Tag Archives: afghanistan

"My Guilt Will Never Go Away"

by RollandPardo Posted on May 29, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

“My guilt will never go away,” former Marine Matthew Hoh explained to me. “There is a significant portion of me that doesn’t believe it should be allowed to go away, that this pain is fair.”

If America accepts the idea of fighting endless wars, it will have to accept something else as well: that the costs of war are similarly endless. I’m thinking about the trillions of dollars, the million or more “enemy” dead (a striking percentage of them civilians), the tens of thousands of American combat casualties, those 20 veteran suicides each day, and the diminished lives of those who survive all of that. There’s that pain, carried by an unknown number of women and men, that won’t disappear, ever, and that goes by the label “moral injury.”

When I started Hooper’s War, a novel about the end of World War II in the Pacific, I had in mind just that pain. I was thinking—couldn’t stop thinking, in fact—about what really happens to people in war, combatants and civilians alike. The need to tell that story grew in large part out of my own experiences in Iraq, where I spent a year embedded with a combat unit as a US State Department employee, and where I witnessed, among so many other horrors, two soldier suicides.

The new book began one day when Facebook retrieved photos of Iraqi children I had posted years ago, with a cheery “See Your Memories” caption on them. Oh yes, I remembered. Then, on the news, I began seeing places in Iraq familiar to me, but this time being overrun by Islamic State militants or later being re-retaken with the help of another generation of young Americans. And I kept running into people who’d been involved in my war and were all too ready to share too many drinks and tell me too much about what I was already up all too many nights thinking about.

As these experiences morphed first into nightmares and then into the basis for research, I found myself speaking with more veterans of more wars who continued to suffer in ways they had a hard time describing, but which they wrestled with everyday. I realized that I understood them, even as they seemed to be trying to put their feelings into words for the first time. Many of them described how they had entered the battle zones convinced that “we’re the good guys,” and then had to live with the depth of guilt and shame that followed when that sense didn’t survive the test of events.

Sometimes they were remarkably articulate, sometimes anything but. It seemed not to matter which war we were talking about—or whether I was reading a handwritten diary from the Korean War, an oral history of the Pacific War, or an old bestseller about a conflict ironically labeled “the Good War.” The story always seemed to be the same: decisions made in seconds that lasted lifetimes, including the uncomfortable balancing of morality and expediency in situations in which a soldier might believe horrific acts like torture could save lives or had to accept civilian casualties in pursuit of military objectives. In war, you were always living in a world in which no action seemed ideal and yet avoiding acting was often inconceivable.

Matthew Hoh, that former Marine, now a veterans advocate, introduced me to the phrase “moral injury,” though the term is usually attributed to clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay. He coined it in 1991 while working for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

We are, of course, beings with a complex sense of right and wrong, which can be messed with in disastrous ways. There are boundaries inside us that can’t be crossed without a great price being paid. Though the term moral injury is fairly new, especially outside military circles, the idea is as old as war. When people sent into conflict find their sense of right and wrong tested, when they violate deeply held convictions by doing something (such as killing a civilian in error) or failing to do something (such as not reporting a war crime), they suffer an injury to their core being.

Examples of this phenomenon are relatively commonplace in popular culture. Think of scenes from Tim O’Brien’s iconic Vietnam War book, The Things They Carried, William Manchester’s World War II odyssey, Goodbye Darkness, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, or films like William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives and Oliver Stone’s Platoon.

You can find similar examples as far back as the Iliad and as recently as late last night. Lisa Ling, for instance, was a former Air Force technical sergeant who worked in America’s armed drone program before turning whistleblower. She was perhaps typical when she told the makers of the documentary film National Bird that, in helping carry out drone strikes which killed people across the globe by remote control, “I lost part of my humanity.”

Once upon a time, society expressed skepticism or worse toward such formulations, calling those who emerged visibly suffering from the acts of war “cowards” or dismissing them as fakes and frauds. Yet today post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a widely acknowledged condition that can be identified by MRI tests.

PTSD and moral injury often occur together. “I think having both PTSD and moral injury are the normal things for us,” Ling says of those in the drone program. Moral injury, however, takes place at the intersection of psychology and spirituality, and so is, in a sense, all in someone’s head. When experiencing moral injury, a person wields guilt and/or shame as a self-inflicted penalty for a choice made. PTSD is more physical, more fear-based, and often a more direct response to an event or events witnessed in war.

Think of it this way: PTSD is more likely to result from seeing something terrible, moral injury from doing something terrible.

Moral injury doesn’t just affect soldiers, but civilians, too. Noncombatants are not just victims or targets, but often complex participants in war. This reality led me, as my book developed, to interview now-elderly Japanese who had experienced World War II as children. They described the horrific choices they faced, even at a young age. In a wartime landscape of hunger, survival often depended on small, grim acts that would never be forgotten.

Sometimes, I sensed in talking to them, as in interviewing former soldiers, that the psychic injuries of wartime don’t end until the sufferers do. Moral injury turns out to be a debt that often can never be repaid.

Those survivors of the end of the war in Japan who got the food necessary to live had to pay a price for knowing what happened to those who didn’t. In a landscape ravaged by war, just because something wasn’t your fault doesn’t mean it won’t be your responsibility. An act as simple as which of her children a mother offered a disappearing supply of water to first could mean the difference between life and death. And though, in truth, it might have been impossible in such circumstances and at such an age to know that you were responsible for the death of your sister or brother, 70 years later you might still be thinking about it with an almost unbearable sense of guilt.

And here’s a small footnote: Did you know that it’s possible to sit quietly on a Tokyo park bench in 2017, perfectly aware of whose distant relatives and countrymen dropped the bombs that took away the water that forced that mother to make that decision, and still shamefully continue taking notes, saying nothing as you witness someone else’s breakdown?

What help can there be for something so human?

There are, of course, the bad answers, all too often including opioids and alcohol. But sufferers soon learn that such substances just send the pain off to ambush you at another moment, and yet, as many told me, you may still look forward to the morning’s first throat-burning shot of something strong. Drinking and drugs have a way, however temporarily, of wiping out hours of pain that may stretch all the way back to the 1940s. You drink in the dark places, even after you understand that in the darkness you can see too much.

Tragically, suicide is never far from moral injury. The soul isn’t that big a place.

One former soldier told me he’s never forgiven his neighbor for talking him out of going into the garage with his rifle. Another said the question wasn’t why he might commit suicide, but why he hadn’t. Someone I met knows vets who have a “designated driver,” a keeper not of the car keys but of their guns during emotional rough patches.

The Department of Veterans Affairs counts a stunning average of 20 veteran suicides a day in America. About 65% of those are individuals 50 years old or older with little or no exposure to the country’s twenty-first-century conflicts. No one tracks the suicide rate for civilians who survive war, but it’s hard to imagine that it isn’t high as well. The cause of all those self-inflicted deaths can’t, of course, be traced to any one thing, but the pain that grows out of moral injury is patient.

For such sufferers, however, progress is being made, even if the trip back is as complex as the individual. The Department of Veterans Affairs now acknowledges moral injury and its effects, and in 2014 Syracuse University created the Moral Injury Project to bring together vets, doctors, and chaplains to work on how to deal with it. In the meantime, psychologists are developing diagnostic assessment tools for what some call “soul repair.”

One effective path back seems to be through helping patients sort out just what happened to them and, when it comes to remembered transgressions, what part of those may be their own responsibility (though not necessarily their own fault). What doesn’t work, according to Matthew Hoh, is trying to convince veterans who view themselves as damaged that, in the present American manner, they are really heroes.

Others suffering moral injury may try to deal with it by seeking forgiveness.

Lisa Ling, for example, traveled to Afghanistan, with a desire to truly grasp her role in a drone program that regularly killed its victims from thousands of miles away. To her surprise, during an encounter with the relatives of some civilian victims of such drone strikes, they forgave her. “I didn’t ask for forgiveness,” Ling told me, referring to what she had done in the drone program, “because what I did was unforgivable.”

Killing by remote control requires many hands. Ling worked on databases and IT networking. Analysts studied the information in those databases to recommend humans to target. Sensor operators manipulated lasers to pinpoint where a drone pilot would eventually slam his missile home for the kill.

“Like all of us,” she added, “I spent time on the mission floor, or at briefings where I saw and heard devastating things, or blatant lies, but to actually connect my individual work to single events wasn’t possible due to the diffusion of responsibility. For sensor operators, it is more like stepping on ants. For analysts, they get to know people over time. As watchers and listeners they describe an intimacy that comes with predictably knowing their family patterns. Kissing the kids, taking children to school, and then seeing these same people die.”

Another way back is for the sufferer to try to rebalance the internal scales a little by making amends of some sort. In the case of moral injury, this can often mean drawing a line between who one was then and who one might be now. Think of it as an attempt to re-inscribe those internal borders that were transgressed so long ago.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, the connections between moral injury and whistleblowing, like those between moral injury and suicide, appear to run deep.

For example, Iraq War whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s decision to leak video of civilian deaths caused by members of the US military may have been her version of amends, driven by guilt over silently witnessing war crimes. Among the acts she saw, for instance, was a raid on a printing facility that had been billed as an al-Qaeda location but wasn’t. The US military had, in fact, been tricked into shutting down the work of political opponents of Iraq’s then-prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Until Manning finally tells her story, this remains speculative, but I was at the same forward operating base in Iraq as she was and know what happened and how it affected me, as well as the others around us.

Whistleblowers (and I was one of them) talk of conscience, of a realization that we were part of something that was wrong. Jonathan Shay suggests that the failure of moral agency does not have to rest with the individual alone. It can involve witnessing a betrayal of “what’s right” by a person in legitimate authority.

That part of moral injury could help explain one of the most significant whistleblowers of our time. In talking about his reasons for blowing the whistle, Edward Snowden invoked questions of right and wrong when it came to the actions of senior American government officials. It would be a worthy question to put to Snowden: How much guilt and shame—the hallmarks of moral injury—do you retain from having been part of the surveillance state, and how much was your whistleblowing driven by trying to rid yourself of it?

After all, for those suffering from moral injury, the goal is always the same: to somehow reclaim the good parts of oneself and to accept—but not be eternally defined by—what one did or didn’t do.

I know, because for me, this is so much more than fiction.

“You mean that Vietnam helicopter thing?” A well-meaning family doctor asked me this when I got back from Iraq in 2010, referring to the way some vets react to the sound of a helicopter, sending them “back to the jungle.” No, no, far more than that, I responded, and told him a little about my sorry role in administering reconstruction projects in Iraq and how it left me more interested in vodka than my family. That was my own personal taste of moral injury, of a deeply felt failure to accomplish any of the good I’d hoped to do, let down by senior leaders I once believed in. It’s why I tell the story in Hooper’s War in reverse order, opening with a broken Nate Hooper in his late eighties finally finding a form of redemption for the events of a few weeks at war when he was 18. By moving toward an innocent boy as far away in rural Ohio as one can be from war, I felt I was working through my own experience of the damage war causes deep inside the self.

In tallying the costs of war, what’s the price of a quick death versus a slow one? A soldier who leaves his brains on the wall in the den two decades after his war ended or one whose body remains untouched but who left his mind 10,000 miles away?

The price of endless war is beyond calculation. As our wars continue to morph and roll on, the costs—financial, emotional, and in blood—only pile up as the men and women who have been welcomed home as if it were all over continue to be torn apart. The nasty conclusion on the scales of moral injury: that our endless conflicts may indeed have left our society, one that just can’t stop itself from making war, as one of the casualties.

Peter Van Buren, a former State Department official, blew the whistle on waste and mismanagement during the Iraq “reconstruction” in his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book, Hooper’s War, is a novel set in World War II Japan.

Source – 

"My Guilt Will Never Go Away"

Posted in alo, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on "My Guilt Will Never Go Away"

The United States Just Dropped a 21,600-Pound Bomb In Afghanistan

by ChristaBurge61 Posted on April 13, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Thursday, US forces dropped the largest conventional bomb in its arsenal on an ISIS tunnel complex in Nangahar province, eastern Afghanistan. The GBU-43 Massive Ordinance Air Blast, aka the “Mother of All Bombs,” or “MOAB,” is a 21,600-pound bomb developed in 2003 during the first Iraq War. Its explosion is reportedly equivalent to 11 tons of TNT and creates a one-mile blast radius in every direction. As one of its creators stated at the time of its testing, “It is the largest guided bomb in the history of the world with a tremendous impact and detonation.” This marks its first use in combat, and serves as a reminder that the longest war in US history rages on over 15 years after the US first invaded Afghanistan.

United States Forces-Afghanistan issued a statement Thursday morning confirming the strike, stating that it was “designed to minimize the risk of Afghan and U.S. Forces conducting clearing operations in the area while maximizing the destruction of ISIS-K fighters and facilities.” General John W. Nicholson, Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, said, “As ISIS-K’s losses have mounted, they are using IEDs, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their defense. This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our defensive against ISIS-K.”

In Thursday morning’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, “The GBU 43 is a large, powerful & accurately delivered weapon. The US took all precautions against civilian casualties.” When reporters asked for details, Spicer declined to comment further.

“The hard truth is…when explosive weapons are used in populated areas, over 90 percent of those killed or injured will be civilians,” Iain Overton, the executive director of Action on Armed Violence, said in an e-mail. “And when explosive violence is used in lesser populated areas, at last 25 percent of those killed or injured will be civilians. In short, the bigger the blast you create, the more civilians will be killed.”

Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Military Times, “What the MOAB does is basically suck out all of the oxygen and lights the air on fire. It’s a way to get into areas where conventional bombs can’t reach.”

Matthew Bolton, director of the International Disarmament Institute at Pace University, is worried that the military’s decision could encourage other countries to develop or deploy similar weapons. Bolton also says it is unlikely that this sort of weapon could spare civilians. “It is difficult to imagine how it might be used in the kind of wars the US now fights—often in urban areas—without posing serious dangers to civilians,” he says, “both as a result of its immediate wide area effect and the impact on vital infrastructure like electricity, water, sewers, schools, and health services.”

While the number of civilian casualties and destruction to civilian property remains unknown, the strike comes amidst concerns that the Trump administration has loosened the rules of engagement that had sought to minimize civilian casualties for airstrikes against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. During the campaign, Trump promised that in the fight against ISIS he would “bomb the shit out of ’em” and pledged to “take out their families.”

Last month, Lt. Gen. Steve Townsend, the top US commander in Iraq, acknowledged that the coalition “probably had a role” in an airstrike in al-Jadida, Iraq, that killed as many as 240 Iraqi civilians. According to Airwars, an international airstrikes monitoring organization, March marked the third month in a row in which alleged US-led coalition civilian casualty events outnumbered those of Russia, and the number of US munitions dropped in the first three months of 2017 is up 59-percent over last year.

Of the MOAB, Overton adds, “That bomb cannot be targeted, it cannot be proportional and it cannot but kill civilians.”

This story has been updated.

Taken from – 

The United States Just Dropped a 21,600-Pound Bomb In Afghanistan

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The United States Just Dropped a 21,600-Pound Bomb In Afghanistan

Donald Trump May Be on Your Television, But Here’s What America Really Looks Like

by coolmathgamesgU Posted on February 25, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Photojournalist Peter van Agtmael considers his third book, Buzzing at the Sill, the latest chapter of what he calls “one greater book”—a sweeping exploration of the September 11th attacks and the impact of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on soldiers and their families. His project began with his 2009 book, 2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die, and continued with Disco Night Sept. 11, which appeared in 2014. In Buzzing at the Sill, published by Kehrer Verlag, he shifts his attention to unexplored corners the United States, after he realized “how little I know about my country.”

The Magnum photographer first went to Iraq in 2006 when he was 24, and he covered the conflicts there and in Afghanistan for several years before returning to the States. With 72 images pulled from his journalism assignments and others he shot while traveling throughout the country, Buzzing at the Sill examines the reverberations of 9/11 through glimpses of daily American life that often have the intimate feel of a snapshot. The photos in Buzzing at the Sill depict vulnerable, grieving, celebrating, and sometimes threatening Americans, collectively offering a cohesive and sharp reading of the country, with a powerful undercurrent of alienation. “In America, we somehow feel immune,” he writes in Buzzing at the Sill, “but in any country at war, the first thing they’ll tell you is that they didn’t think it could happen there.”

I talked with van Agtmael about making this book and what it might say about the political climate in the United States today.

Kentucky Derby aftermath. (Louisville, KY. 2015)

Mother Jones: Can you tell me about the title, Buzzing at the Sill?
Peter van Agtmael: Buzzing at the Sill is from a Theodore Roethke poem called “In a Dark Time.” I’d heard a small part of it in a play, a sort of sci-fi play about morality in a virtual reality universe. Nothing to do with the book precisely, but it was a great play. I read the poem afterwards because I was intrigued and had one of those strange senses: “This poem is kind of important to me. I don’t know why, but I’m going to just keep it in the back of my mind.” I just kept coming back to it. As I started putting the book together and writing the stories for it, this idea of buzzing as a word kept popping up in my brain.

I started the book with the story of a vulture that flapped up to this window sill outside of a burn ward at a military hospital in Texas. I guess it could smell the rotting flesh through the walls and was just trying to desperately and aggressively get in through that window, I don’t know, to try and feast on the flesh. It was really a troubling moment. But apparently it happens all the time, because the soldiers in recovery and the nurses were totally accustomed to the presence of those vultures.

When I started thinking of the decisions that led me down the road first—which was part of Disco Night Sept. 11 and then the buzzing being— I somehow couldn’t ignore the urge to do things that kind of defy logic. And I liked the poem, I liked the ring of it. I was sitting with David Allan Harvey one day when he pointed out how appropriate the title was for the things I was talking about.

MJ: In what way do you see that Buzzing at the Sill continues the narrative you built with Disco Night?

PVA: I went out to cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fundamentally because I was interested in war as a notion and in experiencing it. I was interested in history and how societies form. I was interested in the recent history of what had provoked these wars. So when I finally got out there, I was really seeing the wars through the American perspective, much more than through being embedded with American soldiers and Marines. I realized in that process how little I knew about my own country. I had grown up in the suburbs and, after college, I moved out of the country, so I didn’t really know the place well. When I started following soldiers and their families back home, it provoked a lot of the questions about who we are as a nation, questions I realized couldn’t be explored through the more limited framework of looking at the military at war and at home. So that inspired these trips in which I began to explore America in more general terms. I really started this work in 2009. I got the bulk of it done as I was easing out of Disco Night. I started them as almost concurrent projects.

A woman attending the annual Iowa GOP Ronald Reagan dinner, where Sarah Palin gave the keynote speech. (Des Moines, Iowa, 2010)

The Fourth of July. (Brooklyn, New York, 2010)

The KKK had boasted that dozens from their Klan chapter would attend the rally and cross burning, but there were only a few people when we showed up, including a British TV crew and a freelance photographer. (Maryland, 2015)

Outside Lyniece Nelson’s house. Nelson’s 19-year-old daughter, Shelly Hilliard (known as “Treasure”), was strangled, dismembered, and set on fire in 2011. Treasure was a transgender teen born Henry Hilliard Jr. The family is with Treasure’s urn. (Detroit, Michigan, 2012)

MJ: What was your thinking as you approached putting together this body of work? The photos feel like they’re pieced together from assignments or from different stories.

PVA: At first it wasn’t meant to be a book, although I’m always thinking about that in the back of my mind. It started off as a series of exploratory road trips that I was doing with Christian Hansen, who I dedicated the book to. Then I started getting some assignments to go shoot in America because I think editors liked the pictures I was taking. What I was doing for those assignments wasn’t always directly tied to what I was doing for myself, but it gave me the space to photograph. I started getting assignments that dealt with my own interests and made some pictures in that direction. A lot of it was just photographed through general exploration. It was sometimes provoked by assignments, then I’d go back on my own dime if I really clicked with a place. And sometimes it was just hanging out with my family or friends.

MJ: How did you approach the editing? How were you going to tie the pictures together?

PVA: I’m a constant editor. Every few months or so I make a ton of 4×6 prints. I put them on a magnetic board and I live with them for a while to see what bubbles to the surface. A lot of this was part of Disco Night originally, and I suddenly started realizing, “If I keep working on this because I’m not done and I put all that in Disco Night, how can this be one book? Is it going to be too long and bloated and crazy?” Then I started thinking, “Okay, I have so many other questions about America, when do I stop?” I started thinking about each book being a chapter in one bigger book and that gave me the space to cut it off at a certain point. I needed to have some kind of thematic focus to the work.

I was taking all these prints and I brought them to the Magnum meetings, trying the old Josef Koudelka trick: Give them to photographers, who are getting bored during the talks about the economics of the agency, to look through with a pen. They’ll separate them in two piles—what they like and what they don’t like—and put their initials on the back. I started to find the core pictures that people seem to relate to. I’d ask myself why? And did I relate to them? Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. But it gave me an idea of how other people were seeing the work. From there, I kept shooting but started making drafts of the work, essentially spending a few days a month sequencing and editing, hanging things up on the board, showing them to trusted confidantes from in and outside the photo world. It started to take its shape naturally over time until I kind of ran out of ideas. At that point I was like, “Okay, I guess it’s a book.”

After dinner at Lyniece Nelson’s house. One of Nelson’s children was murdered, one committed suicide shortly after his 16th birthday. Her house burned down not long after the death of her son, destroying the urns of both her deceased children. (Detroit, Michigan, 2012)

Hunting rabbits with BB guns. (The outskirts of New Orleans, Louisiana, 2009)

Iraqi refugees in a low-income housing community in Portland. The area is home to several thousand Iraqi refugees. (Portland, Oregon, 2015)

MJ: When you’re out on these road trips, do you still see reverberations from 9/11 in the country?

PVA: Constantly. You find them in them most unexpected places, like graffiti on a wall. Sometimes it’s a faded picture; sometimes it’s a newspaper tacked to a wall. Sometimes it’s weird paraphernalia related to it, home constructed paraphernalia. It resonates through society and continues to resonate today. The travel ban that was imposed by the administration is a very direct reverberation of 9/11. Even though most people were disconnected from it, the moment amplified a fairly massive and somewhat irrational fear that exists in the populace at large. And I think a lot of the work I’ve done and a lot of the work I’m going to do in the future still ties to 9/11 and the fallout from it.

MJ: In the text you’ve written for both Disco Night September 11 and Buzzing at the Sill, you are introspective about covering war. Do you still cover conflict?

PVA: I am still covering conflict to some degree. I was back in Iraq last year for the next book I’m working on. I’ve covered quite a bit of the Israel and Palestine conflict in the last five years for another book I’m working on. But I’m not doing it with the kind of intensity I was before and I’m not seeking out the front line and the kind danger that comes with being at the edge of the war the way I used to. It just kind of ran its course for me. For a long time I could justify doing it to myself, no matter how irrational it was. It was important to me and my work. And I just don’t feel it in the same way any more. When it comes up and it’s important to me, I’ll do it, but more out of sense of duty than desire—which used to be a big part of it.

MJ: When we started talking, you mentioned that Buzzing at the Sill reflects the times, the current situation in America. Can you explain what you meant?

PVA: It deals with the margins of America, a lot of parts unseen. Well, parts that are seen and familiar to a lot of the populace, but unseen when it comes to the parameters of what mainstream news and popular culture and Hollywood reflects. That kind of unease, that melancholy, is of course partly my interpretation, but partly, I think, it’s something that’s really there as well. It resonates with this moment and the sort of alienation from the power structure a lot of people feel, as well as a certain amount of desperation, in the hope of disrupting the power structure so they can live better lives. I think in those ways, it’s intimately connected to today.

The youngest children tending the horses. (Pine Ridge, South Dakota, 2011)

A “second line parade” is a local African American tradition where brass bands–known as the first line-march in the streets and are joined by members of the public, the “second liners.” (New Orleans, Louisiana, 2012)

All photos by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos, from his book Buzzing at the Sill.

Continue reading – 

Donald Trump May Be on Your Television, But Here’s What America Really Looks Like

Posted in Delk, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump May Be on Your Television, But Here’s What America Really Looks Like

Thanks For Everything, President Obama. We’re Going to Miss You.

by GarryKellogg Posted on January 19, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s less than 24 hours until Barack Obama leaves the White House. In eight years, here’s my top ten list of what he accomplished:

  1. Affordable Care Act
  2. Stimulus package
  3. Climate actions: Paris agreement, EPA power plant standards, auto mileage standards, etc.
  4. Dodd-Frank financial reform
  5. Iran nuclear treaty
  6. Killed Osama bin Laden
  7. Allowed gays to serve openly in the military
  8. New START treaty
  9. Delivered 74 consecutive months of job growth
  10. Declined to get seriously involved in Syria

I’m keenly aware of all the criticisms you can make of this list: the stimulus wasn’t big enough; Dodd-Frank didn’t go far enough; Obamacare doesn’t have a public option; cap-and-trade failed; the surveillance state became permanent; there was no help for underwater homeowners; there are still troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; and so forth. These are all legit. Nonetheless, if you compare this list to other presidents of the past century, there aren’t more than three or four who can match it. Here in the real world, that’s pretty good.

On foreign affairs, Obama got better as he spent more time in office. In 2009 he approved a huge surge of troops into a hopeless fight in Afghanistan. In 2011, he resisted intervening in Libya but eventually agreed to a middling-size offensive. Finally, by 2013, he had learned his lesson and simply refused to allow more than a modest bit of engagement in Syria. And thank God for that. If we had committed seriously to Syria, we’d be fighting a massive two-front war there to this day. Anybody who thinks otherwise is just not paying attention.

In the end, Obama wasn’t a transformative president. But that’s a high bar: in my book, FDR and Reagan are the only presidents of the past century who qualify. Still, Obama turned the battleship a few degrees more than most presidents, and we’re all better off for it. He also brought a certain amount of grace and civility to the White House, as well as a genuine willingness to work across the aisle. In the event, that turned out to be futile, because Republicans had already decided to oppose everything he did sight unseen. But he did try.

I don’t know how much of his legacy will survive. A fair amount, I think, since repealing things like Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and the Iran treaty are harder than they look. But some of it will fade or evaporate in the Trump era. And Obama was never able to make any headway against the anger that festers in the hearts of so many Americans toward the poor, the non-white, the non-male, the non-straight, and the non-Christian. Now this anger will guide our next four years. I miss him already, the best president of my lifetime.

Excerpt from – 

Thanks For Everything, President Obama. We’re Going to Miss You.

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Thanks For Everything, President Obama. We’re Going to Miss You.

North Carolina Statehouse in Chaos as Republicans Act to Maintain Grip on Power

by DemetriLabarber Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The North Carolina statehouse descended into chaos on Friday as Republican legislators scrambled to pass measures to limit the power of the incoming Democratic governor and protesters were removed from the chambers and arrested.

North Carolina Republicans are seeking to entrench their political power after Democrat Roy Cooper defeated Republican incumbent Pat McCrory in the governor’s race last month. The GOP-dominated state Legislature passed a measure Friday that was quickly signed by McCrory and will effectively give Republicans permanent control of the State Board of Elections during major election years. The Legislature is also considering bills that would drastically reduce the number of political appointees the governor can make and give the state Senate veto power over the governor’s Cabinet picks.

Protesters descended on the statehouse to call on lawmakers to respect the will of the voters. More than a dozen of them have been arrested and kicked out of both the House and Senate chambers during Friday’s special session. General Assembly Police Chief Martin Brock, speaking outside the chambers, said the protests are disrupting lawmakers, and he’ll arrest anyone “leading songs, chants, or cheers.” Even so, protesters continue to speak out and to burst into chants such as “All political power comes from the people!” and “Whose house? Our house!”

Tensions were just as high inside the chamber, where procedural disagreements between Democrats and Republicans led to a shouting match between legislators. Several legislators also complained that the protesters outside prevented them from hearing their colleagues’ remarks. But the noise did not stop the legislators from passing Senate Bill 4, the bill to overhaul the State Board of Elections and reduce the influence of the governor’s party. Democratic legislators have argued that the bill is overly broad and that the special session does not allow enough time to discuss it.

Democratic members of the House continued to debate the purpose of the special session and the lack of notice given to Democrats before it began. “I think we are doing great harm to our body when we don’t give members equal access,” one legislator said. Throughout the session, Democrats have argued that the session is a blatant attempt to curb the powers of the governor-elect. On Thursday, Cooper threatened to sue the Legislature over any new laws he deems unconstitutional.

On a call with reporters, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a leading candidate for Democratic National Committee chair, said that North Carolina Republicans were “undermining the democratic prerogatives of the people of North Carolina” and that the bills passed during the special session “would lead to unprecedented partisan gridlock” in the state. North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Robin Hayes released a statement calling the protesters a “small mob” that violated “the rights of over nine million citizens.”

The News and Observer has a livestream of the commotion in the statehouse:

Update 4:45 p.m.: The state House and Senate passed the bill stripping the governor of power over his own Cabinet and subjecting these appointments to state Senate confirmation. McCrory has yet to sign the bill.

This story has been updated to reflect McCrory’s signing of Senate Bill 4 and the comments from Ellison and Hayes.

Excerpt from – 

North Carolina Statehouse in Chaos as Republicans Act to Maintain Grip on Power

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on North Carolina Statehouse in Chaos as Republicans Act to Maintain Grip on Power

Hillary Clinton’s New Ad Will Remind You How Awful Trump Has Been to Veterans

by OpalZGOBforjovi Posted on September 19, 2016

Mother Jones

Donald Trump has said a lot of awful things, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign wants to make sure you don’t forget. Her latest campaign ad directly attacks Trump’s controversial statement last July that questioned Vietnam veteran and Arizona Sen. John McCain’s status as a war hero.

“He’s a war hero because he was captured—I like people who weren’t captured, okay?” Trump said, provoking the ire of numerous Republicans. Trump has yet to apologize for the comment.

The Clinton ad was timed to coincide with National Prisoners of War Remembrance Day, which took place on September 16, and features Joel Sollender, a prisoner of war who was captured by the Nazis during WWII. “Apart from the outrage of the insult to prisoners of war, he insulted all of our military,” says Sollender, who appeared to be choking back tears as he noted his war was both “70 years ago, and yesterday.”

“I would hope we would not adulate a man like him and put him into the most precious office in this country,” he concluded.

Trump, who received five deferments during the Vietnam War and has never served in the military, has had a number of controversies involving veterans. Earlier in January, Trump held a highly publicized fundraiser for veterans and promised to personally donate $1 million to veterans’ causes. The money only arrived four months later, after pressure from the Washington Post. In August, Trump came under fire again after he smeared Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of an American solider who had died in Afghanistan.

Original link:  

Hillary Clinton’s New Ad Will Remind You How Awful Trump Has Been to Veterans

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hillary Clinton’s New Ad Will Remind You How Awful Trump Has Been to Veterans

The Dallas Police Shooter Bought an AK-47 Via Facebook

by emiliachavez422 Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In 2014, Micah Johnson, who killed five police officers and injured seven in an ambush in Dallas last week, purchased an AK-47 rifle in a deal arranged through Facebook and finalized in a Target parking lot, according to the New York Daily News. In an interview with the Daily News, the seller, 26-year-old Colton Crews, said that Johnson “didn’t stand out as a nut job. He didn’t stand out as a crazy person at all.” In fact, because Johnson had been a US military service member, Crews said that “he was like your first pick when you’re selling a gun to somebody.”

The AK-47 was apparently not used in the Dallas attack. Citing an unnamed law enforcement official, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Johnson used an Izhmash-Saiga 5.45mm rifle, an AK-style variant, in the shooting. But news of the sale highlights just how easy it is to acquire a gun through Facebook. The social media giant has come under fire from activists who say the company isn’t doing enough to make sure the site isn’t used as an online weapons bazaar. In Texas, where Johnson purchased the AK-47 from Crews, background checks are not required in private sales, and Facebook pages dedicated to selling firearms are ubiquitous.

In the wake of the Orlando massacre last month, a disparate collection of individuals began taking to Facebook to report pages and individuals advertising gun sales in an attempt to get them kicked off the site for violating its user rules. In January, Facebook banned users from coordinating unregulated gun sales, but it has left the enforcement of the ban entirely to users who report violators.

In his interview with the Daily News, Crews said, “First off, it was my belief Johnson would have passed a background check. He didn’t seem weird in any way, just a normal guy.” At the Target parking lot where the deal was finalized, they made small talk. They checked out the AK-47, making sure it was in working condition, and Crews’ stepdad thanked Johnson for his service. Johson made a comment about how he missed the rifle’s firepower since returning home from Afghanistan. “He seems like he’s 100 percent on the up and up.”

This article is from:  

The Dallas Police Shooter Bought an AK-47 Via Facebook

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Dallas Police Shooter Bought an AK-47 Via Facebook

Why Are Dallas Police Linking the Shooter to Rap Group "Public Enemy"?

by PorterGunson65 Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In a press release late Friday, the Dallas Police Department provided details about their investigation into the gunman in Thursday’s mass shooting, 25-year-old Micah Johnson, a local resident and former soldier who served in Afghanistan. They said that a search of Johnson’s home revealed “bomb making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics.” Strangely, the Dallas PD included a couple of select details about Johnson’s Facebook account:

The suspect’s Facebook account included the following names and information: Fahed Hassen, Richard GRIFFIN aka Professor Griff, GRIFFIN embraces a radical form of Afrocentrism, and GRIFFIN wrote a book A Warriors Tapestry.

It is unclear why the Dallas PD chose to include this information regarding Griffin, who was a member of the seminal 1980s rap group Public Enemy. The press release contained no further context about it.

Johnson’s Facebook page (which is no longer available online) reportedly contained a photo of Johnson posing with Griffin, who quickly took to Twitter to say that he had no relationship with the attacker.

Read this article: 

Why Are Dallas Police Linking the Shooter to Rap Group "Public Enemy"?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Are Dallas Police Linking the Shooter to Rap Group "Public Enemy"?

Too Strong to Lose, Too Weak to Win

by DemetriaGrullon Posted on July 2, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

We live in an age of disintegration. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Across the vast swath of territory between Pakistan and Nigeria, there are at least seven ongoing wars—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan. These conflicts are extraordinarily destructive. They are tearing apart the countries in which they are taking place in ways that make it doubtful they will ever recover. Cities like Aleppo in Syria, Ramadi in Iraq, Taiz in Yemen, and Benghazi in Libya have been partly or entirely reduced to ruins. There are also at least three other serious insurgencies: In southeast Turkey, where Kurdish guerrillas are fighting the Turkish army, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where a little-reported but ferocious guerrilla conflict is underway, and in northeast Nigeria and neighboring countries where Boko Haram continues to launch murderous attacks.

All of these have a number of things in common: They are endless and seem never to produce definitive winners or losers. (Afghanistan has effectively been at war since 1979, Somalia since 1991.) They involve the destruction or dismemberment of unified nations, their de facto partition amid mass population movements and upheavals—well publicized in the case of Syria and Iraq, less so in places like South Sudan, where more than 2.4 million people have been displaced in recent years.

Add in one more similarity, no less crucial for being obvious: In most of these countries, where Islam is the dominant religion, extreme Salafi-Jihadi movements, including the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban are essentially the only available vehicles for protest and rebellion. By now, they have completely replaced the socialist and nationalist movements that predominated in the 20th century—these years have, that is, seen a remarkable reversion to religious, ethnic, and tribal identity, to movements that seek to establish their own exclusive territory by the persecution and expulsion of minorities.

In the process and under the pressure of outside military intervention, a vast region of the planet seems to be cracking open. Yet there is very little understanding of these processes in Washington. This was recently well illustrated by the protest of 51 State Department diplomats against President Obama’s Syrian policy and their suggestion that air strikes be launched targeting Syrian regime forces in the belief that President Bashar al-Assad would then abide by a ceasefire. The diplomats’ approach remains typically simpleminded in this most complex of conflicts, assuming as it does that the Syrian government’s barrel-bombing of civilians and other grim acts are the “root cause of the instability that continues to grip Syria and the broader region.”

It is as if the minds of these diplomats were still in the Cold War era, as if they were still fighting the Soviet Union and its allies. Against all the evidence of the last five years, there is an assumption that a barely extant moderate Syrian opposition would benefit from the fall of Assad, and a lack of understanding that the armed opposition in Syria is entirely dominated by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda clones.

Though the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is now widely admitted to have been a mistake (even by those who supported it at the time), no real lessons have been learned about why direct or indirect military interventions by the US and its allies in the Middle East over the last quarter century have all only exacerbated violence and accelerated state failure.

The Islamic State, just celebrating its second anniversary, is the grotesque outcome of this era of chaos and conflict. That such a monstrous cult exists at all is a symptom of the deep dislocation societies throughout that region, ruled by corrupt and discredited elites, have suffered. Its rise—and that of various Taliban and al-Qaeda-style clones—is a measure of the weakness of its opponents.

The Iraqi army and security forces, for example, had 350,000 soldiers and 660,000 police on the books in June 2014 when a few thousand Islamic State fighters captured Mosul, the country’s second largest city, which they still hold. Today the Iraqi army, security services, and about 20,000 Shia paramilitaries backed by the massive firepower of the United States and allied air forces have fought their way into the city of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, against the resistance of ISIS fighters who may have numbered as few as 900. In Afghanistan, the resurgence of the Taliban, supposedly decisively defeated in 2001, came about less because of the popularity of that movement than the contempt with which Afghans came to regard their corrupt government in Kabul.

Everywhere nation states are enfeebled or collapsing, as authoritarian leaders battle for survival in the face of mounting external and internal pressures. This is hardly the way the region was expected to develop. Countries that had escaped from colonial rule in the second half of the 20th century were supposed to become more, not less, unified as time passed.

Between 1950 and 1975, nationalist leaders came to power in much of the previously colonized world. They promised to achieve national self-determination by creating powerful independent states through the concentration of whatever political, military, and economic resources were at hand. Instead, over the decades, many of these regimes transmuted into police states controlled by small numbers of staggeringly wealthy families and a coterie of businessmen dependent on their connections to such leaders as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

In recent years, such countries were also opened up to the economic whirlwind of neoliberalism, which destroyed any crude social contract that existed between rulers and ruled. Take Syria. There, rural towns and villages that had once supported the Baathist regime of the al-Assad family because it provided jobs and kept the prices of necessities low were, after 2000, abandoned to market forces skewed in favor of those in power. These places would become the backbone of the post-2011 uprising. At the same time, institutions like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that had done so much to enhance the wealth and power of regional oil producers in the 1970s have lost their capacity for united action.

The question for our moment: Why is a “mass extinction” of independent states taking place in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond? Western politicians and media often refer to such countries as “failed states.” The implication embedded in that term is that the process is a self-destructive one. But several of the states now labeled “failed” like Libya only became so after Western-backed opposition movements seized power with the support and military intervention of Washington and NATO, and proved too weak to impose their own central governments and so a monopoly of violence within the national territory.

In many ways, this process began with the intervention of a US-led coalition in Iraq in 2003 leading to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the shutting down of his Baathist Party, and the disbanding of his military. Whatever their faults, Saddam and Libya’s autocratic ruler Muammar Gaddafi were clearly demonized and blamed for all ethnic, sectarian, and regional differences in the countries they ruled, forces that were, in fact, set loose in grim ways upon their deaths.

A question remains, however: Why did the opposition to autocracy and to Western intervention take on an Islamic form and why were the Islamic movements that came to dominate the armed resistance in Iraq and Syria in particular so violent, regressive, and sectarian? Put another way, how could such groups find so many people willing to die for their causes, while their opponents found so few? When ISIS battle groups were sweeping through northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, soldiers who had thrown aside their uniforms and weapons and deserted that country’s northern cities would justify their flight by saying derisively: “Die for then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki? Never!”

A common explanation for the rise of Islamic resistance movements is that the socialist, secularist, and nationalist opposition had been crushed by the old regimes’ security forces, while the Islamists were not. In countries like Libya and Syria, however, Islamists were savagely persecuted, too, and they still came to dominate the opposition. And yet, while these religious movements were strong enough to oppose governments, they generally have not proven strong enough to replace them.

Though there are clearly many reasons for the present disintegration of states and they differ somewhat from place to place, one thing is beyond question: The phenomenon itself is becoming the norm across vast reaches of the planet.

If you’re looking for the causes of state failure in our time, the place to start is undoubtedly with the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago. Once it was over, neither the US nor the new Russia that emerged from the Soviet Union’s implosion had a significant interest in continuing to prop up “failed states,” as each had for so long, fearing that the rival superpower and its local proxies would otherwise take over. Previously, national leaders in places like the Greater Middle East had been able to maintain a degree of independence for their countries by balancing between Moscow and Washington. With the break-up of the Soviet Union, this was no longer feasible.

In addition, the triumph of neoliberal free-market economics in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse added a critical element to the mix. It would prove far more destabilizing than it looked at the time.

Again, consider Syria. The expansion of the free market in a country where there was neither democratic accountability nor the rule of law meant one thing above all: Plutocrats linked to the nation’s ruling family took anything that seemed potentially profitable. In the process, they grew staggeringly wealthy, while the denizens of Syria’s impoverished villages, country towns, and city slums, who had once looked to the state for jobs and cheap food, suffered. It should have surprised no one that those places became the strongholds of the Syrian uprising after 2011. In the capital, Damascus, as the reign of neoliberalism spread, even the lesser members of the mukhabarat, or secret police, found themselves living on only $200 to $300 a month, while the state became a machine for thievery.

This sort of thievery and the auctioning off of the nation’s patrimony spread across the region in these years. The new Egyptian ruler, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, merciless toward any sign of domestic dissent, was typical. In a country that once had been a standard bearer for nationalist regimes the world over, he didn’t hesitate this April to try to hand over two islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia on whose funding and aid his regime is dependent. (To the surprise of everyone, an Egyptian court recently overruled Sisi’s decision.)

That gesture, deeply unpopular among increasingly impoverished Egyptians, was symbolic of a larger change in the balance of power in the Middle East: Once the most powerful states in the region, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq had been secular nationalists and a genuine counterbalance to Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf monarchies. As those secular autocracies weakened, however, the power and influence of the Sunni fundamentalist monarchies only increased. If 2011 saw rebellion and revolution spread across the Greater Middle East as the Arab Spring briefly blossomed, it also saw counterrevolution spread, funded by those oil-rich absolute Gulf monarchies, which were never going to tolerate democratic secular regime change in Syria or Libya.

Add in one more process at work making such states ever more fragile: the production and sale of natural resources—oil, gas, and minerals—and the kleptomania that goes with it. Such countries often suffer from what has become known as “the resources curse”: States increasingly dependent for revenues on the sale of their natural resources—enough to theoretically provide the whole population with a reasonably decent standard of living—turn instead into grotesquely corrupt dictatorships. In them, the yachts of local billionaires with crucial connections to the regime of the moment bob in harbors surrounded by slums running with raw sewage. In such nations, politics tends to focus on elites battling and maneuvering to steal state revenues and transfer them as rapidly as possible out of the country.

This has been the pattern of economic and political life in much of sub-Saharan Africa from Angola to Nigeria. In the Middle East and North Africa, however, a somewhat different system exists, one usually misunderstood by the outside world. There is similarly great inequality in Iraq or Saudi Arabia with similarly kleptocratic elites. They have, however, ruled over patronage states in which a significant part of the population is offered jobs in the public sector in return for political passivity or support for the kleptocrats.

In Iraq, with a population of 33 million people, for instance, no less than seven million of them are on the government payroll, thanks to salaries or pensions that cost the government $4 billion a month. This crude way of distributing oil revenues to the people has often been denounced by Western commentators and economists as corruption. They, in turn, generally recommend cutting the number of these jobs, but this would mean that all, rather than just part, of the state’s resource revenues would be stolen by the elite. This, in fact, is increasingly the case in such lands as oil prices bottom out and even the Saudi royals begin to cut back on state support for the populace.

Neoliberalism was once believed to be the path to secular democracy and free-market economies. In practice, it has been anything but. Instead, in conjunction with the resource curse, as well as repeated military interventions by Washington and its allies, free-market economics has profoundly destabilized the Greater Middle East. Encouraged by Washington and Brussels, 21st century neoliberalism has made unequal societies ever more unequal and helped transform already corrupt regimes into looting machines. This is also, of course, a formula for the success of the Islamic State or any other radical alternative to the status quo. Such movements are bound to find support in impoverished or neglected regions like eastern Syria or eastern Libya.

Note, however, that this process of destabilization is by no means confined to the Greater Middle East and North Africa. We are indeed in the age of destabilization, a phenomenon that is on the rise globally and at present spreading into the Balkans and Eastern Europe (with the European Union ever less able to influence events there). People no longer speak of European integration, but of how to prevent the complete break-up of the European Union in the wake of the British vote to leave.

The reasons why a narrow majority of Britons voted for Brexit have parallels with the Middle East: The free-market economic policies pursued by governments since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister have widened the gap between rich and poor and between wealthy cities and much of the rest of the country. Britain might be doing well, but millions of Britons did not share in the prosperity. The referendum about continued membership in the European Union, the option almost universally advocated by the British establishment, became the catalyst for protest against the status quo. The anger of the “Leave” voters has much in common with that of Donald Trump supporters in the United States.

The US remains a superpower, but is no longer as powerful as it once was. It, too, is feeling the strains of this global moment, in which it and its local allies are powerful enough to imagine they can get rid of regimes they do not like, but either they do not quite succeed, as in Syria, or succeed but cannot replace what they have destroyed, as in Libya. An Iraqi politician once said that the problem in his country was that parties and movements were “too weak to win, but too strong to lose.” This is increasingly the pattern for the whole region and is spreading elsewhere. It carries with it the possibility of an endless cycle of indecisive wars and an era of instability that has already begun.

Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the Independent of London and the author of five books on the Middle East, the latest of which is Chaos and Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East (OR Books).

Continue reading here: 

Too Strong to Lose, Too Weak to Win

Posted in alo, Brita, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, oven, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Too Strong to Lose, Too Weak to Win

Draft Registration Has Hurt American Men for Decades. Now It May Hurt Women, Too.

by EdwinFortin Posted on June 17, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Every month, on the sixth floor of an office building in Arlington, Virginia, the employees of a mostly forgotten government agency practice sending you to war.

They gather in a windowless white-and-turquoise conference room for what feels like the world’s saddest, most ominous Pick 6 drawing. At the far end, ping-pong balls are racked up inside a pair of plastic drums, big, clear hexagons that sit on pedestals above industrial gray carpeting. One holds 366 balls, each blue and labeled with a different day of the year, including leap day. The white balls in the other drum are numbered 1 to 366. The lower the number, the likelier a young man will be told to pick up a rifle.

The workers drop the balls out of their racks and send them bouncing around the drums, lottery-style. After a minute, a woman plucks one out and reads off the date: September 1. Another worker double-checks and barks out the date a second time, over the whir of the drum fans. Off to the side, a TV screen keeps track of the drawing results, a Microsoft Office version of the NFL’s fancy draft ticker. Then two other employees repeat the process with a numbered ball. They pull 235; September 1 babies are probably safe.

This is all a dry run. An actual military draft would be broadcast live across the country, watched by the same mix of young men, frantic parents, and rubberneckers who tuned in to witness the lotteries held during the Vietnam War. The real thing hasn’t been held in more than 40 years, and virtually no one believes it will ever be held again. That hasn’t stopped the government from continuing to fund the 124-person Selective Service System to the tune of $23 million a year, saying the independent agency—whose sole function is to administer the draft—is needed in case we ever face another large-scale war. “We’re a very inexpensive insurance policy,” says Lawrence Romo, a stout 59-year-old former Air Force officer who’s now the agency’s director. Every American man between 18 and 25 still has to register for the draft or face the consequences.

Now women, finally allowed into front-line combat positions this year, may have to join them.

Failure to register is a felony. It can theoretically land you in prison for five years or cost you a $250,000 fine. Selective Service still sends lists of nonregistrants to the Department of Justice in case the government feels like prosecuting anyone. Prosecutions don’t occur during peacetime, Romo assures me, but “severe consequences” still lurk. Men who don’t register before age 26 can’t hold most federal jobs or get federal government student loans. Many immigrants who arrive in the United States before they turn 26 can’t become citizens if they don’t register. A majority of states even make registration a requirement to get a driver’s license. And once you’ve missed the deadline, there’s no going back. (In 2014, 12 percent of men ages 18 to 25 failed to register.)

No agency tracks how many people are cut off from college loans and other federal programs each year, but the potential scope is huge. Last year, just over 58,000 young men asked Selective Service for a “status information letter” that tells them whether they’re registered or if they’re exempt from registering. (The agency doesn’t track its answers.) Such letters are often requested when students are trying to figure out if they’re eligible to apply for federal loans, appeal aid denial, or seek federal government jobs.

Karen McCarthy, a senior policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, calls linking federal loans to the draft a “whim of Congress to incorporate some kind of social agenda into the financial-aid eligibility process.” The federal student aid application, she points out, asks applicants only two specific questions about potential crimes: Did you register for Selective Service, and have you ever had a drug conviction? “We would love to see the Selective Service question removed entirely” from financial aid applications, she says.

But now the pool of registrants may be about to double. The Pentagon opened all of the military’s combat jobs to women in January, and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called on Congress to reexamine draft laws. House and Senate lawmakers have done so—and they have apparently decided it’s time for women to sign up for the draft as well. (Romo estimates that expanding his agency to register women will cost another $8 million a year and require 36 more employees.) First two Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee, both opposed to women in combat, pushed an amendment to the 2017 defense spending bill that required women to register, intending it as a “gotcha amendment” to prove that Democrats weren’t serious about allowing women to take combat jobs. The effort backfired when the measure passed their committee. And while the full House removed that language from its defense bill, the Senate this week passed its own version that requires women to start registering with Selective Service beginning in 2018.

The House and Senate now have to come up with a compromise version of the defense bill, and President Barack Obama has threatened to veto it because of a provision that bans closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Drafting women doesn’t sit well with opponents of Selective Service, including Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who has repeatedly introduced bills to kill the draft altogether during peacetime. He argues that the current system has “outmoded computers” and “inaccurate lists” and wouldn’t be effective even if needed. “I am not about to revise the Selective Service and say we should now take the other half of young people in America and subject them to the same stupid, unnecessary, mean-spirited, wasteful bureaucracy,” he says of including women.

The United States first conscripted soldiers during the Civil War and did so again for World Wars I and II. All three times, the draft went away when the wars ended. It wasn’t until the Cold War that the draft became a peacetime fixture. It remained in effect until the US military became an all-volunteer force in 1973. Only in 1980 did registration return, and the impetus was geopolitical brinksmanship. “President Carter decided that, given the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, we wanted to show our resolve—and that we would do that by registering,” says Bernard Rostker, then the head of the Selective Service agency and now a senior fellow at the RAND Corporation.

Despite once overseeing the process, Rostker argues that registration has always been pointless. Young men are required to keep Selective Service apprised of address changes, but few do. In 1982, just two years after draft registration had resumed, the US General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office) found that 20 to 40 percent of the addresses for 20-year-olds were outdated. The GAO pegged the number at 75 percent for 26-year-olds. In the event of an emergency call-up, Rostker says, a huge chunk of records would be useless.

Then there’s the question of whether draftees would even be helpful to the military. “The fact of the matter is we have a high-tech military,” Rostker says. “I don’t see us needing 600,000 untrained people. I don’t have any idea what the hell we would do with them.”

See more here:  

Draft Registration Has Hurt American Men for Decades. Now It May Hurt Women, Too.

Posted in Casio, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Stout, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Draft Registration Has Hurt American Men for Decades. Now It May Hurt Women, Too.