Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama’

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US drone attacks in Pakistan

May 24, 2009

By Ian Sinclair | ZNet, May 23, 2009
Source: Morning Star

Two weeks after Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States, former Clinton administration official David Rothkopf made the shrewd observation that the new leader’s cabinet choices adhered closely to “the violin model: you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.”

This musical analogy is also useful in analysing Obama’s foreign policies – presented to the public as progressive and benign, but in reality often adhering closely to the disastrous approach of his hugely unpopular and much derided predecessor. So while the first Black occupant of the White House asked the Muslim world to “unclench” its fist in his widely praised inauguration speech, in early April the New York Times quoted senior US administration officials as saying Obama “intended to step up its use of drones to strike militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas and might extend them to a different sanctuary deeper inside the country.”

For those who thought drones were something only seen in sc-fi movies, think again. Since October 2001 the US military has been using drones – unmanned, remotely-controlled aircraft –  to gather intelligence and bomb targets in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen. With the first operations undertaken by the smaller Predator drones, today the US is increasingly using the huge Reaper drones – “hunter-killers” with a 25-metre wingspan and up to 3000lbs of bombs that can be kept in the air for more than 40 hours by pilots working shifts at Creech airbase in Nevada. “The Reaper is a bomber in all but name”, says Paul Rodgers, Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University.

According to the US Government the drones are an extremely effective tool in targeting Al-Qaeda leaders and its supporters in the semi-autonomous tribal area of north-west Pakistan. To back up this claim US officials recently leaked to the press information showing the drone strikes had killed 9 of the 20 top Al Qaeda leaders.

However, in response to the US Government’s figures the Pakistani Government leaked data of its own to The News International, the second-largest English language newspaper in the country. These records revealed that out of the 60 US drone strikes that had been carried out in Pakistan since January 2006 only 10 hit their actual targets, killing 14 Al-Qaeda leaders.  Meanwhile these attacks have killed 687 Pakistani civilians (about 160 of which have been killed since Obama took office according to the Los Angeles Times).

This shocking number of civilian fatalities and disgraceful targeting history has produced some unsurprising results, with the Times newspaper reporting last month that the drone attacks are “causing a massive humanitarian emergency” with “as many as 1m people” fleeing their homes “to escape attacks by the unmanned spy planes as well as bombings by the Pakistani army.”

David Kilcullen, the top counter-insurgency advisor to General Petraeus, told the House Armed Service Committee in the US that the drones attacks are “highly unpopular” in Pakistan and have “given rise to feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism”. One such “spike” was the March terrorist attack on the police academy in Lahore, which the Pakistani Taliban said was in revenge for the remotely-controlled air strikes. Returning from a fact-finding trip to the region, the UK’s social cohesion minister Saddiq Khan backed up Kilcullen’s testimony, noting “the anger at the drone attacks was huge.  The view they [the students he met] had was the UK was somehow responsible for this… They lumped us together with the US, which to me is a poison.”

The UK is not – yet – conducting air strikes in Pakistan, but the students confusion is understandable. Not only is the UK the US’s main ally in Afghanistan and Iraq, but John Hutton, the British Defence Secretary, recently told Channel Four‘s Despatches “we’ve got to fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan”. In fact, the Ministry of Defence’s own website notes that British drones used in Afghanistan “operate from Nevada in the USA as part of the USAF 432nd Wing” – the same airbase the US uses to fly their own drones. A very cosy relationship then, and hardly one that suggests opposition to the US attacks in Pakistan.

Putting mainstream journalists to shame, the activist-run Peace News newspaper accurately described the – presumably illegal – US drone attacks against Pakistan as “state terrorism”.  However, with minimal coverage in the British media, public awareness about this important issue is unfortunately, but not surprisingly, very low. But what about the poor response from the anti-war movement?  What is their excuse? Where are the voices raised in protest against these murderous and counterproductive air strikes which kill large numbers of civilians, produce thousands of refugees, destablise the entire region and increase the terrorist threat to the UK?

* An edited version of this article recently appeared in the Morning Star newspaper.  ian_js@hotmail.com

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Why are they letting torturers off the hook?

May 20, 2009

Barack Obama is disappointing expectations that he would at least curb the worst abuses of the Bush administration.

Editorial,

Socialist Worker, May 20, 2009

Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, George Bush

EVERYONE EXPECTS Dick Cheney to rationalize torture by the CIA and U.S. armed forces. But Barack Obama?

Anger is growing among many people who voted for Obama last November over how the president has reversed himself on key issues relating to the treatment of detainees in the “war on terror”–and how the government should handle evidence of past abuses.

First, Obama decided not to release photos of brutal treatment of detainees, citing the safety of U.S. troops as a rationale. Then, reversing a campaign promise to get rid of the Bush administration’s military tribunal system for detainees, the administration admitted it would use “modified” military tribunals, rather than giving these prisoners access to U.S. courts.

Plus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has waded into her own mess over the issue. She came up with first one, then another explanation in denying that she had been briefed about waterboarding–torture by any other name–as early as 2002, in spite of CIA memos suggesting otherwise.

Such incidents are a slap in the face to millions of people who looked to Obama and the Democrats to reverse the worst abuses of the Bush administration–including its rabid defense of the right of the U.S. government to torture prisoners and lock them away indefinitely without due process.

Dick Cheney, of course, is still making his case. Like a bad horror movie villain, the former vice president just won’t go away. In May, he took to the airwaves to lecture America–and especially the Democrats–about how helpful it was to torture “war on terror” prisoners.

“No regrets. I think it was absolutely the right thing to do,” Cheney told CBS News. Harsh “enhanced” interrogations, including waterboarding, “saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives,” he said.

In reality, there’s no evidence that torture “saved lives.” When FBI Chief Robert Mueller was asked by Vanity Fair if he knew of any planned terrorist attacks on the U.S. that had been thwarted thanks to intelligence obtained through “enhanced techniques” of interrogation, he responded, “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

Not only did the torture of detainees fail to “save lives,” it destroyed some prisoners, both mentally and physically. Some “confessed” to plots they couldn’t possibly have been involved in, just to get the torture to stop.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, for example, was waterboarded repeatedly–at least 183 times in a single month in 2005. Little wonder that Mohammed later “admitted” to being involved in more than 30 terrorist plots or activities, including planning the September 11 attacks, personally killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, and plotting the murder of former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and Pope John Paul II.

Such confessions are as reliable as those of women who confessed to being witches during the Salem witch trials.

In truth, if Cheney really wanted “full disclosure” on the issue of torture and interrogations, he’d be in favor of full Congressional hearings on the matter–which, so far, he and other Republicans (and most Democrats) have denounced.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

IF CHENEY and other Republicans have been able to go on the offensive over torture, however, it’s only because Obama and the Democrats are giving them the room to do so.

Pelosi is a case in point. She was caught lying about the fact that, as the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, her aide attended a CIA briefing in which waterboarding was discussed as a tactic being used on detainees. In addition, a national intelligence report showed Pelosi was briefed in 2002–and her aide in 2003–on enhanced interrogation techniques.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama has made a U-turn on important issues related to torture. He justified his decision not to release additional photos showing brutal treatment of detainees with the claim that this would spark a backlash that could put U.S. troops in harm’s way–an excuse used repeatedly by figures in the Bush administration in their attempt to keep Abu Ghraib and other scandals under wraps.

Some of the photos were later released by the Australian television channel SBS–and far from being “not particularly sensational,” as Obama claimed, they show shocking acts of brutality. One picture shows a naked detainee hanging upside-down off a steel bed frame. Another shows a naked man smeared in excrement, standing in a corridor near a menacing-looking guard.

As Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald noted:

Obama sounded positively Rumsfeldian in his insistence that releasing the photos could hurt the troops…For the first time in his presidency, I had the sick feeling that Obama was lying in his remarks on the photos, once when he said the new images “are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib”–I simply don’t believe that–and again when he insisted “the individuals who were involved have been identified, and appropriate actions have been taken.”

That is a flat-out lie. Out of eight prosecutions, mostly of so-called bad apples, only reservist Charles Graner sits in prison today, while the architects who “Gitmo-ized” Abu Ghraib and encouraged torture all went free.”

Likewise, the Obama administration broke its promise to shut down the military tribunal system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and grant detainees the right to a trial in U.S. courts or under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Instead, the White House will adopt some kind of modified military commissions to try detainees at Guantánamo.

Unlike the commissions planned under Bush, these proceedings will supposedly exclude evidence obtained through torture or other harsh interrogation methods, and limit the use of hearsay as evidence.

But the problem isn’t the way the commissions are handled–it’s the commissions themselves. Like its predecessor, the Obama administration plans to subvert the law by creating its own unconstitutional court system for detainees.

The Obama administration plans to retain military commissions not out of some worry about “terrorists” being tried in civilian courts, but because it is in the interest of the U.S. government to keep such a weapon in its arsenal.

So Obama orders the Guantánamo prison closed down, but keeps open the option of “rendering” prisoners to other countries. He publicly denounces torture, but protects U.S. officials who crafted torture policies from being prosecuted. He claims the mantle of civil liberties, but defends the right of the government to eavesdrop on citizens without a warrant. He travels to Egypt to further a U.S. “dialogue” with the Arab and Muslim worlds, but prevents victims of CIA kidnapping from getting their day in court.

All this is part of the logic that comes with running the world’s only superpower. When it comes to the pursuit of U.S. imperial aims, human rights are expendable.

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Obama Picks Up Where Bush Left Off

May 16, 2009

From My Lai to Bala Baluk

By Mike Whitney | Counterpunch, May 15 – 17, 2009

Barack Obama is aggressively stepping up the war in Afghanistan. He’s intensified the cross-border bombing of Pakistan and he is doubling the number of U.S. troops to 68,000 by 2010. He’s also a strong proponent of pilotless drones even though hundreds of civilians have been killed in bombing raid blunders.

On May 4, 2009, 143 civilians were killed in a bombing raid in Bala Baluk, a remote area south of Herat. Obama brushed off the incident with terse apology never intimating that the US policy for aerial bombardment would be reviewed to avoid future mishaps. Patrick Cockburn gave a summary of the incident:

I did not meet survivors but I did talk to a reliable witness, a radio reporter called Farooq Faizy, who had gone to Bala Baluk soon after the attack happened. He (had) some 70 or 80 photographs and they bore out the villagers’ story: there were craters everywhere; the villages had been plastered with bombs; bodies had been torn to shreds by the blasts; there were mass graves; there were no signs of damage from bullets, rockets or grenades.

US military spokesmen denied the news reports and concocted a wacky story about Taliban militants rampaging through the village hurling grenades into buildings. It was a ridiculous narrative that no one believed. The facts have since been verified by senior government officials, high-ranking members of the Afghan military and representatives of the Red Cross. The United States military killed 143 unarmed villagers and then they tried to cover it up with a lie. None of the victims were fighters. After the bombing, the villagers loaded body parts onto carts and took them to the office of the regional governor who confirmed the deaths. The photos of grief-stricken Afghans burying their dead have been widely circulated on the Internet.

From Reuters:

Ninety-three children and 25 adult women are among a list of 140 names of Afghans who villagers say were killed in a battle and U.S. air strikes last week, causing a crisis between Washington and its Afghan allies.

The list, obtained by Reuters, bears the endorsement of seven senior provincial and central government officials, including an Afghan two-star general who headed a task force dispatched by the government to investigate the incident.

Titled “list of the martyrs of the bombardment of Bala Boluk district of Farah Province”, it includes the name, age and father’s name of each alleged victim.

The youngest was listed as 8-day-old baby Sayed Musa, son of Sayed Adam. Fifty-three victims were girls under the age of 18, and 40 were boys. Only 22 were men 18 or older. (“List of 140 Afghan Killed In US Attack Includes 93 Children”, Reuters)

Neither Obama nor anyone in his administration has acknowledged that 93 children were killed by American bombs.

Military operations in Afghanistan have increased under Obama especially in the south where the Taliban are most heavily concentrated. The fighting has spread into Pakistan where President Asif Ali Zardari has been pressured into deploying his troops the Swat Valley to fight militants despite growing public disapproval. Nearly 850,000 people have been forced from their homes in the last few weeks to seek shelter in the south. For the most part, the humanitarian crisis has gone unreported in the western media, but Obama knows what is going on and is sticking with the same policy. Hundreds of thousands of people are now living in tent cities without food or clean water because of the escalation in the violence. It’s a disaster.

OBAMA PICKS A GENERAL: Enter the assassination squads

This week, General David McKiernan was replaced by Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal as Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan. Here’s how the Washington Post summarized McChrystal’s qualifications for the job:

“McChrystal kills people. Has he ever worked in the counterinsurgency environment? Not really,” said Roger Carstens, a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former Special Forces officer….

Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former Special Operations chief who is President Obama’s new choice to lead the war in Afghanistan, rose to military prominence because of his single-minded success in a narrow but critical mission: manhunting. As commander of the military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for nearly five years starting in 2003, McChrystal masterminded a campaign to perfect the art of tracking down enemies, and then capturing or killing them. He built a sophisticated network of soldiers and intelligence operatives who proceeded to decapitate the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq and kill its most notorious leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.(“High-value-target hunter takes on Afghan war” Washington Post)

Obama chose McChrystal because of his “black ops” pedigree, which suggests that the conflict in Afghanistan is about to take a very ugly turn. According to Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, McChrystal ran the “executive assassination wing” of the military’s joint special-operations command. (JSOC) The experts believe that he will breeze through congressional confirmation hearings because many Senators believe that his counterinsurgency theories helped the surge in Iraq to succeed. There’s some truth to this, too. But it would be more accurate to say that the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad helped to reduce the violence. That is the truth about the surge; it’s a public relations moniker for ethnic cleansing.

McChrystal’s appointment suggests that Obama supports the idea that hunter-killer units and targeted assassinations are an acceptable means of achieving US foreign policy objectives. Obama supporters should pay close attention; this is a continuation of the Rumsfeld policy with one slight difference, a more persuasive and charismatic pitchman promoting the policy. Other than that, there’s no difference.

Obama knows of McChrystal’s involvement in the prisoner abuse scandal at Baghdad’s Camp Nama, just as he knows of his role in the cover-up in the friendly-fire death of ex-NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman. None of this matters to Obama. What matters is winning; not principle, ideals, human rights or civilian casualties. Just winning.

FROM MY LAI TO BALA BALUK

On March 16, 1968, the US military was involved in a similar incident which soured the public on Vietnam and eventually helped bring the war to a close. Barack Obama was only seven years old when Charlie Company–led by platoon leader second Lieutenant William Calley–entered the small hamlet of My Lai and proceeded to slaughter 347 unarmed civilians. This is Sam Harris’s account of what took place on that day 40 years ago:

“Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in the village by helicopter. Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people and animals. There was no sign of the Vietcong battalion and no shot was fired on Charlie Company all day, but they carried on. They burnt down every house. They raped woman and girls and then killed them. They stabbed some women in the vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or scalps. Pregnant woman had there stomachs slashed open and were left to die. There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets. There were mass executions. Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women and children, were machined-gunned in a ditch. In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed.” (Sam Harris from his book “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason“)

The only difference between My Lai and Bala Baluk is the degree of savagery. In both cases the guilt can be traced directly back to the White House.

Obama believes that civilian casualties are an unavoidable part of achieving one’s policy goals. The end justifies the means. He has strengthened the Bush policy, not repudiated it. So much for “change”.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com

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‘Prisoner abuse’ photographs surface as Barack Obama prepares to block publication

May 16, 2009

Graphic photographs of alleged prisoner abuse, thought to be among up to 2,000 images Barack Obama is trying to prevent from being released, have emerged.

By Alex Spillius in Washington | Telegraph.co.uk
 Last Updated: 8:11AM BST 16 May 2009

Images emerged from Australia yesterday where they were originally obtained by the channel SBS in 2006 in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Images emerged from Australia yesterday where they were originally obtained by the channel SBS in 2006 in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Shocking images of inmates in Iraq are the kind of images whose release the president has now vowed to fight in court.

They risk provoking renewed hostility in the Middle East as Mr Obama attempts to build bridges with the Islamic world.

He is scheduled to make a major speech in Cairo on June 4 when he will launch his version of a plan to bring peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

One picture showed a prisoner hung up upside down while another showed a naked man smeared in excrement standing in a corridor with a guard standing menacingly in front of him. Another prisoner is handcuffed to the window frame of his cell with underpants pulled over his head.

Others yet to be released reportedly show military guards threatening to sexually assault a detainee with a broomstick and hooded prisoners on transport planes with Playboy magazines opened to pictures of nude women on their laps.

The images emerged from Australia where they were originally obtained by the channel SBS in 2006 in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. They were not distributed around the world at the time but are now believed to be among those the president is trying to block.

Mr Obama previously committed to allowing thousands of images to be published but changed his mind after senior generals warned that their publication could place US troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan in greater danger.

The president’s change of heart brought bitter criticism from the left wingers and the American Civil Liberties Union, which had brought a freedom of information case against the US government applying to see the pictures.

Pledging to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court, the ACLU accused him of betraying his principles of open government and “complicity in covering up” the “commission of torture by the Bush administration”.

“It is true that these photos would be disturbing. The day we are no longer disturbed by such repugnant acts would be a sad one,” said Anthony Romero, executive director.

“Only by looking squarely in the mirror, acknowledging the crimes of the past and achieving accountability can we move forward and ensure that these atrocities are not repeated.”

The White House legal team was yesterday preparing for a June 9 deadline to present its case that it would be against the interests of national security to make the pictures public.

The controversy came as it was revealed that the administration is considering detaining terror suspects from Guantanamo Bay indefinitely and without trial on US soil.

Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator, said after meeting White House lawyers that terror suspects deemed too dangerous to release could be jailed permanently by a new national security court.

Other options include revising the Bush administration’s military commissions for senior al-Qaeda suspects that have been criticised for relying too heavily on hearsay and uncontestable intelligence information.

When he took office on Jan 20 Mr Obama ordered that the prison at a US naval base on Cuba be closed within a year.

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Obama and the Middle East

May 13, 2009

By Gilbert Achcar | ZNet, May 12, 2009

Whether the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States will qualitatively alter U.S. Middle East policy and the regional situation remains to be seen. The fact is that Barack Obama has been much bolder with regard to U.S. relations with Latin America than he has been with regard to the Middle East during the 100 first days of his administration. This is despite the fact that, as a presidential candidate, Obama emphasized much more his difference with the Bush administration on Middle East issues, especially Iraq, than on South American issues.

Beyond the various electoral statements, the truth is that Obama ran as a candidate dedicated to bipartisan consensus in the realm of foreign policy, and singularly with regard to the Middle East. His critique of the Bush administration was restricted to the extent to which it did not fully comply with this consensus as expressed in the report of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group. To put it more precisely, Obama supported the “surge,” which conformed to the recommendations of the report, and announced that he would stick to the exit (from Iraq) strategy that it envisaged. On this, he had nothing very original to say when compared to what the Bush administration was already doing since it implemented the “surge.” Hence, the very symbolic as well as significant fact that he asked Robert Gates to remain at the helm of the Pentagon — thus repeating the kind of bipartisan gesture with regard to “Defense” that Bill Clinton made when he appointed to the same position another Republican, William Cohen, for his second term.

Where Obama differed from Bush in public statements was mainly with regard to Iran: whereas the Bush administration never really agreed to comply with the recommendation of talking to Iran that was expressed in the Baker-Hamilton report, Obama made clearly the point that this was what he would do if elected, and he got attacked for precisely that reason by all the friends of the Israel Lobby. However, since his inauguration, Obama, and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have made no real substantive changes in that respect. One explanation for this is that they fear that engaging in talks with Iran at this stage might impact the forthcoming presidential election in that country in a way that would be contrary to what they deem to be U.S. interests. If this explanation is true, it implies that they will continue to “wait and see” until the election in June 2009, that is due to be held five weeks from the time of writing these lines.

After the Iranian presidential election, the Obama administration will probably move to a more serious opening in the direction of Iran, applying a carrot and stick policy — with a big carrot whereas the Bush administration only carried a big stick. They will hope for a deal with the Iranian leadership, a deal whereby Tehran would cooperate with them in stabilizing Iraq and the Middle East, each side acknowledging the interests of the other, in the same way that they are actually doing presently in Iraq, where both sides sponsor the same Maliki government in Baghdad. Such a conciliatory policy has been imposed on the U.S. government by the dire condition in which it found itself in the Middle East as a result of the disastrous policy of the Bush administration. Basically, the Obama administration faced with the Iraqi semi-debacle, at a time when its room for maneuver has been narrowed by the global economic crisis, is contemplating a reaction similar to that of the Nixon administration when it faced the Vietnam debacle. The exit strategy then was: “Vietnamize” the war, get all the troops out of Vietnam, cut a deal with Moscow and Beijing. The strategy now is: “Iraqize” the war (done through the “surge” and its reliance on the buying off of major chunks of what used to be the Sunni “insurgency” in the form of the “Awakening Councils”), get most of the troops out of Iraq (planned until 2011), cut a deal with Tehran. Both policies take place against a backdrop of severe global economic crisis.

In a sense, the new policy, if fully implemented, will require much less boldness than the one implemented by the Nixon-Kissinger team: withdrawing from Vietnam against the background of the ongoing Cold War was much more spectacular than withdrawing from Iraq in the absence of any “peer” global challenger of the United States; talking to “Red China” was much more spectacular than any conciliatory gesture toward Iran could be, all the more that it cannot be expected that Obama-Clinton will go to the same extent of sudden warming up with yesterday’s enemy as Nixon-Kissinger did in their relation with China. One important difference is that the Nixon team could play on the “triangulation” of its relations with Moscow and Beijing in light of the enmity between the two “communist” capitals. There is no situation of this kind with regard to Iran.

But the key difference is, to be sure, the role of Israel. For the Zionist state, Iran is the main enemy in the whole region, and the nuclear issue is a “red line” that would prompt the Israeli state to act militarily if it deemed that the line was crossed. We know from the revelation by The New York Times last January (David Sanger, “U.S. Rejected Aid for Israeli Raid on Iranian Nuclear Site,” NYT, January 10, 2009) that the Olmert government already asked the Bush administration for a green light to attack Iranian nuclear facilities with air strikes flying through Iraqi air space. The Olmert government wanted to take advantage of the remaining time in office of this American administration that was most cooperative with the worst plans and deeds of the Israeli state. The green light was not granted, however, for a variety of reasons related to the highly risky and uncertain character of the operation and its potential consequences in a time of unfolding global economic crisis.

The Obama administration will indeed be clearly less amenable to Israel’s hardliners than the Bush team was. And tensions between the two countries are all the likelier to unfold given that their political evolutions are presently going in opposite directions: whereas the last U.S. presidential election started a pendulum backswing after eight years of the most reactionary administration in U.S. history, the recent Israeli parliamentary election only carried on further the swing to the right that started with the election of Ariel Sharon in February 2001 in the wake of Bush’s presidential inauguration.

These are the main elements of the present picture in the Middle East: to get into other developments — the efforts of Washington’s Arab friends to foster reconciliation between Hamas and Abbas’s “Palestinian Authority,” the forthcoming parliamentary election in Lebanon, etc. — would take longer than the space of this article. However, the whole policy of the Obama administration is a pragmatic and cautious move within the guidelines described above.

Gilbert Achcar is a Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. This article is based on the preface to the Iranian edition of Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy. Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice by Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar, edited by Stephen R. Shalom. The updated English paperback edition was published in 2008 by Paradigm Publishers.

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Obama’s 100 Days — The Mad Men Did Well

April 29, 2009

By John  Pilger | ZNet, April 29, 2009
John Pilger’s ZSpace Page

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.

No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous “Change you can believe in”, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. “We will be the most powerful,” he often declared.

Perhaps the Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers of a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticised him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as “adroit literary creations, rich, like those Doric columns, with allusion . . .” (Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian). The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote: “Many spiritually advanced people I know . . . identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who . . . can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On 24 April, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not “persons”, and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works. One of his senior US intelligence officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in 1989; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, the US experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of “defence”, Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, has been retained by Obama.

All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office.

In Afghanistan, the US “strategy” of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the “Taliban”) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the US military will remain indefinitely. Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, justifying it as a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing “a real threat” to Europe and the US. On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as “anti-nuclear”. It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead programme, the US is building new “tactical” nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.

Perhaps the biggest lie – the equivalent of smoking is good for you – is Obama’s announcement that the US is leaving Iraq, the country it has reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed US army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain “for the next 15 to 20 years”. On 25 April, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they have been suckered – especially as the nation’s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Lawrence Summers, Obama’s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3trn at the same banks that paid him more than $8m last year, including $135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in.

Much of the American establishment loathed Bush and Cheney for exposing, and threatening, the onward march of America’s “grand design”, as Henry Kissinger, war criminal and now Obama adviser, calls it. In advertising terms, Bush was a “brand collapse” whereas Obama, with his toothpaste advertisement smile and righteous clichés, is a godsend. At a stroke, he has seen off serious domestic dissent to war, and he brings tears to the eyes, from Washington to Whitehall. He is the BBC’s man, and CNN’s man, and Murdoch’s man, and Wall Street’s man, and the CIA’s man. The Madmen did well.

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Torture: Holding America to account

April 18, 2009

To read the four newly released Bush-era memos on America’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” for terror suspects is to enter a very dark moral world indeed. It is the Orwellian world of the concealed global detention network set up by the CIA on President Bush’s authority after 9/11 in which suspected terrorists – many of whom may have had a lot of blood on their hands – were secretly held in US bases from Afghanistan to Romania and systematically tortured. A world in which Britain is implicated too, do not forget.

The memos do not admit torture, of course. The United States, Mr Bush famously claimed in 2006, “does not torture”. The memos embody a cynical bureaucratic attempt to align what went on in the secret prisons with that claim. Yet no one who reads their argument that the threat of imminent drowning caused by waterboarding does not reach the level of “prolonged mental harm” which the Bush lawyers argue is necessary to constitute torture, can doubt that torture is precisely what the CIA had been permitted and encouraged to carry out. The truth, as the new US attorney general Eric Holder has said, is clear: “Waterboarding is torture.”

Jaw-dropping though they are, the memos are not the only evidence of the Bush administration’s embrace of torture. Two years ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was given access to 14 Guantánamo detainees who had been through the “alternative procedures”. Their experiences, retold in two recent essays by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books (one of which we republish inside our own Review today), tell of the relentless abuse of detainees who were kept naked in low temperatures for weeks, forced to live in permanent bright light (or total darkness), required to wear nappies, deprived of solid food, blindfolded, shackled, forcibly shaved, and compelled to wear earphones through which loud music was repeatedly played.

The “procedures” discussed in the memos – grasping, slapping, holding, banging against walls, confinement in boxes (sometimes with insects), sleep deprivation, prolonged confinement in “stress positions” and waterboarding – were additional to these. The ICRC heard accounts of most of them from the detainees. These accounts are far more graphic (and even credible) than the cold lawyerish prose of the memos. The ICRC conclusion was emphatic: “The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA programme, either singly or in combination, constituted torture.”

America should hang its head at methods that Dick Cheney still defends (and which, importantly, may not have yielded much good intelligence). Barack Obama did the right thing by ending the abuses within hours of taking office. He did well to publish the legal memos too. In such ways Mr Obama makes clear that his administration is making a clean break with the discredited past, while at the same time graphically reminding the world why that past (and Britain’s role in it) was so disgraceful.

On balance Mr Obama may also be right to assure CIA personnel that they will not face prosecution if they carried out their work in good faith based on the old legal advice. But an essential part of the rule of law is that those who break it must be answerable for their actions. The Bush administration crossed a fateful threshold after 9/11. Its officials, including its lawyers, must be accountable for that. It is understandable that Mr Obama does not want his first term to be dominated by a reliving of the past. Yet America will only ensure it does not embrace torture again by getting to the bottom of why it did so this time. A full congressional inquiry is in order, as Speaker Pelosi has hinted. One way or another, those who ordered the abuses, from the president and vice-president down, must answer for them.

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Obama attacked from all sides over CIA memos

April 18, 2009

Former Bush aides condemn release of sensitive documents / Human rights groups criticise immunity given to interrogators

By David Usborne in New York | The Independent, UK, Apr 18, 2009

Mr Obama said no one who had used discredited techniques would be prosecuted

REUTERS

Mr Obama said no one who had used discredited techniques would be prosecuted

The White House was engulfed by a maelstrom of anger yesterday after its decision to release memos from the Bush era providing legal cover for “enhanced” interrogation techniques in secret CIA prisons. At the same time, it made promises to protect those who implemented them from prosecution.

The act of releasing the memos with almost no blacking out of sensitive sections was attacked by two senior former Bush aides. Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey, who served respectively as CIA director and US attorney general, said their publication “was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy”.

Perhaps more controversial was the decision to couple their publication with assurances from Barack Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, that no one who carried out interrogations using the now disavowed techniques, including forcing detainees to stand naked for hours and slamming them against walls, would face prosecution.

Some deemed the decision as fitting a pattern that Mr Obama has set, which involves honouring his campaign promises – in this case to lift the veil of secrecy on the way the “War on Terror” was waged by his predecessor – while rarely going as far as some of his supporters wanted or expected.

If Mr Obama had hoped to draw a line under the shame of how the CIA treated terror suspects at secret overseas prisons, he has failed. Even if he and Mr Holder can guarantee immunity for CIA interrogators, an inquiry is still likely to be opened by members of Congress. Nor is it clear they could be protected from prosecution under international laws.

Among those expressing their dismay at the legal immunity was a former Guantanamo detainee now living in Egypt. “All of us in Guantanamo never had hope or faith in the American government,” said Jomaa al-Dosari, a Saudi released last year. “We only ask God for our rights, and to demand justice for the wrongs we experience in this life.”

Human rights groups also deplored giving immunity to those who practised interrogation, which critics say amounted to illegal torture. “The release of CIA memos on interrogation methods by the US Department of Justice appears to have offered a get-out-of-jail-free card to people involved in torture,” Amnesty International said.

“It is one of the deepest disappointments of this administration that it appears unwilling to uphold the law where crimes have been committed by former officials,” said the Washington-based Centre for Constitutional Rights. The Centre argued that it was not just the interrogators who should face scrutiny, but those directing them.

“Whether or not CIA operatives who conducted water boarding are guaranteed immunity, it is the high-level officials who conceived, justified and ordered the torture programme who bear the most responsibility for breaking domestic and international law, and it is they who must be prosecuted,” it said.

The memos, written by senior Justice Department experts in 2002 and 2005, were designed to give the CIA reassurance that the so-called “enhanced” techniques would pass legal muster.

The decision to release them did not come easily to Mr Obama, who waited weeks as debate raged both within the White House and between the various agencies involved. While the Justice Department broadly backed their publication, the CIA did not, for fear their contents would aid terror organisations.

All the information in the memos, set out by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, was categorised as top secret and should have remained so, argued Mr Mukasey and Mr Hayden in a joint article published in The Wall Street Journal.

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What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

April 10, 2009

By Patrick Goodman | Counterpunch, April 9, 2009

The start of the Iraq war in 2003 marked a crucial break between the US and almost all the states of the region. “None of Iraq’s neighbors, absolutely none, were pleased by the American occupation of Iraq,” says the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari. Long-term US allies like Turkey astonished the White House by refusing to allow US troops to use its territory to invade Iraq.

Barack Obama, who made his first official visit to the country on Tuesday, is now trying to disengage from Iraq without appearing to scuttle or leave anarchy behind.

He is trying to win back old allies, and, as he made clear in a speech in Ankara on Monday, to end the confrontation between the US and Islam which was president Bush’s legacy.

It is not easy for Mr Obama to reverse the tide of anti-Americanism or bring to an end the wars which Mr Bush began. For all the Iraqi government’s claim that life is returning to normal in Baghdad the last few days have seen a crescendo of violence. The day before the President arrived, six bombs exploded in different parts of Baghdad, killing 37 people.

And as much as Mr Obama would like to treat the Iraq war as ancient history, the US is still struggling to extricate itself. The very fact that the Democratic President had to arrive in Iraq by surprise for security reasons, as George Bush and Tony Blair invariably did, shows that the conflict is refusing to go away.

The Iraqi Prime Minister and President remain holed up in the Green Zone most of the time. The American President could not fly into the Green Zone by helicopter because of bad weather but the airport road is still unsafe and Baghdad remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The Iraqi political landscape too was permanently altered by the US invasion and it will be difficult to create a stable Iraqi state which does not depend on the US. Opinion polls in Iraq show that most Iraqis believe that it is the US and not their own government which is in control of their country.

One change which is to Mr Obama’s advantage is that the American media have largely stopped reporting the conflict because they no longer have the money to do so and a majority of Americans think the,  war was won. But the danger for the President is that if there is a fresh explosion in Iraq, he may be blamed for throwing away a victory that was won by his predecessor.

The rhetoric with which the US conducts its diplomacy is easier to change than facts on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Mr Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament in Ankara was a carefully judged bid to reassure the Muslim world that the US is not at war with Islam.
Everything he said was in sharp contrast to George Bush’s bellicose threats post 9/11 about launching a “crusade” and to the rhetoric of neo-conservatives attacking “Islamo-fascism” or claiming that there was a “clash of civilizations.”

The leaders of states with Muslim majorities appreciate the different tone of US pronouncements, but wonder how far Mr Obama will be able to introduce real change.

Turkish students at a meeting with Mr Obama in Istanbul voiced scepticism that American actions in future would be much different from what they were under Mr Bush. Reasonably enough, Mr Obama replied that he should be given time and “moving the ship of state is a slow process.” But he also cited the US withdrawal from Iraq as a sign that he would match actions to words.

Istanbul, on the boundaries of Europe and Asia, is a good place for the US leader to display a more conciliatory attitude towards Islam. The city is filled with grandiose monuments to Christianity and Islam, though religious tolerance was more in evidence under the Ottoman empire than since the foundation of the modern Turkish state in 1923. Mr Obama paid visits to the great Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia and was shown the splendors of the Blue Mosque by turbaned clerics.

But the women students wearing short skirts and without headscarves asking Mr Obama questions in fluent English give a misleading impression of the balance between the secular and the religious in modern-day Turkey.

The reality is that secularism is dying away in Turkey’s rural hinterland and is on the retreat even in Istanbul itself. Butchers selling pork are few compared to 20 years ago. Obtaining alcohol is quietly being made more difficult, except for foreign tourists, by high taxes on wine and expensive liquor licenses for restaurants.

The old middle class, particularly in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir may be resolute in their defense of the secular state. But the so-called “Anatolian Tigers”, the new companies which have led Turkey’s spectacular economic growth, are generally owned and run by more conservative families where the women wear headscarves.
“Socially Turkey is becoming far more Islamic,” said one expert on Turkey yesterday, “although the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is moving cautiously.”

Mr Obama’s effort to make a U-turn in American policy towards the Islamic world will ultimately depend on how far he changes US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians, the occupation of Iraq, the confrontation with Iran and Syria and the war in Afghanistan.

The Iranians, for instance, note that despite Mr Obama’s friendlier approach to them the US official in Washington in charge of implementing sanctions against them is a hold-over from the Bush administration.

The American confrontation with Islam post 9/11 always had more to do with opposition to foreign intervention and occupation than it did with cultural differences; the most ideologically religious Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia supported the US and it is doubtful how far al-Qa’ida fighters were motivated primarily by religious fanaticism.
The chief US interrogator in Iraq, Major Mathew Alexander, who is credited with finding out the location of the al-Qa’ida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says that during 1,300 interrogations he supervised, he came across only one true ideologue. He is quoted as saying that “I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the No 1 reason they had decided to pick up arms and join al-Qa’ida was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay.”

This diagnosis by Major Alexander is confirmed by the history of Islamic fundamentalism across the Muslim world over the past 30 years.

It was the success of the Iranian revolution against the Shah in 1978/79 which began an era when political Islam was seen as a threat by the West, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s appeal to Iranians always had a strong strain of nationalism and his exiling by the Shah in 1964 was because of his vocal opposition to extra-territorial rights for US military personnel in Iran.

The success of political Islam over secular nationalism in the Arab world has largely been because of the former’s ability to resist the enemies of the community or the state. In Egypt the nationalism of Nasser was discredited by humiliating defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. In Iraq, for all his military bravado, Saddam Hussein was a notably disastrous military leader. All the military regimes espousing nationalism and secularism in the Arab world began or ended up turning into corrupt and brutal autocracies. In contrast, political Islam has been able to go some way towards delivering its promises of defending the community.

In Lebanon, Hizbollah guerrillas were able to successfully harass Israeli forces in the 1990s where Yasser Arafat’s commanders had abandoned their men and fled.

In Gaza this year, Hamas was able to portray itself as the one Palestinian movement committed to resisting Israel.

In Iraq, al-Qa’ida got nowhere until it could present itself as the opposition to the US occupation and as an ally, though a supremely bigoted and murderous one, of Iraqi nationalism.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has the advantage of fighting against foreign occupation.

Secularism in the Arab world and in Afghanistan, on the other hand, has the problem that it is seen as being at the service of foreign intervention. It is why secularism and nationalism are ultimately stronger in Turkey than in almost all other Islamic countries.

Kemal Ataturk and the Turkish nationalists successfully defended the Turkish heartlands from foreign attack between 1915 and 1922. This gave secularism and nationalism a credibility and a popularity in Turkey which they never had in Iraq, Egypt or Syria.

Mr Obama’s aim of ending the confrontation between the US and the Muslim world is both easier and more difficult than it looks. It is easier because the confrontation is not primarily over religion or clashing cultures. But the confrontation is over real issues such as the fate of the Palestinians, the future of Iraq and the control of Afghanistan. And even if Mr Obama wanted to change the US political relationship with Israel, it is not clear that he has the political strength at home to do so.

If these concrete issues are not resolved then America’s confrontation with the Muslim world may remain as confrontational and difficult as it was under Mr Bush.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of ‘The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq‘, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. His new book ‘Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq‘ is published by Scribner

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The Lobby Falters

March 23, 2009

John Mearsheimer| London Review of Books, March 26, 2009

Many people in Washington were surprised when the Obama administration tapped Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the production of National Intelligence Estimates: Freeman had a distinguished 30-year career as a diplomat and Defense Department official, but he has publicly criticised Israeli policy and America’s special relationship with Israel, saying, for example, in a speech in 2005, that ‘as long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected.’ Words like these are rarely spoken in public in Washington, and anyone who does use them is almost certain not to get a high-level government position. But Admiral Dennis Blair, the new director of national intelligence, greatly admires Freeman: just the sort of person, he thought, to revitalise the intelligence community, which had been very politicised in the Bush years.

Predictably alarmed, the Israel lobby launched a smear campaign against Freeman, hoping that he would either quit or be fired by Obama. The opening salvo came in a blog posting by Steven Rosen, a former official of Aipac, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, now under indictment for passing secrets to Israel. Freeman’s views of the Middle East, he said, ‘are what you would expect in the Saudi Foreign Ministry, with which he maintains an extremely close relationship’. Prominent pro-Israel journalists such as Jonathan Chait and Martin Peretz of the New Republic, and Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, quickly joined the fray and Freeman was hammered in publications that consistently defend Israel, such as the National Review, the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard.

The real heat, however, came from Congress, where Aipac (which describes itself as ‘America’s Pro-Israel Lobby’) wields enormous power. All the Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee came out against Freeman, as did key Senate Democrats such as Joseph Lieberman and Charles Schumer. ‘I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him,’ Schumer said, ‘and I am glad they did the right thing.’ It was the same story in the House, where the charge was led by Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Steve Israel, who pushed Blair to initiate a formal investigation of Freeman’s finances. In the end, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, declared the Freeman appointment ‘beyond the pale’. Freeman might have survived this onslaught had the White House stood by him. But Barack Obama’s pandering to the Israel lobby during the campaign and his silence during the Gaza War show that this is one opponent he is not willing to challenge. True to form, he remained silent and Freeman had little choice but to withdraw.

The lobby has since gone to great lengths to deny its role in Freeman’s resignation. The Aipac spokesman Josh Block said his organisation ‘took no position on this matter and did not lobby the Hill on it’. The Washington Post, whose editorial page is run by Fred Hiatt, a man staunchly committed to the special relationship, ran an editorial which claimed that blaming the lobby for Freeman’s resignation was something dreamed up by ‘Mr Freeman and like-minded conspiracy theorists’.

In fact, there is abundant evidence that Aipac and other hardline supporters of Israel were deeply involved in the campaign. Block admitted that he had spoken to reporters and bloggers about Freeman and provided them with information, always on the understanding that his comments would not be attributed to him or to Aipac. Jonathan Chait, who denied that Israel was at the root of the controversy before Freeman was toppled, wrote afterwards: ‘Of course I recognise that the Israel lobby is powerful and was a key element in the pushback against Freeman, and that it is not always a force for good.’ Daniel Pipes, who runs the Middle East Forum, where Steven Rosen now works, quickly sent out an email newsletter boasting about Rosen’s role in bringing Freeman down.

On 12 March, the day the Washington Post ran its editorial railing against anyone who suggested that the Israel lobby had helped topple Freeman, the paper also published a front-page story describing the central role that the lobby had played in the affair. There was also a comment piece by the veteran journalist David Broder, which opened with the words: ‘The Obama administration has just suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the lobbyists the president vowed to keep in their place.’

Freeman’s critics maintain that his views on Israel were not his only problem. He is said to have especially close – maybe even improper – ties to Saudi Arabia, where he previously served as American ambassador. The charge hasn’t stuck, however, because there is no evidence for it. Israel’s supporters also said that he had made insensitive remarks about what happened to the Chinese protesters at Tiananmen Square, but that charge, which his defenders contest, only came up because Freeman’s pro-Israel critics were looking for any argument they could muster to damage his reputation.

Why does the lobby care so much about one appointment to an important, but not top leadership position? Here’s one reason: Freeman would have been responsible for the production of National Intelligence Estimates. Israel and its American supporters were outraged when the National Intelligence Council concluded in November 2007 that Iran was not building nuclear weapons, and they have worked assiduously to undermine that report ever since. The lobby wants to make sure that the next estimate of Iran’s nuclear capabilities reaches the opposite conclusion, and that would have been much less likely to happen with Freeman in charge. Better to have someone vetted by Aipac running the show.

An even more important reason for the lobby to drive Freeman out of his job is the weakness of the case for America’s present policy towards Israel, which makes it imperative to silence or marginalise anyone who criticises the special relationship. If Freeman hadn’t been punished, others would see that one could talk critically about Israel and still have a successful career in Washington. And once you get an open and free-wheeling discussion about Israel, the special relationship will be in serious trouble.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Freeman affair was that the mainstream media paid it little attention – the New York Times, for example, did not run a single story dealing with Freeman until the day after he stepped down – while a fierce battle over the appointment took place in the blogosphere. Freeman’s opponents used the internet to their advantage; that is where Rosen launched the campaign. But something happened there that would never have happened in the mainstream media: the lobby faced real opposition. Indeed, a vigorous, well-informed and highly regarded array of bloggers defended Freeman at every turn and would probably have carried the day had Congress not tipped the scales against them. In short, the internet enabled a serious debate in the United States about an issue involving Israel. The lobby has never had much trouble keeping the New York Times and the Washington Post in line, but it has few ways to silence critics on the internet.

When pro-Israel forces clashed with a major political figure in the past, that person usually backed off. Jimmy Carter, who was smeared by the lobby after he published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, was the first prominent American to stand his ground and fight back. The lobby has been unable to silence him, and it is not for lack of trying. Freeman is following in Carter’s footsteps, but with sharper elbows. After stepping down, he issued a blistering denunciation of ‘unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country’ whose aim is ‘to prevent any view other than its own from being aired’. ‘There is,’ he continued, ‘a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government.’

Freeman’s remarkable statement has shot all around the world and been read by countless individuals. This isn’t good for the lobby, which would have preferred to kill Freeman’s appointment without leaving any fingerprints. But Freeman will continue to speak out about Israel and the lobby, and maybe some of his natural allies inside the Beltway will eventually join him. Slowly but steadily, space is being opened up in the United States to talk honestly about Israel.

John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

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