The American Bear

› Karzai Says U.S. Can Keep Afghan Bases After 2014 | NYT

The United States and Afghanistan are negotiating a security agreement that would allow American forces to stay here beyond the end of 2014, and Mr. Karzai said the Obama administration had asked for nine bases spread across the country.

“We agree to give them these bases,” Mr. Karzai told students during a speech at Kabul University. “We consider our relations with the United States beyond 2014 to be positive for Afghanistan.”

The American reaction, though, was far less positive than one would expect. Officials characterized Mr. Karzai’s comments as premature at best, and said they appeared to reflect the Afghan government’s desire for a larger force than the United States is likely to be willing to commit.

The Obama administration has yet to decide how large a force it would like to keep in Afghanistan, but administration officials have signaled that it is unlikely to total more than 10,000 service members. They said it was more important now to hash out a range of issues, like whether American troops would continue to have legal immunity in Afghanistan after next year, than to talk about the specifics of where troops would be based.

› Yemen: US drone strikes kill 5 people

April 17th, 2013

Two U.S. drone strikes Wednesday killed at least five suspected “al-Qaida militants”* and destroyed the house of one of them in a mountainous area south of the capital, Sanaa, a Yemeni security official and witnesses said.

The four were killed in the first strike while riding a vehicle in the desert area of Oussab al-Ali, about 140 kilometers (90 miles) south of Sanaa, the official said.

The second strike killed a fifth suspected jihadi, Hamed Radman. A drone bombed his house, the official said. Radman is known to security authorities as influential al-Qaida member and played a role in recruitment, he said.

A witness in a nearby village said he saw columns of smoke rising into the sky after two explosions rocked the area. He said that U.S. drones have been flying over his village for three days and are still in the sky.

After a short pause, the U.S. resumes its drone campaign in Yemen. The last reported strike was on January 30th.

In addition, there were strikes reported today and Sunday in Pakistan.

* US and Yemeni officials label all military-age male victims of drone strikes as “militants” unless they are proven innocent after their deaths.

› Afghanistan faults U.S., Taliban for deadly airstrike | latimes.com

The Taliban and U.S. military were both at fault in a NATO airstrike in eastern Afghanistan this month that killed 17 civilians, including 12 children, according to an Afghan government investigation. The inquiry raised the number of civilian deaths from an earlier total of 11.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has completed an investigation of the same incident in Kunar province, but its report is still under review, a coalition spokesman said.

… “As the reports confirm that armed Taliban were there in the area, we strongly condemn the use of civilians and their homes as shields by the Taliban,” President Hamid Karzai said in a statement. But, he added, airstrikes on residential areas are not acceptable “under any name and for any purpose whatsoever.”

Karzai added that the airstrike in a crowded residential area by the International Security Assistance Force violated human rights and breached an Afghan executive order banning the use of such weapons in populated neighborhoods.

› Afghanistan Confirms Eleven Children Killed in April 6 NATO Air Strike | Jim White

Khaama Press reports today that a group of investigators appointed by the Afghan government has confirmed that eleven children were killed on Saturday in a NATO air strike in Kunar Province. Although several press reports indicate that NATO has said that it is investigating the strike, I can find no word on the Defense Department or ISAF websites mentioning this strike. The absence of any report from NATO is puzzling, since their site provides near-daily accounts of actions under the heading of “Joint Command Operational Update”.

Here is how Khaama Press relates the confirmation of the deaths:

Head of the Afghan delegation appointed by Afghan president Hamid Karzai to probe NATO airstrike in eastern Kunar province of Afghanistan confirmed at least 11 children and 4 women were killed during raid.

The delegation also added that at least 25 people had suffered casualties during the air raid in this province.

› Afghan official: U.S. Airstrike kills 10 children

An Afghan official says 11 civilians, including 10 children, have been killed in an airstrike during a weekend military operation in eastern Afghanistan.

Wasifullah Wasify, a government official in Kunar province, said Sunday the airstrike occurred the day before during a fierce gunbattle between Taliban militants and a joint force of U.S. and Afghan forces.

He says 10 children and one woman were killed when the airstrike destroyed a house in a remote area of the province.

A U.S. civilian adviser also was killed in Saturday’s fighting. Col. Thomas Collins, a spokesman for U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, provided new details about the adviser’s death, saying he was killed during fighting in Kunar province. Most of the troops on the ground were Afghan and the Americans were operating in an advisory and training role, he said. The coalition also provided air support.

The American adviser was one of three U.S. civilians killed Saturday. The two others — a female foreign service officer with the U.S. State Department and an employee with the U.S. Defense Department — were killed in a suicide bombing in southern Zabul … . Three U.S. soldiers also were killed in the attack.

› US troops will stay in Afghanistan to support local forces, Allen insists | guardian.co.uk

Rewind to the 2012 debates - “we’re getting out of Afghanistan at the end of 2014. Period.” Now read this:

The US and its allies will retain a presence in Afghanistan big enough to bolster Afghan forces after the withdrawal of international combat troops at the end of 2014, the recently retired commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, said on Monday.

Speaking in Washington, Allen said he had never been asked to produce a report on the so-called “zero option” – the suggestion that no American troops would remain after the 2014 deadline, floated by one White House adviser in January.

Instead, Allen said that he expected that Obama would approve a force that would be commensurate with ensuring that the Afghan security forces could be properly supported.

Obama is currently considering how many troops are to be left behind, mostly in an advisory capacity, after the official withdrawal in 2014.

Speculation on the size of the force ranges from about 6,000 through to 20,000. Allen offered Obama various options about force size before retiring last month. He ruled out a full pullout, an option the White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes had said in January was on the table.

“I was never asked to conduct any analysis with respect to the zero option,” Allen told a meeting at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Monday.

› Pentagon Seeks Money for New Gitmo Prison

becauseithinktoomuch:

Despite the supposed budget crunch across the military, the Pentagon continues to find all sorts of things it feels the need to squander millions on. With news already out of a $150 million plan to “renovate” Guantanamo Bay, SOCOM has upped the ante with a request for another $49 million on top of that for a new prison building at the base.

The “new prison” is distinct from the existing overhaul, which is focusing on improvements for troops and for the conditions of the vast majority of detainees, held in the crumbling “camp six.”

Rather, the new prison appears to be a replacement for the notorious “camp seven,” which the Pentagon rarely acknowledges to even exist and which has been described as a camp for “special” detainees.

The original camp seven was constructed to hold 14 people coming out of CIA black sites, but it is no longer clear how many people are even in such detention, and the administration has made much of its intention to bring the “high value” captives to trial, since those are some of the few detainees they seem to have any actual evidence on. A new facility suggested that either there is more to camp seven than meets the eye, or that officials foresee a new influx of “high value” captives that need to be sequestered from the rest of the camp.

(via randomactsofchaos)

› Terrorist Classification Could Prompt Mali Drone War

The United States might be poised to ramp up its presence in Mali in the coming weeks following news Thursday that it has classified one of the militant groups fighting there as terrorists.

The State Department’s decision to add Ansar al Dine to its list of terrorist organizations [magically] grants the U.S. the political and legal authority to pursue directly the [associates of associates of] al-Qaida affiliate, says J. Peter Pham, a senior advisor to U.S. Africa Command.

The move is an “important housekeeping detail” for the U.S., which is prohibited by [US] law from intervening militarily in Mali after rebels successfully overthrew the democratically elected leader a year ago.

“We continue humanitarian assistance to Mali, but we certainly can’t engage in direct military assistance with the Malian military, which was behind the coup,” says Pham, an Africa expert with the Atlantic Council. “It [magically] provides the basis [that] as a designated terrorist organization, U.S. military and intelligence resources can be brought to assist those fighting Ansar al-Dine.” [i.e. flying robots can murder them].

President Barack Obama announced in February that U.S. forces would establish a drone base in neighboring Niger to stage flights over the arid Sahel region, the area of operations for groups such as Ansar al-Dine and al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. Those drones are to be used purely for surveillance purposes, though Pham says this new classification could lay the groundwork for that to evolve to other missions.

› Obama Marks Iraq War Anniversary with War Summit in Israel | Ben Schreiner

A decade after the American-led invasion of Iraq, the U.S. is once again preparing to set the Middle East ablaze. In fact, President Obama will touch down in Tel Aviv ten years to the day “shock and awe” was first unleashed for what appears to be little more than a war summit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to the Guardian, Netanyahu plans on using the president’s trip “to try to persuade the US to carry out air strikes on Syria if there is evidence that Syrian missiles are to be handed over to Hezbollah in Lebanon, or at least to give full support to Israeli military action to prevent the transfer.” Tel Aviv, the paper adds, wants U.S. support for more preemptive Israeli strikes “even if they risk provoking a cross-border conflict with Hezbollah.”

Back in the U.S., meanwhile, similar domestic pressure continues to build for an escalated level of U.S. intervention into the Syrian conflict.

On Monday, New York Representative Eliot Engel, a fierce Israel supporter, introduced a bill calling on the Obama administration to directly arm and train the Syrian opposition. Of course, the U.S. is already training Syrian rebels in Jordan, and is providing at least tacit approval of arms shipments.

Additional reports, however, have also revealed that the U.S. has begun collecting intelligence for future drone strikes against Islamic extremists fighting inside Syria. Moreover, the CIA is reportedly stepping up its aid to Iraqi counter-terrorism forces fighting the spillover of Islamic extremists from Syria. As Robert Dreyfuss commented, this dual policy of both aiding and targeting the Syrian opposition appears rather bizarre.

“[A]s the United States ramps up its aid to Syria’s rag-tag rebels, whose backbone is comprised of radical Islamists and Sunni fundamentalists, some with ties to Al Qaeda,” Dreyfuss writes, “the CIA is busily engaged in combat inside Iraq with the very same radical Islamists and Sunni fundamentalists, some with ties to Al Qaeda.”

Such a strategy is only truly bizarre, though, if one assumes the Obama administration is actually seeking a resolution to the Syrian conflict. It is only bizarre if one ignores the possibility that working to stoke the war may just, in fact, be Washington’s strategy. After all, short of installing a client regime in Damascus, the destruction of Syria as a sovereign state and significant player in regional politics is the next best hope for the U.S. And this goes for Israel, as well. In fact, the weakening of the Syrian army by the prolonged conflict has already come to be cheered in Tel Aviv.

But the U.S.-Israel war summit won’t be limited to Syria; for in the end, what’s a war summit without Iran?

Indeed, as the Guardian reports, “Obama will also come under Israeli pressure to lower the US threshold for military action against Iran.” A process the U.S. Senate, with the help of the pro-Israel lobby, has already begun.

Undoubtedly anticipating such pressure, Obama sought last week to appease the war hawks by effectively providing a deadline for attacking Iran.

Speaking to Israeli media on Thursday, Obama stated that, “Right now, we think that it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon.” A rather dubious claim, given that a mere week prior saw the U.S. National Intelligence Director James Clapper reaffirm that “we do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

The president’s suspect time frame, as Kaveh Afrasiabi notes, is also “a potentially dangerous gambit,” seemingly aimed at furthering the current stalemate between the U.S. and Iran at the very time nuclear negations appear to be progressing. Of course, such a gambit also serves to make war all the more likely. As Afrasiabi writes, “That is a distinct possibility that Obama, who is at present playing brinksmanship with Iran, should be wary of. All he needs to do is to remind himself of the precious lessons of the US$2 trillion Iraq war.” [++]

› Obama administration: Warrantless GPS tracking needed to fight terrorism

sinidentidades:

The Obama administration will argue before a federal appeals court on Tuesday that law enforcement must regain the ability to use GPS tracking devices without a warrant, which it says is necessary to continue the fight against terrorism.

The use of GPS devices in warrantless snooping has been illegal since January 2012, when the Supreme Court ruled that vehicles are private property protected by the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. If the Obama administration is successful on its appeal however, GPS devices will be fair game for police nationwide.

The administration’s brief (PDF) in U.S. v. Katzin, filed with the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, goes even further than just arguing for law enforcement’s access to the technology: the administration says vehicle tracking is necessary to keep the nation safe from terrorist attacks as well.

› Barbarian Rhapsody: Ten Years Deeper Into Hell | Chris Floyd

… Yes, it has certainly been, as Barack Obama memorably characterized [the “end” of the Iraq War], a “remarkable achievement.” It is also, more and more, a forgotten “achievement.” America’s amnesia regarding the war crime in Iraq and its continuing ramifications — not only the repression and death still going on there, but also the catastrophic impact of this atrocity on America itself, including the tsunami of suicide, homelessness and PTSD among its soldiers, and the back-breaking costs of this orgy of corruption and war-profiteering — is indeed remarkable. It is no longer a reality — a living, anguished, ongoing human tragedy — but simply fodder for commentary, for partisan point-scoring, for barroom blather. This has always been the case with our misbegotten wars of imperial domination …, going back to the 19th century. And the “paradigm-changing” iadvent of the internet has done nothing to change that; despite today’s easy access to unprecedented levels of information about the realities of the Iraq war (and other high crimes and atrocities), the amnesia and willful ignorance remains as profound as ever.

So here we are. Ten years on from the frenzied paroxysm (or was it an orgasm?) of mass violence — which was itself the culmination of years of the bipartisan war-by-sanctions that American officials have openly acknowledged killed more than half a million Iraqi children — what is the central “moral” issue of our national politics today? This once-unimaginable, horribly depraved and obscene question: Should the president be allowed to murder any American citizen he chooses, or should there perhaps be be some kind of secret Congressional oversight of the secret killing program? (The idea of restricting the president’s power to kill any filthy foreigner he chooses is not in question anywhere in our national politics, of course; Rand Paul wasn’t filibustering against that idea. No, any debate on the “ethics” of state murder is restricted to its application to Americans, who, as we know, are the only fully human beings on the face of the earth.)

Given the current trajectory of our plunge into barbarism, I predict that in just a few years we’ll be “debating” whether the president has the right to stick the severed heads of “terrorists” on spikes outside the White House, or if the heads should be passed around discreetly to members of the relevant Senate committees before being dumped in the ocean.

› CIA begins sizing up Islamic extremists in Syria for drone strikes | latimes.com

The CIA has stepped up secret contingency planning to protect the United States and its allies as the turmoil expands in Syria, including collecting intelligence on Islamic extremists for the first time for possible lethal drone strikes, according to current and former U.S. officials.

President Obama has not authorized drone missile strikes in Syria, however, and none are under consideration. [they are under consideration].

The Counterterrorism Center, which runs the CIA’s covert drone killing program in Pakistan and Yemen, recently shifted several targeting officers to improve intelligence collection on militants in Syria who could pose a terrorist threat, the officials said. [i.e., added them to a ‘kill list’.]

The targeting officers have formed a unit with colleagues who were tracking Al Qaeda operatives and fighters in Iraq. U.S. officials believe that some of these operatives have moved to Syria and joined Islamic militias battling to overthrow President Bashar Assad.

The CIA effort, which involves assembling detailed dossiers on key militants, gives the White House both lethal and nonlethal options [the disposition matrix] if it concludes that Syria’s 2-year-old civil war — which has caused 70,000 deaths, according to United Nations estimates — is creating a haven for terrorists. The intelligence files also could be used to help opposition figures with moderate views prevail over extremists.

The targeting is part of an array of CIA and Pentagon responses and contingency plans as the Syrian bloodletting steadily worsens, threatening regional stability [western (US) hegemony]. Other proposals include plans to seize or destroy Syria’s [purported] chemical weapons stockpiles, which are closely monitored by U.S. intelligence, to prevent their misuse.

The targeting officers focusing on Syria are based at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., officials said. The agency has not deployed many American [just a few] operatives into the war zone, but it works closely with Saudi, Jordanian and other regional spy services active there. CIA officers meet with [and train] Syrian rebel leaders in Turkey and Jordan, current and former officials say.

The increased U.S. effort comes as radicalized Islamic fighters have won a growing share of rebel victories. The State Department says one of the strongest militias, Al Nusra Front, is a terrorist organization that is indistinguishable from the group Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Amnesty International reported Thursday that some Syrian opposition fighters routinely executed captives and suspected informants, although the group said Assad’s security forces were even more brutal.

At least in public, the White House has limited the U.S. role in the war to sending food and medical supplies to rebels, as well as aid to nearby countries that have taken in nearly 1 million refugees. U.S. allies are providing weapons and ammunition to the rebels, but Obama so far has objected to proposals for more aggressive U.S. intervention.

The CIA and the White House declined requests for comment Friday on the targeting effort. [read on]

› Karzai’s Ban on US Special Forces: Is It a Response to Operations of CIA Assassination Squad? | Kevin Gosztola

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai ordered United States special forces to leave the Maidan Wardak province after reports of units engaging in the torture and disappearing of Afghan civilians.The order came on February 24 and was immediately followed by the US military rejecting the allegations.

Leaders in the province issued the order in response to Afghans working with US special forces who were allegedly responsible for the “disappearance of at least nine men and the murder of an Afghan university student.” But, on February 25, NATO spokesman German Gen. Gunter Katz said the “International Security Assistance Force found no evidence showing foreign forces were involved in abuses. Katz “did not comment on the Afghans allegedly linked to the Americans.” He added, ”We could not find evidence that would support these allegations.”

Perhaps, it is true that US-led coalition forces are not responsible for the alleged atrocities. A recent report from The New York Times cites Afghan officials, who say “Afghan irregulars who worked with elite American forces” were responsible. The officials apparently have “photos and video of the suspects” and “they are not known irregular forces, like the Afghan Local Police, a defense militia created and trained by coalition Special Forces.” The officials believe “the suspects are part of a force whose existence has been kept secret by the Americans.”

Therefore, this should be the headline. The outrage in Afghanistan is not coming from US Special Forces. According to Afghan officials, they have uncovered some kill or capture team—an assassination or death squad.

The Times adds this is why there is confusion:

…[O]fficials at the coalition and a separate American command, United States Forces-Afghanistan, which operates many of the Special Operations units in the country, say they do not run any secret militias. “My total honest answer: We have no idea what they’re talking about,” a senior American officer said.

One possibility that would match the descriptions of attackers offered by local Afghan officials and, at the same time, exclude American military forces would be that the suspects were working with the Central Intelligence Agency, whose operatives run militias in a number of provinces. A spokesman for the CIA refused to comment on the issue.

One senior Afghan official said it was possible: Afghans, he said, make no distinction between military-type outfits. Americans with weapons, high-end gear and facial hair were “all special forces. It’s a phrase that catches all.”…

Without speculating on what CIA force or CIA-linked force this may be, revelations in the past years indicate that the CIA has a paramilitary presence in Afghanistan. [READ]