(h/t: Critical Dragon)

Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

by Glenn Greenwald

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.

Since then, senior Obama officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and John Brennan, Obama’s top terrorism adviser and his current nominee to lead the CIA, have explicitly argued that the president is and should be vested with this power. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article from October reported that the administration is formally institutionalizing this president’s power to decide who dies under the Orwellian title “disposition matrix”.

When the New York Times back in April, 2010 first confirmed the existence of Obama’s hit list, it made clear just what an extremist power this is, noting: “It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.” The NYT quoted a Bush intelligence official as saying “he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president”. When the existence of Obama’s hit list was first reported several months earlier by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, she wrote that the “list includes three Americans”.

What has made these actions all the more radical is the absolute secrecy with which Obama has draped all of this. Not only is the entire process carried out solely within the Executive branch – with no checks or oversight of any kind – but there is zero transparency and zero accountability. The president’s underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the president – at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as “Terror Tuesday” – then chooses from “baseball cards” and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those powers are exercised in the dark.

In fact, The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ has been so fixated on secrecy that they have refused even to disclose the legal memoranda prepared by Obama lawyers setting forth their legal rationale for why the president has this power. During the Bush years, when Bush refused to disclose the memoranda from his Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that legally authorized torture, rendition, warrantless eavesdropping and the like, leading Democratic lawyers such as Dawn Johnsen (Obama’s first choice to lead the OLC) vehemently denounced this practice as a grave threat, warning that “the Bush Administration’s excessive reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public of legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the system of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government.”

But when it comes to Obama’s assassination power, this is exactly what his administration has done. It has repeatedly refused to disclose the principal legal memoranda prepared by Obama OLC lawyers that justified his kill list. It is, right now, vigorously resisting lawsuits from the New York Times and the ACLU to obtain that OLC memorandum. In sum, Obama not only claims he has the power to order US citizens killed with no transparency, but that even the documents explaining the legal rationale for this power are to be concealed. He’s maintaining secret law on the most extremist power he can assert.

Last night, NBC News’ Michael Isikoff released a 16-page “white paper” prepared by the Obama DOJ that purports to justify Obama’s power to target even Americans for assassination without due process (the memo is embedded in full below). This is not the primary OLC memo justifying Obama’s kill list – that is still concealed – but it appears to track the reasoning of that memo as anonymously described to the New York Times in October 2011.

This new memo is entitled: “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force”. It claims its conclusion is “reached with recognition of the extraordinary seriousness of a lethal operation by the United States against a US citizen”. Yet it is every bit as chilling as the Bush OLC torture memos in how its clinical, legalistic tone completely sanitizes the radical and dangerous power it purports to authorize.

I’ve written many times at length about why the Obama assassination program is such an extreme and radical threat – see here for one of the most comprehensive discussions, with documentation of how completely all of this violates Obama and Holder’s statements before obtaining power – and won’t repeat those arguments here. Instead, there are numerous points that should be emphasized about the fundamentally misleading nature of this new memo:

1. Equating government accusations with guilt

The core distortion of the War on Terror under both Bush and Obama is the Orwellian practice of equating government accusations of terrorism with proof of guilt. One constantly hears US government defenders referring to “terrorists” when what they actually mean is: those accused by the government of terrorism. This entire memo is grounded in this deceit.

Time and again, it emphasizes that the authorized assassinations are carried out “against a senior operational leader of al-Qaida or its associated forces who poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” Undoubtedly fearing that this document would one day be public, Obama lawyers made certain to incorporate this deceit into the title itself: “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida or An Associated Force.”

This ensures that huge numbers of citizens – those who spend little time thinking about such things and/or authoritarians who assume all government claims are true – will instinctively justify what is being done here on the ground that we must kill the Terrorists or joining al-Qaida means you should be killed. That’s the “reasoning” process that has driven the War on Terror since it commenced: if the US government simply asserts without evidence or trial that someone is a terrorist, then they are assumed to be, and they can then be punished as such – with indefinite imprisonment or death.

But of course, when this memo refers to “a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida”, what it actually means is this: someone whom the President – in total secrecy and with no due process – has accused of being that. Indeed, the memo itself makes this clear, as it baldly states that presidential assassinations are justified when “an informed, high-level official of the US government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the US”.

This is the crucial point: the memo isn’t justifying the due-process-free execution of senior al-Qaida leaders who pose an imminent threat to the US. It is justifying the due-process-free execution of people secretly accused by the president and his underlings, with no due process, of being that. The distinction between (a) government accusations and (b) proof of guilt is central to every free society, by definition, yet this memo – and those who defend Obama’s assassination power – willfully ignore it.

Those who justify all of this by arguing that Obama can and should kill al-Qaida leaders who are trying to kill Americans are engaged in supreme question-begging. Without any due process, transparency or oversight, there is no way to know who is a “senior al-Qaida leader” and who is posing an “imminent threat” to Americans. All that can be known is who Obama, in total secrecy, accuses of this.

(Indeed, membership in al-Qaida is not even required to be assassinated, as one can be a member of a group deemed to be an “associated force” of al-Qaida, whatever that might mean: a formulation so broad and ill-defined that, as Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller argues, it means the memo “authorizes the use of lethal force against individuals whose targeting is, without more, prohibited by international law”.)

The definition of an extreme authoritarian is one who is willing blindly to assume that government accusations are true without any evidence presented or opportunity to contest those accusations. This memo – and the entire theory justifying Obama’s kill list – centrally relies on this authoritarian conflation of government accusations and valid proof of guilt.

They are not the same and never have been. Political leaders who decree guilt in secret and with no oversight inevitably succumb to error and/or abuse of power. Such unchecked accusatory decrees are inherently untrustworthy (indeed, Yemen experts have vehemently contested the claim that Awlaki himself was a senior al-Qaida leader posing an imminent threat to the US). That’s why due process is guaranteed in the Constitution and why judicial review of government accusations has been a staple of western justice since the Magna Carta: because leaders can’t be trusted to decree guilt and punish citizens without evidence and an adversarial process. That is the age-old basic right on which this memo, and the Obama presidency, is waging war.

2. Creating a ceiling, not a floor

The most vital fact to note about this memorandum is that it is not purporting to impose requirements on the president’s power to assassinate US citizens. When it concludes that the president has the authority to assassinate “a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida” who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the US” where capture is “infeasible”, it is not concluding that assassinations are permissible only in those circumstances.

To the contrary, the memo expressly makes clear that presidential assassinations may be permitted even when none of those circumstances prevail: “This paper does not attempt to determine the minimum requirements necessary to render such an operation lawful.” Instead, as the last line of the memo states: “it concludes only that the stated conditions would be sufficient to make lawful a lethal operation” – not that such conditions are necessary to find these assassinations legal. The memo explicitly leaves open the possibility that presidential assassinations of US citizens may be permissible even when the target is not a senior al-Qaida leader posing an imminent threat and/or when capture is feasible.

Critically, the rationale of the memo – that the US is engaged in a global war against al-Qaida and “associated forces” – can be easily used to justify presidential assassinations of US citizens in circumstances far beyond the ones described in this memo. If you believe the president has the power to execute US citizens based on the accusation that the citizen has joined al-Qaida, what possible limiting principle can you cite as to why that shouldn’t apply to a low-level al-Qaida member, including ones found in places where capture may be feasible (including US soil)? The purported limitations on this power set forth in this memo, aside from being incredibly vague, can be easily discarded once the central theory of presidential power is embraced.

3. Relies on the core Bush/Cheney theory of a global battlefield

The primary theory embraced by the Bush administration to justify its War on Terror policies was that the “battlefield” is no longer confined to identifiable geographical areas, but instead, the entire globe is now one big, unlimited “battlefield”. That theory is both radical and dangerous because a president’s powers are basically omnipotent on a “battlefield”. There, state power is shielded from law, from courts, from constitutional guarantees, from all forms of accountability: anyone on a battlefield can be killed or imprisoned without charges. Thus, to posit the world as a battlefield is, by definition, to create an imperial, omnipotent presidency. That is the radical theory that unleashed all the rest of the controversial and lawless Bush/Cheney policies.

This “world-is-a-battlefield” theory was once highly controversial among Democrats. John Kerry famously denounced it when running for president, arguing instead that the effort against terrorism is “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world”.

But this global-war theory is exactly what lies at heart of the Obama approach to Terrorism generally and this memo specifically. It is impossible to defend Obama’s assassination powers without embracing it (which is why key Obama officials have consistently done so). That’s because these assassinations are taking place in countries far from any war zone, such as Yemen and Somalia. You can’t defend the application of “war powers” in these countries without embracing the once-very-controversial Bush/Cheney view that the whole is now a “battlefield” and the president’s war powers thus exist without geographic limits.

This new memo makes clear that this Bush/Cheney worldview is at the heart of the Obama presidency. The president, it claims, “retains authority to use force against al-Qaida and associated forces outside the area of active hostilities“. In other words: there are, subject to the entirely optional “feasibility of capture” element, no geographic limits to the president’s authority to kill anyone he wants. This power applies not only to war zones, but everywhere in the world that he claims a member of al-Qaida is found. This memo embraces and institutionalizes the core Bush/Cheney theory that justified the entire panoply of policies Democrats back then pretended to find so objectionable.

4. Expanding the concept of “imminence” beyond recognition

The memo claims that the president’s assassination power applies to a senior al-Qaida member who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States”. That is designed to convince citizens to accept this power by leading them to believe it’s similar to common and familiar domestic uses of lethal force on US soil: if, for instance, an armed criminal is in the process of robbing a bank or is about to shoot hostages, then the “imminence” of the threat he poses justifies the use of lethal force against him by the police.

But this rhetorical tactic is totally misleading. The memo is authorizing assassinations against citizens in circumstances far beyond this understanding of “imminence”. Indeed, the memo expressly states that it is inventing “a broader concept of imminence” than is typically used in domestic law. Specifically, the president’s assassination power “does not require that the US have clear evidence that a specific attack . . . will take place in the immediate future“. The US routinely assassinates its targets not when they are engaged in or plotting attacks but when they are at home, with family members, riding in a car, at work, at funerals, rescuing other drone victims, etc.

Many of the early objections to this new memo have focused on this warped and incredibly broad definition of “imminence”. The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer told Isikoff that the memo “redefines the word imminence in a way that deprives the word of its ordinary meaning”. Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller called Jaffer’s objection “an understatement”, noting that the memo’s understanding of “imminence” is “wildly overbroad” under international law.

Crucially, Heller points out what I noted above: once you accept the memo’s reasoning – that the US is engaged in a global war, that the world is a battlefield, and the president has the power to assassinate any member of al-Qaida or associated forces – then there is no way coherent way to limit this power to places where capture is infeasible or to persons posing an “imminent” threat. The legal framework adopted by the memo means the president can kill anyone he claims is a member of al-Qaida regardless of where they are found or what they are doing.

The only reason to add these limitations of “imminence” and “feasibility of capture” is, as Heller said, purely political: to make the theories more politically palatable. But the definitions for these terms are so vague and broad that they provide no real limits on the president’s assassination power. As the ACLU’s Jaffer says: “This is a chilling document” because “it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen” and the purported limits “are elastic and vaguely defined, and it’s easy to see how they could be manipulated.”

5. Converting Obama underlings into objective courts

This memo is not a judicial opinion. It was not written by anyone independent of the president. To the contrary, it was written by life-long partisan lackeys: lawyers whose careerist interests depend upon staying in the good graces of Obama and the Democrats, almost certainly Marty Lederman and David Barron. Treating this document as though it confers any authority on Obama is like treating the statements of one’s lawyer as a judicial finding or jury verdict.

Indeed, recall the primary excuse used to shield Bush officials from prosecution for their crimes of torture and illegal eavesdropping: namely, they got Bush-appointed lawyers in the DOJ to say that their conduct was legal, and therefore, it should be treated as such. This tactic – getting partisan lawyers and underlings of the president to say that the president’s conduct is legal – was appropriately treated with scorn when invoked by Bush officials to justify their radical programs. As Digby wrote about Bush officials who pointed to the OLC memos it got its lawyers to issue about torture and eavesdropping, such a practice amounts to:

“validating the idea that obscure Justice Department officials can be granted the authority to essentially immunize officials at all levels of the government, from the president down to the lowest field officer, by issuing a secret memo. This is a very important new development in western jurisprudence and one that surely requires more study and consideration. If Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had known about this, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.”

Life-long Democratic Party lawyers are not going to oppose the terrorism policies of the president who appointed them. A president can always find underlings and political appointees to endorse whatever he wants to do. That’s all this memo is: the by-product of obsequious lawyers telling their Party’s leader that he is (of course) free to do exactly that which he wants to do, in exactly the same way that Bush got John Yoo to tell him that torture was not torture, and that even it if were, it was legal.

That’s why courts, not the president’s partisan lawyers, should be making these determinations. But when the ACLU tried to obtain a judicial determination as to whether Obama is actually authorized to assassinate US citizens, the Obama DOJ went to extreme lengths to block the court from ruling on that question. They didn’t want independent judges to determine the law. They wanted their own lawyers to do so.

That’s all this memo is: Obama-loyal appointees telling their leader that he has the authority to do what he wants. But in the warped world of US politics, this – secret memos from partisan lackeys – has replaced judicial review as the means to determine the legality of the president’s conduct.

6. Making a mockery of “due process”

The core freedom most under attack by the War on Terror is the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. It provides that “no person shall be . . . deprived of life . . . without due process of law”. Like putting people in cages for life on island prisons with no trial, claiming that the president has the right to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield without any charges or trial is the supreme evisceration of this right.

The memo pays lip service to the right it is destroying: “Under the traditional due process balancing analysis . . . . we recognize that there is no private interest more weighty than a person’s interest in his life.” But it nonetheless argues that a “balancing test” is necessary to determine the extent of the process that is due before the president can deprive someone of their life, and further argues that, as the New York Times put it when this theory was first unveiled: “while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.”

Stephen Colbert perfectly mocked this theory when Eric Holder first unveiled it to defend the president’s assassination program. At the time, Holder actually said: “due process and judicial process are not one and the same.” Colbert interpreted that claim as follows:

“Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do. The current process is apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them.”

It is fitting indeed that the memo expressly embraces two core Bush/Cheney theories to justify this view of what “due process” requires. First, it cites the Bush DOJ’s core view, as enunciated by John Yoo, that courts have no role to play in what the president does in the War on Terror because judicial review constitutes “judicial encroachment” on the “judgments by the President and his national security advisers as to when and how to use force”. And then it cites the Bush DOJ’s mostly successful arguments in the 2004 Hamdi case that the president has the authority even to imprison US citizens without trial provided that he accuses them of being a terrorist.

The reason this is so fitting is because, as I’ve detailed many times, it was these same early Bush/Cheney theories that made me want to begin writing about politics, all driven by my perception that the US government was becoming extremist and dangerous. During the early Bush years, the very idea that the US government asserted the power to imprison US citizens without charges and due process (or to eavesdrop on them) was so radical that, at the time, I could hardly believe they were being asserted out in the open.

Yet here we are almost a full decade later. And we have the current president asserting the power not merely to imprison or eavesdrop on US citizens without charges or trial, but to order them executed – and to do so in total secrecy, with no checks or oversight. If you believe the president has the power to order US citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it’s truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable.

Some regular commenters criticized my recent post in which I agreed with Prof. Cornel West that President Obama being sworn into office on MLK Jr.’s Bible is very problematic. Some also took issue with my usage of the term “warmonger-in-chief,” and while I think his first four years in office prove the appellation correct, there is a nuanced discussion to be had since Obama did promise in his inaugural to shift the USA away from “perpetual war.”

There is some hope for true change, for instance a draw down in troop presence in Afghanistan, a chance of “mothballing” the drone program, the nomination of Chuck Hagel, but there is also every reason to be skeptical that we are shifting course. The connection between war, an enterprise of empire and Islamophobia is all too evident, dehumanization of those targeted is a prerequisite part and parcel of war propaganda.

To drown the voices of legitimate, concerned criticism however is not the way forward, it is what is most needed at this time.

Obama’s Inaugural and the Danger of an Iran War

by Juan Cole (Informed Comment)

President Obama addressed the big issues of war and peace in his inaugural address, and despite the vagueness of some of his pronouncements, they contain strong clues to his foreign policy agenda in the Middle East. His announced policy will be one of ending US military engagements abroad, multilateral cooperation with allies to face security challenges, negotiation, and avoidance of further military entanglements in the Middle East. In other words, Syrians are on their own, France can have Mali, and Iran is probably not going to be bombed.

Unfortunately, Obama’s stated vision and commitments are open to revision by reality. George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 against nation-building exercises, then took on two countries’ worth of them. Obama’s extreme sanctions against Iran, which are already denying children needed medicine and consist of a kind of blockade (a legitimate casus belli in international law), could well blow up in his face in ways he does not now anticipate.

He said on Monday:

“This generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience. A decade of war is now ending. An economic recovery has begun. America’s possibilities are limitless. . .

We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war. . . we are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as well.

We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear . . . We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom.”

Obama has already fast-tracked the end of active US war-fighting in Afghanistan to this spring, and for the next 18 months or so the main activities of US forces in that country will be training troops of the Afghanistan National Army and providing them logistical help and back up in their own fights with insurgents.

What this decision of Obama means is that as of some point this spring, the US will no longer be at war for the first time since September, 2001 (though some fighting may occur in support of Afghan units). And within two years, the US will be largely out of Afghanistan. It is possible and perhaps likely that the US subsidiary drone war in the north of Pakistan will be mothballed as full sovereignty returns to Afghanistan (I certainly hope so).

By his slamming of “perpetual war” (a conception typical of some of the Neoconservatives and former VP Dick Cheney), Obama is anticipating an era of peace and prosperity.

So we may conclude that he has no intention of bombing the Iranian nuclear enrichment research facilities at Natanz near Isfahan in Iran.

Some people will be disappointed at Obama’s diction here. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been jumping up and down until he is blue in the face demanding a US attack on Iran and threatening to do it himself if Washington won’t. I have all along maintained that Netanyahu lacks the capacity to attack Iran, and that the Department of Defense does not want him cowboying that way in the sensitive Persian Gulf. The Department of Defense is aware that the thousands of US personnel at the US embassy in Baghdad (can you say, huge enormous Benghazi?) are vulnerable to attacks by the Mahdi Army if Israel bombs Iran, as are US facilities in the Gulf such as the al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar and the US naval base in Manama, Bahrain. That is, there is no such thing as a unilateral Israeli military action against Tehran. Any such strike would immediately cause attacks on US facilities in the region and bring the US into the war. Therefore, the DoD and the top brass have repeatedly told Netanyahu not to dare act out.

All the Israeli leadership had been left with was wishful thinking, as with President Shimon Peres’s recent expression of confidence that if all else fails (i.e. if Iran cannot be deterred from its enrichment activities), he is sure that Obama will attack Natanz.

Likewise, the American right wing, whether militarists such as Sen Lindsey Graham or the Neoconservatives in Congress (e.g. Michelle Bachmann, Eric Cantor), are spoiling for a fight with Iran. The arms manufacturers and the thousands of subcontractors to the Pentagon are facing penury in the absence of a new war, unless they find other things to do. (I’ll bet you they can make less expensive, more efficient solar panels if they try.) With the planned reductions in the war budget, which could be quite steep, the US may finally get the ‘peace dividend’ it was promised but never could collect when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Defense-related industries are very inefficient means of creating jobs, and almost anything else they turned their talents to would produce more jobs for less investment. There are going to be enormous demands for more efficient energy storage, inexpensive desalinization, and other tasks related to climate change, to which electronics firms could well make key contributions. They’ll just have to do that instead.

Obama had already signaled his determination not to be pushed into war by the Israel lobbies through his nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. The shameful and outrageous attacks on Hagel by lowlifes such as Elliot Abrams (who should be in jail for lying to Congress and involvement in Iran-Contra and Nicaragua) as an “anti-Semite” have crashed and burned, perhaps forever blunting this sleazy tactic deployed by Jewish nationalists against their critics.

Obama also spoke of reviving multi-lateral institutions for confronting joint security challenges. It is not clear what he meant by that– perhaps reforms to NATO?

There are three dark clouds over Obama’s vision of peace and prosperity.

The first is America’s drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Any time you are dropping bombs on people, whether from an airplane or via a drone, you risk escalation to war. Yemen has too few developed resources to be at risk from an American occupation under ordinary circumstances. But there are things that radical Yemenis could do that would force Obama’s hands, not least an attack on the US embassy. If Obama really wants an era of peace and prosperity, he has to end the drone wars and hand security tasks off to allies.

The second danger is the Israeli Likud government’s final destruction of any two-state solution and permanent denial to millions of Palestinians of the rights of citizenship. Permanently stateless Palestinians will be an element of disorder that is unpredictable, and the near term and medium term actions of their supporters among governments and peoples are likewise impossible to guess at. But this final denial of hope to the Palestinians by Netanyahu is unlikely to pass without incident, and any incident is likely to draw in the US, willy-nilly.

The third danger, more consequential, is the unanticipated outbreak of hostilities with Iran. The financial blockade that the US Congress and the US Treasury Department has imposed on Iran has cut Iran’s petroleum exports by 40% in the past year. It probably does not threaten the stability of the government, and the ayatollahs will find ways of protecting themselves even as the subaltern social classes feel the real pain. But the unilateral interference with Iran’s legal commerce in petroleum, far beyond what UNSC resolutions foresaw, could provoke Tehran to do something stupid. The US financial and, in 1941, petroleum blockade of Japan provoked the Pearl Harbor attack (Japan wanted to break out toward the oil in the Dutch East Indies and resources in British Malaya, were afraid the US would try to stop them, and so wanted to neutralize the US fleet).

The rationale for the extreme US sanctions is that Iran is attempting to construct a nuclear warhead, which is not a proven proposition and against which there is a lot of evidence. Iran once again recently underlined the fatwa or religious ruling by chief theocrat Ali Khamenei that the construction, stockpiling and use of nuclear bombs is strictly forbidden in Islamic law.

Iran could well get desperate this year. An aide to Khamenei, the Iran supreme leader, has announced that the removal of Bashar al-Assad in Syria is an unacceptable “red line.” It would make it impossible for Iran to continue to stretch a security umbrella over Lebanon, protecting it via Hizbullah rockets from Israeli expansionism, since Iran’s land bridge to Beirut through Iraq and Syria would be cut off. An Iran without a pro-Tehran government in Damascus would be much diminished in the Middle East.

The survival of the Nouri al-Maliki government in Iraq in the medium term is also not assured, and if (admittedly this is unlikely) a Sunni Arab- Kurdish- Secular Shiite coalition could be forged, the pro-Iran Shiite religious parties could lose control of the Iraqi parliament in the 2014 elections. If Iran lost both Syria and Iraq, it would be effectively contained for the first time since 2003.

Saudi Arabia seems likely to win out over Iran in Bahrain, as well.

Add to all that Iran’s economic woes, imposed by the US Department of the Treasury and by Neocons and Tea-Partiers in the US congress, and the more adventurous elements of the Iranian military and para-military could be provoked to unwise action.

In short, Iran’s leaders may feel as though they are being drowned and about to be snuffed out by geopolitical reversals and American blockade. Obama has Iran in an imperfect stranglehold, the most dangerous possible posture. His theory may be that if Iran’s leaders feel sufficient pain, that will bring them to the negotiating table. If so, he needs to set talks in motion immediately. Allowing the current financial blockade to fester is an enormous risk.

Wanting an era of peace and prosperity and getting one are not the same thing, and everyone in Washington should remember the law of unintended consequences.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. day in the United States, a day when an icon of the fight against Jim Crow and for Civil Rights is remembered. For many however it’s just another holiday off, a reprieve from the regular grind of work and there is no real remembrance as such of MLK Jr.

It is also coincidentally President Barack Obama’s inauguration. President Barack Obama has now attempted to squarely co-opt the legacy of MLK Jr. through the symbolic action of being sworn into office with his hand on the great civil rights leader’s Bible. MLK Jr. was a fighter for justice and peace  and he was gunned down exactly when he was effectively raising the call against the horrific carnage that the US was leveling upon the people of Vietnam, connecting the civil rights struggle to a broader, global struggle for human rights.

Obama has presided over an increasing depletion of our rights at home while also escalating tensions with nations worldwide, not to mention the killing of innocents through drone warfare.

In this must watch video, Prof. Cornel West discusses the blasphemy of Obama’s bloodsoaked hands being placed on MLK’s Bible in a quite vivid and exacting response to a question on the subject from Tavis Smiley.

Does anyone believe that he was kicked off stage for repeating a song for 30 minutes? The stronger possibility is that they are censoring him because of his criticism of Obama.

Lupe Fiasco escorted offstage at inauguration party

Lupe Fiasco was asked to leave the stage during his performance at an inauguration party in Washington, D.C. on Sunday.

The rapper had been repeating politically charged lyrics for an unusually long time when event officials forced him to stop, according to various attendees.

“So Lupe played one anti-war song for 30 min and said he didn’t vote for Obama and eventually was told to move on to the next song,” Josh Rogin, a reporter at Foreign Policy,tweeted from the bash hosted by StartUp RockOn. “Lupe refused to move to the next song so a team of security guards came on stage and told him to go.”

Video of the incident posted online shows Lupe rapping part of the song “Words I Never Said” before he’s asked to stop.  “Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist,” he says. “Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say s—t. That’s why I ain’t vote for him, next one either.”

Media company HyperVocal — a StartUp Rock On partner involved with the event — addressed what happened shortly afterward on Twitter. “Disappointed that an artist took opportunity to use an event celebrating innovation/startups to make a political statement,” the tweet read.

But the company later stressed that Lupe “was NOT kicked off stage for an anti-Obama rant.”

In an official statement sent Monday, StartUp RockOn said that organizers “decided to move on to the next act” to end a “bizarrely repetitive, jarring performance that left the crowd vocally dissatisfied.”

A rep for the rapper didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The numbers are in fact higher as the SPLC reports that hate crime stats compiled by the FBI are “notoriously understated.”

FBI: Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes Remain Relatively High

by Mark Potok on December 10, 2012, Southern Poverty Law Center

Hate crimes against perceived Muslims, which jumped up 50% in 2010 largely as a result of anti-Muslim propagandizing, remained at relatively high levels last year, according to 2011 hate crime statistics released today by the FBI.

The bureau reported that there were 157 reported anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2011, down slightly from the 160 recorded in 2010. The 2011 crimes occurred during a period when Islam-bashing propaganda, which initially took off in 2010, continued apace.

The FBI statistics, which are compilations of state numbers, are notoriously understated. Two Department of Justice studies have indicated that the real level of hate crimes in America is some 20-30 times the number reported in the FBI statistics, in part because some 56% of hate crimes are never reported to police and more than half of those that are are mischaracterized as non-hate crimes. Nevertheless, the FBI statistics can be used to get a sense of general trends.

Last year saw continued high levels of anti-Muslim propaganda such as the crusade by some against the alleged Muslim plan to impose religious Shariah law on the United States. There were a number of local battles over the construction of new mosques, and several were attacked by apparent Islamophobes.

At the same time, the FBI statistics suggested that there was a 31% drop in anti-Latino hate crimes, from 534 in 2010 to 405 last year. It’s not clear what might be behind that drop, other than an apparent diminution in anti-Latino and anti-immigrant propaganda as negative attention focused on Muslims.

Other hate crime categories remained relatively steady. Anti-Jewish hate crimes fell from 887 in 2010 to 771 last year, while anti-LGBT hate crimes rose slightly, from 1,256 to 1,277. Anti-black hate crimes also fell slightly, continuing a trend of dropping from a high of 2,876 in 2008 (when Barack Obama appeared on the national political scene, fueling anti-black hatred in some quarters) to 2,076 last year.

Robert Greenwald, a documentarian is working on a new film, Drones Exposed, and though it is sad that we live in a world in which there has to be a documentary about drones and their repugnant aftermath, it is nevertheless important that we do not remain in the dark about what is happening in our name.

Regardless of the fraught so-called strategic outlook on why we use drones, having the blood of 178 children (if not more) on our hands is a national issue that we, as U.S. citizens or any conscientious person must address; it is the anti-War issue of our time. Imagine how many countless families we have brought pain and devastation to with these phantom-like air machines raining death and destruction from the skies? And just imagine the unheard repercussions of the drone strikes: each survivor will tell their family and friends that the bombs that killed their loved ones read, “Made in the USA.” Questions will be raised such as “Why do they hate us?”

A vital question remains unacknowledged: Do we have any idea what terrorism really is?

Although we heavily criticize Bill Maher for his ridiculous and excessive anti-Muslim bigotry, as the expression goes “even a broken clock is right twice a day,”

We utilize the best means at our disposal to go into foreign lands and blow up the people we consider the bad guys even if that means collateral damage in the form of civilian casualties. When someone does that exact same thing to us, don’t we call it “terrorism”?

Below is a short video and report by Robert Greenwald exposing what Drones truly do: destroy and terrorize:

U.S. Drone Strikes Are Causing Child Casualties: Video and Report

by Robert Greenwald, HuffingtonPost

During my recent trip to Pakistan as part of our upcoming documentary film, Drones Exposed, I was struck most by the stories told to me by children who had experienced a U.S. drone strike firsthand. The impact of America’s drone war in the likes of Pakistan and Yemen will linger on, especially for the loved ones of the 178 children killed in those countries by U.S. drone strikes.

War Costs’ latest video (with accompanying report) brings attention to the children who have died as a result of drone strikes. The video names some of the children who perished in these strikes, and points out the obfuscation tactics of American officials who will not own up to the significant amount of civilian casualties that have occurred due to this legally- and morally-dubious policy.

In addition to the video, War Costs offers this report detailing the effects of drone strikes on children. The findings come mainly from the diligent investigative reporting of TBIJ and the groundbreaking reports on the impact of drone strikes by Stanford and New York University researchers (Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan) and researchers at Columbia University (The Civilian Impact of Drones: Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions). 

In an effort to compel answers about why these innocent civilians have died without acknowledgement or explanation from the U.S. government, War Costs is calling on the U.S. House of Representatives to debate and pass Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s bill that calls for more transparency regarding U.S. drone strike policy. For more on War Costs’ upcoming drones film, visit our website, or at Facebook and Twitter.

Typical Geller hysteria. This is what we can expect over the next four years, more of the same. (h/t:CriticalDragon):

Loony Pamela Geller: Petraeus Resignation Is an Obama Plot to Put a Muslim in Charge of the CIA

by Charles Johnson (LGF)

The right wing universe is now in full-bore conspiracy theory mode over the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus, just as I predicted. It’s a case study in the conservative movement’s decline into bad craziness; they’re all muttering darkly about cover-ups and hidden connections and “questioning the timing.”

One of the most brain-dead of the wingnuts, loony hateblogger Pamela Geller, has a typical post on the subject; for her it’s all part of the Islamic supremacist stealth shariah takeover of America, of course:

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS RESIGNS – Atlas Shrugs.

I do not believe it was the real reason was [sic] an extramarital affair. I believe it was Benghazi. He refused to be the fall guy. When did an affair ever stop a Democrat. If anything….

Perhaps one of Obama’s many Muslim Brotherhood advisors are on the shortlist to replace him.

The rise of the radical right will continue as will the rise in Islamophobic organizations (h/t: CriticalDragon):

For the Radical Right, Obama Victory Brings Fury and Fear

by Mark Potok (SPLC)

When the word came in last night that Barack Obama and the Democrats had won national elections in a decisive victory, millions of Americans went to bed, satisfied that even if their candidate didn’t win, democracy had survived. The results made it clear that this election had in no way been stolen.

But not so at Ole Miss, which last month marked the 50^thanniversary of deadly segregationist riots. Shortly after midnight, several hundred mostly white students protested furiously, reportedly yelling anti-black racial slurs and throwing rocks at passing cars. An Obama/Biden campaign sign was burned before campus police broke up the crowd in Oxford. There were apparently no arrests or injuries.

The reaction to the re-election of our first black president from the radical right — and that seemed clearly to include some University of Mississippi students — ranged from sputtering rage and name-calling to calls for a new Southern secession, mass emigration to Europe, or even the break-up of the United States. There was one thing large numbers seemed clearly to agree on: The changing racial demographics of our country, expected to lose its white majority by 2050, was key to the result.

“Welcome to a truly white minority world,” wrote one commenter on Stormfront, the world’s largest white supremacist Web forum, which is run by a former Alabama Klan leader. “The future is now. There is no denying this. The sun has set on humanity’s greatest era: 1500-2000. … [T]he only way to survive this war of annihilation is separatism. … [W]e have to choose regions or states.”

“We have truly fallen under God’s judgment,” wrote another. “You will never see another white man occupy the White House again.” Responded a third: “If you can immigrate to Europe you start making plans. … America will become largely a non-white population that is poverty stricken and all those government programs will soon disappear. It will happen. No more Medicare and no more social security.”

The loss of a white majority in the United States has helped drive a truly explosive growth of the radical right in the last three years, and that now seems likely to accelerate. Hate groups in recent years have risen to more than 1,000, and the number of antigovernment “Patriot” groups has shot up from just 149 in 2008 to 1,274, according to research by the Southern Poverty Law Center. For months now, groups on the radical right have increasingly fretted about a possible Obama victory. Now that that has occurred, the radical right may grow more dangerous still.

On Stormfront, given this reality, it wasn’t surprising to find talk of violence in the wake of the election. “I live in a liberal area so many of my ‘friends’ are shouting for joy,” lamented one poster at the racist site. “I don’t actually have many real friends and the ones I do have are scared and talking about arming themselves.”

Over at the conspiracist website Infowars, some reactions weren’t that different. “Now is the time to leave this country,” wrote a commenter using the name munglejonkeys. “[T]hey have brought about a communist takeover without firing a single shot. America will resemble Zimbabwe (economically) in a few years and there will be a huge shift in the welfare-dependent knob-slobs who thought that selling their souls for an Obama-phone was such a great deal. … All because white people didn’t oppose political correctness 35 years ago.”

Remarkably, similar sentiments seemed to crop up in what is taken as the political “mainstream.” Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, fearing an Obama victory, said last night: “The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff.” He added: “The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America any more.”

Donald Trump, the billionaire unrepentant “birther,” didn’t mention race. But he tweeted last night that the election was “a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” He went on to characterize the Electoral College, which gave the race to Republican George W. Bush in 2000, as a “disaster for democracy.”

The anti-gay right reacted with fury, as well. In a long thread on the passage of same-sex marriage referenda at the antigovernment site Free Republic, commenters were apoplectic — and frightened. “Get ready for God’s wrath,” wrote one. “The people are choosing Satan’s finest.” “Fudgies win again,” wrote another. “Incidents of HIV [to] rise again.” And a third: “America is going to pay for its unbelief and its love of abortion and homosexuals. … And IT DESERVES IT.”

“SICK SICK SICK,” wrote still another. “What a filthy night this election is.”

In fact, as pointed out on CNN’s religion blog, the whole election was a “nightmare scenario” for conservative Christian leaders. Noting the approval of two same-sex marriage referenda, the re-election of a president who supported such marriages, and the rejection of hard-line anti-abortion candidates, CNN said the election results “seemed to mark a dramatic rejection of the Christian right’s agenda.”

Read the rest…

by Emperor

Bye, bye to the shining hope of Islamopobes everywhere, Allen West (though he refuses to concede the election) has likely lost his House seat in a close race against 29 year old businessman Patrick Murphy. I’m sure post-Congress West will hit the speaking and right-wing news circuits railing against the infiltration of the USA by the twin phantom menaces known as the “Communists” and the “Mooslims”.

Florida was also the scene of that other darling of the Islamophobia movement, Adam Hasner. You will recall Hasner is good friends with Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, he also shared the stage with the fascist Geert Wilders, who he praised effusively and hosted at a special event in 2009. Hasner lost his bid for the House to West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel.

Also gone is Tea Party politician Joe Walsh who saw “Muslim terrorists” in all of the surrounding suburbs of Chicago, Walsh was defeated by US Army veteran and double amputee Tammy Duckworth.

Charles Fuqua who advocated the “deportation of all Muslims” from the USA was defeated in Arkansas and Chip Cravaack was ousted by Rick Nolan after just one term .

Michelle Bachmann barely squeezed out a victory in Minnesota and Peter King held on, Mike Pence a possible future Republican presidential candidate won the governorship in Indiana and is an Islamophobe to watch.

Overall it was a bad night for the harbingers of anti-Muslim Islamophobic fervor. No doubt, they will try and come back with vengeance, but the electoral defeats they suffered are a good sign that their blatant displays of hate-mongering and scapegoating can be broken.

Obama’s re-election is not going to change much, we are still going to have a corporatist state that continues the policies of Empire, but just on a basic level Obama’s victory staved off a Romney presidency that would be littered with anti-Muslims heavily invested in attempting to intimidate American Muslims and enhancing a global Neo-Con vision. The next four years could have been one in which the likes of Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, Walid Phares and others who are intimately tied with the Islamophobia movement would become regular staples of our Loon Politics category.

Related articles

Top House Islamophobe Allen West Falls – The Daily Beast

Key members of the Congressional ‘Islamophobia caucus’ swept from Congress

Geller on Russell Brand’s show Brand X. Geller’s views are “completely unacceptable”:

Watch the complete interview here.