Tag Archives: foreign policy

American Weapons and Support Are Fueling a Bloody Air War in Yemen

by PatsySummerfield Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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On the night of July 24, Saudi-led coalition warplanes began dropping bombs on two residential compounds in the Yemeni port city of Mokha. A shaky video shot at the scene, a housing site for workers at a nearby power plant, shows a night cast in amber light with a soundtrack of explosions and screams. The video, released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) last week (see below), then shows the lifeless bodies of two young men, one with a stream of blood running from his eye, the other with a gaping wound where the side of his torso had been.

A day and a half later, HRW researcher Belkis Wille went to the scene of the bombing and asked the power plant’s housing supervisor if people had died in a particular apartment unit. “All of them,” Ali Ahmad Ragih answered. “How can you expect people to survive such a situation?…Bodies were taken out. Pieces of bodies. Hands…heads.” When the survivors tallied the damage, they determined that nine bombs had fallen, killing 65 civilians, including 10 children, and injuring dozens more.

Human Rights Watch has called the attack an “apparent war crime,” one that implicates the United States and the United Kingdom due to their supporting roles in the conflict, in which Saudi Arabia and nine other nations are conducting air strikes against Houthi rebels who effectively ousted the government of President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi in January. “Providing direct support to military operations, such as information on targets, would make the US and the UK parties to the armed conflict, and bound to apply the laws of war,” Human Rights Watch noted in a recent report.

The United States maintains that it plays a noncombat advisory role in Yemen. Yet one day after the Saudi-led air campaign, dubbed Operation Decisive Storm, was launched on March 26, the Pentagon announced the expansion of its role by providing Saudi Arabia with bombs, aerial refueling, logistics support, and intelligence—including live feeds from surveillance flights “to help Saudi Arabia decide what and where to bomb.” Additionally, the United States has equipped Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars worth of weaponry, including bombs and fighter jets.

So far, it is unknown who built or provided the bombs dropped on Mokha in July. “There are very few remnants left on the ground after these air strikes,” making it difficult to accurately identify the weapons, says Ole Solvang, a senior emergencies researcher at HRW. (A State Department official confirms that the United States provided support in the July 24 attack, but did not provide details of the type of support.)

Five days after Saudi Arabia launched Operation Decisive Storm, the first civilian casualties were reported: 31 civilians were killed in an air strike that hit a dairy factory, according to the United Nations. Reports of widespread civilian deaths have continued. As of July 21, the civilian death toll in the Yemen conflict has reached at least 1,693 with another 3,829 injured, the majority from coalition air strikes, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Saudi Arabia is currently the world’s largest importer of American arms. According to the Congressional Research Service, Washington and Riyadh inked $90 billion in weapons sales between 2010 and 2014, including the transfer of fighter jets, attack helicopters, missile defense systems, armored vehicles, and missiles and bombs. A 2010 deal worth $29 billion included 84 new F-15SA jets, and thousands of bombs to be loaded onto them. In April, a State Department official told Defense News that the United States is “making every effort to expedite security assistance to Saudi coalition forces.”

The body of a man is uncovered in the rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi air strikes in Sanaa, Yemen, in June. AP Photo/Hani Mohammed

Just two days after HRW accused Saudi Arabia of human rights violations, two new arms deals between the Saudis and United States were announced. One was for $500 million worth of explosives, detonators, fuses, and guided missile systems. Patrick Wilckens, an Amnesty International researcher on arms control and security trade, notes that this deal “seems to be specific to replenishing stock of the particular munitions that have been used in aerial bombardments.” The other sale was of $5.4 billion worth of PAC-3 Missiles and associated equipment, parts, and logistical support, meant to “modernize” and “replenish” Saudi Arabia’s missile stockpiles. The sale, US officials noted, would help “promote stability within the region.”

For many years, the United States armed the Saudis with little expectation that the weaponry would be used in combat. “The theory was that the Saudis mostly bought this stuff to cement the relationship with the United States, and the US would protect them if they were in a jam militarily. It was almost like a tacit alliance sealed with arms deals,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “Much of this equipment used to mostly just sit around. Now it is less a symbolic gesture and a money thing and is more likely to end up in the middle of a war.”

Human rights organizations say the United States isn’t doing enough to ensure the coalition is minimizing civilian casualties while deploying American weapons. “The fact that the US is a strong partner and is providing huge amounts of weapons, logistics, and expertise could be a cause for concern,” says Amnesty’s Patrick Wilckens. “The US, along with the UK and other governments, needs to put in place precautionary measures if there is a risk that some of their equipment will be used in bombing raids that could contravene international humanitarian law. We did research specific strikes and did find that there were not sufficient precautionary measures put in place to avoid civilian targets.”

Asked what preventative measures the United States is taking to mitigate potential casualties in Yemen, the official, who asked to remain unnamed, says, “Since the start of military operations in Yemen, we have called upon all sides to comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law, including by taking all feasible measures to minimize harm to civilians.”

The Saudi coalition has also deployed US-manufactured cluster munitions that have been banned by more than 100 countries due to the danger they pose to noncombatants, which have harmed civilians. Reporting from Yemen in Rolling Stone, Matthieu Aikins recently described meeting a man who claimed that “a huge cluster bomb” had hit as many as 50 homes, killing and injuring dozens. The strike occurred in an area where “there are no military bases,” the man said. Aikins himself saw the casing of a cluster bomb and a half-exploded 1,000-pound bomb that were both made in the United States.

The Obama administration has downplayed concerns about civilian casualties from coalition bombing. On May 6, less than two months into the Saudi bombing campaign, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest stated, “We certainly are pleased that the Saudis have indicated a willingness to scale back their military efforts, but we haven’t seen a corresponding response from the Houthi rebels.” Two days later, the Saudi coalition reportedly dropped leaflets on the cities of Sadaa and Marran, declaring them “military targets” and warning the residents to evacuate by seven that night. On July 6, in responding to a question on the Saudi-led coalition’s repeated destruction of civilian homes, State Department spokesman John Kirby said, “I’ll let Saudi Arabia speak to their operational capabilities and performance.”

Meanwhile, the administration has been making new arms deals with coalition members, which include some the largest recipients of US weapons and security assistance. In late May, the Pentagon announced a new $1.9 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia that included 10 MH-60R Multi-Mission Helicopters, 38 Hellfire missiles, and 380 Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System rockets. Not long afterwards, an arms deal was reached with the UAE for more than 1,000 guided bomb units for use in Yemen and against ISIS. Notably, that deal includes the sale of MK84 bombs, which contain more than 800 pounds of high explosive. An Amnesty International investigation released in July identified fragments of a US-designed MK84 bomb, manufactured in 1983, that had destroyed three houses in a Yemeni village and killed 10 members of a single family, including 7 children. Amnesty says the same type of bomb has been used by the coalition across Yemen, including a strike that killed 17 civilians in May.

Shortly after the attack in Mokha, a resident of the housing complex that was bombed guided HRW’s Belkis Wille through the rubble. “I gathered all my daughters in my arms,” he recalled. “Here, in this place, I shielded them.” He led Wille to his home. “It was peaceful in here…There were children’s smiles here. They died,” he said as tears turned to anger. “They’re gone. Gone because of the war…the war…the war.”

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American Weapons and Support Are Fueling a Bloody Air War in Yemen

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Here’s What Osama bin Laden Wrote About Climate Change

by Shirlee47R Posted on May 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday morning, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a trove of newly declassified documents discovered during the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Among the many letters, videos, and audio recordings is an undated document apparently written by bin Laden discussing the “massive consequences” of climate change, a phenomenon he describes as having more victims than wars.

The newly released document is very similar in content and language to a recording released in 2010, in which the Al Qaeda leader expounded on climate change and criticized the international community’s lackluster relief efforts in response to flooding in Pakistan. The speech, about 11 minutes in length, was accompanied by a video compilation that included images of natural disasters and Bin Laden.

In the document, Bin Laden calls attention to the fate of Pakistani children, who, he says, had been “left in the open, without a suitable living environment, including good drinking water, which has exposed them to dehydration, dangerous diseases and higher death rates.” He also laments that “countries are annually spending 100 thousand million euros on their armies” while failing to address the humanitarian crisis in Pakistan.

This was not the only time Bin Laden spoke about climate change. In a different letter between Bin Laden and senior Al Qaeda leaders—also seized during the 2011 raid and written about by Foreign Affairs in March—Bin Laden remarked on a study about climate change and asked his associates to send it Al Jazeera. In 2010, Al Jazeera obtained an audio recording of Bin Laden criticizing the “industrial states,” the United States among them, for contributing to climate change.

Read the full text of the undated letter below:

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Letter Implications of Climate Change (PDF)

Letter Implications of Climate Change (Text)

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Here’s What Osama bin Laden Wrote About Climate Change

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No, the GOP Has Not Lost Its Lust for War

by HilarioGilpin Posted on May 18, 2015

Mother Jones

It seems like only yesterday that the conventional wisdom was that the Republican Party was on the cusp of a major shift in philosophy: The libertarians had made huge inroads into the party and the rank and file was very, very taken with their agenda—most especially their isolationist foreign policy. The fact that there are exactly two senators who might be called true libertarians, Rand Paul and Mike Lee, and no more than a handful in the House, did not strike political observers as evidence that Republican voters might not be quite as enthusiastic in this regard as they believed.

For a piece entitled “Has the Libertarian Moment Finally Arrived?” in the New York Times magazine last August, journalist Robert Draper spent some time with a few “libertarian hipsters.” He was apparently smitten with their hot takes on various issues, and how they were changing the face of Republicanism as we know it. Of course, there’s nothing new about libertarians and conservatives walking hand in hand on issues of taxation, regulation, and small government, which orbit the essential organizing principle of both movements. Where libertarians and Republicans disagree most is on social issues like abortion, marriage equality, and drug legalization. (The libertarian-ish GOPers have found a nice rhetorical dodge by falling back on the old confederate line that the “states should decide,” which seems to get them off the hook with the Christian Right, who are happy to wage 50 smaller battles until they simply wear everyone down or the Rapture arrives, whichever comes first.)

But what Draper and many other beltway wags insisted had changed among the GOP faithful was a new isolationism which was bringing the rank and file into the libertarian fold. They characterized this as a return to “the real” Republican philosophy, as if the last 70 years of American imperialism never happened. Evidently, the ideological north star of the GOP remains Robert Taft, despite the fact that 95 percent of the party faithful have never heard of him. After quoting Texas Gov. Rick Perry saying that we should cut costs by closing prisons, Draper asserted:

The appetite for foreign intervention is at low ebb, with calls by Republicans to rein in federal profligacy now increasingly extending to the once-sacrosanct military budget. And deep concern over government surveillance looms as one of the few bipartisan sentiments in Washington…

The bipartisan “concern” over government surveillance is unfortunately overstated. Polling shows that it ebbs and flows depending on which party is doing it. And regardless of the sentiment, the default solution is to fiddle at the edges, legalize the worst of it, and call it “reform.”

And while it is correct to say that Republicans loathe what they perceive as “federal profligacy,” there is little real evidence that they think reigning in the military budget is the proper way to cut spending. Politico quizzed a group of activists and “thought leaders” in Iowa and new Hampshire recently on the subject who said that federal debt was their primary concern and suggested that cutting the defense budget had to be on the table. But polling tells a different story. The Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza noted this in the latest NBC-WSJ survey:

Republicans say that national security/terrorism is the single most important issue facing the country.

More than a quarter of Republicans (27 percent) chose that option, putting it ahead of “deficit and government spending” (24 percent) and, somewhat remarkably, “job creation and economic growth” (21 percent), which has long dominated as the top priority for voters of all partisan stripes.

Beyond those top line numbers, there are two other telling nuggets in the data.

The first is that Republican voters are twice as concerned as Democrats about national security and terrorism. In the NBC-WSJ survey, just 13 percent of Democrats named national security as the most pressing issue for the government; job creation and economic growth was far and away the biggest concern among Democrats (37 percent), with health care (17 percent) and climate change (15 percent) ranking ahead of national security and terrorism.

The second is that national security is a rapidly rising concern for Republicans. In NBC-WSJ poll data from March 2012, just eight percent of Republicans named it as the most important issue for the government to address.

Cillizza reported that a “savvy Republican operative” explained that this threefold increase in concern can be attributed to the rise of ISIS and the movie American Sniper arousing the militarist urge in the GOP base. That may be true, but let’s just say it was never exactly deeply buried. In the aftermath of the latest disaster of nationalist bloodlust, they kept a low profile just long enough for the rest of the country to get past the trauma of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But it didn’t take ISIS or a Clint Eastwood movie for the right’s patriotic fervor to return; it is one of the ties that binds the coalition together, and it’s never dormant for long.

Moreover, no one should be surprised to see national security returning to the top of the agenda as Republicans set their sites on the first woman Democratic nominee for president. After all, they have spent many decades portraying the men of the Democratic Party as little better than schoolgirls on this front. You can be sure they will not forsake the tactic in the face of an actual woman candidate. Indeed, they’ve carefully laid the groundwork for a full-scale assault on Hillary Clinton’s capabilities in this department with their Benghazi crusade. And as Heather Hurlburt pointed out recently in the American Prospect, there is good reason for Dems to be concerned here:

The majority of voters express equal confidence in men and women as leaders, but when national security is the issue, confidence in women’s leadership declines. In a Pew poll in January, 37 percent of the respondents said that men do better than women in dealing with national security, while 56 percent said gender makes no difference. That was an improvement from decades past, but sobering when compared to the 73 percent who say gender is irrelevant to leadership on economic issues.

Yet, aside from the fact that the GOP base has been hawkish on national security for at least 70 years, and that their best opportunity to defeat the (presumed) first woman presidential candidate may lie in deep voter anxieties about a woman’s ability to execute the role of commander in chief, we are to believe that Republicans are going to run in 2016 on an isolationist platform. If that’s the case, the GOP presidential candidates didn’t get the memo. As Karen Tumulty reported recently in the Washington Post:

As recently as two years ago, it appeared that the 2016 presidential contest was likely to become a monumental debate within the Republican Party over national security and foreign policy.

But not anymore. Although national security is Topic A for the growing field of candidates for the GOP nomination, it is becoming harder to discern any differences among them.

The contenders are a hawkish group—at least in their sound bites. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been the most skeptical of military intervention and government surveillance, but even he has proposed increasing defense spending and staged an event during his announcement tour in front of an aircraft carrier in South Carolina.

That’s right, even Rand Paul is proposing to increase defense spending. And the rest of them are sounding more like cartoon movie heroes than presidential candidates on the stump (perhaps lending some support to that American Sniper theory). Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who just released his very muscular national security manifesto, the “Rubio Doctrine,” probably wins the award for most hawkish speech thus far, thanks to this bit during a recent meeting of GOP candidates in South Carolina:

On our strategy on global jihadists and terrorists, I refer them to the movie Taken. Have you seen the movie Taken? Liam Neeson. He had a line, and this is what our strategy should be: “We will look for you, we will find you, and we will kill you.”

The crowd went wild. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker went in a different direction by first sharing his innermost thoughts:

National security is something you hear about. Safety is something you feel.

But lest he be construed as some kind of touchy feely, wimpy Wisconsin cheese-eater, he then brought the house down with a red-meat cri de coeur:

I want a leader who is willing to take the fight to them before they take the fight to us.

The crowd came to its feet and cheered.

Frankly, I feel a little bit sorry for poor old Rick Perry who, back in October, delivered what may be the most aggressive warhawk speech of the cycle so far—before anyone was paying attention. He spoke in London, where there’s no shortage of national security anxiety these days:

What all of these various hate groups have in common is a disdain for, and a wish to destroy, our Western way of life.

And someone needs to tell them that the meeting has already been held. It was decided, democratically, long ago—and by the way through great and heroic sacrifice—that our societies will be governed by Western values and Western laws.

Among those values are openness and tolerance. But to every extremist, it has to be made clear: We will not allow you to exploit our tolerance, so that you can import your intolerance. We will not let you destroy our peace with your violent ideas. If you expect to live among us, and yet plan against us, to receive the protections and comforts of a free society, while showing none of its virtues or graces, then you can have our answer now: No, not on our watch!

You will live by exactly the standards that the rest of us live by. And if that comes as jarring news, then welcome to civilization.

(Prime Minister David Cameron seems to have taken notes: He was reportedly set to say pretty much the same thing in his Queen’s speech, while adding some meat to the bone by proposing various kinds of government censorship and suppression of activity.)

It’s obvious that the GOP is not making the big switch to isolationism any time soon. So what are all those libertarian Republicans going to do? Are they willing to suck it up and sign on to the GOP’s imperial project, once again selling out their most deeply held views about America’s place in the world for a couple of cheap tax breaks? It’s not as if they have to. There is one candidate in the race who has a long record of antiwar positions and is fully onboard with shrinking the military industrial complex until it only needs a bathtub in which to float. He has no interest in worrying about American “prestige” around the world or spending any blood and treasure on behalf of commercial interests.

His name is Bernie Sanders in case anyone is wondering. He’s even an Independent, one of the very few in the US Congress. Unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely that any libertarians will join his campaign. Which is also quite telling. When it comes to making a choice between voting against war and voting for tax breaks for millionaires, tax breaks for millionaires wins every time. Their priorities have always been clear—and the leaders of the Republican Party know they’ll never have to change a thing to buy their loyalty.

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No, the GOP Has Not Lost Its Lust for War

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Marco Rubio Wants to Make Neocons Cool Again

by TristanFrank Posted on May 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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All-but-announced presidential candidate Jeb Bush caused a stir recently when he cited his brother, former President George W. Bush, as a top policy adviser on the Middle East. But it’s fellow Floridian Sen. Marco Rubio who has made a Bush-era neoconservative foreign policy a centerpiece of his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

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Marco Rubio Wants to Make Neocons Cool Again

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The Jeb Bush Adviser Who Should Scare You

by MariZssppgvc Posted on May 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last week, Jeb Bush, the all-but-announced GOP presidential candidate, stirred up a fuss when he privately told a group of Manhattan financiers that his top adviser on US-Israeli policy is George W. Bush. Given that Jeb has tried mightily to distance himself from his brother, whose administration used false assertions to launch the still highly unpopular Iraq War, this touting of W.—even at a behind-closed-doors session of Republican donors—seemed odd. But perhaps more noteworthy is that Jeb Bush has embraced much of his brother’s White House foreign policy team. In February, the Jeb Bush campaign released a list of 21 foreign policy advisers; 17 of them served in the George W. Bush administration. And one name stood out: Paul Wolfowitz, a top policy architect of the Iraq war—for the prospect of Wolfowitz whispering into Jeb’s ear ought to scare the bejeezus out of anyone who yearns for a rational national security policy.

Wolfowitz, who was deputy defense secretary under George W. Bush, was a prominent neocon cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq. He was also the top conspiracy theorist in the Bush-Cheney crowd. As Michael Isikoff and I reported in our our 2006 book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, Wolfowitz, prior to the Iraq War, was a champion of a bizarre theory promoted by an eccentric academic named Laurie Mylroie: Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, not Islamic extremists such as Al Qaeda, was responsible for most of the world’s anti-United States terrorism.

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The Jeb Bush Adviser Who Should Scare You

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Did Barack Obama Just Lose to Elizabeth Warren?

by JeffK60jfdckim Posted on May 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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In Washington, as in much of life, it often seems that social evolution doesn’t progress much beyond high school. So it was hardly surprising that in the media the battle over the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal was often depicted as a spat between the BMOC of the party (President Barack Obama) and the queen of the alt crowd (Sen. Elizabeth Warren). Yet the vote on Tuesday afternoon in the Senate that blocked fast-track legislation—which would allow the president to bring the TPP to an up-or-down floor vote with no amendments—was a sign that Obama’s problems are not just with Warren, the Massachusetts populist and progressive darling. Every member of his own party but one voted to stymie a vote on the fast-track bill Obama has been pushing. And after the vote, Sen. Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat who often is mindful of the interests of Manhattan-based financiers, was at the mic denouncing the fast-track measure and demanding a trade deal that does right by American workers—a jab at Obama, who has passionately asserted the TPP is good for US workers.

It turns out that Warren was not holding a marginal position, as the White House had contended. The president was.

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Did Barack Obama Just Lose to Elizabeth Warren?

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The American Teen Whose Death-by-Drone Obama Won’t Explain

by GenieMcGuigan Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, President Barack Obama appeared in the White House press room to reveal that a US strike in January on an Al Qaeda compound had killed two hostages held by the terrorist group, Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian, and Warren Weinstein, an American. He offered his condolences to their families for the mistake that led to their deaths.

It’s remarkable that Obama spoke of this at all. The US targeted killing program is shrouded in secrecy, and the president had never before issued a statement like this about people accidentally killed by US drone strikes. (He did not use the word “drone.”) One such death that stands out is that of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American citizen who was killed in a US drone strike.

Abdulrahman was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric turned Al Qaeda propagandist. The father was killed in a drone strike that targeted him in Yemen in September 2011. The son was killed weeks later in a separate strike in Yemen. According to his family, the attack was on a restaurant. Attorney General Eric Holder later said that this strike did not “specifically” target the young man.

The US government has never said that Abdulrahman was involved in terrorist activities. In 2012, I asked Obama during a Reddit AMA what he thought about the teen’s death, and the question received hundreds of votes from Redditors, meaning the president and/or his social-media team almost certainly noticed it. Yet Obama didn’t respond.

Now that he’s established the precedent of explaining the killings of US citizens in targeted strikes, Obama and the administration might see fit to say what happened in the case of Abdulrahman. Was his death accidental or is there evidence he was involved with terrorists?

For more on Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, read Tom Junod’s 2012 piece on his killing.

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The American Teen Whose Death-by-Drone Obama Won’t Explain

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This Declassified CIA Report Shows the Shaky Case for the Iraq War

by Ludie69E Posted on March 20, 2015

Mother Jones

The United States began its invasion of Iraq 12 years ago. Yesterday, a previously classified Central Intelligence Agency report containing supposed proof of the country’s weapons of mass destruction was published by Jason Leopold of Vice News. Put together nine months before the start of the war, the National Intelligence Estimate spells out what the CIA knew about Iraq’s ability to produce biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. It would become the backbone of the Bush administration’s mistaken assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and posed a direct threat to the post-9/11 world.

The report is rife with what now are obvious red flags that the Bush White House oversold the case for war. It asserts that Iraq had an active chemical weapons program at one point, though it admits that the CIA had found no evidence of the program’s continuation. It repeatedly includes caveats like “credible evidence is limited.” It gives little space to the doubts of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which found the CIA’s findings on Iraq’s nuclear program unconvincing and “at best ambiguous.”

This isn’t the first time the report’s been released in full: A version was made public in 2004, but nearly all the text was redacted. Last year, transparency advocate John Greenwald successfully petitioned the CIA for a more complete version. Greenwald shared the document with Leopold.

Here’s the full report:

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CIA 2002 Iraq Report (PDF)

CIA 2002 Iraq Report (Text)

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This Declassified CIA Report Shows the Shaky Case for the Iraq War

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US Weapons Have a Nasty Habit of Going AWOL

by ShantelMnj Posted on March 19, 2015

Mother Jones

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon can’t say what happened to more than $500 million worth of gear—including “small arms, ammunition, night-vision goggles, patrol boats, vehicles and other supplies”—it had given to the Yemeni government. The news comes as Al Qaeda and Iranian-backed groups vie to control the country following the collapse of the country’s US-backed regime in January. The Post noted that the Pentagon has stopped further shipments of aid, but the damage has been done. “We have to assume it’s completely compromised and gone,” an anonymous legislative aide said.

This isn’t the first time US military aid to allies has gone AWOL or wound up in the wrong hands. A few notable examples:

Libya: In late 2012, the New York Times reported that weapons from a US-approved deal had eventually gone to Islamic militants in Libya. The deal, which involved European weapons sent to Qatar as well as US weapons originally supplied to the United Arab Emirates, had been managed from the sidelines by the Obama administration.

Syria: More than once, American arms intended to help bolster the fight against ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq have ended up in the group’s control. Last October, an airdrop of small arms was blown off target by the wind, according to the Guardian. ISIS quickly posted a video of its fighters going through crates of weapons attached to a parachute.

Iraq: American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army have also found their way ISIS via theft and capture. And weapons meant for the Iraqi army have also gone to Shiite militias backed by Iran. This isn’t a new problem: As much as 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces between 2004 and early 2007 could not be accounted for.

Afghanistan: It’s been widely documented that American forces invading Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 had to face off against weapons the United States had once supplied to mujahideen fighters battling the Soviets in the ’80s.

Somalia: In 2011, Wired reported that as much as half of the US-supplied arms given to Uganda and Burundi in support of the fight against al-Shabaab was winding up with the Somali militant group.

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US Weapons Have a Nasty Habit of Going AWOL

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Netanyahu to American Jews: Get Lost

by TeddyLowrance Posted on January 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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It was not so shocking that House Speaker John Boehner would seek to undermine President Barack Obama and his attempt to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to deliver an address to Congress, in which Netanyahu will presumably dump on Obama’s efforts. Nor was it so shocking that Netanyahu, who apparently would rather see another war in the Middle East than a deal that allows Iran to maintain a civilian-oriented and internationally monitored nuclear program, agreed to mount this stunt two weeks before the Israeli elections—a close contest in which the hawkish PM is fighting for his political life. Certainly, Netanyahu realized that this audacious move would strain his already-ragged ties with the Obama administration and tick off the president, who will be in office for the next two years and quite able to inconvenience Netanyahu should he hold on to power. (Even Fox News talking heads acknowledged that Boehner’s invitation and Netanyahu’s acceptance were low blows.) But what was surprising was how willing Netanyahu was to send a harsh message to American Jews: Drop dead.

For the past six years, one big question has largely defined US politics: Are you for or against Obama? The ongoing narrative in Washington has been a simple one: The president has tried to enact a progressive agenda—health care, gun safety, a minimum-wage hike, climate change action, immigration reform, Wall Street reform, gender pay equity, expanded education programs, diminishing tax cuts for the rich—and Boehner and the Republicans have consistently plotted to thwart him. The GOP has used the filibuster in the Senate to block Obama initiatives and routine presidential appointments. The House Republicans have resorted to extraordinary means—shutting down the government, holding the debt ceiling hostage, ginning up controversies (Benghazi!)—to block the president. All this has happened as conservative allies of the Republican Party have challenged Obama’s legitimacy as president (the birth certificate) and peddled vicious conspiracy theories (he’s a Muslim socialist who will destroy the nation). Throughout the Obama Wars, one demographic group that has steadfastly stood with the president is American Jews.

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Netanyahu to American Jews: Get Lost

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