Privatization of ‘Obama’s War’

Michael Winship
Consortium News
June 5, 2009

Editor’s Note: President Barack Obama is making some moves on the international chess board – reaching out to the Muslim world, chastising Israel for its harsh treatment of Palestinians and seeking to bring Iran and hard-line Arab states into regional peace talks.

However, even as Obama makes those rhetorical and diplomatic moves, the wars in Iraq and, especially, Afghanistan grind on, with some disturbing similarities to George W. Bush’s approach, writes Michal Winship in this guest essay:

The sudden reappearance of former Vice President Dick Cheney over the last few months – seeming to emerge from his famous undisclosed location more frequently now than he ever did when he was in office – does not mean six more weeks of winter.

But it does bring to mind that classic country and western song, “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?” Or, maybe, “If You Won’t Leave Me, I’ll Find Someone Who Will.”

In his self-appointed role as voice of the opposition, Mr. Cheney has been playing Nostradamus, gloomily predicting doom if the Obama White House continues to set aside Bush administration policy, setting the stage for recrimination and finger-pointing should there be another terrorist attack on America.

Cheney’s grouchy legacy is the gift that keeps on giving. Just this week, The Washington Post reported for the first time that while vice president, Cheney oversaw “at least” four of those briefings given to senior members of Congress about enhanced interrogation techniques; “part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used on detainees…

…….full article here

Buying Brand Obama

Chris Hedges
May 3, 2009

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.

What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His administration has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to reinflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand Obama has allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next 15 to 20 years. Brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, including the use of drones sent on cross-border bombing runs into Pakistan that have doubled the number of civilians killed over the past three months. Brand Obama has refused to ease restrictions so workers can organize and will not consider single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush’s secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus.

…….full article here

Obama’s 100 Days

The Mad Men Did Well

John Pilger
Information Clearing House
April 29, 2009

The BBC’s American television soap Mad Men offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the “smart” people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving dreamt up by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged and sold.

It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The “Obama brand” has been named “Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008”, easily beating Apple computers. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign as “an institutionalised mass-level automated technological community organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force”. Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino union organiser César Chávez – “Sí, se puede!” or “Yes, we can” – the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush.

…….full article here

Red Cross report details CIA war crimes

Tom eley
WSWS.org
April 9, 2009

This week, the New York Review of Books released the full version of an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report detailing US Central Intelligence Agency torture of 14 “high value” terrorist suspects at prison “black sites” from 2001 until 2006. Earlier, it had produced excerpts of the report and an analysis by author Mark Danner.

The report makes explicit that the CIA violated the laws of war and basic human rights in its treatment of the prisoners, which included beatings, humiliations, sleep deprivation, and suffocation by water (“waterboarding”), among dozens of specifically named acts of brutality.

At several points, the 40-page report refers to CIA actions as illegal according to international law. The ICRC, based in Geneva, Switzerland, is the body tasked with overseeing observance of the laws of war. That it has declared acts carried out by US intelligence personnel as torture carries enormous legal weight.

…….full article here

April 9

Malcolm Lagauche
Uruknet.info
April 9, 2009

Six years ago, many of us awoke to see Saddam Hussein’s statue being torn down in Baghdad. The media ate it up. This was as eventful as the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, George Bush stated. Iraq was free, most pundits wrote or spoke. The U.S. proved its naysayers to be wrong. Baghdad had fallen with a minimal loss of U.S. lives. A democratic Iraq was just over the horizon.

What you saw wasn’t real. Saddam’s statue was not torn down by Iraqis. The event was staged and well-rehearsed by the U.S. military.

The “crowd” comprised U.S. military personnel and tanks, and about 50 or so journalists who were alerted in the Palestinian Hotel, near the venue, to come and witness this historic event. This definitely was no popular action on behalf of the Iraqi people.

…….full article here

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Where are we Today?

MalcomLagauche.com
Mar 24, 2009

For the past five years or so, Iraq was always in the headlines. In the past few months, the plight of the country is mentioned less-and-less. President Obama has told us all that Afghanistan is the number one threat to the U.S.

Pundit-after-pundit has hailed the diminishing violence in Iraq. There is a Santa Claus. Iraq is now peaceful and the Iraqi people are free. This newly-assessed theory about Iraq is false. There is still much violence, only the players may have changed. Many U.S. forces stick close-by their barracks as the new Iraqi police and military forces take over security. There has been a recent increase in resistance attacks that has devastated some Iraqi police forces and military personnel. We are not reading about this in the West. Plus, electricity and clean water supplies are just as minuscule as they were after the March 2003 invasion.

If an Iraqi lapsed into a coma before March 2003 and recovered today, he/she would not recognize Iraq. Plus, the person would probably prefer to relapse because of the horrible nightmare that is today’s Iraq.

The country has no leadership. There is a U.S.-appointed “government” that must reside in the heavily-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad. If any of the members stroll outside this area without the benefit of being guarded by tanks and other military hardware, his/her life-span would be measured in minutes.

…….full article here

Six years of Washington’s war in Iraq

Bill Van Auken
WSWS.org
Mar 20, 2009

Today marks six years since Washington launched its “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq, raining bombs and missiles on Baghdad. Despite the massive opposition of the American people to this war and the change from the Bush to the Obama administration, the US war in Iraq continues, with no end in sight.

This anniversary is both tragic and infamous. It marks the beginning of a war of aggression based upon lies. Launched in the name of “liberating” the Iraqi people, it has inflicted a catastrophe of world historic proportions upon their country and constitutes the greatest crime against humanity of the 21st century.

In six years, the Iraq war has, by the most credible estimates, claimed the lives of over 1 million Iraqis, while leaving countless others wounded and maimed. Nearly 5 million people have been driven from their homes, either forced into exile or displaced in Iraq by US repression and sectarian violence.

The US government and media have extolled the “improved security” situation in Iraq and the “return to normalcy.” Such claims can only be made in comparison to the bloodbath that was carried out beforehand.

…….full article here

White House And Pentagon: Change, Continuity And Escalation

Rick Rozoff
Global Research
Mar 19, 2009

Few of his contemporaries and far fewer since knew of the nineteenth century French journalist and novelist Alphonse Karr, but most everyone is familiar with some variant of his quip plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: The more it changes the more it’s the same thing.

Anyone driving the streets of major American cities over the past year or more has seen a bumper sticker that simply read 01-20-2009.

The numbers indicated the date that George W. Bush would leave the White House.

Until last November no one knew who his replacement would be or even with which of the two major political parties he or she would be affiliated; it was enough to anticipate Bush’s departure as an end in itself.

Judging by other bumper stickers that often accompanied this one on a given vehicle, it was assumed that those who so adorned the back of it looked forward to the end of eight years of an aggressive foreign policy, one marked by the war in Iraq and, for anyone who had paid attention to other matters, that in Afghanistan and assorted counterinsurgency and proxy wars such as those in Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines.

…….full article here

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