roger hollander

Haditha massacre: Covering up war crimes in a criminal war

rogerhollander — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:01:05 +0000

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Falsifying history in the service of Empire

The Pentagon has decided that U.S. Marines who killed 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha, Iraq on Nov. 19, 2005, will serve no jail time.

By Brian Becker, National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition

If only Private Bradley Manning had slaughtered innocent Iraqi civilians he would have been set free by the Pentagon. The Pentagon brass has kept Manning locked up for 21 months. They say that he leaked the 2007 video of a U.S. helicopter gunship massacring Iraqi civilians and journalists. Manning is facing life in prison for allegedly releasing classified documents and information to WikiLeaks that revealed U.S. war crimes.

In contrast, the Pentagon decided on Jan. 23, 2012, that there will be no jail time for any of the U.S. Marines who systematically and deliberately slaughtered 24 Iraqi civilians in their homes in Haditha, Iraq on Nov. 19, 2005. This was not a battle. They entered the homes of unarmed civilians at night and murdered children and their moms, dads and grandparents. The murdered were in their pajamas.

The superior officers of the rampaging Marines in Haditha lied and covered up the crime. The Pentagon brass, then under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld, knew about the massacre and covered it up as well. A Pentagon statement issued just after the Haditha massacre described the incident as an insurgent ambush on a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol that left insurgents, civilians and U.S. troops dead.

If only Private Bradley Manning had slaughtered innocent Iraqi civilians he would have been set free by the Pentagon.

That the Pentagon lied about this war crime should be understood as the norm and not an exception. All Iraqis were seen as the enemy or potential enemy. Indeed, Iraqis from across the political and religious spectrum opposed the occupation of their country. As in the Vietnam War, rampant racism allowed occupying forces to treat the occupied people as less than human. For those involved it was just one more war crime in a criminal war.

The truth about the massacre came out when investigative journalist Tim McGirk broke the story in Time Magazine in March 2006. McGirk had been in contact with an Iraqi human rights organization that provided a video of the aftermath of the massacre. The evidence revealed the bodies of bloodied children in their pajamas, killed in their homes by grenades and direct gunfire.

The trial of the Marine unit’s leader, Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who was facing life in prison for the massacre, came to an abrupt end this week when he accepted the Pentagon prosecutor’s plea offer. In return for pleading guilty to negligent dereliction of duty, Wuterich was demoted in rank and will have his pay level reduced. Earlier, six other Marines had their charges for their roles in the massacre dropped, and one was acquitted. Those who carried out this known and documented war crime will suffer no real punishment at all.

Even if these individual Marines had been convicted, however, the big shot war criminals—both in and out of uniform—who ordered the invasion and occupation of Iraq, who authorized and institutionalized torture, secret prisons and targeted assassinations, have never been charged for their crimes.

This is part of an unspoken bipartisan agreement between the two parties of imperialism. Both Republican and Democratic administrations are unofficially immunized for any crime committed in the service of the U.S. global empire.

Exposing Pentagon lies

Iraq was torn apart by the U.S. war of aggression. No one knows for certain how many Iraqis perished, but it is minimally in the hundreds of thousands, and probably well over 1 million. Many more suffered grievous wounds. More than 5 million became internal and external refugees. A whole generation of Iraqi children suffered the trauma of living through a decade of war. Every family faced the fear and terror of simply driving up to a U.S.-staffed checkpoint in their own city or town. The rules of engagement for nervous U.S. soldiers was “shoot first, ask questions later.” After all, U.S. casualties inflamed anti-war sentiment at home, while Iraqi casualties were not even a brief media blip.

U.S. crimes in Iraq are being whitewashed inside the United States. Not only were Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld shielded from prosecution by the Obama administration, but the semi-official narrative of the war can only be described as an example of falsification and national chauvinism.

When President Obama spoke to announce the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq in December 2011, he chose to speak at the military base in Fort Bragg to thousands of assembled soldiers. The speech was widely publicized and his version of history was designed to reach into homes throughout the United States.

He paid tribute to the suffering of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, but did not say anything about the Haditha massacre, the destruction of the city of Fallujah, the torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib prison, or the multiple other episodes that are permanently imprinted on the consciousness of the Iraqi people. That comes as no surprise. But President Obama’s speech did not include even one word about the suffering of Iraqis from the war.

He said, “We know too well the heavy cost of this war. More than 1.5 million Americans have served in Iraq—1.5 million. Over 30,000 Americans have been wounded, and those are only the wounds that show. Nearly 4,500 Americans made the ultimate sacrifice—including 202 fallen heroes from here at Fort Bragg—202. So today, we pause to say a prayer for all those families who have lost their loved ones, for they are part of our broader American family. We grieve with them.”

The attempt to omit from history the pain and suffering—as well as the heroic resistance—of the Iraqi people must be challenged and contested. This falsified history is a prescription for promoting national chauvinism in the broader population. Such consciousness is useful for the Pentagon and the Military-Industrial Complex as they continue the era of endless imperialist war. We need to tell the truth about Iraq and expose the lies of the Pentagon.

Instead of endless war and occupation on behalf of capitalism and imperialism, we promote a program of international solidarity. Millions of people in the United States recognize that the war and occupation are great crimes. They support the demand that Iraq be paid reparations by the U.S. government for the wanton acts of death and destruction inflicted by the invading forces.

Also read: The Logic of War Crimes in a Criminal War, written by Brian Becker and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard in 2006.

The ANSWER Coalition is organizing every day all over the country against war, racism and economic injustice. Please make an urgently needed donation now to support this critical work.

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America, arms-dealer to the world

rogerhollander — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:53:34 +0000

Tuesday, Jan 24, 2012 11:23 AM 20:32:35 EST

Munitions is the one U.S. industry that’s booming — with devastating global consequences

By William Astore

Assembly line workers work on a F-35 fighter aircraft at a production plant in Fort Worth, Texas (Credit: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi)

This originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Perhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college. It’s about auto workers back in 1955 who were “young and proud” to be making Ford Thunderbirds. But in the early 1980s, Seger sings, “the plants have changed and you’re lucky if you work.” Seger caught the reality of an American manufacturing infrastructure that was seriously eroding as skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these parts.

If the U.S. auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs or Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which America is still dominant. When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons. In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.

Yes, we’re the world’s foremost “merchants of death,” the title of a best-selling exposé of the international arms trade published to acclaim in the U.S. in 1934. Back then, most Americans saw themselves as war-avoiders rather than as war-profiteers. The evil war-profiteers were mainly European arms makers like Germany’s Krupp, France’s Schneider or Britain’s Vickers.

Not that America didn’t have its own arms merchants. As the authors of “Merchants of Death” noted, early on our country demonstrated a “Yankee propensity for extracting novel death-dealing knickknacks from [our] peddler’s pack.” Amazingly, the Nye Committee in the U.S. Senate devoted 93 hearings from 1934 to 1936 to exposing America’s own “greedy munitions interests.” Even in those desperate depression days, a desire for profit and jobs was balanced by a strong sense of unease at this deadly trade, an unease reinforced by the horrors of and hecatombs of dead from the First World War.

We are uneasy no more. Today we take great pride (or at least have no shame) in being by far the world’s number one arms-exporting nation. A few statistics bear this out. From 2006 to 2010, the U.S. accounted for nearly one-third of the world’s arms exports, easily surpassing a resurgent Russia in the “Lords of War” race. Despite a decline in global arms sales in 2010 due to recessionary pressures, the U.S. increased its market share, accounting for a whopping 53 percent of the trade that year. Last year saw the U.S. on pace to deliver more than $46 billion in foreign arms sales. Who says America isn’t number one anymore?

For a shopping list of our arms trades, try searching the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute database for arms exports and imports. It reveals that, in 2010, the U.S. exported “major conventional weapons” to 62 countries, from Afghanistan to Yemen, and weapons platforms ranging from F-15, F-16 and F-18 combat jets to M1 Abrams main battle tanks to Cobra attack helicopters (sent to our Pakistani comrades) to guided missiles in all flavors, colors, and sizes: AAMs, PGMs, SAMs, TOWs — a veritable alphabet soup of missile acronyms. Never mind their specific meaning: They’re all designed to blow things up; they’re all designed to kill.

Rarely debated in Congress or in U.S. media outlets is the wisdom or morality of these arms deals. During the quiet last days of December 2011, in separate announcements whose timing could not have been accidental, the Obama Administration expressed its intent to sell nearly $11 billion in arms to Iraq, including Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter-bombers, and nearly $30 billion in F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, part of a larger, $60 billion arms package for the Saudis. Few in Congress oppose such arms deals since defense contractors provide jobs in their districts — and ready donations to Congressional campaigns.

Let’s pause to consider what such a weapons deal implies for Iraq. Firstly, Iraq only “needs” advanced tanks and fighter jets because we destroyed their previous generation of the same, whether in 1991 during Desert Shield/Storm or in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Secondly, Iraq “needs” such powerful conventional weaponry ostensibly to deter an invasion by Iran, yet the current government in Baghdad is closely aligned with Iran, courtesy of our invasion in 2003 and the botched occupation that followed. Thirdly, despite its “needs,” the Iraqi military is nowhere near ready to field and maintain such advanced weaponry, at least without sustained training and logistical support provided by the U.S. military.

As one U.S. Air Force officer who served as an advisor to the fledging Iraqi Air Force, or IqAF, recently worried:

“Will the IqAF be able to refuel its own aircraft? Can the Iraqi military offer adequate force protection and security for its bases? Can the IqAF provide airfield management services at its bases as they return to Iraqi control after eight years under US direction? Can the IqAF ensure simple power generation to keep facilities operating? Will the IqAF be able to develop and retain its airmen?… Only time will tell if we left [Iraq] too early; nevertheless, even without a renewed security agreement, the USAF can continue to stand alongside the IqAF.”

Put bluntly: We doubt the Iraqis are ready to field and fly American-built F-16s, but we’re going to sell them to them anyway. And if past history is a guide, if the Iraqis ever turn these planes against us, we’ll blow them up or shoot them down — and then (hopefully) sell them some more.

Our Best Arms Customer

Let’s face it: the weapons we sell to others pale in comparison to the weapons we sell to ourselves In the market for deadly weapons, we are our own best customer. Americans have a love affair with them, the more high-tech and expensive, the better. I should know. After all, I’m a recovering weapons addict.

Well into my teen years, I was fascinated by military hardware. I built models of what were then the latest U.S. warplanes: the A-10, the F-4, the F-14, -15 and -16, the B-1, and many others. I read Aviation Week and Space Technology at my local library to keep track of the newest developments in military technology. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I went on to major in mechanical engineering in college and entered the Air Force as a developmental engineer.

Enamored as I was by roaring afterburners and sleek weaponry, I also began to read books like James Fallows’s ”National Defense” (1981) among other early critiques of the Carter and Reagan defense buildup, as well as the slyly subversive and always insightful “Augustine’s Laws” (1986) by Norman Augustine, later the CEO of Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin. That and my own experience in the Air Force alerted me to the billions of dollars we were devoting to high-tech weaponry with ever-ballooning price tags but questionable utility.

Perhaps the best example of the persistence of this phenomenon is the F-35 Lightning II. Produced by Lockheed Martin, the F-35 was intended to be an “affordable” fighter-bomber (at roughly $50 million per copy), a perfect complement to the much more expensive F-22 “air superiority” Raptor. But the usual delays, cost overruns, technical glitches and changes in requirements have driven the price tag of the F-35 up to $160 million per plane, assuming the U.S. military persists in its plans to buy 2,400 of them. (If the Pentagon decides to buy fewer, the cost-per-plane will soar into the F-22 range.) By recent estimates the F-35 will now cost U.S. taxpayers (you and me, that is) at least $382 billion for its development and production run. Such a sum for a single weapons system is vast enough to be hard to fathom. It would, for instance, easily fund all federal government spending on education for the next five years.

The escalating cost of the F-35 recalls the most famous of Norman Augustine’s irreverent laws: “In the year 2054,” he wrote back in the early 1980s, “the entire defense budget will [suffice to] purchase just one aircraft.” But the deeper question is whether our military even needs the F-35, a question that’s rarely asked and never seriously entertained, at least by Congress, whose philosophy on weaponry is much like King Lear’s: “O, reason not the need.”

But let’s reason the need in purely military terms. These days, the Air Force is turning increasingly to unmanned drones. Meanwhile, plenty of perfectly good and serviceable “platforms” remain for attack and close air support missions, from F-16s and F-18s in the Air Force and Navy to Apache helicopters in the Army. And while many of our existing combat jets may be nearing the limits of airframe integrity, there’s nothing stopping the U.S. military from producing updated versions of the same. Heck, this is precisely what we’re hawking to the Saudis — updated versions of the F-15, developed in the 1970s.

Because of sheer cost, it’s likely we’ll buy fewer F-35s than our military wants but many more than we actually need. We’ll do so because Weapons ‘R’ Us. Because building ultra-expensive combat jets is one of the few high-tech industries we haven’t exported (due to national security and secrecy concerns), and thus one of the few industries in the U.S. that still supports high-paying manufacturing jobs with decent employee benefits. And who can argue with that?

The Ultimate Cost of Our Merchandise of Death

Clearly, the U.S. has grabbed the brass ring of the global arms trade. When it comes to investing in militaries and weaponry, no country can match us. We are supreme. And despite talk of modest cuts to the Pentagon budget over the next decade, it will, according to President Obama, continue to grow, which means that in weapons terms the future remains bright. After all, Pentagon spending on research and development stands at $81.4 billion, accounting for an astonishing 55 percent of all federal spending on R&D and leaving plenty of opportunity to develop our next generation of wonder weapons.

But at what cost to ourselves and the rest of the world? We’ve become the suppliers of weaponry to the planet’s hotspots. And those weapons deliveries (and the training and support missions that go with them) tend to make those spots hotter still — as in hot lead.

As a country, we seem to have a teenager’s fascination with military hardware, an addiction that’s driving us to bust our own national budgetary allowance. At the same time, we sell weapons the way teenage punks sell fireworks to younger kids: for profit and with little regard for how they might be used.

Sixty years ago, it was said that what’s good for General Motors is good for America. In 1955, as Bob Seger sang, we were young and strong and makin’ Thunderbirds. But today we’re playing a new tune with new lyrics: What’s good for Lockheed Martin or Boeing or [insert major-defense-contractor-of-your-choice here] is good for America.

How far we’ve come since the 1950s!

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: William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel. He has taught cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, and currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He is the author of “Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism,” among other books. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu. More William Astore

Tennessee Tea Party to Children: What Slaves?

rogerhollander — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:40:48 +0000

by Abby Zimet, www.commondreams.org, 24 January 2012

Showing a marked aversity for anything remotely resembling the truth, Tennessee Tea Party leaders have issued “demands” to state legislators that schools stop teaching - through “neglect and outright ill-will” – all that bad stuff about our fine Founding Fathers like the “made-up criticism” that maybe they owned slaves or killed Indians or did other icky things, and that, “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens.” This, after Texas approved 100 revisions to textbooks for its almost five million kids that would rename slave trade “Atlantic triangular trade,” explore the “unintended consequences” of affirmative action,” emphasize the role of the Christian Chuch in the nation’s founding, call for studying iconic conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and The Moral Majority, and otherwise twist “history” to their liking.

“We seek to compel the teaching (of) the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”

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Posted by ctrl-z

Jan 24 2012 – 1:52pm

They weren’t slaves, it’s just that, back then, the penalty for illegal immigration was a lifetime at hard labor. Obviously, to be like the founding fathers, we need to reimpose the original sentence.

Posted by vaialdiavolo

Jan 24 2012 – 2:10pm

So this is what the descendants of the illegal “immigrants”- genocidal slavers look like and it looks like they may have found their messiah in the overtly racist Professor of Revisionist History running for President. This has echoes of what was done to the children of the First Nations through the same racist “educational” system of “killing the Indian”. A storm is coming…

Western justice and transparency

rogerhollander — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:53:21 +0000

By Glenn Greenwald, www.salon.com

Anwar Awlaki and Barack Obama (Credit: AP)

On Saturday in Somalia, the U.S. fired missiles from a drone and killed the 27-year-old Lebanon-born, ex-British citizen Bilal el-Berjawi. His wife had given birth 24 hours earlier and the speculation is that the U.S. located him when his wife called to give him the news. Roughly one year ago, El-Berjawi was stripped of his British citizenship, obtained when his family moved to that country when he was an infant, through the use of a 2006 British anti-Terrorism law — passed after the London subway bombing — that the current government is using with increasing frequency to strip alleged Terrorists with dual nationality of their British citizenship (while providing no explanation for that act). El-Berjawi’s family vehemently denies that he is involved with Terrorism, but he was never able to appeal the decree against him for this reason:

Berjawi is understood to have sought to appeal against the order, but lawyers representing his family were unable to take instructions from him amid concerns that any telephone contact could precipitate a drone attack.

Obviously, those concerns were valid. So first the U.S. tries to assassinate people, then it causes legal rulings against them to be issued because the individuals, fearing for their life, are unable to defend themselves. Meanwhile, no explanation or evidence is provided for either the adverse government act or the assassination: it is simply secretly decreed and thus shall it be.

Exactly the same thing happened with U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki. When the ACLU and CCR, representing Awlaki’s father, sued President Obama asking a federal court to enjoin the President from killing his American son without a trial, the Obama DOJ insisted (and the court ultimately accepted) that Awlaki himself must sue on his own behalf. Obviously, that was impossible given that the Obama administration was admittedly trying to kill him and surely would have done so the minute he stuck his head up to contact lawyers (indeed, the U.S. tried to kill him each time they thought they had located him, and then finally succeeded). So again in the Awlaki case: the U.S. targets someone for death, and then their inability to defend themselves is used as a weapon to deny their legal rights.

The refusal to provide transparency is also the same. Ever since Awlaki was assassinated, the Obama administration has steadfastly refused to disclose not only any evidence to justify the accusations of Terrorism against him, but also the legal theories it is using to assert the power to target U.S. citizens for death with no charges. A secret legal memo authorizing the Awlaki assassination, authored by Obama lawyers David Baron and Marty Lederman, remains secret. During the Bush years, Democratic lawyers vehemently decried the Bush DOJ’s refusal to release even OLC legal memoranda as tyrannical “secret law.” One of the lawyers most vocal during the Bush years about the evils of “secret law,” Dawn Johnsen (the never-confirmed Obama appointee to be chief of the OLC) told me back in October: “I absolutely do not support the concealment of OLC’s Awlaki memo . . . .The Obama administration should release either any existing OLC memo explaining why it believes it has the authority for the targeted killings or a comparably detailed legal analysis of its claimed authorities.”

A Daily Beast report today says that the Obama administration “is finally going to break its silence” on the Awlaki killing, but here’s what they will and will not disclose:

In the coming weeks, according to four participants in the debate, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. is planning to make a major address on the administration’s national-security record. Embedded in the speech will be a carefully worded but firm defense of its right to target U.S. citizens. . . .

An early draft of Holder’s speech identified Awlaki by name, but in a concession to concerns from the intelligence community, all references to the al Qaeda leader were removed. As currently written, the speech makes no overt mention of the Awlaki operation, and reveals none of the intelligence the administration relied on in carrying out his killing.

In other words, they’re going to dispatch Eric Holder to assert that the U.S. Government has the power to target U.S. citizens for assassination by-CIA-drone, but will not even describe a single piece of evidence to justify the claim that Awlaki was guilty of anything. In fact, they will not even mention his name. As Marcy Wheeler said today:

This is simply an asinine compromise. We all know the Administration killed Awlaki. We all know the Administration used a drone strike to do so. . . .

The problem–the problem that strikes at the very heart of democratic accountability–is that the Administration plans to keep secret the details that would prove (or not) that Awlaki was what the Administration happily claims he is under the veil of anonymity, all while claiming that precisely that information is a state secret.

The Administration seems to be planning on making a big speech on counterterrorism–hey! it’s another opportunity to brag again about offing Osama bin Laden!–without revealing precisely those details necessary to distinguish this killing, and this country, from that of an unaccountable dictator.

The CIA seems to have dictated to our democratically elected President that he can’t provide the kind of transparency necessary to remain a democracy. We can kill you–they appear to be planning to say–and we’ll never have to prove that doing so was just. You’ll just have to trust us!

That, of course, is the heart and soul of this administration’s mentality when it comes to such matters, and why not? Between Republicans who always cheer on the killing of Muslims with or without any explanation or transparency, and Democrats who do so when their leader is the assassin, there is little political pressure to explain themselves. If anything, this planned “disclosure” makes the problem worse, since we will now have the spectacle of Eric Holder, wallowing in pomp and legal self-righteousness, finally defending the power that Obama already has seized — to assassinate U.S. citizens in secret and with no checks — but concealing what is most needed: evidence that Awlaki was what the U.S. Government claims he is. That simply serves to reinforce the message this Government repeatedly sends: as Marcy puts it, “We can kill you and we’ll never have to prove that doing so was just. You’ll just have to trust us!” The Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen added: “The US legal opinion on Awlaki is one thing, but it rests on assumptions made by the intelligence community, which won’t be revealed.”

This no longer seems radical to many — it has become normalized — because it’s been going on for so long now and, more important, it is now fully bipartisan consensus. But to see how extreme this all really is, to understand what a radical departure it is, just consider what George Bush’s neocon Ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, told the Israelis in 2001, as flagged by this Guardian Op-Ed by Mary Ellen O’Connell comparing Obama’s assassinations to Bush’s torture program:

The United States government is very clearly on the record as against targeted assassinations. They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.

What George Bush’s Ambassador condemned to the Israelis’ face just a decade ago as something the nation was steadfastly against has now become a staple of government policy: aimed even at its own citizens, and carried out with complete secrecy. And those who spent years mocking the notion that “9/11 Changed Everything” will have no choice but to invoke that propagandistic mantra in order to defend this: what else is there to say?

: Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.More Glenn Greenwald

Obama to Use Pension Funds of Ordinary Americans to Pay for Bank Mortgage “Settlement”

rogerhollander — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:24:09 +0000

Roger’s note: more Obama “plus ca change” you can believe in.

Published on Monday, January 23, 2012 by Naked Capalitism

by Yves Smith

Obama’s latest housing market chicanery should come as no surprise. As we discuss below, he will use the State of the Union address to announce a mortgage “settlement” by Federal regulators, and at least some state attorneys general. It’s yet another gambit designed to generate a campaign talking point while making the underlying problem worse.

The president seems to labor under the misapprehension that crimes by members of the elite must be swept under the rug because prosecuting them would destabilize the system. What he misses is that we are well past the point where coverups will work, and they may even blow up before the November elections. If nothing else, his settlement pact has a non-trivial Constitutional problem which the Republicans, if they are smart, will use to undermine the deal and discredit the Administration.

To add insult to injury, Obama is apparently going to present his belated Christmas present to the banking industry as a boon to ordinary citizens. He refused to appoint a real middle class advocate, Elizabeth Warren, to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but he’s not above stealing her talking points.

We and other commentators have discussed how the mortgage settlement negotiations nominally led by Iowa attorney general Tom Miller had descended into farce. Almost nothing the Miller camp said was believable. They were presented as “attorney general” discussions when the Administration was pulling the strings. They’ve described a deal as weeks away for over a year. They kept claiming that they had undertaken investigations when not a single subpoena was issued by the AGs still involved in the negotiations. They’ve argued from the get go that a pact will be good for homeowners when the deal reached by under-resourced Nevada attorney general Catherine Cortez Masto with a single servicer, Saxon, resulted in a payout that is 10 to 20 times what the Administration is calling a victory. And that assumes that the banks will live up to their side of the deal when past settlements of servicing abuses have shown that they don’t.

The administration has finally woken up to the fact that the housing mess is almost certain to get worse before it gets better, and Obama must therefore be armed with better propaganda. The Miller-led talks have become a bit of an embarrassment and needed to be put out of their misery. So Team Obama and Federal banking regulators have agreed on terms and as we discussed last Friday, are upping the pressure on state attorneys general to fall into line. As reported by Shahien Nasiripour of the Financial Times:

Banks and government negotiators have cleared a big hurdle in efforts to resolve allegations of widespread mortgage-related misdeeds, agreeing on terms for a settlement that are being circulated to the 50 US states for approval, state officials and a bank representative say.

The proposed pact would potentially reduce mortgage balances and monthly payments by more than $25bn for distressed US homeowners…

State prosecutors have already received a set of documents detailing new mortgage servicing standards that the banks and the government negotiators have agreed to. The states were also being sent documents detailing other main components of the deal, such as the liability release for the banks, the so-called “menu” of options describing the various forms of aid to be given to borrowers, as well as the precise language of the so-called “most favoured nation” clause, which spells out how participating states in the deal would be eligible to receive more advantageous terms should a holdout state strike a more favourable deal on its own with the five targeted banks.

The story did not outline terms, but previous leaks have indicated that the bulk of the supposed settlement would come not in actual monies paid by the banks (the cash portion has been rumored at under $5 billion) but in credits given for mortgage modifications for principal modifications. There are numerous reasons why that stinks. The biggest is that servicers will be able to count modifying first mortgages that were securitized toward the total. Since one of the cardinal rules of finance is to use other people’s money rather than your own, this provision virtually guarantees that investor-owned mortgages will be the ones to be restructured. Why is this a bad idea? The banks are NOT required to write down the second mortgages that they have on their books. This reverses the contractual hierarchy that junior lien-holders take losses before senior lenders. So this deal amounts to a transfer from pension funds and other fixed income investors to the banks, at the Administration’s instigation.

Another reason the modification provision is poorly structured is that the banks are given a dollar target to hit. That means they will focus on modifying the biggest mortgages. So help will go to a comparatively small number of grossly overhoused borrowers, no doubt reinforcing the “profligate borrower” meme.

But those criticisms assume two other things: that the program is actually implemented. The experience with past consent decrees in the mortgage space is that the servicers get a legal get out of jail free card, a release, and do not hold up their end of the deal. Similarly, we’ve seen bank executives swear in front of Congress in late 2010 that they had stopped robosigning, which turned out to be a brazen lie. So here, odds favor that servicers will pretty much do nothing except perhaps be given credit for mortgage modifications they would have made anyhow.

There are two clever features of the deal, but neither look intended to benefit ordinary citizens. One is that the deal throws some funding at chronically cash stressed mortgage counselors. They are thus certain to voice approval of the pact. The other is (per the FT story) the deal’s “most favored nations clause” is designed to reduce the bargaining leverage of any AGs that go their own way. It means that any servicer will have the incentive to fight hard against giving any state a better deal because it will automagically trigger improved terms across the states that signed on to the Federal deal. But this may have interesting perverse effects, since banks that refuse to settle with breakaway AGs will ultimately have damages awarded by a court. That means longer and most costly fights by the states, but in most cases, ultimately bigger awards (frankly, the fact set is so bad that all the state AGs need to do is focus on fairly conservative legal theories to have good odds of scoring big wins).

Dave Dayen seemed to think that the AG rebellion was likely to stay firm, given how few of the Democrats were going to Chicago on Monday for an arm-twisting meeting with HUD head Shaun Donovan and an unnamed emissary from the Department of Justice. I would not be so certain. With states so budget starved, I don’t see how anyone can justify sending a live body to Chicago when a phone briefing would work just as well. More important, the most favored nation clause is nasty, and may nudge some fence-sitters over the line.

And I have also been told that Donovan was on the Hill late last week pressuring Congressmen to support the deal. Since this is a regulatory measure that does not require Congressional approval, this move is meant to deprive dissenting state AGs from any support in local media from sympathetic Congressmen. For instance, 31 California representatives wrote the Justice Department, the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency calling on them to “investigate possible violations of law or regulations by financial institutions in their handling of delinquent mortgages, mortgage modifications and foreclosures.” Clearly they could be expected to support California attorney general Kamala Harris’ withdrawal of the deal. Donovon is trying to get them and like minded solons speaking from the Obama script.

But the Administration’s scheme may not be playing out according to script. Senator Sherrod Brown sent a letter last week to associate attorney general Thomas Perelli, Donovan, the CFPB’s Richard Cordray and Tom Miller criticizing the settlement pact. It could have been written by Naked Capitalism readers. Key section:

Now while Republicans may relish the specter of Democrats infighting, the fact is no one is going to want to be seen to be undermining the leader of the party in an election year. So that will put a damper on how aggressive the opponents will be. And media outlets have been amplifying Obama’s efforts to take credit for gravity. For instance, the Administration is touting the fall in foreclosures as an indicator of success when their policies have ranged from do nothing to disasters like HAMP. The fall in foreclosures is actually a sign of failure, as banks are attenuating the process more and more, in some cases due to their inability to come up with necessary documentation, in others out of a desire to wring even more fees out of investors (when a borrower can’t pay, the bank’s fees come first out of the eventual sale of the house).

Either a Gingrich nomination or Romney getting too dented during Republican primary fights increase the odds of what heretofore seemed impossible: an Obama win in November. So if the Republicans were smart, they’d take advantage of a serious weakness in this deal: that it violates the 5th Amendment takings clause. I am told by Bill Frey of Greenwich Financial that a servicer safe harbor provision in HAMP, which was supposed to shield servicers from investor lawsuits over mortgage modifications, was passed by both the House and Senate but was removed in reconciliation because that provision would have run afoul of the 5th Amendment. This settlement is intended to have servicers engage in even more aggressive mortgage modifications and would thus seem to have precisely the same Constitutional problem.

As I urged last week, please call your state attorney general and tell them you think taking from your pension to enrich banks for abusing homeowners is a lousy idea and they should therefore refuse to sign on to the settlement. You can find their phone numbers here. Please call today if you haven’t already. Thanks!

–>

Yves Smith is the pen name of Susan Webber, a Principal of Aurora Advisors, Inc. and publisher of the Naked Capitalism blog.

more Yves Smith

The Puppet, the Dictator, and the President: Haiti Today and Tomorrow

rogerhollander — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:52:16 +0000

Created 01/17/2012 – 20:13

Submitted by Jemima Pierre on Tue, 01/17/2012 – 20:13

by BAR editor and columnist Jemima Pierre, PhD

There they were, at the official ceremony: the living, breathing banes of Haiti’s existence. “Rubbing shoulders on stage, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries were Haitian President Michel Martelly, former US President and UN Special Envoy, Bill Clinton, and, Jean Claude Duvalier,” the mass murderer and former dictator. The dictator is hoping for some kind of comeback, and the puppet president “will open up Haiti to permanent US occupation and economic exploitation while terrorizing Haitians who fight back.” Clinton oversees the whole process on behalf of imperialism.

“Duvalier has been allowed to roam Haiti’s streets, even dining at the finest restaurants with the likes of Sean Penn.”

Lost amidst the heart-wrenching stories and photographs of the “poor Haitians” living in squalor and misery circulating on the second anniversary of the 12 January 2010 earthquake, another set of images appeared. Few people noticed these other images – they received little attention in the mainstream media – but they offer an insight into the prospects for Haiti’s reconstruction and, indeed, into the prospects for Haiti’s political and economic future.

The images [4] were taken during the official commemoration ceremonies at the hillside ofTitanyen [5] [pdf], north of Port-au-Prince, where former dictators Jean Claude Duvalier and his father, Francois Duvalier, discarded the bodies of their political opponents. After the earthquake, it became the gravesite of thousands of unidentified earthquake victims. During the ceremonies, local delegates and international diplomats paid their respects to the Haitians that lost their lives and pledged to help those who lived. But the most striking image [6] that emerged during the ceremonies was that of an immoral triumvirate. Rubbing shoulders on stage, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries were Haitian President Michel Martelly, former US President and UN Special Envoy, Bill Clinton, and, Jean Claude Duvalier. To understand the future of Haiti, we have to shift our focus from the “poor Haitians” who dominate Haiti coverage and understand the significance of these three figures to the shaping of US imperial designs on Haiti.

“President Martelly is the face – and backbone – of a resurgent Duvalierism.”

“Baby Doc” Duvalier returned to Haiti after twenty-five years in exile on 16 January 2010. His arrival was supposedly a surprise, though it is becoming clear that he was given the go-ahead by France and the United States. The Obama administration’s relative silence around the return of Duvalier needs to be contrasted with the noise it made while it forcefully [7] tried to prevent [8] the return of Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected President. The contrast smacks of duplicity. Let’s remember that under Duvalier (and his father, Francois) nearly 50,000 [9] Haitians were killed, disappeared, and tortured by the reviled tonton macoutes [10], his private army. At the same time, Duvalier embezzled [11] hundreds of millions of dollars, most of which sponsored an exiled life of grandeur [12]. Despite the calls for his arrest and prosecution by Haitian survivors, lawyers, and international human rights organizations, Duvalier has been allowed to roam Haiti’s streets, even dining at the finest restaurants with the likes of Sean Penn.

What does Duvalier symbolize? For Haiti’s elite, he represents a form of totalitarian nostalgia. There is a cultish aura that surrounds Duvalier, a reminder of the era of “macoutized bourgeoisie [13],” as journalist Kim Ives has referred to it, when there was an alliance between the elite and the paramilitary forces of terror. But Duvalierism was also good for US politics and economics. In the 1960s, they needed Francois (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier to offset the rise of revolutionary communist Cuba. Under Jean Claude (“Baby Doc”), they were able to open up the Haitian markets and resources to US businesses, expand sweatshops, and lay the basis for the coming neoliberal economic policies.

“Duvalierism was good for US politics and economics.”

This is where the US-selected President Martelly and “Papa” Bill Clinton come in. As we’ve pointed out here [14] on Black Agenda Report, right-wing candidate Martelly was handpicked by the Obama administration to become Haiti’s president in a forced election marred by irregularities and low voter turn out. More importantly, he is the face – and backbone – of a resurgent Duvalierism. His Duvalier affinities are well known as is his animus [15] towards former President Aristide. He has historic ties with Duvalier loyalists, has called for “amnesty [16]” for Duvalier, and is now in the process of reestablishing the Haitian army. Moreover, his erratic and belligerent interactions with his constituency and political colleagues – and, in particularly, his threats against Haitian journalists – are early indications of his repressive tendencies.

But he is a good puppet. As Ezili Danto of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network reminds us: “Martelly is merely a tool to be used by those ‘more schooled in the patterns of privilege and domination’ than any self-serving Haiti politician could ever dream to be. Martelly is the valve that releases accumulated surface pressure while reinforcing the ‘violent Haitian’ narrative. Brilliant US/Euro move. A no brainer.” In the meantime, he will open up Haiti to permanent US occupation and economic exploitation while terrorizing Haitians who fight back. As the U.S. attempts to consolidate its military presence in the Western hemisphere, control of Haiti is important. For many, this is one of the reasons explaining Haiti’s currently military occupation by the UN-led criminal force, MINUSTAH, the largest UN military force in a country that is not at war. It is also the reason for the massive new US embassy in Haiti, the fourth largest US embassy in the world.

“Clinton practically dictates Haitian policy.”

And then there’s Bill Clinton. Clinton provides the “kind [17]” face of US control of Haiti. With his push to turn Haiti into a Western tourist paradise while Haitians become cheap sweatshop labor [18] for making Western goods, Clinton is the arbiter of a new phase of neoliberalism. Clinton practically dictates Haitian policy. In fact, in one of the more absurd and nepotistic twists of Haiti’s political history, Haiti’s Prime Minister, Gary Conille, is Clinton’s former chief of staff [19]. Conille also has a long family [19] history with the Duvaliers: his father was a minister to Baby Doc. As @dominique_e recently said on twitter, everything is set to “kill Haiti with neoliberalism.”

Last week, Glen Ford remarked [20] that in the US media, “Haiti is most often spoken of as a tragedy – when it is actually the scene of horrific crimes, mainly perpetrated by the United States over the span of two centuries.” With the puppet, the dictator, and the president on the scene, it is hard to imaging a more sinister cohort guiding Haiti down the path of US exploitation.

Jemima Pierre can be reached at BAR1804@gmail.com [21].

MTV (Viacom Inc.) REFUSES Ad For The Last War Crime Movie

rogerhollander — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:42:45 +0000

opednews.com

Waterboarding scene by The Pen

No sooner had we achieved a real victory in forcing YouTube to reinstate our waterboarding scene preview clip, now we are facing brick wall opposition from MTV (that’s Viacom Inc., a Standard and Poor’s 500 giant media conglomerate) in getting out our PAID advertising for “The Last War Crime” movie. It’s about indicting Cheney for torture . . . and isn’t that something billions of people want to see?

See the ad MTV refuses to run on this page.
Protest Viacom Censorship Action Page: http://www.lastwarcrime.com

Friends, the corporate political censors have their hands clenched around the throat of our public discourse right now, and only your valiant voices of resistance can save our democracy. The right wing’s rogue Supreme Court says money equates to free speech, but if even if you have the money, you cannot even BUY free speech if the corporations don’t preapprove of your message.

This is the end game, folks. Corporate special interests already write ALL legislation in Congress. We must raise a hue and cry so loud with our voices that we directly force the corporations to be accountable. Otherwise there is no chance whatsoever for meaningful policy change.
If you want to fight back, if you want to keep them from completely suppressing this potentially world changing movie, there are THREE things we urgently need you to do, at the cost to you to do ALL three of a grand total of maybe 99 cents and about three clicks of a mouse.

1) Submit the action page to protest MTV’s rejection of the ad for their Times Square HD video screen for The Last War Crime, and here is the link again.
Protest Viacom Censorship Action Page: http://www.lastwarcrime.com

2) At the top of that same page is a “like” button for the Facebook page for “The Last War Crime”. We MUST demonstrate mass numbers of likes on that page so that the distributors know how huge the potential audience is for this movie and we get real distribution. If you have a Facebook account all you have to do is click the button right there one time before you submit the action page. Please just do it. And here is a direct link to the Facebook movie page.
The Last War Crime on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelastwarcrime

3) As a collateral action we have produced the most amazing theme song track you ever heard. It’s called, “It’s A Crime”, and we pulled together the absolute top musicians and singers in Los Angeles to cut it live. We need each and every one of you to take just 99 cents and buy the song over at iTunes, so we chart the song in their top 100 and create additional mass visibility for this project, and show there is a market for this kind of political content. From this page just click on “View in iTunes”, and if you don’t have the iTunes application you’ll be prompted on how to get it.

Theme Song Download: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/its-a-crime-single/id495274915

We simply wanted to run a 10 second video ad on MTV’s high definition video screen in Times Square, but first their ad manager demanded to know the content of the film itself. Here are the incriminating admissions we actually have in writing of blatant censorship:

The Pen: “Must MTV approve the underlying content of a movie to accept an ad for that movie (you asked me to tender a synopsis)?”

MTV: “Yes”

The Pen: “Does that not implicate some kind of possibly arbitrary political censorship?”

MTV: “Yes”

Can you even imagine, can you even get your mind around, the sheer arrogance of putting such admissions in writing, as if they were sure they could get away with it?
Viacom Inc. is comprised of approximately 170 media networks reaching more than 600 million global subscribers. We must presume the rejection of this ad represents banning any reference to the movie going forward across all those wide ranging properties, an intolerable result under any construction of free speech in our society.

We are demanding that Viacom Inc. immediately reverse its position with regard to this first ad, and attempt no further act of political censorship against the producers of this movie or anyone else.

Please do ALL three things we are asking of you above. 1) Submit the Viacom protest, 2) “like” the Facebook page for the movie, and 3) get the movie theme song from iTunes. Then and only then can we get this movie out there like it so deserves to be, so we can keep the voice of real truth alive.

The PEN is an acronym for The People’s Email Network, a resource founded in 2004 with the mission of making sending policy advocacy messages as facile and easy as possible. With this goal in mind The PEN pioneered one click action pages in the (more…)

Why there will be a war in the Middle East this year

rogerhollander — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:02:23 +0000

An Iranian woman walks past an anti-U.S. mural painted on the wall of the former U.S. embassy in Tehran on Nov. 19, 2011. ATTA KENARE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

By Tony BurmanSpecial to the Star

There will be a war in the Middle East within the next several months, triggered by an Israeli attack on Iran, and this is how it will happen. Like the Iraq war, it will be a fatal blend of political arrogance and near criminal risk-taking, and this should come as no surprise to us because we know the political players. But we should also know that the time to prevent it is running out.

In Iran, the government is reeling from colossal economic and political pressures. There are signs of desperation. Western sanctions over its nuclear program are biting and there is an open power struggle among key government leaders. The murders since 2010 of four nuclear scientists — most certainly masterminded by agents of Israel’s Mossad — are deeply humiliating. With parliamentary elections in March regarded by many as the most important in the history of the Islamic republic, the pressure within Iran to hit back at Israel in some damaging way is inevitable — and this will happen soon.

In Israel, the calculation is also overwhelmingly political. The fractious government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is obsessed with the prospect of a nuclear Iran even if the evidence is still unclear how imminent that threat is. Netanyahu is also driven by his bitter rivalry with President Barack Obama. There is growing speculation the prime minister will trigger early Israeli elections in June to shore up his political position before Obama, as Netanyahu believes, is re-elected in November. He knows his best opportunity to attack Iran will be shortly before the U.S. election when he figures Obama would be politically cornered. But Netanyahu needs a pretext to act in “self-defence” and that is why Mossad is still covertly at work inside Iran. Iran will have to retaliate before Israel can act — and this will happen soon.

In the United States, Obama is caught up in the morass of election-year politics. His likely Republican presidential rival, Mitt Romney, is accusing the president of being weak on Iran: “If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.” The U.S. and its European allies now have a deadline of July 1 to impose a full embargo of Iranian oil. Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, claimed on Wednesday that a decision to launch a pre-emptive strike is “very far off.” But U.S. defence officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, are increasingly concerned that Israel is preparing to strike Iran — and this will happen soon.

Report: US Soldiers Bringing Their Violence Home from Overseas

rogerhollander — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:39:58 +0000

Roger’s note: One is reminded of Malcolm X’s controversial statement after the Kennedy assassination: “the chickens are coming home to roost.”

Published on Friday, January 20, 2012 by Common Dreams

After Ten Years of War Sex Crimes, Domestic Abuse, and Suicide on the Rise for US Soldiers

– Common Dreams staff

After more than ten years at war, soldiers in the US military are more prone to sexual violence, domestic abuse (including spousal and child abuse), and suicide, according to a report released by the Pentagon on Thursday.

In this file photo, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta speaks at the Pentagon. The Pentagon is preparing a series of new initiatives to try to curb sexual assaults in the military, Panetta said Wednesday, calling the problem a stain on the honor of the armed forces. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) Reuters reports:

Violent sex crimes committed by active U.S. Army soldiers have almost doubled over the past five years, due in part to the trauma of war, according to an Army report released on Thursday.

Reported violent sex crimes increased by 90 percent over the five-year period from 2006 to 2011. There were 2,811 violent felonies in 2011, nearly half of which were violent felony sex crimes. Most were committed in the United States.

One violent sex crime was committed by a soldier every six hours and 40 minutes in 2011, the Army said, serving as the main driver for an overall increase in violent felony crimes.

The report acknowledges that post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) and other scars from long or repeated deployments are clearly contributed factors to the resulting violence, as the Reuters‘ report indicates:

Soldiers suffering from issues such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury, and depression have been shown to have higher incidences of partner abuse, according to the report.

Soldiers with PTSD are up to three times more likely to be aggressive with their female partners than those without such trauma, the report said.

The report also said that family abuse cases are typically underreported.

As the largest branch of the U.S. armed forces, the Army has done the bulk of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, including years of extended duty and repeated deployments.

Stars & Stripes, the magazine for the US Armed Services, suggests that even as the wars wind down, the rate of violence at home likely may not:

One violent sex crime was committed by a soldier every six hours and 40 minutes in 2011, the Army said, serving as the main driver for an overall increase in violent felony crimes.

Though troops have left Iraq and an Afghanistan withdrawal is planned, the health and psychological problems will continue, and in some cases could even increase as veterans enter the civilian world, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said. The Army will stay on top of them, he promised.

And though unreported violence against other service members and family members means that few of the Pentagon numbers can be deemed accurate – a fact the Pentagon acknowledges – they do think some of the rising rates of reported violence have been impacted not only by increased stress, but also by increased openness in the military system. According to the Christian Science Monitor:

General Peter Chiarelli, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army… said that one reason sex crimes figures may have increased “so dramatically” in the past five years is that troops feel more comfortable coming forward to report the crime.

The Army study indicates that the vast majority (97 percent) of perpetrators “at least casually” know their attacker. Both the victims and perpetrators of sex crimes tend to be among the youngest soldiers.

And the New York Times highlighted the continued rise in the suicide rate among soldiers, noting:

Suicides among active-duty soldiers hit another record high in 2011, Army officials said on Thursday, although there was a slight decrease if nonmobilized Reserve and National Guard troops were included in the calculation.

War crimes in a criminal war: Vets & GIs speak out on Marines urinating video

rogerhollander — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:46:00 +0000

Politicians sanctimoniously condemn war crime while prolonging the war

January 17, 2012

Barely scratching the surface of war crimes in Afghanistan.

The people of Afghanistan have endured over ten years of death and destruction at the hands of the U.S. military.

The graphic video going viral of U.S. Marines urinating on corpses in Afghanistan—a war crime under international law—is forcing people in the United States to face the reality of the war.

The video is emblematic of what the U.S. military has been doing to the people of Afghanistan for over ten years.

As combat veterans and active-duty members of the U.S. military, we feel we should weigh in…

1.Urinating is wrong, but bullets are okay? Yes, the video is “shocking” to most. But the politicians, talking heads and media outlets who call it “shocking” and “deplorable” will not use those same words to describe the war itself.

It would be laughable, if not so tragic, that the Pentagon strongly denounced the video, and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta says he “condemns it in the strongest possible terms.” Panetta and the Pentagon officials then left the press conference to continue overseeing the destruction of Afghanistan. Any lip service from Washington or its apologists, from where the mass murder in Afghanistan is being orchestrated, is a complete joke.

There is so much apparent concern over the sanctity of life after these Afghan men were killed. But they should never have been killed in first place. They were only lying dead on the ground because the U.S. government used the 9/11 attacks—in which the people of Afghanistan played no role—as a pretext to launch a full scale invasion to conquer a resource-rich, independent country that they had been trying to dominate for years. This is a war that all polls show is opposed by the U.S. public, U.S. troops and the people of Afghanistan.

2. There is no such thing as “good conduct” in an immoral war. The dehumanization in the video isn’t shocking to those of us who have seen the reality of the wars wages by the U.S. government. But the reactions to the video from most beg the question: what did people think was going on over there? Passing out candy and building schools?

The video is a dose of reality. Its content reveals less than a minute of the war—just one minute in what has been going on for over ten years. Imagine how many such incidents will never be known. And not just acts of desecration, but the acts that are accepted as necessary by the generals and politicians: dropping missiles on houses from robots in the sky, artillery barrages on villages, torture at Bagram Airbase, shooting “suspected insurgents” for carrying a shovel or pushing a wheelbarrow.

This is a colonial-type war, a war for empire, a war for resources and profits. The war itself is a crime. With that foundation, it is only inevitable that even more war crimes will grow out of a criminal war.

3. The inhumanity goes back decades. U.S. involvement in Afghanistan—the second poorest country on the planet— goes back far beyond the bombing and invasion in 2001. And it has never been for humanitarian reasons. Throughout the 70’s, during Afghanistan’s brief progressive period, the CIA pumped billions of dollars to sponsor right-wing militias. These elements attacked women’s schools, slaughtered hundreds of teachers initiating major literacy programs, and carried out a reign of terror on those in Afghanistan deemed “enemies” of the so-called “national interests” of the U.S. government. As Afghanistan was trying to lift itself from feudalism, the will of the people was crushed by the CIA and its Mujahadeen partners.

Those reactionary political groups funded and armed by the CIA continued to receive that support as they committed further atrocities, and as they became the Taliban, who we are now told we must fight and die endlessly to defeat. The Taliban leadership received funding from the CIA up until September 11, 2001. During this phase, the political character of Afghanistan’s government meant nothing to the U.S. government—what mattered to them was the possibility of a business deal that would allow massive oil pipelines through the country. But negotiations were not going as planned for Wall Street, so the 9/11 attacks provided a pretext for the classic tactic used to straighten out nations who will not open up their markets for plunder: all-out military force.

For over ten years, the people of Afghanistan have lived under a brutal occupation. In just the first month of the war, more civilians were killed by U.S. bombs than died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. But the blood had just started flowing. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians are dead at the hands of the U.S. military. Tens of thousands are orphaned, widowed, maimed and homeless. Civilian deaths in Afghanistan are now the highest they have been compared to every other year of the war.

The people of Afghanistan have endured more than a decade of bombings, night raids, torture, a corrupt puppet government and a foreign occupation of more than 100,000 troops and mercenaries from the world’s biggest and most destructive military machine. The U.S. occupation has been a complete catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan, which is why they overwhelmingly want us out. Even Afghans who strongly oppose the Taliban site the U.S. occupation as the main cause of the country’s problems and violence.

4. Afghanistan has the right to resist occupation. The people of Afghanistan who are now suffering under the weight of the U.S. military machine played no role whatsoever in the 9/11 attacks. In fact, when young Afghan men were polled in Kandahar and Helmand province—the location where the video of the Marines was film—it was found that over 90 percent of them had never even heard of the World Trade Center or the 9/11 attacks. The majority of those polled believe the U.S. military is in Afghanistan simply for “violence and destruction.”

The media unquestioningly report that the Marines urinated on dead “Taliban insurgents.” Yet, there are no weapons laid-out next to the bodies, which have been searched, as is standard practice—only a wheelbarrow, in a country almost entirely dependent on an agricultural economy. The claim that these men died after attacking U.S. forces is accepted as fact. This is a bizarre assertion, considering all the other ongoing scandals in Afghanistan involving U.S. forces killing innocent civilians—from the “Kill Team,” to the notorious night raids that every Afghan fears, to Apache helicopters cutting down children one-by-one. Such racist atrocities flow from the Pentagon’s racist, Islamophobic propaganda that dehumanizes the people targeted by the U.S. war machine—the lie that if Afghans are killed, they must have deserved it—which has become the dominant narrative.

But, if these men were in fact killed during a firefight with the Marines, does that justify their deaths? Whose home is Afghanistan, that of the dead men or the Marines? Whose country has been bombed, invaded, and occupied for over ten years? Do the victims of illegal foreign aggression not have the right to resist?

As troops who have been to war and seen the reality, we understand why people living under occupation take up arms to kick us out. We know that we would be doing the same thing if we were in their position. In fact, our experiences have shown us that that we actually have more in common with them than with the millionaire politicians and Pentagon generals telling us to fight. Whoever the dead men are, they are not the “bad guys.” They are the victims of a criminal war of aggression.

5. End the war now! There is no kinder, gentler war in Afghanistan. This video is just a small glimpse of its ugly face. The video has revealed to millions of people in the United States what their tax dollars are paying for. At a time when 40 million people in the United States are out of work, when millions are being cut from heating assistance, social programs, food assistance—when tuition is skyrocketing, layoffs increasing, budgets being gutted—the U.S. government is pouring our tax dollars into a war that 2/3 of the population is against.

This is an endless war, a war the politicians and generals acknowledge they cannot win. They agree that the U.S. presence there will last “the rest of our lives, and the rest of our children’s lives.” This is a war for profits, for a tiny clique of Wall Street CEOs, defense contractors and shareholders. The type of conduct in this video will be repeated over and over; our friends and loved ones will die and be maimed endlessly; our brothers and sisters in Afghanistan will suffer endlessly.

The Pentagon brass have vowed to find the culprits shown in the video and punish them severely. And they should be. But they do not condemn the culture of racist propaganda that promotes and fosters such war crimes, nor will they end the war which allows the killing to continue, with or without the desecration of corpses. The leaders at the top, from whom this behavior consciously flows, should be punished as well.

The video should be a clarion call to all people to demand an immediate, complete withdrawal of all US/NATO forces from Afghanistan. And this little glimpse into the inhumanity unleashed on the people of Afghanistan shows that we not only need to end the war immediately, but pay heavy reparations to the victims of this criminal war.
6. Troops have the right to refuse their orders. The war in Afghanistan is a war for the 1%. In Wall Street’s relentless pursuit of new raw materials and new sources of profits, they have literally thrown away the lives of us and our friends, and unleashed untold suffering on an entire population. The people of Afghanistan are not our enemies; but those millionaires and billionaires, who keep the war raging endlessly, are.
We have a right to not be used as cannon fodder in Wall Street’s attempt to conquer new markets. We have a right to not be party to an occupation that constitutes a great crime against humanity.

Everyday, more and more active-duty troops are excercising their right to refuse to take part in the unpopular, immoral war in Afghanistan. If you’re interested in doing the same, click here for information and support.