The Case of the Missing Terrorists By Paul Craig Roberts - Information Clearing House

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31325.htm

 

The Case of the Missing Terrorists

By Paul Craig Roberts

May 14, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- If there were any real terrorists, Jose Rodriguez would be dead.

Who is Jose Rodriguez? He is the criminal who ran the CIA torture program. Most of his victims were not terrorists or even insurgents. Most were hapless individuals kidnapped by warlords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” for the bounty paid.

If Rodriguez’s identity was previously a secret, it is no more. He has been on CBS “60 Minutes” taking credit for torturing Muslims and using the information allegedly gained to kill leaders of al Qaeda. If terrorists were really the problem that Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA claim, Rodriguez’s name would be a struck through item on the terrorists’ hit list. He would be in his grave.

So, also, would be John Yoo, who wrote the Justice (sic) Department memos giving the green light to torture, despite US and International laws prohibiting torture. Apparently, Yoo, a professor at the Boalt School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, was ignorant of US and international law. And so was the US Department of Justice (sic).

Notice that Rodriguez, “The Torturer of the Muslims,” does’t have to hide. He can go on national television, reveal his identity, and revel in his success in torturing and murdering Muslims. Rodriguez has no Secret Service protection and would be an easy mark for assassination by terrorists so capable as to have, allegedly, pulled off 9/11.

Another easy mark for assassination would be former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who staffed up the Pentagon with neoconservative warmongers such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who in turn concocted the false information used to justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Rumsfeld himself declared members of al Qaeda to be the most vicious and dangerous killers on earth. Yet Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Richard Perle, together with neoconservative media propagandists, such as William Kristol and Max Boot, have been walking around safe for years unmolested by terrorists seeking revenge or bringing retribution to those responsible for as many as 1,000,000 Muslim deaths.

Condi Rice, Colin Powell, who delivered the Speech of Lies to the UN inaugurating the invasion of Iraq, and Dick Cheney, whose minimal Secret Service protection could not withstand a determined assassination attempt, also enjoy lives unmolested by terrorists.

Remember the deck of cards that the Bush regime had with Iraqi faces? If terrorists had a similar deck, all of those named above would be “high value targets.” Yet, there has not been a single attempt on any one of them.

Strange, isn’t it, that none of the above are faced with a terrorist threat. Yet, the tough, macho Navy Seals who allegedly killed Osama bin Laden must have their identity kept hidden so that they don’t become terrorist targets. These American supermen, highly trained killers themselves, don’t dare show their faces, but Rodriguez, Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice can walk around unmolested. Indeed, the Seals’ lives are so endangered that President Obama gave up the enormous public relations political benefit of a White House ceremony with the heroic Navy Seals. Very strange behavior for a politician. A couple of weeks after the alleged bin Laden killing, the Seals unit, or most of it, was wiped out in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

If you were a Muslim terrorist seeking retribution for Washington’s crimes, would you try to smuggle aboard an airliner a bomb in your underwear or shoe in order to blow up people whose only responsibility for Washington’s war against Muslims is that they fell for Washington’s propaganda? If you wanted to blow up the innocent, wouldn’t you instead place your bomb in the middle of the mass of humanity waiting to clear airport security and take out TSA personnel along with passengers? Terrorists could coordinate their attacks, hitting a number of large airports across the US at the same minute. This would be real terror. Moreover, it would present TSA with an insolvable problem: how can people be screened before they are screened?

Or coordinated attacks on shopping malls and sports events?

Why should terrorists, if they exist, bother to kill people when it is easy to cause mayhem by not killing them? There are a large number of unguarded electric power substations. Entire regions of the country could be shut down. The simplest disruptive act would be to release large quantities of roofing nails in the midst of rush hour traffic in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. You get the picture: thousands and thousands of cars disabled with flat tires blocking the main arteries for days.

Before some reader accuses me of giving terrorists ideas, ask yourself if you really think people so clever as to have allegedly planned and carried out 9/11 couldn’t think of such simple tactics, plots that could be carried out without having to defeat security or kill innocent people? My point isn’t what terrorists, if they exist, should do. The point is that the absence of easy-to-do acts of terrorism suggests that the terrorist threat is more hype than reality. Yet, we have an expensive, intrusive security apparatus that seems to have no real function except to exercise power over American citizens.

In place of real terrorists carrying out easy plots, we have “terrorist” plots dreamed up by FBI and CIA agents, who then recruit some hapless or demented dupes, bribing them with money and heroic images of themselves, and supplying them with the plot and fake explosives. These are called “sting operations,” but they are not. They are orchestrations by our own security agencies that produce fake terrorist plots that are then “foiled” by the security agencies that hatched the plots. Washington’s announcement is always: “The public was never in danger.” Some terrorist plot! We have never been endangered by one, but the airports have been on orange alert for 11.5 years.

The federal judiciary and brainwashed juries actually treat these concocted plots as real threats to American security despite the government’s announcements that the public was never in danger.

The announcements of the “foiled” plots keep the brainwashed public docile and amenable to intrusive searches, warrantless spying, the growth of an unaccountable police state, and endless wars.

The “War on Terror” is a hoax, one that has been successfully used to destroy the US Constitution and to complete the transformation of law from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of the state. By destroying habeas corpus, due process, and the presumption of innocence, the “War on Terror” has destroyed our security.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. 

www.paulcraigroberts.org

 

America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill - By Tom Engelhardt - Information Clearing House

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31312.htm

 

America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill

On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing

By Tom Engelhardt

May 14, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- Here’s the essence of it: you can trust America’s crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands.  No need to constantly look over their shoulders.

Placed in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could create a living nightmare; controlled by the best of people, they lead to measured, thoughtful, precise decisions in which bad things are (with rare and understandable exceptions) done only to truly terrible types.  In the process, you simply couldn’t be better protected.

And in case you were wondering, there is no question who among us are the best, most lawful, moral, ethical, considerate, and judicious people: the officials of our national security state.  Trust them implicitly.  They will never give you a bum steer.

You may be paying a fortune to maintain their world -- the 30,000 people hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country, the 230,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, the 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, the 4.2 million with security clearances of one sort or another, the $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center that the National Security Agency is constructing in Utah, the gigantic $1.8 billion headquarters the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency recently built for its 16,000 employees in the Washington area -- but there’s a good reason.  That’s what’s needed to make truly elevated, surgically precise decisions about life and death in the service of protecting American interests on this dangerous globe of ours.

And in case you wondered just how we know all this, we have it on the best authority: the people who are doing it -- the only ones, given the obvious need for secrecy, capable of judging just how moral, elevated, and remarkable their own work is.  They deserve our congratulations, but if we’re too distracted to give it to them, they are quite capable of high-fiving themselves.

We’re talking, in particular, about the use by the Obama administration (and the Bush administration before it) of a growing armada of remotely piloted planes, a.k.a. drones, grimly labeled Predators and Reapers, to fight a nameless, almost planet-wide war (formerly known as the Global War on Terror).  Its purpose: to destroy al-Qaeda-in-wherever and all its wannabes and look-alikes, the Taliban, and anyone affiliated or associated with any of the above, or just about anyone else we believe might imminently endanger our “interests.”

In the service of this war, in the midst of a perpetual state of war and of wartime, every act committed by these leaders is, it turns out, absolutely, totally, and completely legal.  We have their say-so for that, and they have the documents to prove it, largely because the best and most elevated legal minds among them have produced that documentation in secret. (Of course, they dare not show it to the rest of us, lest lives be endangered.)

By their own account, they have, in fact, been covertly exceptional, moral, and legal for more than a decade (minus, of course, the odd black site and torture chamber) -- so covertly exceptional, in fact, that they haven’t quite gotten the credit they deserve.  Now, they would like to make the latest version of their exceptional mission to the world known to the rest of us.  It is finally in our interest, it seems, to be a good deal better informed about America’s covert wars in a year in which the widely announced “covert” killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is a major selling point in the president’s reelection campaign.

No one should be surprised.  There was always an “overt” lurking in the “covert” of what now passes for “covert war.”  The CIA’s global drone assassination campaign has long been a bragging point in Washington, even if it couldn’t officially be discussed directly before, say, Congress.  The covertness of our drone wars in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere really turns out to have less to do with secrecy -- just about every covert drone strike is reported, sooner or later, in the media -- than assuring two administrations that they could pursue their drone wars without accountability to anyone.

A Classic of Self-Congratulation

Recently, top administration officials seem to be fanning out to offer rare peeks into what’s truly on-target and exceptional about America’s drone wars. In many ways, these days, American exceptionalism is about as unexceptional as apple pie.  It has, for one thing, become the everyday language of the presidential campaign trail.  And that shouldn’t surprise us either.  After all, great powers and their leaders tend to think well of themselves.  The French had their “mission civilisatrice,” the Chinese had the “mandate of heaven,” and like all imperial powers they inevitably thought they were doing the best for themselves and others, sadly benighted, in this best of all possible worlds.

Sometimes, though, the American version of this does seem... I hate to use the word, but exceptional.  If you want to get a taste of just what this means, consider as Exhibit One a recent speech by the president’s counterterrorism “tsar,” John Brennan, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  According to his own account, he was dispatched to the center by President Obama to provide greater openness when it comes to the administration’s secret drone wars, to respond to critics of the drones and their legality, and undoubtedly to put a smiley face on drone operations generally.

Ever since the Puritan minister John Winthrop first used the phrase in a sermon on shipboard on the way to North America, “a city upon a hill” has caught something of at least one American-style dream -- a sense that this country’s fate was to be a blessed paragon for the rest of the world, an exception to every norm.  In the last century, it became “a shining city upon a hill” and was regularly cited in presidential addresses.

Whatever that “city,” that dream, was once imagined to be, it has undergone a largely unnoticed metamorphosis in the twenty-first century.  It has become -- even in our dreams -- an up-armored garrison encampment, just as Washington itself has become the heavily fortified bureaucratic heartland of a war state.  So when Brennan spoke, what he offered was a new version of American exceptionalism: the first “shining drone upon a hill” speech, which also qualifies as an instant classic of self-congratulation.

Never, according to him, has a country with such an advanced weapon system as the drone used it quite so judiciously, quite so -- if not peacefully -- at least with the sagacity and skill usually reserved for the gods.  American drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are “ethical and just," "wise," and "surgically precise” -- exactly what you’d expect from a country he refers to, quoting the president, as the preeminent “standard bearer in the conduct of war.”

Those drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are based on staggeringly “rigorous standards” involving the individual identification of human targets. Even when visited on American citizens outside declared war zones, they are invariably “within the bounds of the law,” as you would expect of the preeminent “nation of laws.” 

The strikes are never motivated by vengeance, always target someone known to us as the worst of the worst, and almost invariably avoid anyone who is even the most mediocre of the mediocre.  (Forget the fact that, as Greg Miller of the Washington Post reported, the CIA has recently received permission from the president to launch drone strikes in Yemen based only on the observed “patterns of suspicious behavior” of groups of unidentified individuals, as was already true in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.)

Yes, in such circumstances innocents do unfortunately die, even if unbelievably rarely -- and for that we couldn’t be more regretful.  Such deaths, however, are in some sense salutary, since they lead to the most rigorous reviews and reassessments of, and so improvements in, our actions. “This too,” Brennan assured his audience, “is a reflection of our values as Americans.”

“I would note,” he added, “that these standards, for identifying a target and avoiding... the loss of lives of innocent civilians, exceed what is required as a matter of international law on a typical battlefield.  That’s another example of the high standards to which we hold ourselves.”

And that’s just a taste of the tone and substance of the speech given by the president’s leading counterterrorism expert, and in it he’s no outlier.  It catches something about an American sense of self at this moment.  Yes, Americans may be ever more down on the Afghan war, but like their leaders, they are high on drones.  In a February Washington Post/ABC News poll, 83% of respondents supported the administration’s use of drones.  Perhaps that’s not surprising either, since the drones are generally presented here as the coolest of machines, as well as cheap alternatives (in money and lives) to sending more armies onto the Eurasian mainland.

Predator Nation

In these last years, this country has pioneered the development of the most advanced killing machines on the planet for which the national security state has plans decades into the future.  Conceptually speaking, our leaders have also established their “right” to send these robot assassins into any airspace, no matter the local claims of national sovereignty, to take out those we define as evil or simply to protect American interests.  On this, Brennan couldn’t be clearer.  In the process, we have turned much of the rest of the planet into what can only be considered an American free-fire zone.

We have, in short, established a remarkably expansive set of drone-war rules for the global future.  Naturally, we trust ourselves with such rules, but there is a fly in the ointment, even as the droniacs see it.  Others far less sagacious, kindly, lawful, and good than we are do exist on this planet and they may soon have their own fleets of drones.  About 50 countries are today buying or developing such robotic aircraft, including Russia, China, and Iran, not to speak of Hezbollah in Lebanon.  And who knows what terror groups are looking into suicide drones?

As the Washington Post’s David Ignatius put it in a column about Brennan’s speech: “What if the Chinese deployed drones to protect their workers in southern Sudan against rebels who have killed them in past attacks? What if Iran used them against Kurdish separatists they regard as terrorists? What if Russia used them over Chechnya? What position would the United States take, and wouldn’t it be hypocritical if it opposed drone attacks by other nations that face ‘imminent’ or ‘significant’ threats?”

This is Washington’s global drone conundrum as seen from inside the Beltway.  These are the nightmarish scenarios even our leaders can imagine others producing with their own drones and our rules.  A deeply embedded sense of American exceptionalism, a powerful belief in their own special, self-evident goodness, however, conveniently blinds them to what they are doing right now.  Looking in the mirror, they are incapable of seeing a mask of death.  And yet our proudest export at present, other than Hollywood superhero films, may be a stone-cold robotic killer with a name straight out of a horror movie.

Consider this as well: those “shining drones” launched on campaigns of assassination and slaughter are increasingly the “face” that we choose to present to the world.  And yet it’s beyond us why it might not shine for others.

In reality, it’s not so hard to imagine what we increasingly look like to those others: a Predator nation.  And not just to the parents and relatives of the more than 160 children the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has documented as having died in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.  After all, war is now the only game in town.  Peace?  For the managers of our national security state, it’s neither a word worth mentioning, nor an imaginable condition.

In truth, our leaders should be in mourning for whatever peaceful dreams we ever had.  But mention drones and they light up.  They’re having a love affair with those machines.  They just can’t get enough of them or imagine their world or ours without them.

What they can’t see in the haze of exceptional self-congratulation is this: they are transforming the promise of America into a promise of death. And death, visited from the skies, isn’t precise. It isn’t glorious. It isn’t judicious. It certainly isn’t a shining vision.  It’s hell.  And it’s a global future for which, someday, no one will thank us.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.

This article was first published at TomDispatch

Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt

Code Pink’s Next Battle - Drone warfare - By Jacob Silverman - The Tablet Magazine

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/99000/code-pinks-next-battle?all=1

United States

Code Pink’s Next Battle

Can the women’s antiwar group, active in the anti-Israel BDS effort, turn people against drone warfare?

By Jacob Silverman|May 8, 2012 7:00 AM|9comments

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Replica Reaper drone. An actual drone is five times this size. (Noreen Nasir)

“Jeremy, is President Obama a serial murderer?” Ralph Nader asked.

Nader directed this question to Jeremy Scahill, the journalist for The Nation who’s been working on a documentary about targeted killing, at Mount Vernon Place United Methodist church in Washington D.C., on a recent Saturday night. Scahill had just finished delivering a blistering 40-minute speech attacking Obama’s foreign policy, which he said doesn’t differ in any significant way from George W. Bush’s and, in fact, has only expanded on some of its worst aspects. Nader stood in front of his seat, waiting expectantly for Scahill’s response.

Scahill hedged for a minute before offering his answer: “It comes with the office title.”

Scahill’s remark—and Nader’s question—typified the outrage at what was arguably the world’s first Drone Summit. Held on April 28 and 29 in Washington, D.C., the event was sponsored by Code Pink, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the British legal organization Reprieve, which lobbies against the death penalty and represents inmates at Guantanamo Bay. Scahill—who received a boisterous standing ovation from the crowd—had unleashed a fusillade of zingers in his speech, including: “President Obama is the one operating secret death panels”; “We have set an agenda that terrorists need to die. And we have some hammers, so let’s go find some nails”; and: “We have become a nation of assassins.”

Those gathered at the conference count themselves among a lonely minority, for the program, perhaps the country’s worst-kept secret, is actually immensely popular among the American public. In a February Washington Post/ABC News poll, 83 percent of respondents approved of the U.S. drone program; 63 percent approved of using drones to kill suspected American terrorists overseas. That may not be a surprise, given that drones are credited with breaking the back of al-Qaida in Pakistan. But critics of drone warfare, including the 250 participants at last week’s conference, contend that the U.S. program is illegal, a boon to jihadist recruitment, a violation of Pakistani sovereignty, and far less precise than the U.S. government claims, particularly with the use of “signature strikes,” in which targets are plucked out based on a “pattern of life.” (The methodology behind signature strikes remains secret, but it is believed to involve tracking movements, looking for the transport of weapons, and building a dossier of other incriminating behavior.)
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which participated in the conference, claims that at least 2,429 people have been killed in CIA drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and that at least 479 of them were civilians. But with drones now finding their way stateside—the Border Patrol uses unarmed Predators at both borders, and the Federal Aviation Administration has begun drawing up rules for domestic drone use by law enforcement and private operators—anti-drone activists believe that the public can be turned against drones, especially if they believe that their own privacy and civil liberties are at risk.

Which is why, though drone warfare appears entrenched as a counter-terrorism strategy, Code Pink hopes that it’s not too late to raise the alarm about growing domestic drone use, which may, in turn, raise concern about secret wars and civilian casualties overseas. The conference was the brainchild of Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, who is also the author of a new book on the subject, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. Benjamin, along with the event’s co-sponsors, aims to catalyze a nascent anti-drone campaign that includes constitutional scholars, aging Vietnam War activists, Pakistani lawyers, Yemeni journalists, and Occupy protesters concerned about domestic surveillance.

“Unless we shine a light on it, we’re going to turn around and say, ‘Wait, how’d we get involved in all these wars without knowing about it?’ ” Benjamin told me. “We’re going to turn around and say: ‘How do we suddenly have drones watching us here at home without us knowing about it?’ I think this is a movement in some ways behind its time when it comes to the use of drones for lethal killing and ahead of its time when it comes to drones for spying here at home.”

***

Here’s what that guild of doves is up against: powerful military contractors, the intelligence community, a 55-member Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, and the president himself. Benjamin’s campaign also comes at a nadir for the antiwar left. The election of Barack Obama sapped the energy from her organization, which had thrived as much on theatrical gestures of pique toward George W. Bush as it did on opposition to that administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Code Pink is much smaller than we were during the Bush years,” Benjamin admitted. “We find that though the core members of Code Pink are just as angry at Obama as we were at Bush, a lot of the people who supported Code Pink became quiet when Obama got elected.” (In its 2010 IRS filing, the organization reported $317,380 in assets—or about 7 percent of the cost of one Predator drone.)

But Benjamin and her fellow activists see an opportunity in the momentum of the still inchoate Occupy movement—and view drones as a way to capitalize on activists’ frustration with U.S. militarism. They hope to harness Occupy’s energy and organizational skills, as well as its popularity with young people, and in turn to teach Occupiers how the use of drones here and abroad is, in fact, related to their economic concerns. Anti-drone activists draw a connection between outsized military spending and drone warfare, which they believe provides a convenient and low-risk method of perpetuating existing conflicts while encouraging the military and CIA to expand or open new, costly campaigns in places like Yemen and Somalia. What’s more, they argue, drones could soon be deployed by police departments to monitor protesters and even to shoot them with nonlethal weapons. They predict that communities will be under perpetual surveillance, spied upon by drones equipped with powerful cameras and facial-recognition technology. (Drone manufacturers have begun vigorously marketing their products to U.S. police departments, several of which already own drones.)

While Code Pink is known for flamboyant displays like holding “kiss-ins” outside of recruiting centers (“Make out, not war!” their signs read), Benjamin doesn’t seem interested in coloring this campaign pink. (Her book, though, was on prominent display at the conference.) It may be something she’s learned from Occupy’s leaderless structure or is simply an unfortunate exigency of an attenuated antiwar movement.

“Now we have the Occupy movement, so it doesn’t have to be Code Pink,” Benjamin said. “It feels really good when you know that some war criminal is coming to town and you can call up folks in the Occupy movement and they’ll be out there. Or we can join in their actions, for example, on holding the banks accountable.”

Benjamin, who moved a couple years ago from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., has taken part in a number of Occupy actions and speaks glowingly about its mission, and it’s clear that it’s helped to reanimate her organization. But Occupy isn’t the only protest movement that Code Pink hopes to harness. In our interview, Benjamin emphasized that drone opponents could learn something from their peers engaged in BDS—the boycott, divestment, and sanctions aimed at Israel.

“This is an opportunity to make links with the Israeli peace movement, with the Palestinian social justice movement, to use some of the strategies by the BDS to look at getting divestment from drone industries here at home, getting students involved and seeing what drone research is being done on their campuses, and trying to separate their campuses from the development of drones,” she told me. “So, I think there’s a lot of overlap and a lot of lessons that we can learn from the BDS movement.”

In my conversations with anti-drone activists, it quickly became clear that they consider the BDS campaign an important model for their work, despite its lack of tangible successes. The two causes have much in common. Both can draw on narratives of powerful militaries subjugating disempowered Muslim populations. And with Israel having essentially invented the modern military drone, as well as being the No. 1 exporter of drones, the links are more than thematic. Israel pioneered targeted killing by drones and now deploys them extensively in Gaza. The Predator drone—the most recognizable and popular umanned aerial vehicle in the American arsenal—is based on an earlier design by Abraham Karem, an Israeli. For many activists, then, drones are another arena in which the United States and Israel are deeply connected—and deserving of censure. These close military partners, activists argue, both rely on similar technology to break international law.

***

Allegiances at the drone summit were declared by way of T-shirts, pins, and free pamphlets. One summit volunteer wore a T-shirt in support of Mohammad Mossadegh. Veterans for Peace garb was ubiquitous; BDS or Gaza Flotilla gear popped up periodically. A couple men wore black shirts bearing the pleading but tongue-in-cheek text, “unarmed civilian.” (They’re part of an organization called Know Drones, which tours the country with drone models and educational materials as a way of stirring up anti-drone activism.)

The archetypal summit attendee was Jimmy Johnson, a 34-year-old Midwesterner. Wearing faded blue overalls and standing well over 6 feet tall, with a small paunch, scruffy cheeks, and a buzzed head, Johnson at first has the look of a farmer far from home. But his tattoos give him away: Across one set of knuckles is the word shalom; tzedek decorates the other hand. And in a curved line on his back, just below his neck, are the words “tzedek, tzedek tirdof lemaan tichyeh.” (Justice, justice you shall pursue so that you may live, a verse from Deuteronomy.)

Johnson, who is Jewish, is a one-man advocacy organization, operating under the name Neged Neshek, meaning “Against Arms.” He researches and tracks Israeli weapons development and the export of these technologies. “In a way you’re kind of following the Occupation out into the world,” he told me.

Johnson lives in Detroit, where he also grew up. In the 1990s, he served in the Army as part of a fuel-hauling unit working in support of the No-Fly Zone in northern Iraq. “It was planes that were going back and forth and bombing once, twice a week for the whole decade,” he said. “That was my role.”

After a year-and-a-half, he deserted, earning himself a dishonorable discharge. I asked him why he left: “Maybe I got a little conscious of activism and then I forgot why I was helping to kill Iraqis. It didn’t make any sense to me.”

A relationship later took him to Israel. He wasn’t a Zionist then, he said, and isn’t one now. But he remained in Israel for 10 years and became disturbed by the demolition of Palestinian homes.

Two years ago, he moved back to Detroit to take care of his brother, who would soon die of an illness. Johnson is trained as a mechanic, but the city has few jobs, so he’s devoted to his work with Neged Neshek, which in turn has brought him into contact with a number of European and Israeli groups concerned with the arms trade and Palestinian rights. He’s also active in the Detroit Occupy movement, and he’s the author of an unpublished 47-page pamphlet, “Fragments of the Pacification Industry: Exporting the Tools of Inequality Management From Palestine/Israel.”

Whatever one might think of his beliefs, Johnson is, like many of those I encountered at the drone summit, deeply versed in the issues. He participated in a panel at the summit (“Ethical/Political Issues of Drone Use & Targeted Killings”) and gave a brief presentation about Israeli drones, where he called the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon “a turning point” for the technology.

Johnson is also, like many other attendees, essentially a lone operator while also being a relentless networker. I spotted him speaking with panelists and activists throughout the weekend, often waiting patiently nearby as a scientist or lawyer packed up his presentation materials. In some ways, the structure of this young movement mirrors the drone program itself, which is dispersed among dozens of military bases around the United States and sites abroad and is supplied by military contractors throughout the country. It is a distributed network relying on close communication and sharing of data.

***

On the second day of the conference, attendance had slipped from the first day, but energy levels were high. That morning, a CIA drone had struck in Miramshah, a frequent target in North Waziristan, a district in Pakistan’s FATA region. I sat in on a discussion group of a dozen or so activists, and on a whiteboard someone had written the town’s name, underlined it, and drawn an arrow pointing to text that read, “4 girls killed this a.m. by CIA drone strikes / BOO! HISS!!” (News reports said that four unnamed militants were killed. They were apparently holed up in an abandoned girls school.)

One group was focused on domestic drones; another, which included a group of Stanford law students, was discussing legal policy. Mine was tasked with brainstorming direct action, education, and organizational strategies. The conversation was free-flowing and generally cordial but suffused with the antic passions endemic to political meetings. Activists took turns speaking and sometimes fluttered their fingers in the air to show agreement.

There was wide support among the group for the use of dramatic visual aids and of gory imagery. One man proposed distributing stickers with graphic photos after drone strikes. “That way they have to confront it,” he said. Another suggested using mural art to depict events in Afghanistan. “We want people to know what it looks like,” said a man from Know Drones, the touring educational organization, who identified himself simply as Jeff.

A man with a Veterans for Peace shirt and pin, his thin white hair matched by a white beard, worried that base protests, while a popular idea, weren’t that useful. “The thing is you’re not educating anybody,” he noted.

Another Veterans for Peace man, this one in a Free Bradley Manning shirt, said, “Don’t forget economics”—that is, emphasizing the cost of the drone program. (A Reaper drone, for example, costs about $30 million of taxpayer money, and Hellfire missiles go for about $70,000 each.)

The man launched into a short disquisition on his background. He almost became a Catholic monk but now attends a synagogue, he told us, before name-checking Rabbi Michael Lerner, a Bay Area-based rabbi known for his social activism.

A National Day Against Drones was discussed several times before the group agreed that it was one of their most promising ideas. When someone raised the issue of protesting other weapons systems, like cruise missiles and AC-130 gunships, both of which have been used to strike militants in Somalia, a man emphasized the particular visual power of drones: “This is our new image. It’s a good image that we can use.”

A middle-aged, dreadlocked man, wearing sunglasses and sitting outside the circle, offered a slight critique. “I’m still not focused on what the endgame is,” he said. “At the end of the day, what needs to be done so that everybody can go home?”

After a few seconds, someone else spoke up, returning to an old standby: “Right now, I think a really good model is the BDS movement.” He emphasized that it has a “specific ask”—i.e., boycott Israel—and that the anti-drone movement should as well.

A woman who identified herself as Barbara Wien, an academic involved in the Peace & Justice Studies Association, added, “Israel is the largest exporter of drones, so that’s a connection between our anti-drones [campaign] and BDS work.”

“How many people are on Facebook?”

Some hands went up.

“So is the government,” a woman said, sourly.

A man in a cutoff T-shirt proposed that Columbia’s journalism school “would be a great place to do some street theater, before they all become flunkies for AP and UPI.”

The Lockheed Martin union was mentioned as problematic (too in thrall to management), but Lockheed, which manufactures the Hellfire missile and is the country’s largest military contractor, was named as an important protest target.

Jeff returned to the notion of reaching out to interfaith groups, before an elderly woman, whose black T-shirt read “We Will Not Be Silent” in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, remarked that she doesn’t like the use of the word “terrorism,” even in regard to Pakistani Taliban attacks on Pakistani civilians. “We have no business being there or telling people what to do,” she said. Another woman had trouble with “acknowledging that there’s even a problem with terror,” saying it feeds into militarism.

Later, the groups reconvened to share what they’d settled on. The group I observed agreed on distributing educational materials, using public art and street theater, and organizing a National Day Against Drones. A statement was read aloud; some slight amendments were suggested and ratified, including one, put forth by a roboticist, noting that certain nonmilitary uses of drones are acceptable.

Medea Benjamin, standing in front of a blowup of her book cover, raised the possibility of leading a delegation to Pakistan to meet with activists, lawmakers, and victims’ families. She asked Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer, if they would be welcomed in his country.

“Yes, yes. We have plenty of jail cells,” he cracked.

***

The day after the summit ended, John Brennan, the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser, gave a speech defending the drone war. It was a rare on-the-record comment about the secretive program, though it offered no revelations about targeting procedures or other such matters. Speaking at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, Brennan was interrupted by a protester, who yelled at him about the deaths of innocent people and the sanctity of the Constitution. Few people in that room likely knew that the woman disrupting Brennan was Medea Benjamin. The woman whose group had been the colorful vanguard of antiwar protest under the Bush Administration went unrecognized. ABC News reported that “a well-dressed blonde woman” had to be carried out of the auditorium.

***

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Jacob Silverman is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and book critic. He is also a contributing editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review

How the bastrdisation of Keynes is still haunting us. - DNA, English Daily, Mumbai, India

Open letter to Mr. Vivek Kaul, re: his article: How the bastrdisation of Keynes is still haunting us. - DNA, English Daily, Mumbai, India

Monday, May 14, 2012

Dear Mr. Vivek Kaul, Salaams

Re: Your DNA article - How the bastardisation of Keynes is still haunting us.

You wrote:

"On the subject of money, I was reading somewhere about some Western economists recommending negative interest rates, she said.

"The idea is to charge people who let their money lying idle in a bank account." I explained.

Unquote

Since you are apparently open minded about reading 'somewhere', about the negative interest rate and placing the idea with Western economists; I may venture to present the case of Islam's Zakat concept, imposed over 14 centuries ago, of charging 2 1/2 % on all accumulated wealth, that remains with the individual for full one year and is turned over to Baitul Maal for the benefit of the needy among other state expenditures.

The second idea of -- saving money during the good times to be spent during the bad times, --- attributed to Keynes, is as old as Prophet Yusuf, who interpreted Pharaoh's dream  and  advised about saving crops during 7 years' good times to be used for the next 7 years of drought and famine. This is very explicit in Quran.

Regretfully, we are so besotted to West, that we refuse to acknowledge that in the world of ideas, West is not always original. It is a good packager. But once we know its sources of ideas, any competitor will try to find out Western sources, so that it may find out if there are more ideas from whence one particular idea has probably come out.

Muslim have been inviting the world to Islamic ideas and now particularly the no-interest banking idea. But I can only quote Ghalib at this juncture:

Main bulata tu  hoon usko magar a jazba-e dil
Oos pe ban jaye kuchh aisi ke bin aaye na bane
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

-------------

http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column_how-the-bastardisation-of-keynes-is-still-haunting-us_1688370

How the bastardisation of Keynes is still haunting us Vivek Kaul | Monday, May 14, 2012

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“So how does it feel to be an educated unemployed?” she asked. “Shikshit berozgar sounds much better,” I retorted. “Plus you are making a pot load of money anyway.” “Ah. Where has the male ego gone?”   “Well, as long as you keep the money coming, ego can take a backseat.”   “On the subject of money, I was reading somewhere about some Western economists recommending negative interest rates,” she said. “The idea is to charge people who let their money lying idle in a bank account,” I explained. “Charge?” “Yes. Say if you keep $1,000 in your bank account and the negative interest rate is 2%, then at the end of the year, your account will have $980 ($1,000 - 2% of $1,000).” “Oh. But why?” “So that instead of letting the money lay idle in the bank account people take it out and spend it.” “And how will that help?” “Well, when people spend the money, the demand for goods and services will go up. This, in turn, will mean more profits for businesses, which, in turn, may recruit more people and decrease unemployment.” “Interesting. Where does this idea come from?” “It comes from the concept of paradox of thrift which was first explained by John Maynard Keynes, an economist whose thinking had the most influence on economists and politicians of the twentieth century.” “But why call it a paradox? Isn’t being thrifty or saving money a good thing?” “Keynes thought that when it comes to saving, what makes sense for an individual may not work for the economy. If an individual saves more, he cuts down on his expenditure. If one person does this, it makes sense for him because he saves more money. But more people doing it creates a problem.” “What problem?” “What is expenditure for one person is income for someone else. When you buy your fancy makeup, a lot of people earn money. The shop you buy it from. The company that makes the brand you buy and so on. When you don’t, the entire chain earns lesser.” “Ah. Never thought about it that way.” “So, as everybody spends less, businesses see a fall in revenue. To stay competitive, they start firing people, which leads to a further cut in spending. The unemployed obviously spend less.But so do others in the fear that they might be fired as well.” “And all this is not good for the economy,” she said.  “But how is it linked to negative interest rates?” “Since the financial crisis started in 2008, people in Europe, America and even Japan, are not spending money. Hence the idea of negative interest rates has been put forward. People would rather spend the money than see its value go down.” “But is that what Keynes suggested?” “No. What Keynes had said was that consumers and firms would be unwilling to spend money in an environment where jobs are falling and demand is falling or is flat or growing at a very slow rate. So, the government should become the ‘spender of the last resort’ by coming up with a stimulus package.” “Hmmm.” “Keynes also said that during recessions, the government should not be trying to balance its budget. That is to say, match its income with expenditure. The logic being that taxes collected would anyway fall during a recession. If the government tried to match this with a cut in expenditure, it would squeeze the economy even more.” “So Keynes advocated that governments run fiscal deficits,” she concluded. “Not at all. Keynes believed that on an average, the government budget should be balanced. This meant that during years of prosperity, the governments should run budget surpluses. That is, earn more than what they spend. But when the economy wasn’t doing well, governments should spend more than what they earn and hence run a fiscal deficit.” “Okay. So the money saved during the good time could be spent during the bad times.” “Yes. Keynes came up with this theory in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936. This book had ideas based on the study of the Great Depression. During those days, it was not fashionable for governments to run fiscal deficits as it is today. As Franklin Roosevelt, the then President of America, put it: ‘Any government, like any family, can, for a year, spend a little more than it earns. But you know and I know that a continuation of that habit means the poorhouse.’ But then attitudes changed.” “How was that?” “As governments got ready to fight World War II, they spent a lot of money in getting ready for it, which meant they ended with fiscal deficits.Economies around the world which were still in the doldrums because of the Great Depression, suddenly started rebounding,” I explained. “And so the star of Keynes shone?” “Yes. But the politicians over the decades just took one part of Keynes’s advice and ran with it. The belief in running deficits in bad times became permanently etched in their minds. Meantime, they forgot that Keynes had also wanted them to be running surpluses during good times. So, they ran deficits in good times and bigger deficits in bad times. This meant more and more borrowing. And that’s how the Western world ended up with all the debt which has brought the world to the brink of economic disaster.” “But what about negative interest rates?” she asked. “Will they help?” “Not really.” “Why?” “See, the thing is, other than government debts increasing in the Western world, the debt of individuals has also gone up over the years. So, right now, they, by not spending, are saving money so that they can repay their debts.” “Hmmm. But do you see negative interest rates coming in?” “On the face of it I don’t think that will happen,” I replied. “But then you never know. Politicians have bastardised Keynes in the past. They can do it again.” “How sure are you of this?” she asked. “Let me answer your question with a couplet written by Javed Akhtar.  Main khud bhi sochta hoon ye kya mera haal hai/ Jiska jawab chahiye wo kya sawaal hai.” Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at   vivek.kaul@gmail.com

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