So when is America’s next War — this one with Iran — to begin?

Huffington Post highlights how fast the notoriously slow Congressional process can move when sufficiently motivated.

Last week the Senate passed comprehensive sanctions on Iran — a bill being pushed by [America’s all-powerful pro-Israel lobby] AIPAC neocons and the other “usual suspects” — in record time. It was brought up with only three senators on the floor; there was a five minute debate and it passed by voice vote. Just like that.

So we now have bills in both chambers that do little of anything to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions [which] will not harm the people they are meant to harm while hurting innocent Iranians instead.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor who ran with Sen. John McCain against the Obama-Biden ticket, said on Sunday on Fox News that U.S. President Barack Obama can win [the next election] again if he starts backing Israel and decides to attack Iran.

And in Iran, we have Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saying Iran is set to deliver a “punch” that will stun world powers during this week’s 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution, which is celebrated February 11.

The country’s top cleric was marking the occasion when Iran’s air force gave its support to revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a key event which led to the toppling of the US-backed Shah on February 11, 1979.

War Costs are Bankrupting America

Military and intelligence spending relentlessly increase as unemployment heads over 10% and the economy bleeds red ink.

Obama’s total military budget is nearly $1 trillion. This includes Pentagon spending of $880 billion. Add secret black programs (about $70 billion); military aid to foreign nations like Egypt, Israel and Pakistan; 225,000 military “contractors”; and veterans’ costs. Add $75 billion (alone nearly four times Canada’s total defense budget) for 16 intelligence agencies with 200,000 employees.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars ($1 trillion so far) will cost $200-250 billion more this year, including hidden and indirect expenses. Obama’s Afghan “surge” of 30,000 new troops will cost an additional $33 billion – more than Germany’s total defense budget.

The Pentagon now accounts for half of total world military spending. China and Russia combined spend only a paltry 10% of what the U.S. spends on defense.

There are 750 U.S. military bases in 50 nations and 255,000 service members stationed abroad, 116,000 in Europe, nearly 100,000 in Japan and South Korea.

Military spending gobbles up 19% of federal spending and at least 44% of tax revenues. During the Bush administration, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – funded by borrowing – cost each American family more than $25,000.

Like Bush, Obama is paying for America’s wars through supplemental authorizations ­- putting them on the nation’s already maxed-out credit card. Future generations will be stuck with the bill. If U.S. taxpayers actually had to pay for the Afghan and Iraq wars, these conflicts would end in short order.

Toronto Sun

US Government claims its right to kill American citizens

There’s a revelation buried in a Washington Post article by Dana Priest which described how the Obama administration has adopted the Bush policy of targeting selected American citizens for assassination if they are deemed (by the Executive Branch) to be Terrorists.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said in each case a decision to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen must get special permission. . . . Before an American citizen can be placed on the assassination list, consider from whom that “permission” is obtained:  the President, or someone else under his authority within the Executive Branch.  There are no outside checks or limits at all on how these “factors” are weighed.

In last week’s post, I wrote about all the reasons why it’s so dangerous — as well as both legally and Consitutionally dubious — to allow the President to kill American citizens not on an active battlefield during combat, but while they are sleeping, sitting with their families in their home, walking on the street, etc.  That’s basically giving the President the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens without any charges or trial.

Do we really want the President to be able to make this decision unilaterally and without outside checks?  Remember when many Democrats were horrified (or at least when they purported to be) at the idea that Bush was merely eavesdropping on American citizens without judicial approval?  Shouldn’t we be at least as concerned about the President’s being able to assassinate Americans without judicial oversight?  That seems much more Draconian to me.

Noting a campaign to deny “accused Terrorists” access to lawyers and a real trial, Adam Serwer wrote: “You can be denied rights not through due process of law but merely based on the nature of the crime you are suspected of committing.”

Salon

A Definition of Mainstream Media

Progressive activists and writers continually bemoan the fact that the news they generate and the opinions they express are consistently ignored by the mainstream media, and thus kept from the masses of the American people.

This disregard of progressive thought is tantamount to a definition of the mainstream media.

It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy; it’s a matter of who owns the mainstream media and the type of journalists they hire — men and women who would like to keep their jobs; so it’s more insidious than a conspiracy, it’s what’s built into the system, it’s how the system works.

The disregard of the progressive world is of course not total; at times some of that world makes too good copy to ignore, and, on rare occasions, progressive ideas, when they threaten to become very popular, have to be countered.

–William Blum

Explosion in Pakistan blows cover of U.S. troops in the country

Three U.S. soldiers were killed in a bomb attack in north-west Pakistan. The three are the first known American military fatalities in Pakistan. Three schoolgirls were also killed, while 70 people, including another two US soldiers were injured in the explosion in Lower Dir.

The question is why U.S. soldiers were in Pakistan, a country the U.S. is not technically at war with?

The US embassy said the military personnel had been training Pakistan’s Frontier Corps in counter-insurgency. The Frontier Corps, Pakistan’s paramilitary force, is responsible for operations against militants.

News that three US soldiers were killed is highly embarrassing for the Pakistani government, which is acutely aware of the unpopularity of its close ties to Washington, says the BBC’s Ilyas Khan in Islamabad.

Such is the sensitivity about US activity in the country that the Frontier Corps initially claimed the soldiers were “foreign aid workers”. The revelation of the presence of U.S. troops in the country now threatens to increase resentment against the Pakistani government.

US intelligence agencies deliberately allowed Christmas underwear bomber to board flight to the States

In his prepared statement to the House Committee on Homeland Security on January 27, State Department Under-Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy [testified] … that US intelligence agencies made a deliberate decision to allow Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board the commercial flight [Flight 253] without any special airport screening.

[Furthermore, this revelation] has been buried in the media. As of this writing, nearly a week after a hearing, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have published no articles on the subject. Nor have the broadcast or cable media reported on it.

Kennedy confirmed that all US intelligence agencies received warnings that Abdulmutallab was training with terrorists in Yemen. … Under questioning by Rep. Dan Lungren, Kennedy confirmed that Abdulmutallab’s case was one in which US intelligence officials had interceded to block a visa revocation.

At the January 27 hearing, National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter said that there had been “multiple” points of failure in the US government’s response to warnings of the impending attack. However, all three government officials testifying—Kennedy, Leiter and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Deputy Secretary Jane Lute—said no disciplinary action would be taken.

Whether US agencies were unaware of Abdulmutallab’s plans, or consciously decided to allow an attack to proceed, remains unclear.

The question must be asked: What would have been the consequences of a successful attack? Hysterical media coverage would have provided fodder for the most right-wing factions to demand war against Yemen or other Muslim countries. At home, there would have been calls for a mass dragnet like that after the September 11 attacks, and immense political pressure for a new battery of police-state laws.

Full article

U.S. Defense budget is 53 percent of discretionary spending

The Pentagon will be asking for a 7.1 percent increase in proposed defense spending, even as painful cuts are being administered in other fields.

The budget line for defense stands at $708 billion, 53 percent of discretionary spending, eight times more than the next largest item, health and human services.

Does that reflect America’s priorities? Is that who we are?

Related, a recent development was the failure — again — of the missile-defense system in a $150 million trial that took place Sunday. That system, a dog that has been around for years, cleverly conceived and presented as an umbrella over the United States and some of its allies against Iranian or North Korean missiles, has two basic problems. First, it is expensive. Second, it doesn’t work.

Although those two flaws do not necessarily deter Pentagon planners or defense contractors.

Excerpts of an article by a former U.S. Ambassador

Karzai’s Brother and Corruption in Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, the theft of public and private land is a growing form of corruption. President Hamid Karzai has vowed to tackle the vexing issue. But one obstacle is his own brother, who is part of the problem.

The spoils of corruption can be seen several times a week at Kabul’s tiny airport: bags of money heading out of the country. In one instance, Kirk Meyer the top American corruption investigator in Afghanistan says, his team was told a high-ranking official took $52 million to Dubai in one trip.

The money leaving Afghanistan, says Meyer and others, is increasingly coming from land grabs. Government officials misuse the law to take control of public and even private land for development — and developers and corrupt officials split the profits, Meyer says.

The land grabs started not long after President Karzai came to power six years ago, according to Ahmad Nader Nadery of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

Some Kabul residents were evicted from their property. And Nadery says the land was made available for a fraction of the cost to the president’s political allies. “It was pretty much given away,” Nadery says.

U.S. and Afghan officials say that the man at the center of the land grabs in one province is the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. He has also been accused of using his influence to help opium traffickers, an allegation that he has denied.

One Afghan lawmaker, Sardar Mohammad Rahman Oghli, says that President Karzai’s re-election last fall was a victory for corruption. He doubts the Afghan government will do much about it, and he criticizes the Americans, too.

“If they had been honest in the fight against corruption, they wouldn’t have helped a corrupt and incompetent government like Karzai’s get elected,” he says.

Full article

Obama’s Budget a Surge in War Spending

President Barack Obama’s new budget forecasts two consecutive years of near $160 billion in war funding, far more than he hoped when elected and only modestly less than the last years of the Bush Administration.

In 2011 alone, the revised numbers are triple what the president included in his spending plan a year ago. The budget’s increased war funding is not entirely surprising given Obama’s decision to add more U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The president’s 2010 defense budget a year ago requested $130 billion for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and just $50 billion in 2011. The new budget ramps up 2010 spending to $163 billion and for 2011 requests $159 billion in overseas contingency funds for the military.

When compared to the peak war spending of the Bush years, Obama is only about 10% below Bush’s annual average of $176 billion in fiscal years 2007 and 2008—the time of the Iraq war surge.

Democrats are increasingly agitated by the pace of withdrawal from Iraq, and the combined costs of the two wars is striking –especially when measured against the much more hopeful rhetoric of Obama’s campaign.

Excerpted from Politico

The absence of heroes in the American drone warfare

During the Second World War, Royal Air Force ace pilots prided in shooting down Axis powers fighter planes in dogfights and were awarded an appropriate gallantry award.

No such heroic deeds by the coalition forces have come to fore in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s well known that the CIA operates the drone flights in Pakistan and Afghanistan. So it’s a covert war being fought against an undefined enemy, call it counterinsurgency, counterterrorism or whatever.

There’s no dearth of misleading names attached to the war. The war in Afghanistan remains a war of occupation by foreign troops and a war of freedom by the Afghan people whose land has been occupied. Afghans are refuges in their own territory.

These wars will not produce heroes. Can a CIA operative who pushes the joystick button to launch hellfire missiles by a Predator or a Reaper drone to kill mostly innocent people in mud hamlets in FATA be called a war hero?

[Excerpt of an article by Iftekhar A. Khan]