Obama: Change You Can’t Believe In.

The election of Barack Obama to the White House in 2008 was one of the most celebrated electoral victories of recent times. Not since Nelson Mandela’s win in South Africa, following the collapse of the Apartheid regime, was the supposed power of the ballot box so publicly celebrated and displayed.

Obama’s victory was hailed as a triumph for the ‘democratic process’ and was widely touted as a fine example of how people power and electioneering can trump entrenched bigotry and money.

Full version here. Published in the Irish Anarchist Reivew [Issue 3]  May 2011.

A Promise Broken: Obama and Guantánamo Bay

Guantánamo Bay detention facility was created under George Bush’s Presidency in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001.  Described as ‘a place where normal legal rules’ do not apply, it quickly became infamous for harsh and extreme conditions of detention.  Interrogators practiced a variety of torture techniques on prisoners…

Full version here. Published in the Irish Anarchist Reivew [Issue 3]  May 2011.

The FBI’s Long Arm…

The FBI’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC)

According to legend the FBI always gets its man – leaving sexism aside for the moment.   Whether true or not, a recent case undoubtedly highlighted the extremely long reach of the US’s famous law enforcement agency.  The case involved Anis Abid Sardar, an Iraqi national, who was working in London as a taxi driver.  Last month Sardar was convicted of killing a US soldier in Iraq in 2007 and for this heinous crime he has been sentenced to serve a minimum of 38 years in prison – in the UK.

It seems that Anis Sardar became involved in the resistance to the US occupation of Iraq and took up making improvised explosive devices or IEDs.  One of the bombs that he made exploded under a troop carrier west of Bagdad in 2007 killing “34-year-old Sergeant First Class Randy Johnson, of 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment” . Some months after the attack Sardar was fingerprinted as he entered the UK having travelled via Syria.  Seven long years passed and then he came into the sights of the FBI.  The Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Centre (TEDAC) identified his fingerprints on a number of devices that were similar to those that killed Randy Johnson.  They issued a warrant for Sardar’s arrest and just last month he was convicted in what Sue Hemming of the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service described as a “landmark prosecution”.

Now you might ask what is TEDAC?  Well that’s part of what’s interesting .  The FBI’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Centre is located at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico in Virginia.  In the FBI’s own words it is the “US Government’s single repository for IEDs that have been collected or are of interest to the United States government.”  To put it another way ‘it’s the bomb library of America.’

The FBI are extremely proud of TEDAC.  It comprises a huge warehouse to where are repatriated the remnants of any device used against US agencies or its armed forces.  Right now there are thousands of boxes in the warehouse awaiting examination (see above).  When a device explodes anywhere and the target is US troops, the fragments from the entire conflagration are gathered up, logged and transported all the way back to said TEDAC facility in the USA.  Just imagine the logistics involved here for one moment.  The gathering of everything from a bomb blast must take place; the attention to detail must be paramount; everything is then packed up and posted in over to Virginia.

Amazing right.  Take a look at the photo above of the warehouse and those racks of crates and you get some indication of the huge effort that is taking place.  Every single one of those crates is a crime waiting to be solved.  This is cutting edge detective work alongside a cutting edge commitment to justice too.  Am I not right?

Eventually these bits of metal are examined and checked, and sometimes, as with the case of Sardar a prosecution results.  The FBI notes that ‘Since its creation in 2003, TEDAC has examined more than 100,000 IEDs from around the world and currently receives submissions at the rate of 800 per month. Two million items have been processed for latent prints—half of them this year alone.’  An FBI spokesperson added, ‘We have a lot of experience identifying IED components and blast damage.  As a result we have identified over 1,000 individuals with potential ties to terrorism.’

So there you are.  Shit hot, right?  TEDAC and everything associated with it is a commitment to justice that is second to none, right ?Except… Wait a minutes… What about…?

The question is HOW do you square up this dedicated pursuit by the FBI of men like Sardar with its polar opposite: the mounting tally of deaths associated with the US’s drone bombing campaign?

Before I set down another letter on WordPress, let me hasten to point out here that I’m not intending FOR ONE MOMENT to get into the matter of whether or not the US is entitlement to wander about the globe killing what it terms ‘legitmate’ targets at will.  That is not for now.  Afterall, a lowly writer such as I, who am I to question the right of the United States to execute at will those it deems to be its enemies?

Instead I will confine myself here to what are termed collateral deaths associated with this drone campaign?  In a recent interview regarding the Naming The Dead project, Jack Serle of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism  said, ‘We don’t have an absolute figure on how many people have been killed, but our best estimate is about 2,318. I don’t think it’s realistic to think that we’ll be able to name every single one of them, partly because a lot of people have died anonymously.”  To date in fact NTD have managed to name just over 700 individuals.

Site of a suspected U.S. drone strike on an Islamic seminary in Hangu district, bordering North Waziristan, November 21, 2013.

For me it beggars belief that in t his day and age this sort of murderous activity can go on with no one or no organisation able to stop it, but there you are it does.  The point however is that with regard to the US’s drone bombing campaign, significant numbers of civilians are being killed each week.  This is simply a war crime, but one that is happening week in and week out now.  The drone bombing campaign contravenes all the usual standards of conduct in war – where reasonable effort must be made to avoid the targeting of civilians.  And in almost all the cases I know of there isn’t even a war on in the first place.  The US is targeting  and killing at will in areas of the world where it sees fit.  Which puts TEDAC and the FBI’s investigative prowess into a somewhat different light, no?

The Naming The Dead project got underway due to the fact that in many of the cases where drone bombings have been conducted, the extent of the destruction and the arbitrariness of the attacks is such that no one knows often how many or who has died.  It is not unusual on any day to have on the newswires a brief report that a drone bomb attack has taken place.  In such reports the general number of casualties is reported on.  The names of the victims are rarely given… and the world moves on.  [Rest assured that no stellar effort by FBI or anyone else for that matter is going to take place in regard to these murderous attacks; in fact the victims’ families will be doing well if they manage to recover the remains of their loved ones.]

As I composed this post, I noted that the following report appeared on the wires.  It is entitled, Fresh US drone strikes have claimed the lives of at least 14 people in the troubled eastern part of Afghanistan.   To summarize the information in this report.  There were six casualties on Friday when a group of people were targeted by a US Drone flying over eastern Paktia Province.  ‘Witnesses and local resident say the victims were civilians, but Afghan officials insist that they were all Taliban militants.’  Furthermore, it is noted that later on that same Friday, ‘eight people were killed in another US drone strike in the eastern Nangarhar Province.’ The following is also noted: ‘The US has stepped up its drone campaign across Afghanistan in recent weeks.’  And the following was also noted:

• June 5^th at least 15 civilians lost their lives in a US drone strike in Alishir district of Khost province near the border with Pakistan. Local residents said the victims were attending the funeral of a local tribesman.
• On June 4^th Separate drone attacks across Nangarhar had claimed at least 17 lives the day before.

If you wish to know more about the extent and nature of the US’s drone war, the following pdf is worth examining.

So there you have it.  One the one hand people are beavering away in TEDAC day in and day out, scouring fragments of metal, powering up scanning electron microscopes, piecing together tiny fragments of prints – generally DOING THEIR DAMNEDEST to find those criminals out there in the world.  While on the other hand, under the same grand canopy that is US Justice and Law Enforcement, people are being blown to smithereens at will, with such gay abandon that in many cases it isn’t even known who is being killed or who they even are.

I guess you’ll drawn your own conclusions from all of this but I know one thing for sure, the days of having one law for one set of people in the world and another for another set, is long over with.

 

Related Links and Articles

Living Under Drones

Targetting the Rescuers

The “Drone Bomber” Arrives To A Warm Welcome From Our Glorious Leaders

Image via Wikipedia

Hamid Mir, Editor with Geo News in Islamabad (Pakistan) recorded that there were 34 drone attacks in the Pakistan region between 2004 -2008.  Between 2008 and March 2009 the  number rose dramatically and there were 46 drone attacks alone in that 15 month period.  [Note, as confirmed in reports below, the number of drone attacks has risen further and sharply under Obama’s first office term.  See in particular this Google Map of the attacks]

Mir points out that there 80 drone attacks during the entire period referred to above.  In all of these attacks 513 people were killed.  Having checked all the records Mir has ascertained that of all these casualties only 14 were actually of alleged terrorists (names confirmed by US Defense Dept Press Releases). The remainder, 499 people, were all civilians.

Hamid Mir investigated 11 individual incidents of drone bombings.  In two of these, he found that two ‘low-level’ Taliban activists had been killed.  In the remaining 9 attacks only civilians were killed.  As he states in the second of the two you tube clips below this is violation Article 3 of the UN Human Rights Charter – among many other violations contrary to the conduct of war.

Today, our glorious leaders, will warmly welcome the Commander In Chief of the US armed forced responsible for these atrocities.

And Hamid Mir on Drone attacks in Pakistan.

Related articles

• WikiLeaks Cables: Pakistan Urged Drone Strikes (newser.com)
• Obama Increase Drone Bombings
• You: Six killed in US drone attack in NWaziristan (nation.com.pk)
• “Drone strike kills six in N Waziristan” and related posts (thefrontierpost.com)
• Eight Killed In Latest Drone Bombing

Bloodshed and ‘Togetherness’ in Afghanistan

Commander Fire Now and Apologise Later Growing Up

A brief post: the war in Afghanistan.  Only last week (Feb 14th) NATO slaughtered a slew of civilians in a mis-aimed missile attack.  Children, men and women were blown to bits as they traveled along a road going about their business.  On the RTE news I heard the atrocity reported as a ‘set back’.   This Orwellian description was rejoined by a brief sound-bite interview with the US commander there – whose name I can’t recall but let’s for the purpose of this post call him Commander Fire Now and Apologise Later.  Commander Fire Now and Apologise Later informed us that the NATO campaign was still on track despite the murderous mistake that had been made.

All just spin – let’s face it.  Because it has now emerged that in the past week at least 60 (yes, 60!) more civilians have been slaughtered in various mistakes made by NATO troops.   When these atrocities happen it often takes quite a while for the details to filter out – so it may well be in a number of months from now that we get the full facts on these war crimes.   But as an example of the sort of thing that is now happening as a routine, check out this news article on a murderous NATO attack in December.

Anyway the point I want to get to is this.  We are not hearing much about this brutal war that is being conducted in Afghanistan.  It has grown bigger and bigger and more and more Afghanis are suffering (in order to ‘free’ them, of course.)

But for an interesting look into what is going on and why, and how the media side of ‘spinning’ this war is being conducted, see the current, excellent article from Media Lens entitled “War As PR – Operation Moshtarak, Meaning “Together”.  Media Lens is a small dedicated media analysis organisation who have done sterling work over the last number of years examining and reporting on the bias of the corporate media.  At the end of the Media Lens article there are various suggestions on what you can do with regard to the way in which the Afghanistan war is being reported.  None of these actions in their own right are going to change a whole lot but nevertheless it is vital that we make ourselves aware of the lies and slant that are being used to justify and brush over these crimes.  Read the article – inoculate yourself.

the glove and the iron fist

Does anyone believe this hand-wringing in respect to US atrocities in Western Afghanistan?

For the last few months there have been repeated massive bombardments in the area without any concern for the impact on the huge number of civilians caught up in the conflict.  A series of leaks from the latest US military report on this concedes as much stating that “dozens of civilians were killed in the air strikes in western Farah province” earlier last month.   Dozens?  It seems that the real number is more in the region of several hundred.  Note this: “In one case, a compound of buildings where suspected militants were massing was struck, even though it was in a densely populated area and there was no imminent threat, the New York Times said.” Indeed, a disregard for civilian casualties so that mission objective is achieved seems to be order of the day.

I drew attention to this in an earlier blog in February entitled The Obama Lie.  It seems that on the one hand Obama is keen and adept to present a caring image of his presidency.  But the reality for many ordinary citizens of this planet is much different: women, men and children have literally been bombed beyond recognition in what is a brutal and unrelenting assault in Western Afghanistan; that assault is all about securing US foreign policy into the future.

Few column inches are spared for the dead from these dreadful assaults by the US military machine.  Indeed we hear little about them and who they are; what they loved in life and who was near and dear to them.  Instead these hundreds of dead in Afghanistan are anonymous and will remain so it seems, discarded as mere numbers in the various reports which which casually allude to each atrocity as it happens.   Contrast that with, if you wish, the many column inches given to the awful killing of the traveller Edwin Dyer in Mali earlier this week.  The Guardian carried a good article about Mr Dyer – who he was and the fate that befell him.  It is a sorry, ugly story but in it we learn that Mr Dyer was ‘was well-respected in his community’.  A number of strongly worded condemnations of his murder also carried in the same article.  Such a report of course is important for his family and friends – granting them and the victim some respect in what is for them a tragic time.

But no such words and not even the names for the countless murdered by the US military machine.

The Obama Lie

So, we must be over a month into the Barak Obama presidency.  A lot of hope and a lot of optimism, right?

Last night I watched Obama sign into law his new ‘stimulus’ package to revive the US economy.  Heady stuff – but I won’t go into that right now. Instead I am thinking about a different matter: a short news bulletin on Friday last which reported that a drone aircraft had dropped two missiles in a remote area of Afghanistan.  It seems that the missiles, according to reports carried by CNN and others, killed at leat twenty people.

By all accounts the targets of the attack were members of the Taliban AND it was claimed that two such ‘target’ Taliban members were actually killed in the attack. Well, I’m still okay at my mathematics, so that leaves how many? Let’s see now, two from twenty leaves eighteen – that’s right 18 – doesn’t it? That is, eighteen others, who were never targets, were also killed in the attack.  I have got that right, haven’t I?  Please get back to me if I did the calculation incorrect.

So, eighteen people murdered in cold blood, by two bombs dropped from pilot-less aircraft.   Is this the new era so?  The Obama era that was supposed to make such a difference.  And this is not to even get into the rights or wrongs of the state assassination of two suspected Taliban members.  You know old adage: who gives anyone the right to be judge, jury and executioner?

No, for the moment, I am just going to focus on the eighteen people that were killed.  Were they women, men, children?  Does anyone know?  Does Barak Obama know?  Or more to the point, did he know about this attack and about the possible collateral damage?  Well, what do you think?  Did Barak say it was okay to kill 18 people/ civilians as part of the operation to get the two Taliban activists.  And when you think about it, given that there is a strong chance that he did know, then what does it say about this new era?  I ask you?