US Suspends Constitution in Permanent World War on Terror

Dees Illustration

Eric Blair

Two disturbing developments have occurred in the last couple of days that have gone relatively unnoticed compared to the recent IRS, AP, and Benghazi scandals. 

First, the senate is debating an expansion of the already broad powers of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) so the U.S. can essentially engage any area in the world in the war on terror, including America. Which brings us to the second development: the Pentagon has recently granted itself police powers on American soil.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Sheehan told Congress yesterday that the AUMF authorized the US military to operate on a worldwide battlefield from Boston to Pakistan.  Sheehan emphasized that the Administration is authorized to put boots on the ground wherever the enemy chooses to base themselves, essentially ignoring the declaration of war clause in the US Constitution.

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British Sheep Talk to We Are Change (Video)

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US 'strongly condemns' Kabul hotel attack

The Inter-Continental hotel in seen in the dark as tracer
bullets are shot during an attack in Kabu

© AFP Massoud Hossaini

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States condemned Tuesday a Taliban suicide attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, offering condolences to victims but providing no details on the number of casualties.

At least one suicide bomber and several gunmen attacked the hotel typically frequented by foreigners and Afghan officials, police and officials said, in a brazen strike claimed by the Taliban.

Witnesses reported hearing three explosions late Tuesday at the high-security hotel on a hill overlooking the Afghan capital, as gunmen penetrated the building and sparked a shootout.

“After you Brother!” Qadaffi stays and Obama leaves?

Dees Illustration

Franklin Lamb LLM, PhD
Activist Post

Tripoli, Libya -- The 6/27/11 International Criminal Courts (ICC) arrest warrants issued for Muammar Gadhafi, his son Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, and Libya intelligence chief Abdullah al-Sanoussi, however pleasing to the “rebels” and NATO, probably won’t have much effect on negotiating a settlement between the two camps and certainly the warrants will not facilitate a voluntary regime change. Quite likely, the warrants effects will tend toward the obverse, with the Libyan government ignoring, but ridiculing the much criticized ICC and pointing out its historical pattern of targeting African leaders. At Tripoli’s Rixos Nasser Hotel, just a few hours after the arrest warrants were announced, Libya’s Justice Minister and a high ranking Foreign Affairs official did just that and then refused to take any questions from the large gathering of western journalists of whom Libya is distrustful of, given a spate of recent false main stream media reports that have been exposed as hoaxes.

Colonel Qaddafi and his supporters, in a series of what this observer refers to as “Hezbollah style free give and take dialogue sessions” are making it very plain that they will prevail in re-unifying Libya and probably before Ramadan which begins, this year, in early August. They argue that the “rebels” are increasingly fighting among themselves and are losing popular support. It’s an argument similar to the one the “rebels” are using to explain how their victory is all but assured, also by the end of Ramadan.

War Counsel: Obama shops for Libya advice that lets him ignore the law

President Woodrow Wilson asking Congress to
declare war on Germany, 2 April 1917 - Wiki Image

Jacob Sullum
Reason Magazine 

During the Bush administration, when the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) got into the habit of rationalizing whatever the president wanted to do, Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen dreamed of an OLC that was willing to "say no to the President." It turns out we have such an OLC now. Unfortunately, as Barack Obama's defense of his unauthorized war in Libya shows, we do not have a president who is willing to take no for an answer.

While running for president, Obama criticized George W. Bush's lawless unilateralism in areas such as torture, warrantless surveillance, and detention of terrorism suspects. "The law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers," he declared in 2007, condemning "unchecked presidential power" and promising that under his administration there would be "no more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient."

Obama's nomination of Johnsen to head the OLC, although ultimately blocked by Senate Republicans, was consistent with this commitment; his overreaching responses to threats ranging from terrorism to failing auto companies were not. Last week, by rejecting the OLC's advice concerning his three-month-old intervention in Libya's civil war, Obama sent the clearest signal yet that he is no more inclined than his predecessor to obey the law.

Bill would approve US role in Libya retroactively

US Senator John Kerry
© AFP/File Aamir Qureshi

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Two top US senators on Tuesday introduced a bill that would retroactively support America's military role in Libya, amid a raging debate over whether President Barack Obama flouted the law by not getting prior congressional approval.

"I believe we will find a strong, bipartisan majority that is in favor of authorizing our current military operations in Libya and seeing this mission through to success," said Republican US Senator John McCain, one of the authors of the bill.

"That is a message that (Libyan President Moamer) Kadhafi needs to hear. It is a message that Khadafi's opponents, fighting to liberate their nation, need to hear," McCain told his fellow senators during floor debate in the Senate, as he urged a vote on the measure "as soon as possible."

Mayors of America Unite to tell Obama and Congress: End the Wars and Keep The Money at Home

“Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.” - Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Martin Luther King Jr. - Wiki Image

Eileen Fleming
Salem-News

(BALTIMORE) - The United States Conference of Mayors, representing 1,200 cities with populations over 30,000, voted in their June 20 plenary session to call on the federal government to end America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and redirect that military spending to home land priorities.

The Conference of Mayors first convened during the depths of the Depression and mayors have met annually ever since; but the last time they addressed American military policy was when they called for an end to America’s war in Vietnam.

Mayor Kitty Piercy, of Eugene, Oregon, introduced Resolution 59 stating, “Mayors call on our country to begin the journey of turning war dollars back into peace dollars, of bringing our loved ones home and of focusing our national resources on building security and prosperity here at home. Our children and families long for and call for a real investment in the future of America. It is past due.”

A Firestorm On The Eastern Horizon

Dees Illustration

Brandon Smith
Alt-Market

The Middle East is and always has been an incredible waste of time, energy, capital, and of course, human lives. Every civilization that has attempted to tame and corral the region has met with resounding frustration and defeat. Every empire that moves to extend its borders around its existing cultures has withered under the strain of constant war and revolution. Long before petroleum became a sought after commodity and long after its free flow was established, the Middle East has been used as a fulcrum point for turning nations and worlds inside out. One might begin to wonder where the West’s mindless obsession with the place actually comes from...

From crusades for the holy land, to crusades for oil, to crusades for “WMD’s” and the “downtrodden masses”; we have been regaled for centuries by governments and elitists with elaborate rationalizations for indefinite war within the cradle of civilization. Our government in particular has seen fit to topple dictatorships, install new dictatorships, embroil our troops in the quagmire of nation building, instigate social instability and civil unrest, fund terrorist organizations, elevate madmen, and then brandish them like weapons to frighten the American public into relinquishing their civil liberties. Every decade, and every new layer of conflict, brings the U.S. closer to the breaking point, and closer to bankruptcy.

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“Popeye” History: Enslaving a Generation

Image public domain
Wikimedia commons

Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
Veterans Today

Little teaching goes on in schools, even less happens in homes. Popular culture teaches our children as it reeducates and propagandizes our adults. Simply examine the terms.

Popular.

Few remember the 1950s. Music tastes, then, as especially now, were dictated corporations who bribed disc jockeys to play mindless blither. The scandal was called “payola.” With so much good music out there, then at least, millions were unaware that “factories” were producing the utter crap they were listening to and buying, crap they learned to love, crap that has since disappeared.

There is nothing left of the thousands of “hit songs” from the 1950s, almost all have simply gone away, not worth stealing, not illegally downloaded even.

The same people who “did” our music, built the rest of our culture too, a culture built on mythology, a hokey form of phony patriotism and totalitarian ”brain washing” based on the carryover of cheap wartime propaganda. Think tanks with unpleasant globalist political agenda’s reinvented America by controlling our education and culture. This is me discussing the issue with Daryl Bradford Smith a couple of years ago..

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Eisenhower's worst fears came true. We invent enemies to buy the bombs

Britain faces no serious threat, yet keeps waging war. While big defence exists, glory-hungry politicians will use it

War Mind
 Anthony Freda Illustration

Simon Jenkins
Telegraph

Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain's borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?

Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US defence secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe's "failure of political will" in not maintaining defence spending. He said Nato had declined into a "two-tier alliance" between those willing to wage war and those "who specialise in 'soft' humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks". Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.

This call was echoed by Nato's chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who pointed out how unfair it was that US defence investment represented 75% of the Nato defence expenditure, where once it was only half. Having been forced to extend his war on Libya by another three months, Rasmussen wanted to see Europe's governments come up with more money, and no nonsense about recession. Defence to him is measured not in security but in spending.

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Vision: An Antiwar Movement That Puts Peace Over Politicians

Instead of continuing the hard work of protesting unjust wars, too many people took the election of politicians with "D"s after their name as their own Mission Accomplished.

Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis
AlterNet

After campaigning as the candidate of change, the man awarded a Nobel Prize for peace has given the world nothing but more war. Yet despite Barack Obama's continuation – nay, escalation – of the worst aspects of George W. Bush's foreign policy, including his very own illegal war in Libya, you’d be hard-pressed to find the large-scale protests and outrage from the liberal establishment that characterized his predecessor's reign (and only seems to pop up when a Republican's the one dropping the bombs).

That's not for a lack of things to protest. Since taking office, Obama has doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan and now looks set to break his pledge to begin a significant withdrawal in July. He has unilaterally committed the nation to an unapologetically illegal war in Libya and in two years has authorized more drone strikes in Pakistan than his predecessor authorized in two terms, with one in three of their victims reportedly civilians. In Yemen, he has targeted a U.S. citizen for assassination and approved a cluster bomb strike that,according to Amnesty International, killed 35 innocent women and children.

Kucinich and Rand Paul Talk About Bipartisan Lawsuit Against Libya War (Video)

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The Media Distract the Public from War

Dees Illustration

Sheldon Richman
Future of Freedom

If one is to judge by the tone of the television commentators, America must be deep in a crisis. Long stretches of cable time are devoted to the breaking news. Each detail is presented as more grave and consequential for the republic than the last. The fate of the country surely hangs in the balance.

What is it? War? Fiscal crisis? Mass unemployment? A double-dip recession?

No. A congressman was caught sending lewd photographs of himself to women over the Internet.

This is what now consumes so much of the news media’s attention. This is what outranks in news value continuing occupations of foreign countries, three overt and an undetermined number of covert wars, and a looming fiscal crisis. As America’s imperial elite seeks to hold on to and extend its global power in defiance of economic reality, the spectacle of a congressman, Anthony Weiner of New York, appparently sharing pictures of his private parts with female strangers has taken center stage.

US foresees $46 billion in 2011 military sales

US military equipment sales, tripled to $30bn after 2005
© AFP/File Louisa Gouliamaki

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States plans to export $46.1 billion in weapons this year, nearly doubling its 2010 figures, officials said.

During the fiscal year 2011, which ends September 30, Washington expects the sales of equipment and military services through its Foreign Military Sales process to grow. About 79 percent of these exports are financed by client countries and organizations, with the remainder funded by US aid programs.

US military equipment sales, confined to about $10 billion in the early 2000s, tripled to around $30 billion after 2005.

Peter Van Buren, How Not to Withdraw from Iraq

The Fall of Baghdad - Wiki Image

Peter Van Buren
TomDispatch

Iraq?  Where’s that?  Most Americans no longer seem to know and evidently could care less, but don’t tell that to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, various key military figures and Washington officials, or some of the neocons, warrior-pundits, and liberal war-fighters circling them. They continue to relentlessly promote Iraq as a mission-never-accomplished-but-never-to-be-ended experience.  Somehow, two decades after our Iraq wars began, they still can’t get enough of them.  Learning curve?  Don't even think about it.  It’s as if they’re trapped in that old Thomas Wolfe novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.

For more than a year now, a crew of lobbyists eager to abrogate the withdrawal agreement the Bush administration negotiated with the Iraqis have been dropping the broadest of hints.  Should the Iraqis ask, they say, the U.S. military must stay in that country (whatever war-ending pledgesPresident Obama might once have made).  General Martin Dempsey, the newly appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is typical.  Only weeks before the president picked him, he reaffirmed his support for “keeping American troops in Iraq beyond December if requested by Iraqi leaders.”  And when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki nonetheless continued to insist on sticking to an end of 2011 withdrawal date for all U.S. troops (and assumedly for emptying those monster military bases the Pentagon sank billions of dollars into), top Washington officials began pleading, wheedling, and undoubtedly pressuring him in all sorts of ways to change his mind.  Now, he’s provisionally done so.

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6 in 10 Americans Now Oppose Obama's War in Libya

The president has made himself vulnerable by launching the conflict without congressional cover. Will Republicans capitalize?

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Six in 10 Americans don't think the U.S. should be involved in Libya, according to a new CBS News poll. It found that only 30 percent of Americans think we're doing the right thing by intervening militarily in that country. That includes majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents. As a point of comparison, 51 percent of Americans and a majority of Republicans think we're "doing the right thing" in Afghanistan. The Libya numbers are bad news for the man in the Oval Office.

What does it mean for a president seeking reelection to have launched a wildly unpopular war without congressional approval? That his Republican challengers should run to President Obama's left on at least some aspects of national security. It might've been awkward to do so given that much of Obama's national security strategy is identical to the one that Republicans praised under George W. Bush. But this affords a surprisingly easy opportunity to win support from an electorate that is tiring of expensive foreign wars: The GOP nominee need not disavow conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan that rank and file conservatives defended for so long. He or she need only rail against the expense, execution, and questionable strategic value of fighting in Libya.

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Laws, the War On Drugs, Police Brutality, and Efforts to Control the Internet, Are Essential to the State

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest accumulation of depotentiated social units. ~ Carl Jung

Butler Shaffer
Lew Rockwell

The title of this article encompasses topics that arouse attention and criticism among persons of libertarian persuasion. The discussion of such matters usually treats each issue as though it were sui generis, independent of one another. Most of us respond as though the woman who is groped at the airport has no connection with the man who is tasered by a police officer; that the person serving time in prison for selling marijuana is unrelated to the men being held at Guantanamo. The belief that one person’s maltreatment is isolated from the rest of us, is essential to the maintenance of state power.

What we have in common is the need to protect one another’s inviolability from governmental force. When we understand that the woman being groped by a TSA agent stands in the same shoes as our wife, mother, or grandmother; when the man being beaten by a sadist cop is seen, by us, as our father or grandfather, we become less willing to evade the nature of the wrongdoing by invoking the coward’s plea: "better him than me." The state owes its very existence to the success it has had in fostering division among us, a topic I explored in my Calculated Chaos book. Divide-and-conquer has long been the mainstay in political strategy. If blacks and whites; or Christians and Muslims; or employees and employers; or "straights" and "gays"; or men and women; or any of seemingly endless abstractions, learn to identify and separate themselves from one another, the state has established its base of power. From such mutually-exclusive categories do we draw the endless "enemies" (e.g., communists, drug-dealers, terrorists, tobacco companies) we are to fear, and against whom the state promises its protection. By becoming fearful, we become existentially disabled, and readily accept whatever safeguards the institutional fear-mongers impose, . . . all for our "benefit," of course!

NATO shortcomings 'could jeopardise Libya mission'

© AFP/File

AFP

BRUSSELS (AFP) -  US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned on Friday that military shortcomings among NATO members could jeopardise the alliance's air war in Libya.

With half of the countries in the 28-member alliance not participating in the Libya campaign, Gates said it reflected a worrisome lack of military assets.

"Frankly, many of those allies sitting on the sidelines do so not because they do not want to participate, but simply because they cannot. The military capabilities simply aren't there," Gates said in a speech in Brussels.