In the words of Ambrose Bierce: “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

from Crikey …..

John Brennan should be on trial, not given the CIA

BERNARD KEANE

John Brennan, the man picked by President Barack Obama to replace David Petraeus as head of the CIA, attended confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee this morning Australian time.

As Deputy National Security Advisor and chief counter-terrorism adviser to Obama, Brennan has overseen the US drone strike program that has resulted in the deaths several hundred civilians, including over 160 children. At the CIA, he would have access to the agency's own drone program, separate from the Department of Defense's program, although both are overseen by the White House.

While apologists might dismiss the killing of several hundred civilians by drones as a "necessary" consequence of the War on Terror (even as a senior US general admits how much damage they cause to the US), two deaths can't be so easily dismissed: those of Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011. They are a different matter entirely, at least legally. They were American citizens, and they were killed by their government without any due process of any kind.

Anwar was an active member of al-Qaeda; that is not in dispute, although his chief role toward the end of his life appeared to be that of propagandist. He was deliberately targeted in a drone strike in Yemen in September 2011 after Obama had added his name to a secret terrorist assassination list in 2010.

Abdulrahman was no member of al-Qaeda. He was a 16-year-old boy, who was born and grew up in Denver. He was killed a fortnight after his father, in a separate drone strike in Yemen.

There is no suggestion that he was involved in any way with his fathers' activities: the US initially tried to claim after the strike that he was a "military-age male", in line with the regular US practice of insisting anyone killed in a drone strike is automatically a "militant". Later, an anonymous administration source admitted the boy was "in the wrong place at the wrong time" and a senior Obama associate blamed Anwar - by the time of the strike, dead two weeks - for his son's death.

So, an American boy is killed by his own government, and his death is waved away with excuses, and not even an inquiry or official admission of error.

At Brennan's confirmation hearing this morning, he was asked by both Republican and Democrat senators to justify a process in which US citizens like Anwar are targeted for assassination by their own government at the whim of the President. Even the Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, usually a slavish supporter of US intelligence agencies, flagged a proposal to establish a secret court to provide due process for US citizens marked for death by their own government.

Brennan, whose appearance was repeatedly disrupted by protesters, insisted the program - which the administration barely acknowledges exists - is "legally grounded", despite being conducted entirely in secret. The administration this week released a paper explaining its legal reasoning for the extra-judicial killing of US citizens, which essentially revolved around a senior official deciding that a citizen represented a "continuing threat" to the US.

And he insisted that the evidence against Anwar was compelling - which as Glenn Greenwald noted on Twitter, begs the question of why he wasn't indicted before being assassinated, rather than being subjected to a secret process inside the White House.

Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden also pushed Brennan about the lack of transparency around the drone program, demanding information on which countries the program is operating in. On another issue, Brennan remarkably refused to acknowledge the CIA's practice of waterboarding as torture, placing himself at odds with outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who has bluntly declared the practice "torture and wrong".

Brennan is likely to be confirmed, particularly after Feinstein effusively praised him at the close of the session. These hearings are thus likely to be as close as Brennan gets to where he should be: in the dock and on trial for the killings of Americans Anwar al-Awlaki and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.

Tehran - Azadeh, a graduate law student from Tehran University, on the sidelines of Iran’s Third Annual Hollywoodis (www.hollywoodism.org) reminded her interlocutors, of the obvious damming admissions last week by two US politicians:

“It would be a defense lawyer’s worst nightmare wouldn’t it?

I mean to have one's clients, in this case the Vice-President of the United States and the outgoing Secretary of state confess so publicly to serial international crimes against a civilian population?”

The confessions and the crimes, she correctly enumerated to her audience, were those admitted to by US Vice-President Joe Biden and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this past week.

Both of the US officials, in discussing US relations with the Islamic Republic, openly admitted that the US-led sanctions against Iran (and Syria) are politically motivated and constitute a "soft-war" against the nearly 80 million people of Iran (23 million people in Syria) in order to achieve regime change.

Mrs Clinton was the first of the dynamic duo to be heard from. She acknowledged that the harsh US sanctions were intended to target and send the people of Iran a message. “So we hope that the Iranian people will make known their concerns… so my message to Iranians is do something about this.”

Some listening concluded she meant food riots and inflation riots to overthrow the Iranian government. An Australian Broadcasting Company interviewer asked Clinton on January 31 of last year: “If you have issues with the government of Iran, why destroy the Iranian people with the current sanctions in place? It's very difficult to find certain medicines in Iran. Where is your sense of humanity?”

What the Clinton interrogator had in mind, she explained later, were the US-led sanctions reducing Iran’s GDP growth (-1.1% GDP) resulting in an inflation of 21.0% that is being felt mostly by the civilian population. As well as periodic food shortages in the supermarkets of such staples such as rice, there are price rises on everything. For example, per page printing for students is up as much as 400% and the cost of a used car up 300%. In general, supermarket items have risen 100 to 300 percent or higher over the past twenty-four months and, devastating for many, certain lifesaving medicines are no longer available.

Clinton: “Well, first, let me say on the medicine and on food and other necessities, there are no sanctions.” This statement is utter nonsense and Mrs. Clinton knows it.

The targeting process by the US Treasury Department is well entrenched in Washington. When dear reader is next in Washington, DC, perhaps on a tour bus riding down NW Pennsylvania Avenue following a visit to the US Capitol, consider getting off the bus at 15th and Pennsylvania at the US Department of the Treasury. Walk around the main building and you will see an Annex building. This building, as Clinton knows well, and like Biden, has visited more than once, houses the Office of Financial Assets Control (OFAC). The well-funded agency’s work includes precisely targeting “food and medicines and other necessities” in order to force the civilian population of Iran to achieve regime change.

For more than two hundred years, since the War of 1812, when OFAC was founded to sanction the British, the office has become expert at imposing sanctions and it has done so more than 2000 times. OFAC currently uses a large team of specialists and computers to think-up, design, test, and send to AIPAC and certain pro-Zionist officials and members of congress their work-product topped off by recommendations.

OFAC and its Treasury Department associates have had a hand in virtually every US sanction applied to Iran since President Jimmy Carter issued Executive Order 12170 in November 1979 freezing about $12 billion in Iranian assets, including bank deposits, gold and other properties. From the State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act in 1979 to the Syria Accountability Act of 2004, more than a dozen Presidential Executive Orders including the 2011-2012 Executive orders which froze the US property of high-rankling Syrian and Iranian officials and more broadly E.O. 13582 which froze all governmental assets of the Syrian government and prohibited Americans from doing business with the Syrian government and banned all US import of Syrian petroleum products.

What OFAC does with its data base is science not art. It can calculate quite precisely the economic effect on the civilian population of a single action designating one company, bank, government entity or infrastructure system of a country. OFAC, on behalf of its government, electronically wages a cold war against its civilian targets.

This week OFAC and the Treasury Department blacklisted Iran’s state broadcasting authority, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, responsible for broadcast policy in Iran and overseas production at Iranian television and radio channels, potentially limiting viewing and listening opportunities for Iran’s civilian population. Its director, Ezzatollah Zarghami, was included in the action. Additionally sanctioned are Iran’s Internet-policing agencies and a major electronics producer. David S. Cohen, the pro-Zionist Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, who oversees the OFAC sanctions effort, reportedly following meetings with Israeli officials, said last week's actions were meant to “tighten the screws and intensify the economic pressure against the Iranian regime.”

In reality, the sanctions target the civilian population and the “Iranian regime” won’t be much affected. The same applies to Syria. Despite the public relations language that “food and medicine are exempted form the brutal US-led sanctions, as OFAC well knows, the reality is something else. They know well the chilling effects of the sanctions on international suppliers of medicines and food stuffs with respect to a targeted country.

The US Treasury department has thousands of gigabytes of data confirming that the boards of directors of international business do not, and will not allow their companies to risk millions of dollars in profits by technically violating any of the thousands of details in the sanctions - many of which are subject to interpretation - for the sake of doing business with Iran or Syria. This is why there are severe shortages of medicines and certain foodstuffs in these sanctioned countries and to state otherwise is Orwellian News-Speak.

OFAC does not operate in a vacuum. It works closely with other US agencies including the 16 intelligence agencies that together make up the UN Intelligence Community. Together they have applied sanctions of great breadth and severity against the civilian populations of Syria and Iran. These sanctions have been bolstered on occasion by several direct and/or green-lighted Israeli assassinations and cyber-assaults, hoping to foment civil unrest to achieve regime change and other political goals.

A few days after Mrs. Clinton's somewhat inadvertent confession that the US government intentionally targets the civilian population of Iran, Vice President Joe Biden chimed in on the 4th of February that the US was ready to hold direct negotiations with Iran but added the caveat, "We have also made clear that Iran's leaders need not sentence their people to economic deprivation,” acknowledging as did Hillary that the US sanctions are intended to target and harm the Iranian and Syrian people. A senior Obama administration official described the latest step as “a significant turning of the screw,” meaning that the people of Iran face a “stark choice” between bowing to US demands and reviving their oil revenue, the country’s economic lifeblood or more and more sanctions will follow until they do.

This targeting of Iran’s and Syria’s civilian population by US-led sanctions is a massive violation of the principles, standards and rules of international law and their most fundamental underpinnings which is the protection of civilians.

Some examples:

The 1977 Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions prohibit any measure that has the effect of depriving a civilian population of objects indispensable to its survival. Article 70 of Protocol I mandates relief operations to aid a civilian population that is “not adequately provided” with supplies and Article 18 of Protocol II requires relief operations for a civilian population that suffers “undue hardship owing to a lack of supplies essential for its survival, such as foodstuffs and medical supplies.”

Prohibition on Starvation as a Method of Warfare

• Under international humanitarian law, civilians enjoy a right to humanitarian assistance during armed conflicts.

• Art. 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention obligates states to facilitate the free passage and distribution of relief goods including medicines, foodstuffs, clothing and tonics intended for children under 15, expectant mothers, and maternity cases.

• Art. 70 of Additional Protocol I prohibits interfering with delivery of relief goods to all members of the civilian population.

• US-led sanctions are prohibited by the principle of proportionality found in Arts. 51 and 57 of Additional Protocol I.

• Under the terms of Art. 3 common to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, humanitarian and relief actions must be taken. Pursuant to Art. 18(2) of Additional Protocol II, relief societies must be allowed to offer their services to provide humanitarian relief.

• The US-led sanctions violate the Rule of Distinction between civilians and combatants.

The Right to life

The US-led sanctions violate the right to life incorporated in numerous international human rights instruments including Art. 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966; Art. 2 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, 1950; and Art. 4 of the African Charter of Human Rights, 1981.

The Rights of the Child

One of the groups most vulnerable to US-led sanctions in Syria and Iran are children. The rights of children are laid down in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989, which currently stands as the most widely ratified international agreement. Most relevant in the context of the US-led sanctions are Arts. 6 and 24 of the Convention, according to which every child has the inherent right to life and the right to the highest attainable standard of health and access to medical services.

If "terrorism" means, as the United States government defines it as the targeting of civilians in order to induce political change from their government, what is it called when the American government itself applies intense economic suffering on a civilian population, causing malnutrition, illnesses, starvation and death in order to induce regime change?

The US-led sanctions against Iran and Syria are illegal, inhumane, ineffective, immoral and outrageous. They must be resisted every day by every person of good will, everywhere, until they are withdrawn.

Franklin Lamb is doing research in the Islamic Republic of Iran and is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com

US Officials Confess To Targeting Iran’s Civilian Population

A review of “America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy” by William Blum (Zed Books, London/New York, 2013.)

In activist-author-publisher William Blum’s new book, America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, he tells the story of how he got his 15 minutes of fame back in 2006. Osama bin Laden had released an audiotape, declaring: “If you [Americans] are sincere in your desire for peace and security… and if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book Rogue State.” Bin Laden then quoted from the Foreword of Blum’s 2000 book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, in which he had mused:

“If I were… president, I could stop terrorist attacks [on us] in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize… to all the widows and the orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. I would then announce that America’s global interventions… have come to an end. And I would inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but… a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.”

Unfortunately, Blum never made it to the White House! But, fortunately, for those who have read his books or follow his “Anti-Empire Reports” on the Web, he was not assassinated! And now he has collected his reports and essays of the last dozen years or so into a 352-page volume that will not only stand the test of time, but will help to define this disillusioned, morose, violent and unravelling Age.

America’s Deadliest… is divided into 21 chapters and an introduction - and there’s something to underline or memorize on every page! Sometimes it’s just one of Blum’s irrepressible quips, and sometimes it’s a matter of searing American foreign or domestic policiy that clarifies that Bushwhackian question of yore: “Why do they hate us?”

Reading this scrupulously documented book, I lost count of the times I uttered, “unbelievable!” concerning some nefarious act committed by the US Empire in the name of freedom, democracy and fighting communism or terrorism. Reading Blum’s book with an open mind, weighing the evidence, will bleach out any pride in the flag we have planted in so many corpses around the world. The book is a diuretic and emetic!

Blum’s style is common sense raised to its highest level. The wonder of America’s Deadliest … is that it covers so much of the sodden, bloody ground of America’s march across our post-Second-World-War world, yet tells the story with such deftness and grace-under-fire that the reader is enticed - not moralized, not disquisitionally badgered - but enticed to consider our globe from a promontory of higher understanding.

Some of the themes Blum covers (and often eviscerates) include:

1) Why they hate us;

2) America means well;

3) We cannot permit a successful alternative to the capitalist model to develop anywhere in the world;

4) We will use whatever means necessary - including, lies, deception, sabotage, bribery, torture and war - to achieve the above idea.

Along the way, we get glimpses of Blum’s experientially rich life. A note “About the Author” tells us that, “He left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer because of his opposition to what the US was doing in Vietnam. He then became a founder and editor of the Washington Free Press, the first “alternative” newspaper in the capital.”

In his chapter on “Patriotism,” Blum relates how, after a talk, he was asked: “Do you love America?” He responded with what we may take for his credo: “I don’t love any country. I’m a citizen of the world. I love certain principles, like human rights, civil liberties, meaningful democracy, an economy which puts people before profits.”

America’s Deadliest… is a book of wisdom and wit that ponders “how this world became so unbearably cruel, corrupt, unjust, and stupid?” In a pointillistic approach, sowing aphoristic seeds for thought, Blum enumerates instances of that cruelty, often with wry, pained commentary. “War can be seen as America’s religion,” he tells us. Reflecting on Obama’s octupling Bush’s number of drones used to assassinate, collaterally kill and terrorize, he affirms: “Obama is one of the worst things that has ever happened to the American left.” And, he avers, “Capitalism is the theory that the worst people, acting from their worst motives, will somehow produce the most good.” And then turns around and reminds us - lest we forget - how the mass media have invaded our lives, with memes about patriotism, democracy, God, the “good life”: “Can it be imagined that an American president would openly implore America’s young people to fight a foreign war to defend ‘capitalism’?” he wonders. “The word itself has largely gone out of fashion. The approved references now are to the market economy, free market, free enterprise, or private enterprise.”

Cynthia McKinney writes that the book is “corruscating, eye-opening, and essential.” Oliver Stone calls it a “fireball of terse information.”

Like Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, Paul Craig Roberts, Cindy Sheehan and Bradley Manning, Blum is committed to setting the historical record straight. His book is dangerous. Steadfast, immutable “truths” one has taken for granted - often since childhood - are exposed as hollow baubles to entertain the un/mis/and dis-informed. One such Blumism recollects Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez’s account of a videotape with a very undiplomatic Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and cowboy George Bush: “`We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly,’” Powell said. “`We must have a brute demonstration of power.’ Then Bush spoke: `Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! … Stay strong! … Kill them! … We are going to wipe them out!’”

Blum’s intellectual resources are as keen as anyone’s writing today. He also adds an ample measure of humanity to his trenchant critiques. He juxtaposes the noble rhetoric of our professed values with the mordant facts of our deeds. The cognitive dissonance makes for a memorable, very unpretty picture of how an immensely privileged people lost themselves, while gorging on junk food, junk politics, junk economics, junk education, junk media. Like an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, he lambastes his own - us! - flaying layers of hypocrisy and betrayals while seeking to reveal the core values of human dignity, empathy and moral rectitude.

Gary Corseri has published and posted prose, poetry and dramas at hundreds of periodicals and websites worldwide, including Countercurrents, BraveNewWorld.in, Outlook India, DissidentVoice, CounterPunch, CommonDreams, OpEdNews, The New York Times. He has published novels, poetry collections and a literary anthology (edited). His dramas have been presented on PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere, and he has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library. He has taught in US public schools and prisons, and at US and Japanese universities. Contact: gary_corseri@comcast.net.

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