’s war-making powers in legal briefs as “plenary” — a term defined as “full,” “complete,” and “absolute.”

The current status of our nation’s president’s war-making powers is defined, recognized, and has been practiced as ‘plenary;’ complete and absolute. Now, let’s add to this the fact that our multi-fronted war on terror is global and indefinite, a war open-ended in time and with no national boundaries. What do we have with this equation? A permanent wartime presidency with absolute powers. The Constitution indeed granted the president the power to fight with any resources Congress makes available in wartime, and accordingly the executive is expected to do whatever it takes to protect the nation, even if it leaves some room for abuse of this power. But did our founders factor in the notion of indefinite, open-ended, perpetual wars, and with them, a permanent wartime presidency status? The Constitution gave presidents the freedom to defend the nation, but what about the nation’s need to protect itself against the abuses of this freedom, including the creation of perpetual wars accompanied with indefinite and absolute presidential powers?

The following excerpts are from the Devil’s Advocate, John Yoo:

Critics of presidential war powers exaggerate the benefits of declarations or authorizations of war, and they also fail to examine the potential costs of congressional participation: delay, inflexibility, and lack of secrecy. Legislative deliberation may breed consensus in the best of cases, but it also may inhibit speed and decisiveness. In the post-Cold War era, the United States confronts several new threats to its national security: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the emergence of rogue nations, and the rise of international terrorism. Each of these threats may require pre-emptive action best undertaken by the president and approved by Congress only afterward.

…

The Constitution creates a presidency that can respond forcefully and independently to pre-empt serious threats to our national security. Instead of demanding a legalistic process to begin war, the framers left war to politics. Presidents can take the initiative and Congress would use their funding power to check him. As we confront terrorism, rogue nations, and WMD proliferation, now is not the time to engage in a radical change in the way our government has waged war for decades.

…

Mr. Yoo considers a thorough congressional review and authorization based on findings and careful review as tending to ‘exaggerate the benefits of declarations or authorizations of war.’ If put in an appropriate context, this exaggeration could probably have prevented a preemptive attack on Iraq based on false and made-up intelligence on nonexistent WMD, and we may have saved thousands of American soldiers’ lives, tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ hard-earned money, and would have prevented the loss of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians’ lives. Only in John Yoo’s book of ‘cost & benefits analysis’ would this make it to the ‘exaggerated cost column.’

As for ‘Congress would use their funding power to check him,’ his pretend innocence would not get a pass from even the most naïve or ignorant. Considering where the real funding of the inhabitants of our congress comes from, taking into consideration the old adage ‘thou shall not bite the hand that feeds you,’ and understanding the power of ‘bacon sent home,’ who is Mr. Yoo kidding here; really? Read more ?

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Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:00 EST

In his Afghan "surge" speech at West Point last week, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new "way forward in Afghanistan." He spoke of the "additional 30,000 U.S. troops" he was sending into that country over the next six months. He brought up the "roughly $30 billion" it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don’t faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become.
Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it gave little sense of just how big and how expensive this surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the media as the surge of November 2009 is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the U.S. war effort in many areas. Looked at another way, the media’s focus on the president’s speech as the crucial moment of decision, and on those 30,000 new troops as the crucial piece of information, has distorted what’s actually underway.
In reality, the U.S. military, along with its civilian and intelligence counterparts, has been in an almost constant state of surge since the last days of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, while information on this is available, and often well reported, it’s scattered in innumerable news stories on specific aspects of the war. You have to be a media jockey to catch it all, no less put it together.
What follows, then, is my own attempt to make sense of the nine fronts on which the U.S. has been surging, and continues to do so, as 2009 ends. Think of this as an effort to widen our view of Obama’s widening war.
Obama’s Nine Surges
1. The Troop Surge: Let’s start with those "30,000" new troops the president announced. First of all, they represent Obama’s surge, phase 2. As the president pointed out in his speech, there were "just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan" when he took office in January 2009. In March, Obama announced that he was ordering in 21,000 additional troops. Last week, when he spoke, there were already approximately 68,000 to 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. If you add the 32,000 already there in January and the 21,700 actually dispatched after the March announcement, however, you only get 53,700, leaving another 15,000 or so to be accounted for. According to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, 11,000 of those were "authorized in the waning days of the Bush administration and deployed this year," bringing the figure to between 64,000 and 65,000. In other words, the earliest stage of the present Afghan "surge" was already underway when Obama arrived.
It also looks like at least a few thousand more troops managed to slip through the door in recent months without notice or comment. Similarly, with the 30,000 figure announced a week ago, DeYoung reports that the president quietly granted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the right to "increase the number by 10 percent, or 3,000 troops, without additional White House approval or announcement." That already potentially brings the most recent surge numbers to 33,000, and an unnamed "senior military official" told De Young "that the final number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for additional support personnel such as engineers, medevac units and route-clearance teams, which comb roads for bombs."
Now, add in the 7,500 troops and trainers that administration officials reportedly strong-armed various European countries into offering. More than 1,500 of these are already in Afghanistan and simply not being withdrawn as previously announced. The cost of sending some of the others, like the 900-plus troops Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has promised, will undoubtedly be absorbed by Washington. Nonetheless, add most of them in and, miraculously, you’ve surged up to, or beyond, Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s basic request for at least 40,000 troops to pursue a counterinsurgency war in that country.
2. The Contractor Surge: Given our heavily corporatized and privatized military, it makes no sense simply to talk about troop numbers in Afghanistan as if they were increasing in a void. You also need to know about the private contractors who have taken over so many former military duties, from KP and driving supply convoys to providing security on large bases. There’s no way of even knowing who is responsible for the surge of (largely Pentagon-funded) private contractors in Afghanistan. Did their numbers play any part in the president’s three months of deliberations? Does he have any control over how many contractors are put on the U.S. government payroll there? We don’t know.
Private contractors certainly went unmentioned in his speech and, amid the flurry of headlines about troops going to Afghanistan, they remain almost unmentioned in the mainstream media. In major pieces on the president’s tortuous "deliberations" with his key military and civilian advisors at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, all produced from copious officially inspired leaks, there wasn’t a single mention of private contractors, and yet their numbers have been surging for months.
A modest-sized article by August Cole in the Wall Street Journal the day after the president’s speech gave us the basics, but you had to be looking. Headlined "U.S. Adding Contractors at Fast Pace," the piece barely peeked above the fold on page 7 of the paper. According to Cole: "The Defense Department’s latest census shows that the number of contractors increased about 40% between the end of June and the end of September, for a total of 104,101. That compares with 113,731 in Iraq, down 5% in the same period… Most of the contractors in Afghanistan are locals, accounting for 78,430 of the total…" In other words, there are already more private contractors on the payroll in Afghanistan than there will be U.S. troops when the latest surge is complete.
Though many of these contractors are local Afghans hired by outfits like DynCorp International and Fluor Corp., TPM Muckracker managed to get a further breakdown of these figures from the Pentagon and found that there were 16,400 "third country nationals" among the contractors, and 9,300 Americans. This is a formidable crew, and its numbers are evidently still surging, as are the Pentagon contracts doled out to private outfits that go with them. Cole, for instance, writes of the contract that Dyncorp and Fluor share to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan "which could be worth as much as $7.5 billion to each company in the coming years."
3. The Militia Surge: U.S. Special Forces are now carrying out pilot programs for a mini-surge in support of local Afghan militias that are, at least theoretically, anti-Taliban. The idea is evidently to create a movement along the lines of Iraq’s Sunni Awakening Movement that, many believe, ensured the "success" of George W. Bush’s 2007 surge in that country. For now, as far as we know, U.S. support takes the form of offers of ammunition, food, and possibly some Kalashnikov rifles, but in the future we’ll be ponying up more arms and, undoubtedly, significant amounts of money.
This is, after all, to be a national program, the Community Defense initiative, which, according to Jim Michaels of USA Today, will "funnel millions of dollars in foreign aid to villages that organize ‘neighborhood watch’-like programs to help with security." Think of this as a "bribe" surge. Such programs are bound to turn out to be essentially money-based and designed to buy "friendship."
4. The Civilian Surge: Yes, Virginia, there is a "civilian surge" underway in Afghanistan, involving increases in the number of "diplomats and experts in agriculture, education, health and rule of law sent to Kabul and to provincial reconstruction teams across the country." The State Department now claims to be "on track" to triple the U.S. civilian component in Afghanistan from 320 officials in January 2009 to 974 by "the early weeks of next year." (Of course, that, in turn, means another mini-surge in private contractors: more security guards to protect civilian employees of the U.S. government.) A similar civilian surge is evidently underway in neighboring Pakistan, just the thing to go with a surge of civilian aid and a plan for a humongous new, nearly billion-dollar embassy compound to be built in Islamabad.
5. The CIA and Special Forces Surge: And speaking of Pakistan, Noah Shachtman of Wired’s Danger Room blog had it right recently when, considering the CIA’s "covert" (but openly discussed) drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, he wrote: "The most important escalation of the war might be the one the President didn’t mention at West Point." In fact, the CIA’s drone attacks there have been escalating in numbers since the Obama administration came into office. Now, it seems, paralleling the civilian surge in the Af/Pak theater of operations, there is to be a CIA one as well. While little information on this is available, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times report that in recent months the CIA has delivered a plan to the White House "for widening the campaign of strikes against militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan, sending additional spies there and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the C.I.A.’s budget for operations inside the country."
In addition, Scott Shane of the Times reports:

"The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said…, to parallel the president’s decision… to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide."

The Pakistani southern border province of Baluchistan is a hornet’s nest with its own sets of separatists and religious extremists, as well as a (possibly U.S.-funded) rebel movement aimed at the Baluchi minority areas of Iran. The Pakistani government is powerfully opposed to drone strikes in the area of the heavily populated provincial capital of Quetta where, Washington insists, the Afghan Taliban leadership largely resides. If such strikes do begin, they could prove the most destabilizing aspect of the widening of the war that the present surge represents.
In addition, thanks to the Nation magazine’s Jeremy Scahill, we now know that, from a secret base in Karachi, Pakistan, the U.S. Army’s Joint Special Operations Command, in conjunction with the private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater), operates "a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ’snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan." Since so many U.S. activities in Pakistan involve secretive, undoubtedly black-budget operations, we may only have the faintest outlines of what the "surge" there means.
6. The Base-Building Surge: Like the surge in contractors and in drone attacks, the surge in base-building in Afghanistan significantly preceded Obama’s latest troop-surge announcement. A recent NBC Nightly News report on the ever-expanding U.S. base at Kandahar Airfield, which it aptly termed a "boom town," shows just how ongoing this part of the overall surge is, and at what a staggering level. As in Iraq from 2003 on, billions of dollars are being sunk into bases, the largest of which — especially the old Soviet site, Bagram Air Base, with more than $200 million in construction projects and upgrades underway at the moment — are beginning to look like ever more permanent fixtures on the landscape.
In addition, as Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com has reported, forward observation bases and smaller combat outposts have been sprouting all over southern Afghanistan. "Forget for a moment the ‘debates’ in Washington over Afghan War policy," he wrote in early November, "and, if you just focus on the construction activity and the flow of money into Afghanistan, what you see is a war that, from the point of view of the Pentagon, isn’t going to end any time soon. In fact, the U.S. military’s building boom in that country suggests that, in the ninth year of the Afghan War, the Pentagon has plans for a far longer-term, if not near-permanent, garrisoning of the country, no matter what course Washington may decide upon."
7. The Training Surge: In some ways, the greatest prospective surge may prove to be in the training of the Afghan national army and police. Despite years of American and NATO "mentoring," both are in notoriously poor shape. The Afghan army is riddled with desertions — 25% of those trained in the last year are now gone — and the Afghan police are reportedly a hapless, ill-paid, corrupt, drug-addicted lot. Nonetheless, Washington (with the help of NATO reinforcements) is planning to bring an army whose numbers officially stand at approximately 94,000 (but may actually be as low as 40-odd thousand) to 134,000 reasonably well-trained troops by next fall and 240,000 a year later. Similarly, the Obama administration hopes to take the police numbers from an official 93,000 to 160,000.
8. The Cost Surge: This is a difficult subject to pin down in part because the Pentagon is, in cost-accounting terms, one of the least transparent organizations around. What can be said for certain is that Obama’s $30 billion figure won’t faintly hold when it comes to the real surge. There is no way that figure will cover anything like all the troops, bases, contractors, and the rest. Just take the plan to train an Afghan security force of approximately 400,000 in the coming years. We’ve already spent more than $15 billion on the training of the Afghan Army and more than $10 billion has gone into police training — staggering figures for a far smaller combined force with poor results. Imagine, then, what a massive bulking up of the country’s security forces will actually cost. In congressional testimony, Centcom commander General David Petraeus suggested a possible price tag of $10 billion a year. And if such a program works (which seems unlikely), try to imagine how one of the poorest countries on the planet will support a 400,000-man force. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just suggested that it will take at least 15-20 years before the country can actually pay for such a force itself. In translation, what we have here is undoubtedly a version of Colin Powell’s "Pottery Barn" rule ("You break it, you own it"); in this case, you build it, you own it. If we create such security forces, they will be, financially speaking, ours into the foreseeable future. (And this is even without adding in those local militias we’re planning to invest "millions" in.)
9. The Anti-Withdrawal Surge: Think of this as a surge in time. By all accounts, the president tried to put some kind of limit on his most recent Afghan surge, not wanting "an open-ended commitment." With that in mind, he evidently insisted on a plan, emphasized in his speech, in which some of the surge troops would start to come home in July 2011, about 18 months from now. This was presented in the media as a case of giving something to everyone (the Republican opposition, his field commanders, and his own antiwar Democratic Party base). In fact, he gave his commanders and the Republican opposition a very real surge in numbers. In this regard, a Washington Post headline says it all: "McChrystal’s Afghanistan Plan Stays Mainly Intact." On the other hand, what he gave his base was only the vaguest of promises ("…and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011"). Moreover, within hours of the speech, even that commitment was being watered down by the first top officials to speak on the subject. Soon enough, as the right-wing began to blaze away on the mistake of announcing a withdrawal date "to the enemy," there was little short of a stampede of high officials eager to make that promise ever less meaningful.
In what Mark Mazzetti of the Times called a "flurry of coordinated television interviews," the top civilian and military officials of the administration marched onto the Sunday morning talk shows "in lockstep" to reassure the right (and they were reassured) by playing "down the significance of the July 2011 target date." The United States was, Secretary of Defense Gates and others indicated, going to be in the region in strength for years to come. ("…July 2011 was just the beginning, not the end, of a lengthy process. That date, [National Security Advisor] General [James] Jones said, is a ‘ramp’ rather than a ‘cliff.’")
How Wide the Widening War?
When it came to the spreading Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the president in his speech spoke of his surge goal this way: "We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government." This seems a modest enough target, even if the means of reaching it are proving immodest indeed. After all, we’re talking about a minority Pashtun insurgency — Pashtuns make up only about 42% of Afghanistan’s population — and the insurgents are a relatively lightly armed, rag-tag force. Against them and a miniscule number of al-Qaeda operatives, the Pentagon has launched a remarkable, unbelievably costly build-up of forces over vast distances, along fragile, extended supply lines, and in a country poorer than almost any other on the planet. The State Department has, to the best of its abilities, followed suit, as has the CIA across the border in Pakistan.
All of this has been underway for close to a year, with at least another six months to go. This is the reality that the president and his top officials didn’t bother to explain to the American people in that speech last week, or on those Sunday talk shows, or in congressional testimony, and yet it’s a reality we should grasp as we consider our future and the Afghan War we, after all, are paying for.
And yet, confoundingly, as the U.S. has bulked up in Afghanistan, the war has only grown fiercer both within the country and in parts of Pakistan. Sometimes bulking-up can mean not reversing but increasing the other side’s momentum. We face what looks to be a widening war in the region. Already, the Obama administration has been issuing ever stronger warnings to the Pakistani government and military to shape up in the fight against the Taliban, otherwise threatening not only drone strikes in Baluchistan, but cross-border raids by Special Operations types, and even possibly "hot pursuit" by U.S. forces into Pakistan. This is a dangerous game indeed.
As Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power, wrote recently, "Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism." Whatever the Obama administration does in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, the American ability to mount a sustained operation of this size in one of the most difficult places on the planet, when it can’t even mount a reasonable jobs program at home, remains a strange wonder of the world.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/198728-The-Nine-Surges-of-Obama-s-War-How-to-Escalate-in-Afghanistan

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Joel Beinin
Middle East Report Online
Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:40 UTC

© Unknown

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the oldest such festival in the United States, was founded in rebellion against received wisdom. Since 1980, the festival has promoted independent Jewish films that contest the conventional Hollywood depiction of Jewish life, particularly its lachrymose over-concentration on Jewish victimhood, and regularly presented "alternatives to the often uncritical view of life and politics in Israel available in the established American Jewish community." The festival’s audience, mostly Jewish, has reacted positively to this policy, even in 2005, when the organizers decided to show Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, the theme of which is suicide bombing.
Critical Israeli Jewish auteurs have also been welcome. In 2008, the Israeli director Shai Carmeli Pollak came to San Francisco to present his film, Bil’in Habibti (Bil’in, My Love), which records the non-violent struggle of Palestinians, supportive Israelis and internationals to stop construction of Israel’s separation barrier in a West Bank village. The festival has previously screened two films by Simone Bitton, a Moroccan-born, dual Israeli-French citizen. The first, Mahmoud Darwich: The Land as Language (1998), is an appreciative biopic about the late Palestinian poet laureate. The second, Wall (2005), is an unflattering examination of the separation barrier.
Bitton’s current work, Rachel (Ciné-Sud Promotion, 2008), is not yet in distribution. It has appeared only at film festivals, in Berlin, Paris, New York, Sarajevo, Toronto and elsewhere. In the fall of 2009 it will play at the Haifa Film Festival in Israel. On July 25 and August 4, it was shown at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
The festival’s board of directors surely knew that showing Rachel — which investigates the violent death of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year old American peace activist, at the hands of the Israeli army — would discomfit some Jewish viewers. But they were likely unprepared for the strident, even hysterical, objections of the official organizations of the Bay Area Jewish community. In light of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s history, it is difficult to imagine that these organizations were exercised primarily by the content of the film. Indeed, they saved their strongest language for the "virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic" co-sponsors of the screening, Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and the decision of the festival organizers to invite Rachel’s mother, Cindy Corrie, whom they dubbed an "Israel basher," to take part in a question-and-answer session after the lights went up.
But generic anger at "Israel bashing" is an unsatisfying explanation for the Jewish organizations’ ire, since Jewish Voice for Peace had previously co-sponsored films at the festival and Carmeli Pollak and other Jewish filmmakers had criticized Israel’s occupation policies in much sharper terms than anything anyone in the Corrie family has said on the record. Perhaps the problem was that the festival organizers brought non-Jews — AFSC and Cindy Corrie — under the community tent to witness something of which many members of the community are ashamed.
Forensic Investigation
The death of Rachel Corrie brought a raft of journalistic inquests, all ostensibly concerned to sift through the competing claims of her fellow activists in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who say she was murdered, and the Israeli state, which prefers to call her untimely end a "regrettable accident." Some of the media accounts were skeptical of the army’s internal inquiry, others less so. Many reporters seemed more eager to grill the ISM activists who were present than the soldiers, in lockstep with the Israeli army’s own counterattack: "We are dealing with a group of protesters who are acting very irresponsibly, putting everyone in danger — the Palestinians, themselves and our forces — by intentionally placing themselves in a combat zone." And the army, despite Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s reported promise to President George W. Bush of a "thorough, credible and transparent" investigation, was hardly open to outside scrutiny. Human Rights Watch, which included a section on Corrie in a June 2005 report on faulty Israeli military inquiries, was unable to pronounce a verdict upon how she died, but did conclude that "the impartiality and professionalism of the Israeli investigation into Corrie’s death are highly questionable." In any event, the following facts are not in serious dispute.
On March 16, 2003, Corrie, a senior at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza. The mammoth Caterpillar D9 bulldozer, custom-fitted with armor by Israel, was leveling the ground and demolishing Palestinian homes in the city of Rafah along the Philadelphi axis — the road that runs along the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Many homes and buildings had already been destroyed to create an open space in preparation for constructing a wall on the border. Corrie was working with the ISM, an organization dedicated to non-violent, direct action in solidarity with the Palestinian people under military occupation. She was killed as she stood, unarmed, in front of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist, Samir Nasrallah, in an attempt to prevent the bulldozer from razing it.
Rachel is a deeply moving portrayal of Rachel Corrie the person and ISM volunteer. And though no firm conclusion is asserted, the film is also the most thorough, credible and transparent investigation yet conducted into exactly how she died and who was responsible. As Bitton has written, on a Facebook page dedicated to Rachel, it "does some of what a court should have done" in putting the Israeli state’s narrative of Corrie’s death under the microscope.
Simone Bitton focuses first on the last eight weeks of Corrie’s life, her reasons for going to Gaza, her relationships with several Palestinians, with whom she became quite close, and the work of the ISM in Rafah. The ISM was conceived in the spring and summer of 2001. During the first three weeks of the second intifada, which erupted following Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in September 2000, the right-wing Israeli daily Ma’ariv reported that Israeli forces fired a million bullets at mostly unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. This hail of lead flew before any suicide bombings or other acts of terror inside the pre-1967 borders of Israel took place. (The last suicide bombing had been in 1996.) In the face of this imbalance of force, Ghassan Andoni, George Rishmawi, Huweida Arraf and others developed the idea that a non-violent international presence could protect Palestinians from the ravages of the Israeli military. In addition, they thought, international witnesses who communicated what they saw and experienced could enhance international awareness and media coverage of Israeli violence. The first ISM contingent arrived in Palestine in August 2001. Corrie was an enthusiastic participant, writing home, "Coming here is one of the best things I’ve ever done." The recitation of these words in the film is a gut-ripping moment, as those in the audience know that Rachel Corrie will soon die.
At Pains to Explain
Rachel devotes very careful attention to the circumstances of the protagonist’s death. Like a forensic detective, Bitton gathered pertinent oral testimonies, documents, photographs and video footage. Only the voices of those directly involved are heard: Corrie’s ISM colleagues and Palestinian friends and hosts in Rafah, ISM co-founder Andoni, the Israeli military police officer who investigated the case, the Tel Aviv coroner who examined the body, and Jonathan Pollak, a member of the Israeli group, Anarchists Against the Wall (and brother of filmmaker Shai Carmeli Pollak), who put up Corrie’s colleagues in his Tel Aviv home after she died. Rachel Corrie herself is heard as well, through a narrator’s readings of her e-mails home.
There are no abstract political proclamations. Conflicting testimonies are juxtaposed. It is notable that, of all the persons interviewed, Andoni is the only one who considers that he may bear some responsibility for Corrie’s death, since he trained her and sent her to Rafah. Simone Bitton proceeds like an attorney questioning witnesses, sans speeches to the jury or inferences from the testimony. This technique makes the film a powerful documentary record whose value goes far beyond Bitton’s obvious sympathy for Corrie and her questioning of the official story.
That story — "It is clear the death of Ms. Corrie was not caused as a result of a direct action by the bulldozer or by its running her over" — does not hold up well under Bitton’s lens. On camera, the Israeli military police officer who led the investigation expresses a twinge of doubt about his own conclusions. He admits that he did not visit the site of the Nasrallah home and relied primarily on the testimony of soldiers. Among the eyewitnesses he did not interview were the ISM volunteers who saw the bulldozer run over Corrie from a distance of as little as ten yards. They maintain that their comrade was quite purposely run over, not once, but twice. The official claim that the bulldozer driver did not see Corrie because she was behind a pile of dirt is definitively disproved by Israeli army video footage that shows her standing on top of the mound, wearing a highly visible reflective orange jacket, as the bulldozer approached.
In April 2003, Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine released an autopsy report that attributed Corrie’s death to "pressure on the chest (mechanical asphyxiation) with fractures of the ribs and vertebrae of the dorsal spinal column and scapulas, and tear wounds in the right lung with hemorrhaging of the pleural cavities." How could this finding — she was crushed — be squared with the military police’s seeming absolution of the bulldozer? As the coroner who performed the autopsy is at pains to explain to Bitton, it is possible that Corrie was killed by the weight of the dirt on her body as the bulldozer was passing over her. Since there was no indication that metal had touched her body, he could not conclude that the bulldozer itself killed her.
It is not only the Israeli officials whose conduct is suspect, the film goes on to show. The coroner acknowledges that the Corrie family had a right to be present at the autopsy; since they could not attend, it would have been proper for the US embassy in Tel Aviv to send a representative. Yet embassy officials, despite the request of the Corrie family that they witness the procedure, told the coroner that they were not interested in doing so. Therefore, he proceeded on his own.
The Corrie family has tried persistently to get the US government to mount its own inquiry. A resolution introduced by their congressman, Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA), directing the Department of Justice to open an investigation received 78 co-sponsors but died in committee. John McKay, the former US Attorney for western Washington and one of eight US attorneys fired by the Bush administration in 2006, told the Corries, "There will never be a US investigation into Rachel’s case." The US government remains loath to intercede despite its own position, recorded in a letter to the Corries from former State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson and never rescinded, that Israel’s investigation was inadequate.
Did the bulldozer driver, whose name is kept confidential by the Israeli army, intentionally kill Rachel Corrie? The film is agnostic on this point. According to Bitton, "The intentional crime my movie addresses is not Rachel Corrie’s death. It is the willful destruction of entire neighborhoods, carried out with the knowledge that people who stay in their homes or attempt to defend them will be killed in the process. One clearly sees where this leads us: Six years later, in the same spot, the same army kills hundreds of innocent victims in supposedly targeted bombings. Today the end result has been reached: All Palestinian civilians, as well as anyone seeking to give them assistance, are potential collateral victims; their lives are, strictly speaking, not worth anything anymore. Talking about war crimes or bringing up the Geneva Conventions makes you look naïve, archaic."
These words were written in early 2009, on the heels of Israel’s "all-out war" upon "Hamas and its kind" in Gaza, an operation that left well over 1,000 unarmed Palestinians dead, but they were applicable in 2003 as well. The Israeli army began destroying blocks of homes in Rafah, to cap the same cross-border supply tunnels that achieved such notoriety during the Gaza war, in 2001.
The Value of One Life?
There is undoubtedly something disturbing about making a film focused on the life and death of one young American woman while Israel has killed thousands of non-combatant Palestinians since the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987. One justification is that both the Jewish and Muslim traditions affirm that the value of the life of every human being is equally boundless. Another is the testimony of the soldier who says, "We didn’t know they were foreigners; we thought they were Palestinians." Does this suggest that, if Rachel Corrie had been a Palestinian, it would have been routine to kill her? Might the world media have failed to notice her death, particularly since any investigation would have been perfunctory at best? Israel’s record in the Occupied Territories and the corporate media’s response to it indicate that this surmise is not unwarranted. Yet the response to Corrie’s death has not been overwhelming either.
Until Corrie’s death, the ISM did not imagine that the Israeli army might kill internationals. In fact, she was the first of several international victims. On April 11, 2003, another young ISM activist, Tom Hurndall, was shot in the head in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli sniper, Taysir al-Hayb. (Al-Hayb is a Bedouin with several family members serving in the Israeli military.) Hurndall went into a coma and died nine months later. In April 2005 an Israeli military court convicted al-Hayb of manslaughter and obstruction of justice; he was sentenced to eight years in prison. A year later, a British inquest jury determined that Hurndall was a victim of "unlawful killing." According to the Hurndall family lawyer, this legalism means "intentionally killed," or murdered.
On May 2, 2003, James Miller, a Welsh filmmaker, was shot dead by an Israeli soldier, Capt. Hib al-Hayb. The Israeli military police concluded that they could not determine that al-Hayb’s shot was responsible for Miller’s death. The captain was disciplined for violating the rules of engagement, however, and for changing his account of the incident. In April 2006, an inquest jury of a London coroner’s court returned a verdict of unlawful killing. In August 2007 the Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that the British attorney general had written to his Israeli counterpart requesting a criminal investigation, on the basis that ballistic tests carried out in Israel "could only show that the bullet that killed James [Miller] did not come from the rifle barrels of the weapons that were examined." On the basis of their own ballistic analysis, the British believe the Israelis tested the wrong rifles or even switched the barrel of the offending weapon. Israel has not prosecuted Capt. al-Hayb.
There have been non-lethal shootings as well. On April 5, 2003, Israeli forces shot many rounds of machine gun fire at the face of Brian Avery, an American volunteer with the ISM in the West Bank town of Jenin. The shots broke his jaw and eye socket, and Avery sued for damages. The army refused to investigate the case, claiming that no soldiers had reported the incident. In February 2005 the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the army to reopen the case. Avery settled out of court for $150,000 in November 2008. Most recently, on March 13, 2009, 37-year old Tristan Anderson from Oakland, California suffered critical brain damage in the West Bank village of Ni’lin when Israeli forces shot him in the head with a new high-velocity tear gas canister which has been used since the December 2008 launch of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Anderson was demonstrating, along with villagers, Israelis and other internationals, against the separation barrier Israel is constructing that would effectively annex one quarter of Ni’lin’s land. A resident of Ni’lin was shot in the leg with live ammunition in the same demonstration. Anderson remains in critical condition, and his long-term prognosis is uncertain.
Rachel does not address these casualties or attempt to assess the long-term effect of the ISM’s interventions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since no form of resistance — non-violent or armed — was able to deter Israel’s slaughter of civilians in the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-2009, perhaps it is fair to say that the most substantial impact of the ISM’s work was on the volunteers themselves. The film briefly explores the variety of personal and political motives that brought Rachel Corrie and her colleagues to Palestine. Among them are untutored idealism and youthful naïveté (which they themselves acknowledge in retrospect). None of them were "experts" in the history of the conflict or fully understood the complexities of the Palestinian society into which they inserted themselves. But now they have learned a hard lesson: Anyone who gets in Israel’s way may be killed.
Crossing a Line
While Ghassan Andoni and some of the ISMers demonstrate some capacity for critical reflection about Rachel Corrie’s death, the official institutions of the Bay Area Jewish community were united in rejecting such reflection. The official Jewish institutions certainly were not ready to consider Jonathan Pollak’s climactic explanation for his willingness to host ISM volunteers in his home: "I could not live in this place without resisting, not merely verbally, but by action." Pollak, an Israeli Jew, has been injured several times by the Israeli army while demonstrating non-violently in Bil’in. A soldier shot him in the head with a tear gas canister in April 2005, causing two internal brain hemorrhages and a wound requiring 23 stitches. Since the Jewish institutions have not erupted in protest over equally provocative films in the past, perhaps their over-the-top reaction to the screening of Rachel was a form of circling the wagons after the widespread international condemnation of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.
The faceoff in the Bay Area Jewish community was initiated by an editorial in the Jewish weekly, J, which was particularly incensed that, since Simone Bitton was unavailable, Cindy Corrie would take questions after the screening. "Cindy Corrie’s appearance crosses a line," the J editors wrote. "The Jewish Film Festival is under no obligation to offer a microphone to Israel bashers." Suggesting that there are and ought to be "lines" marking the boundaries of "acceptable discourse" in the Jewish community, to use a term employed by the festival’s executive director Peter Stein at the screening, sounds suspiciously like the McCarthyite notion of "un-American activities." Why the elder Corrie was presumed to be an "Israel basher" the editors did not specify.
While J arrogated to itself the right to draw lines, the two leading Jewish charitable foundations in the Bay Area, Koret and Taube, pushed the panic button. The foundations attacked the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival for making "three egregious errors": First among them was "partnering with Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee, two virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic groups that support boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Both are closely associated with the International Solidarity Movement and other groups that aid and abet terror against the Jewish state. These groups cross the line for inclusion in the Jewish community." Second was "to present a film that lays blame for the accidental death of a civilian at the door of the State of Israel." And third was to "invite Cindy Corrie into our community. This bereaved mother cannot help but have a negative bias toward Israel. Why would a Jewish organization hand her a microphone and a soapbox from which to condemn Israel as Jewish audiences are expected to sit and listen politely? There is no possible counterbalance to an emotional, grieving mother."
The foundations’ rhetoric is tendentious, at best. Jewish Voice for Peace forthrightly supports selective divestment, targeting US companies that aid Israeli occupation policies, and its members have been active in the effort to induce Caterpillar to stop selling Israel the bulldozers that knock down Palestinian residences in violation of international law. The organization does go further than many Jewish anti-occupation groups in refusing to condemn more expansive boycott and divestment campaigns. Its website is articulate on the point that such endeavors, and criticism of Israel generally, are not perforce anti-Semitic or even "anti-Israel." Jewish Voice for Peace has, indeed, published a book-length refutation of that canard, Reframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives (2002). At the same time, the organization’s members insist on speaking out against the occupation as Jews, rather than merely as US citizens or defenders of human rights, precisely because (according to the website) "as Jews, we can make the distinction between real anti-Semitism and the cynical manipulation of that issue to shield Israel from legitimate criticism." The foundations’ attack on the venerable Quaker peace organization, AFSC, is similarly reliant on an untenable definition of "anti-Israel" that brooks no quibble with the Jewish state’s policies. And since two key staffers of AFSC’s Middle East program in San Francisco, including Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, are Jewish, the allegation of anti-Semitism is predicated upon the insipid idea that these Jews are "self-hating."
Is Cindy Corrie in the grip of "negative bias toward Israel" and its partisans in the United States? Judging by the YouTube video of her post-film discussion with Stein and the audience, no. Asked by Stein if she understood the vehement protests against her presence, she said she regarded them as part of a "very healthy discussion" within the Jewish community. She further remarked that members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), with whom she disagrees politically, "believe they’re doing good." Her comportment was consistent with the words of Rabbi Brian Walt, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America: "If I were in [the Corries'] situation, I would imagine that the temptation to hate those who killed my daughter would be hard to resist…. Despite their daughter’s tragic death, the Corries have never spoken in a hateful way toward Israel or Jews. On the contrary, they are deeply committed to peace and to the security of all people in the conflict, Israelis and Palestinians." Indeed, the 1,200 people (mostly Jews) in the Castro Theater on July 25 seemed generally appreciative of Corrie’s remarks.
Nonetheless, the film festival organizers clearly felt the pressure mobilized by the official Jewish organizations. Five days before the festival began, board president Shana Penn resigned with five months left on a two-year term, citing "healthy differences on how to approach sensitive issues." (She will remain on the board.) In the end, the organizers allowed Michael Harris of San Francisco Voice for Israel (affiliated with the ultras of Stand With Us) to speak briefly before what he called "the Rachel Corrie hagiography" played on screen. His remarks are also on YouTube. Where Cindy Corrie was conciliatory, Harris was pugilistic, saying that Rachel "intentionally put herself in harm’s way," enumerating the names of suicide bombing victims who were doing nothing "more risky than riding a bus, or going to buy a slice of pizza or a cup of coffee" and even averring (to loud boos) that these deaths explained why the bulldozer that killed Rachel was operating in Gaza.
It is difficult to imagine that Jewish Voice for Peace or Simone Bitton would be invited to counter the presentation of a speaker from San Francisco Voice for Israel, or AIPAC, or the Israeli consulate. So were the Bay Area Jewish organizations really upset about lack of balance? The leading figures at J and the Koret and Taube Foundations certainly know that there is sharp debate among Israelis about the occupation, home demolitions and the morality of army actions, so were they really concerned with protecting the security of Israel? A more convincing hypothesis is that their outcry is about power. The official institutions of the Jewish community are built on a foundation of money (lots of it) and draw their strength from the two main pillars of American Jewish identity — Holocaust commemoration and unquestioning "support for Israel." Taking away one of these pillars would be an institutional disaster.
Although the furor over Rachel in the San Francisco Jewish community is a tempest in a teapot compared to the daily catastrophes suffered by the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it does have some significance. It demonstrates as definitively as possible that the American Jewish community is deeply split on the question of Israel-Palestine. Public opinion polls suggest that the Koret and Taube Foundations represent the minority position in the community, certainly among Bay Area Jews. More and more American Jews find themselves attracted to the moral commitment that animates Rachel, and left cold by the tactics of pressure groups that spend so much money to shut down debate over Israel and its occupation policies. And that is why the pressure groups are beginning to fail.

Comment: Read also: Thou shalt not present the Truth! Documentary sparks uproar at Jewish film fest

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/191023-Rachel-Corrie-in-Palestine-and-in-San-Francisco

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"The opportunity for business growth in the Middle East has never been better"- Richard Burt, chairman of Diligence.

Contents

[hide]

• 1 Overview
• 2 Bush Administration Connections
• 3 Key People
• 4 Contact

[edit]

Overview

Diligence LLC was formed by past members of the CIA and Britain’s MI5 Intelligence Services. They have included experts in international law, journalism and intelligence services from post-Cold War which enables them to vet all sorts of future investment projects while providing security advice. More than half of their around 100 employees are former members of an intelligence service.[1] They are related to New Bridge Strategies, sharing addresses and many of the same board members.

Diligence first set up in Baghdad in July 2003. They started by providing payroll protection and delivery, personnel and facilities security, due diligence on potential Iraqi business ventures, training and management of personal security forces, and intelligence briefs.

The success of the business led to the development of the subsidiary, Diligence Middle East, LLC, a partnership with the American company New Bridge Strategies and the Al-Mal Investment Company, a Kuwaiti company chaired by Mohammed Al-Sagar, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Kuwaiti parliament.[2] The new partnership provides clients with a range of services through out the Middle East and especially in Iraq.[3]

Said founder and CEO Mike Baker of the new company, "We are able to provide the highest quality information and security work available in Iraq because we have a core staff of more than 150 Iraqis with local knowledge, operating as full time project managers, security trainers, intelligence officers and security staff. By doing so, we are creating a solid, long-lasting, truly Iraqi company with a vested interest in its own success.”[4]

A new branch concentrating on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe will open in Berlin at the end of February 2006 under director Torsten Hinkelmann.[5]

Diligence is a member of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq.

[edit]

Bush Administration Connections

• Ed Rogers is vice-chair New Bridge Strategies and Diligence. He is also the co-founder of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers a lobbying firm that was the initial funder of Diligence and shares their floor with New Bridge in their DC office four blocks from the White House. Rogers has served in in the White House under the Reagan Administration, the Bush-Quayle campaign and the Bush 41 administration. Fellow founder of BG&R, Haley Barbour, whose connections to New Bridge raised concerns from his opponents, won Mississippi’s governor’s race in 2003.[6][7]

• Joe Allbaugh, the deputy chairman of Diligence, resigned his post as head of FEMA on March 1, 2003, a post granted to him after serving as National Campaign Manager for the Bush-Cheney 2000 election. He left to spend time with his children, but quickly jumped into the start up of New Bridge as bombs began falling on Iraq.[8]

• Former head of the CIA station in Baghdad, Whitley Bruner, is now in the private sector as head of Diligence’s operations in Iraq.[9] As well, founder Mike Baker is a former covert operator for the CIA.[10]

• Neil Bush has been paid a $60,000 annual consulting fee by the president of New Bridge, John Howland to aid in the procurement of contracts for companies seeking to do business in Iraq.[11]

[edit]

Key People

Senior Advisory Board

• William H. Webster: former director of the FBI and CIA
• Edward Mathias: managing director of the Carlyle Group
• Arnaud de Borchgrave: former President and CEO of UPI
• John Dooner: chairman and CEO of McCann-Erickson Worldgroup
• Thomas H. Boggs Jr.: chairman Patton Boggs
• Lord Charles Powell: former advisor to Margaret Thatcher and John Major
• Michael Howard: former leader of the Conservative Party, UK
• William Shiebler: asset manager
• Thomas F. McLarty: former President Clinton’s Chief of Staff; current president of Kissenger McLarty Associates
• Rockwell Schnabel: founder Trident Capital
• Kurt J. Lauk: founder and president of Globe Capital Partners

Management

• Nick Day: co-founder, chief operations officer
• Marc Triaureau: chief financial officer
• Ed Rogers: vice-chairman
• Joe M. Allbaugh: deputy chairman
• Russ Corn: managing director, London
• Charles Kestenbaum: COO of Diligence Middle East
• Whitley Bruner: director of Iraqi branch
• Jon Greenaway: managing director, Brussels
• Ewan McPhie: senior managing director, Washington DC
• Michael Redman: managing director, Moscow

Former management

• Mike Baker: founder, chief executive officer (left company in 2005)

[edit]

Contact

Washington, D.C
1275 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W, 10th Floor
Washington, D.C. 20004
Phone: (202) 659 6210
Fax (202) 783 4566
Email: washdc AT diligencellc.com
Website: [http://www.diligencellc.com/

Miami
Brickell Bayview
80 SW 8th Street, Suite 2000
Miami, Florida 33130
Phone:(305)423 7066
Fax: (305) 423 7067
Email: miami AT diligencellc.com

London
46-48 James Street,
London W1U 1EZ
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7935 3234
Fax +44 (0) 20 7935 3983
Email: london AT diligencellc.com

Baghdad
Phone: +88 216 5201 3687
Email: baghdad AT diligencellc.com

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Diligence%2C_LLC

http://www.diligencellc.com/index.html

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