Dissident Veteran For Peace

My first response this morning to the news of Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was disbelief. My next response was to recall part of a story on I heard on NPR yesterday, entitled "Capture Or Kill? Lawyers Eye Options For Terrorists." Below is a relevant excerpt:

Given the difficulty of detaining high-value terrorists in the United States, Cuba, Afghanistan, black sites or foreign countries, another possibility exists.

"To be perfectly blunt, I don't think that they'll pick them up at all," says Ken Anderson of the Hoover Institution and American University's Washington College of Law, who has written about these issues. "I think that we've actually allowed the courts to arrange the incentives to kill rather than capture."

Many national security experts interviewed for this story agree that it has become so hard for the U.S. to detain people that in many instances, the U.S. government is killing them instead.

Last month, American forces staged a raid on a car in Somalia. The man inside the car was a suspected terrorist on the FBI's most wanted list. American troops did not seize him. Instead, helicopters fired on the car, and commandos retrieved his body.

The decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama has been widely described as "aspirational." It may be, however, that delusional is a more apt description in light of Obama's campaign promises and track record as president. Consider the following partial list:

• Candidate Obama pledged to expand the combat forces of the Marines and Army
• Candidate Obama pledged to escalate the war in Afghanistan
• President Obama authorized killer drone attacks in Pakistan in his very first week in office
• President Obama has not ended the US occupation of Iraq
• President Obama has not closed the Guantanamo prison
• President Obama has not ended the little discussed but deadly American military intervention in Somalia
• President Obama has been utterly unable to go beyond tepid, hollow rhetoric concerning murderous US-backed Israel
• President Obama has left "all options on the table" when it comes to US arm-twisting vis-a-vis Iran

With Nobel Peace Prize laureates like Obama who needs war mongers?

See also: "Professor Hakimi's Solution to Gitmo"

Labels: Afghanistan, drones, Empire, Iran, Iraq, Israel, militarism, Obama, Somalia, United States, War

Keith Harmon Snow has an important new article that greatly expands on a topic I first touched upon almost 14 months ago in "Blood Diamonds"--the Israel Connection. Snow's article is "Gertler's Bling Bang Torah Gang: Israel and the Ongoing Holocaust in Congo (Part 1)." On the subject of Congo, please also check out his recent article "Over Five Million Dead in Congo? Fifteen Hundred People Daily? Behind the Numbers Redux: How Truth is Hidden, Even When it Seems to Be Told".

I've written several posts dealing with Darfur and Snow has a couple of good articles on that subject, too. See "The United States' War in Darfur" and "Darfurism, Uganda & U.S. War in Africa: The Spectre of Continental Genocide".

Staying in Africa, late last December Sadia Ali Aden wrote "The 'War on Terror' and the Humanitarian Crisis in Somalia". The current crisis in Kenya seems partly related to the US-backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian troops in 2006. Last Saturday, the Independent (UK) published an article entitled "Somalia: The World's forgotten catastrophe" that focuses mainly on Somalia but also discusses how the US and Kenya figure into the conflict. Here's the intro: "According to the UN, the worst catastrophe in Africa is not taking place in Kenya, or even Darfur. Fifteen years after the disastrous Black Hawk Down incident, Somalia has more refugees than any country in the world"

Please see also "In Somalia, a reckless U.S. proxy war" in the International Herald Tribune. This article is 14 months old but it highlights the US role. Note that both articles say that the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which is one of the groups at the center of the current conflict, was hatched in Nairobi, Kenya at US behest in 2004. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported "Kenya, Ethiopia, the United States and the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia cooperated in a secret detention program for people who had fled the recent conflict in Somalia ... In a March 22 letter to the Kenyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Human Rights Watch detailed the arbitrary detention, expulsion and apparent enforced disappearance of dozens of individuals who fled the fighting between the Union of Islamic Courts and the joint forces of the Transitional Federal Government and Ethiopia from December 2006 through January 2007."

Labels: Africa, Congo, Darfur, diamonds, Empire, Somalia, Sudan, War