Tag Archives: iraqi

Awlaki Assassination Memo Finally Released

by AnnabelCorrigan Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

A federal court has finally released the Obama administration’s memo justifying the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen living in Yemen who was apparently a top Al Qaeda operative. I think we mostly knew this already, but the memo confirms that the decision to kill Awlaki was based primarily on the Authorization to Use Military Force passed a few weeks after 9/11:

“We believe that the AUMF’s authority to use lethal force abroad also may apply in appropriate circumstances to a United States citizen who is part of the forces of an enemy authorization within the scope of the force authorization,” reads the Justice Department memorandum, written for attorney general Eric Holder on 16 July 2010 and ostensibly intended strictly for Awlaki’s case.

Among those circumstances: “Where high-level government officials have determined that a capture operation is infeasible and that the targeted person is part of a dangerous enemy force and is engaged in activities that pose a continued and imminent threat to US persons or interests.”

I’ve never taken a firm stand on the decision to kill Awlaki. Everything I’ve read persuades me that he was, indeed, a high-ranking Al Qaeda operative, and a dangerous one. If we were engaged in a normal war, there would be no question about our right to treat him like any other enemy combatant.

But we aren’t engaged in a normal war, are we? There’s no specific enemy, no specific battlefield, and no way of knowing if and when the war is over. The AUMF is open-ended, both in time and geography, and is famously vague about just who it authorizes the president to make war against. It specifies “those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001,” and that takes in a helluva lot of ground.

Thus, the problem I’ve always had isn’t specifically with the targeting of Awlaki, but with the fact that the targeting was based on such a flimsy legal pretext. However, despite the fact that I’m disappointed in Obama’s decision to interpret the AUMF widely, most of the blame on that score should be directed not at Obama, but at Congress. The AUMF is now more than a dozen years old, and it’s long past time for Congress to emerge from its fetal crouch and write a new law specifically designed for our present circumstances. Among other things, it should address the president’s ability to target American citizens for killing. If Congress wants to give the president that power, it should debate and pass a law and the courts should rule on its constitutionality. That’s the rule of law. And regardless of whether I liked the law, I’d accept it if Congress passed it, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court declared it constitutional.

Instead, as usual, Congress prefers to do nothing. This leaves them free to kibitz if they don’t like what the president is doing, or to simply avoid having to take a stand at all. It’s shameful.

Read the full Justice Department memo here.

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Awlaki Assassination Memo Finally Released

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Nothing Hillary Clinton Says This Week Matters

by kk0qhbx Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

For the love of God, can everyone please stop chattering about whether Hillary Clinton’s latest minuscule miscue is going to be a huge problem for her if she runs for president? Is there truly nothing else to write about?

The correct answer is: no, it will not be a problem. You know why? Because it’s June 2014. The election is scheduled for November 2016. That’s it.

Now can we all move on? I think I’ve only read about 20 explainers today on the path forward for the US at the World Cup. That’s probably not enough, so how about writing a couple dozen more?

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Nothing Hillary Clinton Says This Week Matters

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This Leading GOP Congressional Candidate Insists We Found Saddam’s WMD Program

by PenniK00bpqmwan Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

Steve Russell’s political career has largely been propelled by his Iraq War heroics. The retired Army Lt. Col., who’s vying in Tuesday’s Republican primary to run for the seat being vacated Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.), led the battalion that hunted down and captured Saddam Hussein. After returning to civilian life, he barnstormed the country in support of a troop surge. He has also been one of the leading voices advancing the discredited claim that Iraq possessed an active weapons of mass destruction program at the time of the US invasion in 2003.

“He Saddam Hussein was trying to develop mass destructive weapons to include nuclear weapons,” Russell said in a 2012 speech. “The record is there. We found evidence of it even in Iraq. That’s a big misconception. Oh, there was no WMD, there was no nuclear program. That is false… They were clearly on a path to develop destructive weapons.” Russell, a former Oklahoma state senator, also made the dubious claim during this speech that the rationale for invading Iraq had little if anything to do with WMDs. “Was that the only basis for going in? No. It never was. It was never about WMD. It was about what right does one man have to defy the entire world.”

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This Leading GOP Congressional Candidate Insists We Found Saddam’s WMD Program

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Supreme Court Strikes Down EPA Interpretation of Clean Air Act

by JackieMesserly Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

A few years ago, the EPA added carbon dioxide to an established program that limits emissions of harmful pollutants. But there was a problem: the Clean Air Act says that permits are required by any source that emits more than 250 tons of a covered pollutant. Because CO2 is such a common gas, this would have forced tens of thousands of small sources to go through an expensive and pointless permitting process, something EPA wanted to avoid. So, for CO2 only, they unilaterally changed the threshold to 100,000 tons per year. This exempted most large businesses, but it also gave critics an opening to challenge the law. Today they won:

The Supreme Court, in a split ruling, has blocked the Obama administration from requiring special permits for some new power plants, but upheld them for others. In a dense 5-4 decision Monday, the justices said the Environmental Protection Agency had wrongly stretched an anti-pollution provision of the Clean Air Act to cover carbon emissions in new or modified plants.

But the ruling was confined to only one regulatory provision, and it is not likely to directly affect the broader climate-change policy that the administration announced earlier this month. That policy relies on a different part of the law that says states must take steps to reduce harmful air pollutants, which include greenhouse gases.

This doesn’t affect the EPA’s recent proposal that would limit CO2 emissions from power plants, since that relies on a different provision of the Clean Air Act that’s already been blessed by the Supreme Court. However, today’s ruling is a demonstration of something I’ve mentioned before: When an executive agency modifies the way it interprets a law, it’s a fairly routine affair. Interpretations of federal statutes, especially complex regulatory constructions, are notoriously difficult, and agencies do it all the time. There’s no presidential “lawlessness” or “tyranny” involved, and disputes over these interpretations are routinely resolved by courts. In this case, it was obviously a close call, since the decision was 5-4 and the opinion was long and dense.

This is what’s likely to happen in other cases where the Obama administration has interpreted a law in ways that his critics don’t like. If the critics are serious, they’ll go to court, and in some cases they’ll win. In others, they’ll lose. Welcome to the 21st century.

UPDATE: I wrote this hastily because—and I know you’re going to love this excuse—a temporary crown fell out and I had to pop out to my dentist to get it re-cemented. But now that I’m back, it’s worth pointing out that today’s Supreme Court decision actually upheld most of the EPA’s new limitations on CO2 emissions. The main reason I highlighted the one piece they struck down was because I wanted to make a point about presidential “lawlessness” that’s become such a talking point on the right these days. In the case of the 250-ton rule, the EPA tried to reinterpret the law and the court ruled against them. Other interpretations were upheld. That’s the way this stuff goes.

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Supreme Court Strikes Down EPA Interpretation of Clean Air Act

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Karl Rove Unintentionally Predicted the Current Chaos in Iraq

by HelenaHastings Posted on June 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

As Iraq was unraveling last week and the possible outlines of the first jihadist state in modern history were coming into view, I remembered this nugget from the summer of 2002. At the time, journalist Ron Suskind had a meeting with “a senior advisor” to President George W. Bush (later identified as Karl Rove). Here’s how he described part of their conversation:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

As events unfold increasingly chaotically across the region that officials of the Bush years liked to call the Greater Middle East, consider the eerie accuracy of that statement. The president, his vice president Dick Cheney, his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, among others, were indeed “history’s actors.” They did create “new realities” and, just as Rove suggested, the rest of us are now left to “study” what they did.

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Karl Rove Unintentionally Predicted the Current Chaos in Iraq

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What the Hell Is Happening in Iraq Right Now?

by Rosario38U Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

Iraq is rapidly slipping out of government control as an army of Al Qaeda-inspired militants storms toward Baghdad. Here’s what we know about who these fighters are and what drives them.

Who are these militants?

Some of the fighters are part of an Al Qaeda offshoot known as The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). A Sunni militant group led by an Iraqi named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS grew out of Iraq’s Al Qaeda faction. US troops fought with ISIS and its predecessor until the day they withdrew from Iraq in December 2011.

In the last year, according to the Washington Post, the group became “far more lethal, effective, and powerful” as it focused on controlling parts of war-torn Syria. “ISIS lured into its ranks the bulk of the thousands of foreign volunteers, some from Europe and the United States, who have streamed into Syria to wage jihad, further bolstering its numbers.” ISIS already controls parts of northern Syria along the Euphrates River and much of the arid western region of Iraq, from the Syrian border to Fallujah. As a result of ISIS’s increasing dominance, a rift opened between Al Qaeda and ISIS earlier this year.

ISIS has combined forces with other militants, including local Sunni groups; militias led by members of the Baath party, which ruled the country under Saddam Hussein; and at least one of Hussein’s former top military commanders. It’s not necessarily an ad hoc allegiance: One military leader has said that the planning for this strike began two years ago.

The size of ISIS is unknown. According to the Guardian, the group commands roughly 10,000 men. They are well-trained: “They’re like ghosts,” said one Iraqi officer. “They appear, strike, and disappear in seconds.” Also, there’s this scary paragraph, via the Guardian (emphasis ours):

Iraqi officials told the Guardian that two divisions of Iraqi soldiers — roughly 30,000 men — simply turned and ran in the face of the assault by an insurgent force of just 800 fighters. Isis extremists roamed freely on Wednesday through the streets of Mosul, openly surprised at the ease with which they took Iraq’s second largest city after three days of sporadic fighting.

Why are they doing this?

ISIS is seeking to establish Sunni control over Iraq and the Levant region, which includes Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. In a video posted right after ISIS forces took Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, the group’s spokesman ordered ISIS forces to march on Baghdad, the seat of the country’s Shiite-led government. “We have a score to settle,” he says.

The militant groups assisting ISIS share the same goal, “which is getting rid of this sectarian government, ending this corrupt army and negotiating to form the Sunni Region,” a high-ranking Baathist leader told the New York Times.

Where is this all going down, exactly?

ISIS has seized northern Iraq at breakneck speed. Militia forces first clashed with Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, a city in northern Iraq and the country’s second-largest city, on June 7, and controlled the city by June 10. By June 11, they had pushed south and taken Tikrit and Baiji, which supplies the cities of Kirkuk and Baghdad with electricity.

In Mosul, ISIS freed Al Qaeda fighters from prisons and Iraqi officers set fire to fuel and ammunition depots as they retreated. “Mosul now is like hell. It’s in flames and death is everywhere,” one refugee told Reuters.

The decisive battle will most likely take place in Baghdad. As ISIS converges on the city, hundreds of thousands of civilians are fleeing ahead of them.

In all, ISIS has some control or is fighting to take some two dozen large towns and cities across northern Iraq. Notable exceptions include Erbil and Kirkuk in the semiautonomous, oil-rich Kurdish region that borders Iran and Turkey. While reports indicate that Iraqi government troops have fled the area, Kurds say their pesh merga forces are in firm control of those key cities.

The New York Times has a useful map on where ISIS is gaining control in Iraq and Syria.

What is the Iraqi government doing about it?

The Iraqi army has skirmished with ISIS forces before, sometimes with the support of the country’s Shiite-aligned militia groups. But the Iraqi army has offered very little resistance to ISIS since this conflict kicked off last week. In Mosul, the site of the first major clash, many US-trained Iraqi soldiers abandoned their posts and stripped off their uniforms to blend in with fleeing mobs. An Iraqi military officer described witnessing a “a total collapse of the security forces” in Mosul.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has requested emergency powers in response to the threat. The Iraqi parliament delayed voting on a request, which reportedly entails the power to impose curfews and censor news media.

What is the US doing?

On Thursday, President Obama said that he and his national security team are weighing all options for helping the Iraqi government respond to ISIS advances. “I don’t rule out anything because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria,” Obama said when asked whether he is considering drone strikes. (Maliki’s government reportedly wants the Obama administration to conduct targeted air strikes.) The president has the authority to intervene in Iraq without congressional approval because the original war authorization hasn’t expired. However, White House press secretary Jay Carney said that the administration is “not contemplating sending ground troops” to Iraq.

“It’s a rapidly deteriorating and grave situation in Iraq,” Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fl.), a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said.

Is anyone else doing anything?

The UK has ruled out military intervention, but may provide humanitarian aid. Iran, on the other hand, deployed Revolutionary Guard forces to help Iraqi troops, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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What the Hell Is Happening in Iraq Right Now?

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In "X-Men: Days of Future Past" This Real-Life US President Is (Probably) a Mutant

by BrigetteQxh Posted on May 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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This post contains some spoilers.

The X-Men film series, about a class of mutant superheroes and villains, has always been about the persecution of minorities. The first installment, 2000’s X-Men, drew soft parallels between the US government hunting for mutants and past Nazi atrocities. The story for 2011’s X-Men: First Class, was directly influenced by the civil rights movement and the contrast between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the latest installment, X-Men: Days of Future Past (directed by Bryan Singer, and starring Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Peter Dinklage, and Ellen Page), this theme continues with a storyline surrounding a fictional program from the early 1970s, approved by President Richard Nixon, that involves sending killer robots after America’s closeted mutant population. The film’s political backdrop also features a mutant-ized take on the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, where the US agreed to end direct military involvement in the Vietnam War. On top of that, the new X-Men flick deepens the alternate history explored in the franchise by suggesting that this handsome devil was secretly a mutant:

NASA/Wikimedia Commons

Yep. That’s John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States.

In the film, Erik Lehnsherr, a.k.a. Magneto, (played by Fassbender) is being held in a secret prison beneath the Pentagon for his alleged involvement in the JFK assassination. After his fellow X-Men break him out of prison, he claims that he was wrongly convicted and that he was actually trying to save the president from Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet. His reason? “He was one of us,” Magneto says.

To be fair, this is a brief moment in the movie, and it is never clarified if “one of us” means JFK was a mutant or something along the lines of a friend of the oppressed mutant community. One plausible interpretation of Magneto’s claim here is that it pays homage to the aborted “Princess Diana is a zombie mutant superhero!” plot from the X-Statix spin-off.

We can only assume that JFK’s secret mutant powers consisted of killing Iraqi liberals and rampant lechery.

Now here’s a fake mini-documentary released in November that summarizes Magneto’s alleged involvement in the JFK assassination:

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In "X-Men: Days of Future Past" This Real-Life US President Is (Probably) a Mutant

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Climate Change As a Weapon of Mass Destruction

by BebeTINYuxzkb Posted on May 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Who could forget? At the time, in the fall of 2002, there was such a drumbeat of “information” from top figures in the Bush administration about the secret Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and so endanger the United States. And who—other than a few suckers—could have doubted that Saddam Hussein was eventually going to get a nuclear weapon? The only question, as our vice president suggested on “Meet the Press,” was: Would it take one year or five? And he wasn’t alone in his fears, since there was plenty of proof of what was going on. For starters, there were those “specially designed aluminum tubes” that the Iraqi autocrat had ordered as components for centrifuges to enrich uranium in his thriving nuclear weapons program. Reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon hit the front page of the New York Times with that story on September 8, 2002.

Then there were those “mushroom clouds” that Condoleezza Rice, our national security advisor, was so publicly worried about—the ones destined to rise over American cities if we didn’t do something to stop Saddam. As she fretted in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer on that same September 8th, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” No, indeed, and nor, it turned out, did Congress!

And just in case you weren’t anxious enough about the looming Iraqi threat, there were those unmanned aerial vehicles—Saddam’s drones!—that could be armed with chemical or biological WMD from his arsenal and flown over America’s East Coast cities with unimaginable results. President George W. Bush went on TV to talk about them and congressional votes were changed in favor of war thanks to hair-raising secret administration briefings about them on Capitol Hill.

In the end, it turned out that Saddam had no weapons program, no nuclear bomb in the offing, no centrifuges for those aluminum pipes, no biological or chemical weapons caches, and no drone aircraft to deliver his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (nor any ships capable of putting those nonexistent robotic planes in the vicinity of the US coast). But what if he had? Who wanted to take that chance? Not Vice President Dick Cheney, certainly. Inside the Bush administration he propounded something that journalist Ron Suskind later dubbed the “one percent doctrine.” Its essence was this: if there was even a 1 percent chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, it must be dealt with as if it were a 95 percent-100 percent certainty.

Here’s the curious thing: if you look back on America’s apocalyptic fears of destruction during the first 14 years of this century, they largely involved three city-busting weapons that were fantasies of Washington’s fertile imperial imagination. There was that “bomb” of Saddam’s, which provided part of the pretext for a much-desired invasion of Iraq. There was the “bomb” of the mullahs, the Iranian fundamentalist regime that we’ve just loved to hate ever since they repaid us, in 1979, for the CIA’s overthrow of an elected government in 1953 and the installation of the Shah by taking the staff of the US embassy in Tehran hostage. If you believed the news from Washington and Tel Aviv, the Iranians, too, were perilously close to producing a nuclear weapon or at least repeatedly on the verge of the verge of doing so. The production of that “Iranian bomb” has, for years, been a focus of American policy in the Middle East, the “brink” beyond which war has endlessly loomed. And yet there was and is no Iranian bomb, nor evidence that the Iranians were or are on the verge of producing one.

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Climate Change As a Weapon of Mass Destruction

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Iraq Delusion Syndrome Is Alive and Well

by nowabazaBS1 Posted on May 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Max Boot writes today that over the past couple of years, Iraq has spiraled ever downward into outright anarchy and civil war:

Contrast that with Afghanistan, which I visited last week. While violence, corruption, drug production and government dysfunction remain very real problems in what is still one of the world’s poorest countries, Afghanistan is making real progress. Kabul is bustling and, notwithstanding some high-profile Taliban attacks, far safer than Baghdad….Even more impressive, the security forces managed with virtually no coalition presence on the ground to secure the April 5 presidential election despite Taliban attempts to disrupt it.

….Just a few years ago, Iraq appeared to be in much better shape: President Obama bragged on Dec. 14, 2011, that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.” In hindsight, however, it is obvious that Iraq began to unravel the minute the last U.S. troops left.

….There is an important lesson to be learned here: It’s vitally important to keep a substantial commitment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan after this year. Military commanders are asking for at least 10,000 personnel, and if that request isn’t granted by the White House (as leaks suggest it may not be), the odds will increase that Afghanistan, like Iraq, will descend into a civil war that undoes everything U.S. troops sacrificed so much to achieve.

I should say at the outset that I don’t necessarily oppose a long-term commitment of a small US peacekeeping force to Afghanistan. Fifteen years after the Kosovo war, NATO still has several thousand troops there, about a thousand of which are American. That’s how long this stuff takes sometimes.

That said, I’m endlessly flummoxed by the attitude of guys like Boot. After ten years—ten years!—of postwar “peacekeeping” in Iraq, does he still seriously think that keeping a few thousand American advisors in Baghdad for yet another few years would have made a serious difference there? In Kosovo there was a peace to keep. It was fragile, sure, but it was there. In Iraq it wasn’t. The ethnic fault lines hadn’t changed a whit, and American influence over Nouri al-Maliki had shrunk to virtually nothing. We had spent a decade trying to change the fundamentals of Iraqi politics and we couldn’t do it. An endless succession of counterterrorism initiatives didn’t do it; hundreds of billions of dollars in civil aid didn’t do it; and despite some mythologizing to the contrary, the surge didn’t do it either. The truth is that we couldn’t even make a dent. What sort of grand delusion would persuade anyone that yet another decade might do the trick?

Maybe things are different in Afghanistan. Tribal conflicts are different from sectarian ones. The Taliban is a different kind of enemy than al-Qaeda. Afghanistan’s likely next leader will almost certainly be more pro-American than Hamid Karzai. And strategically, Afghanistan plays a different role than Iraq ever did.

But Iraq? In 2003, maybe it was reasonable to think that the US could not just topple a dictator, but change the culture of a country. We can argue about that forever. But to still believe that in 2014? That’s the stuff of dreamland. Why are there still people around who continue to cling to this fantasy?

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Iraq Delusion Syndrome Is Alive and Well

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President Obama Takes on Overtime Rules

by MicaelaL71 Posted on March 12, 2014

Mother Jones

From the New York Times:

President Obama this week will seek to force American businesses to pay more overtime to millions of workers, the latest move by his administration to confront corporations that have had soaring profits even as wages have stagnated….Mr. Obama’s decision to use his executive authority to change the nation’s overtime rules is likely to be seen as a challenge to Republicans in Congress, who have already blocked most of the president’s economic agenda and have said they intend to fight his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour from $7.25.

This is obviously just the latest in Obama’s long series of Constitution-crushing moves that flout the law and turn the president into a despot-in-chief, gleefully kneecapping Congress and — wait. What’s this?

In 2004, business groups persuaded President George W. Bush’s administration to allow them greater latitude on exempting salaried white-collar workers from overtime pay, even as organized labor objected….Mr. Obama’s authority to act comes from his ability as president to revise the rules that carry out the Fair Labor Standards Act, which Congress originally passed in 1938. Mr. Bush and previous presidents used similar tactics at times to work around opponents in Congress.

Oh. So he’s just doing the same stuff that every other president has done. Sorry about that. You may go about your business.

For what it’s worth, this gets to the heart of my impatience with all the right-wing hysteria about how Obama is shredding the Constitution and turning himself into a modern-day Napoleon. I’m not unpersuadable on the general point that Obama’s executive orders sometimes go too far. But so far no one has provided any evidence that Obama has done anything more than any other modern president. They all issue executive orders, and Obama has actually issued fewer than most. They all urge the federal bureaucracy to reinterpret regulations in liberal or conservative directions. They all appoint agency heads with mandates to push the rulemaking process in agreeable directions. And they all get taken to court over this stuff and sometimes get their hats handed to them.

Is Obama opening up whole new vistas in executive overreach? I don’t see it, and I don’t even see anyone making the case seriously. You can’t just run down a laundry list of executive actions you happen to dislike. You need to take a genuinely evenhanded look at the past 30 or 40 years of this stuff and make an argument that Obama is doing something unique. Until you do that, you’re just playing dumb partisan games.

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President Obama Takes on Overtime Rules

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