Category: US politics & security

The greatest speech on earth

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By Jonathan Power

Fifty years ago Martin Luther King made his earth-shattering “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.

Is there anybody who watches and listens to it on YouTube not moved to the soles of their shoes? I’ve heard it a hundred times and still it stirs me. His dream that one day his children would “not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” is one of the greatest lines in all oratory. The south of the US, he said, was “sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression”.

Within ten years of the end of America’s civil war, fought over the issue of slavery, southern white Democrats had established state constitutions that stripped black citizens of their newly won political rights. Terrorist groups like the Klu Klux Klan destroyed black schools and churches and murdered at will. At the time of Dr King’s speech they were still doing it. Three weeks after his speech Klansman bombed a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four little girls.

At the time of the March on Washington I was working in Africa. But at the next great event in the civil rights movement in 1965 I was there – in Selma, where Dr King led marchers from the segregated town – where a black couldn’t even sit in the same cafe as a white man to drink a cup of coffee – to the state capital of Montgomery. Read More »

On Bradley Manning and America

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By Richard Falk

I am posting on this blog below two important texts that deserve the widest
public attention and deep reflection in the United States and elsewhere.
I would stress the following:

• the extraordinary disconnect between the impunity of Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Yoo, and others who authorized and vindicated the practice
of torture, were complicit in crimes against humanity, and supported
aggressive wars against foreign countries and the vindictive rendering
of ‘justice’ via criminal prosecution, harsh treatment, and overseas
hunts for Snowden and Assange, all individuals who acted selflessly out of concern
for justice and the rights of citizens in democratic society to be informed
about governmental behavior depicting incriminating information kept secret to hide
responsibility for the commission of crimes of state and awkward diplomacy.

A perverse justice dimension of the Manning case is well expressed in
the statement below of the Center of Constitutional Rights “It is a travesty
of justice that Manning who helped bring to light the criminality of U.S.
forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, is being punished while the alleged perpetrators
are not even investigated.” And “We fear for the future of our country in
the wake of this case.”

• the vindictive punishment of Bradley Manning,Read More »

What if a Russian Snowden?

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By Richard Falk

‘Political crimes’ are non-extraditable and Snowden’s transfer to the United States for prosecution would have been a setback for human rights and international law

What is most troubling about how the Snowden case has played out diplomatically and via the media is the almost total refusal to focus attention on the central legal, moral, and political issues. The United States Government from the outset has acted as if it is entitled to have Snowden transferred to its custody because he is a fugitive from American criminal justice.

Pursuing this line of reasoning, Washington has exerted pressure on Latin American governments not to grant Snowden asylum and expressed disappointment with Hong Kong, China, and Russia for their refusal to comply with the U.S. request. The assumption has been that this is a simple instance of cooperative law enforcement, and it is thus unfriendly and unreasonable for another government to shelter Snowden by a grant of asylum.

Barack Obama has underscored the importance he gives to this issue by canceling a scheduled a high profile summit meeting in September with Vladimir Putin. He even contends that Russian non-cooperation in relation to Snowden exhibits a ‘Cold War mentality’ that backslides from recent instances of Russian-American cooperation such as after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Fairly construed, it would seem that it was Obama, not Putin, who was guilty of Cold War posturing. Read More »

Obama’s diplomatic blunder, the cowardice of Western democracies and what Sweden should do

JO1 Comment

TFF PressInfo
August 9, 2013

Summary
President Obama’s decision to cancel the meeting with Putin is yet another indicator of Washington’s intellectual weakness and the U.S. empire’s future dissolution. People like Assange, Manning and Snowden should be seen as heroes and treated with respect. Before the Swedish prime minister meets Obama he should announce that Sweden is willing to host Snowden.

President Obama’s decision to cancel a scheduled meeting with President Putin is extraordinarily short-sighted and counterproductive.

The decision lacks conflict-resolution competence as well as statesmanship. It’s a sign of the increasing powerlessness and desperation in Washington.

There would have been more than enough to talk about such as BRICS, Syria, nuclear abolition – remember Obama’s vision? – ballistic missile ”defence”, Iran, Egypt, and climate change.Read More »

Reviving the Israel-Palestine negotiations: The Indyk appointment

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By Richard Falk

It was to be expected. It was signaled in advance. And yet it is revealing.

The only other candidates considered for the job were equally known as Israeli partisans: Daniel Kurtzer, former ambassador to Israel before becoming Commissioner of Israel’s Baseball League and Dennis Ross, co-founder in the 1980s (with Indyk) of the AIPAC backed Washington Institute for Near East Policy; handled the 2000 Camp David negotiations on behalf of Clinton.

The winner among these three was Martin Indyk, former ambassador to Israel (1995-97; 2000-01), onetime AIPAC employee, British born, Australian educated American diplomat, with a long list of pro-Israeli credentials.

Does it not seem strange for the United States, the convening party and the unconditional supporter of Israel, to rely exclusively for diplomatic guidance in this concerted effort to revive the peace talks on persons with such strong and unmistakable pro-Israeli credentials?Read More »

Geopolitical winds blow in China’s direction

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By Richard Falk

Among those who comment influentially from the sidelines of power, there are new trends visible in thinking about American foreign policy. The most salient of these concerns is a shift away from the post-9/11 counter-terrorist agenda to a new phase of mainstream policy advocacy that emphasizes the renewed strategic importance of geopolitical rivalry among leading sovereign states. There is also a shift away from the temptations of military intervention and regime change as a favored Western tactic for sustaining influence in the post-colonial world.

There is a realization, at least temporarily, that adventures in military intervention, whether Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya, are just that – ‘adventures,’ if not fiascos. And costly too, rarely a success even when overwhelming military superiority is brought to bear.

After the Vietnam War there emerged a similar reluctance to intervene overseas that was derisively labeled ‘the Vietnam Syndrome.’ It endured for more than a decade being finally overcome by the low-casualty victory in the Gulf War. I think it is safe to assume that for the rest of the Obama presidency, barring a major unforeseen development, that both counter-terrorism and military intervention will occupy a much lower place on the foreign policy agenda. This observation does not mean that such issues will disappear from view, as the recurrent debate on Syria shows. It does argue that they will be treated by political leaders as Gordian Knots, and addressed only warily and tangentially.

But power centers abhor a geopolitical vacuum. Read More »

America over the top on threats

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By Jonathan Power

Even taking into account the terrorist bomb attack on the Boston marathon an American has had less chance this year of being killed by a terrorist than killed falling off a ladder. Is it really necessary to monitor the phone calls and e-mails of half the world in order to combat such a small threat (including countries such as Brazil which have never had a terrorist incident)?

Why not monitor the use of ladders? Or find a way of reducing car crashes in the US which claim 33,000 deaths a year to the Swedish level? Or spend the vast budget of the spy program on education and give up hunting down Edward Snowden who has performed the brave task of opening up this debate to media and congressional scrutiny? And just keep a very modest intelligence spying operation for the handful of countries that could produce a terrorist that might do some real damage- Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea……….Can you think of any more?Read More »

Global Big Brother and the Snowden Hollywood chase

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By Richard Falk

The post below is a major revision of another piece on the Snowden Affair that was published in AlJazeera English recently. I have dwelled on the pursuit of Snowden because it raises such vital issues of principle, but also because so much of the public discourse has proceeded on a mistaken understanding of the applicable international law. Beyond the legal guidelines on extradition and asylum that are applicable, there are considerations of world order: protecting dissent and pluralism in a global setting in which the principal political actors are sovereign states that increasingly rely on secrecy and security rationales to constrain democratic open spaces.

What Snowden did was to expose this dynamic of constraint in relation to secret surveillance programs administered by private, for profit, contractors. Also exposed was the ‘Global Big Brother’ implications of extending surveillance to foreign societies and their governments. It is these questions that should receive our attention, and the Hollywood circus chase of Edward Snowden should cease for humanitarian and political reasons.

***********************

I find the discourse surrounding the Snowden Affair bewildering. The latest reports suggest that the United States is using maximum political leverage, including coercive diplomacy, to discourage small Latin American countries from granting asylum to Edward Snowden. It is also complaining that Russia is giving Snowden ‘a propaganda platform’ and expressing its ‘disappointment’ with China/Hong Kong for its earlier refusal to expel Snowden back to the United States to face charges once his passport was cancelled.Read More »

The U.S. micro-managing the world

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By Johan Galtung

There is a simple way of judging the adequacy of media: the focus is on Snowden’s revelations – PRISM, TEMPORA etc. – or on Snowden himself? He is but one in a great chain of revealers driven by conscience rather than money or oaths; there will be more revelations given the enormity of the US spying machine on the world. But, what does it do?

The issue is not the “freedom of expression” of the revealers, the “whistle-blowers”. If they reveal the systematic subversion – and “superversion” from above – of all civil-political and socio-economic human rights, then the denial of the freedom of expression to machine operators is an obvious and rather small part. The focus is naive.

Nor is the intrusion into the privacy of potentially any human being on earth the issue. Recording all traces, verbal and otherwise, left behind by all of us, putting them together for a more holistic image and filing it for its predictive and interventionist value is certainly an “intrusion”. But the basic problem is, for what?Read More »

Mrs Merkel should read the history of Hitler’s economy

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By Jonathan Power

My family is in a bit of a crisis. My earnings are cut by 25%. Writers never did earn a lot and now we have this economic catastrophe. We’ve cut our expenditures severely.

This is what happens to families in financial trouble. Cut. Common sense, eh? But when it comes to our country being in trouble we have to be counter-intuitive. Then a country must spend more. It has to grow faster to produce the wealth that when taxed can pay down the deficit. As the world’s greatest economist, John Maynard Keynes, wrote: “The boom not the slump is the right time for austerity”.

The Germans and the European Union Commission continue to push countries to cut and squeeze. Yet despite the evidence that the patient is not recovering, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany seems determined not to allow the Euro-zone members to let up. (The British government is following the same counter-productive policy.)

President Barack Obama has taken a different tack. Keynesian to his finger tips, he has saved the American economy and now growth has returned. Unemployment is falling, housing starts are up and people are spending. He saved the banks from going bust. Also the big auto companies. He won passage of a new health act, “Obamacare”, that will ensure that most of the poor are taken care of.Read More »