Will the US ever be held accountable for its war crimes?

Jean Perier
New Eastern Outlook

For more than a decade, the United States has been steadily increasing the scale of its illegal military operations across the Middle East, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

Eighteen years ago, the US invaded Afghanistan under the pretext of ousting the Taliban who allegedly granted sanctuary to Al-Qaeda. According to a study released by Brown University, more than 140,000 Afghan militants and civilians have died in the fight.

Since December 2001, the United States has been conducting various operations in Somali, and even today the Pentagon carries out both air strikes and ground operations, accompanied by a constant toll of civilian lives.

Back in 2003, Washington launched Operation Iraq Freedom to strip Saddam Hussein of WMDs he didn't even have and to convert Iraq into a «democracy», plunging this country into a state of perpetual chaos guaranteeing that it will remain a Western bastion in the Arab and Islamic World for years to come.

Eight years ago, the US succeeded in destabilizing Libya, when US warplanes attacked the troops of Libya's most successful ruler to date - Muammar Gaddafi. Back then, Washington took every step to ensure his government would be ousted and and its key leaders murdered. The Libyan conflict has since produced tens of thousands of dead. In 2016, Barack Obama said that Libya was probably the "worst mistake" of his presidency.

The seven years of war in Syria resulted in a death toll of half a million Syrian nationals. Here, American troops are stationed illegally to fight ISIS and "indigenous ground forces." The strange wording that Washington uses in its official rhetoric is no coincidence, since more than on one occasion US armed forces have opened fire on both Syrian government troops and civilians, with no official rationale ever being given to explain this brutality.

In Yemen, the United States has been backing Saudi Arabia's efforts to put an end to the Houthi rebellion for three years. Washington carries on supplying Saudi authorities with high-precision weapons, combat aircraft and intelligence. This war has already triggered the largest humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century, with 20 million people finding themselves on the brink of starvation. 

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US Killing Civilians With 'Impunity' in Hidden War on Somalia: Report

Common Dreams 

"The attacks appear to have violated international humanitarian law."

A human rights group is accusing the United States of waging a shadow air war in Somalia that is killing civilians with abandon. 

Amnesty International issued its findings on the African war Tuesday evening in a report titled The Hidden US War in Somalia (pdf).

The U.S. has been covertly engaging in conflicts in Somalia for decades, but in April 2017, the Donald Trump administration upped airstrikes and attacks targeted at the rebel group Al-Shabaab.

The human rights advocacy group studied five of more than 100 strikes on Somalia over the past two years and found that 14 civilians were killed in the attacks. Eight others were injured, the report says.

"These five incidents were carried out with Reaper drones and manned aircraft in Lower Shabelle," Amnesty said in a press release, "a region largely under Al-Shabaab control outside the Somali capital Mogadishu."

The U.S. military denied to Amnesty that any civilians have been killed as a result of American operations in Somalia.

However, Amnesty's report claims its methodology is sound and that the evidence is overwhelming. 

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Obama Creates New Al-Qaeda Out Of Thin Air To Justify His Somalia War

Michael Kreiger
Liberty Blitzkrieg

An article published in The New York Times this past Sunday perfectly demonstrates how out of control and unconstitutional America’s foreign policy has become. It highlights the latest war being perpetrated by the Obama administration, which is expanding with very little scrutiny from the press or the government branch supposedly in charge of waging war, the U.S. Congress.

The latest growing battlefield is in Somalia, and it threatens to spiral out of control just like so many other undeclared war zones before it. From the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — The escalating American military engagement in Somalia has led the Obama administration to expand the legal scope of the war against Al Qaeda, a move that will strengthen President-elect Donald J. Trump’s authority to combat thousands of Islamist fighters in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation.

Is it “a move that will strengthen President-elect Donald J. Trump’s authority to combat thousands,” or is it a move that will allow Trump to also engage in endless, unconstitutional war?

The administration has decided to deem the Shabab, the Islamist militant group in Somalia, to be part of the armed conflict that Congress authorized against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to senior American officials. The move is intended to shore up the legal basis for an intensifying campaign of airstrikes and other counterterrorism operations, carried out largely in support of African Union and Somali government forces.

The executive branch’s stretching of the 2001 war authorization against the original Al Qaeda to cover other Islamist groups in countries far from Afghanistan — even ones, like the Shabab, that did not exist at the time — has prompted recurring objections from some legal and foreign policy experts.

Would you look at that. Shabab didn’t even exists on 9/11, yet Obama is using 9/11 authority against al-Qaeda to wage war without Congressional approval. He is literally creating new al-Qaeda out of thin air.

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Armies and Police Are Being Privatized Around the World and Business Is Booming

 

 An American private security guard pushes back Iraqi demonstrators in Baghdad.

Slate
By Elliot Hannon

In a world where budgets are tight, and bottom lines daunting, it makes sense that governments around the world have to do more with less, or they just have to do less. Surprisingly, one part of the state apparatus that most countries seem happy to outsource is one of its most fundamental—security. At home, cash-strapped American cities, and even communities, are turning to private forces to protect public order. And a report out of the UN on Monday shows that the private security industry is experiencing a global economic boom that many of its customers would love—the shadowy industry is growing at 7.4 percent a year and is on target to balloon to a $244 billion global market by 2016.

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. is the world’s biggest spender on private security, totaling $138 billion a year, thanks in large part to a spike in demand during the concurrent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the report, last year the Pentagon spent $44 billion on mercenaries in the two countries combined and in 2011 the U.S. spent $3 billion alone on a five-year deal for private protection for the U.S. embassy building in Baghdad. But, as the American military presence diminishes, much of the outsourced security work is transitioning to police work, with protection of oil company assets abroad also on the rise.

Outside of war zones, contractors have flocked to the perilous shipping routes off the Somali coast that are particularly high risk because of pirates. More than 140 private companies now patrol those waters. The ongoing shift towards private forces poses huge regulatory issues, particularly the registering and licensing of private contractors and the absence of internationally binging legal codes, according to the report. The UN itself is a major employer of private security firms and the report warned "there is a risk that, without proper standards and oversight, the outsourcing of security functions by the United Nations to private companies could have a negative effect on the image and effectiveness of the United Nations in the field."

World War III: The Launching of a Preemptive Nuclear War against Iran

Global research

By Michel Chossudovsky

The launching of an outright war using nuclear warheads against Iran has been on the active drawing board of the Pentagon since 2005.  

If such a war were to be launched, the entire Middle East Central Asia region would flare up.  Humanity would be precipitated into a World War III Scenario. 

World War III is not front-page news. The mainstream media has excluded in-depth analysis and debate on the implications of these war plans. 

The onslaught of World War III, were it to be carried out, would be casually described as a "no-fly zone", an operation under NATO's "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) with minimal "collateral damage" or a "limited" punitive bombing against specific military targets, all of which purport to support "Global Security" as well as "democracy" and human rights in the targeted country.  

Public opinion is largely unaware of the grave implications of these war plans, which contemplate the use of nuclear weapons, ironically in retaliation to Iran's nonexistent nuclear weapons program. 

Moreover, 21st Century military technology is at an advanced stage of development combining an array of sophisticated weapons systems.   

We are at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in World history. 

The future of humanity is at stake.  

The present situation is one of advanced war planning by a formidable military force using nuclear warheads.

The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest.

The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the World simultaneously.

Militarization at the global level is instrumented through the US military's Unified Command structure: the entire planet is divided up into geographic Combatant Commands under the control of the Pentagon. According to (former) NATO Commander General Wesley Clark, the Pentagon’s military road-map consists of a sequence of war theaters: “[The] five-year campaign plan [includes]... a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.” 

Military action is waged in the name of the "Global War on Terrorism" and Global Security. It has a stated "humanitarian" "pro-democracy" mandate. 

It is predicated on the notion that the West's arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons are (in contrast to those [nonexistent] of the Islamic Republic), according to expert scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon, "harmless to the surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground."

Irresponsible politicians are unaware of the implications of their actions. They believe their own war propaganda: nuclear weapons are heralded as an instrument of peace and democracy. 

War is heralded as a peace-keeping making operation carried out with the support of the "international community". 

The victims of war are described as the perpetrators. Iran and Syria constitute a threat to Global Security thereby justifying pre-emptive military action. 

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Somalis Under Relentless Drone Attack as U.S. Tightens Military Grip on Continent

Uruknet

Africa, under President Obama, is an expanding theater of war for the United States. There are few points on the African map where the U.S. military does not operate, independently, through proxies, or by agreement with local governments and militaries. AFRICOM has penetrated the armed forces of the continent to a degree no single European power could have ever aspired. Indeed, "the U.S. has so thoroughly infiltrated African armies, many, if not most, would be of no use for national defense against the Americans."

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Drones Evolve Into Weapon in Age of Terror

Wall Street Journal

The Sept. 11 attacks triggered a revolution in U.S. spycraft as the intelligence services shattered a longstanding taboo by launching an expansive program of targeted killings by remote control. The greatest shift both in tactics and mindset has been the embrace of the pilotless, hunter-killer aircraft known as drones. The CIA, which doesn't formally acknowledge the covert program, has killed about 2,000 militants with drones, U.S. officials say, most in the past two years as President Barack Obama's national security team aggressively expanded the program. In 2010, the number of drone strikes more than doubled, to 114, and this year, drone campaigns are expanding.

The CIA now plans flights in Yemen, and the military is using drones to kill militants in Somalia. Legal challenges to the drone program have secured little traction. The main debate inside the government has been over how to execute the campaign without irreversibly damaging Pakistani cooperation. American citizens can be targets, too. Under the legal authority for the drone program, the CIA must consult the National Security Council before capturing an American posing an imminent threat, but no additional consultation is required to kill an American, a former senior intelligence official said. "The reason there hasn't been more of an outcry about it is, it's the Obama administration defending this authority," said the American Civil Liberties Union's Jameel Jaffer.

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US prepares for military intervention in Somalia

WSWS

The Obama administration is preparing a new military intervention in Somalia under the pretext of humanitarian concern for starving drought victims. The media has fallen into line with a campaign mixing crocodile tears and hand-wringing with denunciations of the Islamist movement al-Shabaab, which is blamed for the deepening crisis.

Just as the bombing campaign in Libya was launched with appeals to save the civilian population of Benghazi from slaughter, so now a fresh intervention is being prepared in Africa supposedly to save the starving children of Somalia. This is a cynical exercise in public deception.

Al-Shabaab is at most 10,000 strong, according to a report produced for the US Council on Foreign Relations. Its most loyal forces probably amount to only a few hundred fighters. It has no organisational connections to Al Qaeda, according to the National Counterterrorism Center.

Yet US officials blame this organisation for the present famine. "The relentless terrorism by al-Shabaab against its people has turned an already severe situation into a dire one that is only expected to get worse," US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared last week.

In fact, it is Washington that has denied aid to all areas of Somalia that are not under the control of the US-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG), meaning that aid is restricted to a few square miles. "We are committed to saving lives in Somalia and we are already working in any area not controlled by al-Shabaab," Donald Steinberg, deputy administrator of USAid told a press conference in London. "Unfortunately, about 60 percent of people affected are in al-Shabaab territories." [...]

US extends drone strikes to Somalia

Guardian

  

The US has conducted its first drone strike on Islamist militants in Somalia, marking the expansion of the pilotless war campaign to a sixth country.

The missile strike on a vehicle in the southern town of Kismayo, reported last week as a helicopter assault, wounded two senior militants with al-Shabab and several foreign fighters according to the Washington Post.

Armed Predator and Reaper drones already operate in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya, where they are controlled by the US military or the CIA.

The CIA-run programmes are controversial. Although they provide the Obama administration with a low-risk weapon against Islamist militants, they stir intense anti-American hostility among the local population.

Opposition is most vociferous in Pakistan, where the government said on Wednesday it was shutting down a big CIA drone base, and had ordered US personnel based there to leave.

The closure of Shamsi airbase is unlikely to end the strikes. The CIA has moved its drones to bases across the border in Afghanistan, and some strikes have already taken place from there, according to a senior Pakistani military official. [...]

Peace prize winner Obama waging seven wars

The Guardian

The US has conducted its first drone strike on Islamist militants in Somalia, marking the expansion of the pilotless war campaign to a sixth country.

The missile strike on a vehicle in the southern town of Kismayo, reported last week as a helicopter assault, wounded two senior militants with al-Shabab and several foreign fighters according to the Washington Post.

Armed Predator and Reaper drones already operate in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya, where they are controlled by the US military or the CIA.

The CIA-run programmes are controversial. Although they provide the Obama administration with a low-risk weapon against Islamist militants, they stir intense anti-American hostility among the local population.

Opposition is most vociferous in Pakistan, where the government said on Wednesday it was shutting down a big CIA drone base, and had ordered US personnel based there to leave.

The closure of Shamsi airbase is unlikely to end the strikes. The CIA has moved its drones to bases across the border in Afghanistan, and some strikes have already taken place from there, according to a senior Pakistani military official.

Racked by decades of civil war, Somalia has become an al-Qaida hub, after Yemen and Pakistan's tribal belt. The US military previously targeted militants based there using helicopter gunships, special forces teams and cruise missiles fired from aircraft carriers.

The US has also flown surveillance drones over Somalia – one was shot down in October 2009 – but now they are being used for assassination. The targets of the 23 June strike were reportedly close to Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula.

In May, Awlaki escaped a drone strike in Yemen carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command, an elite military unit that orchestrated the Osama bin Laden raid. Now control of the Yemen strikes is reported to be passing to the CIA.

The closure of Shamsi airbase is a blow to President Barack Obama efforts to flush al-Qaida from Pakistan. Shamsi, in western Balochistan province, was the launchpad for strikes against al-Qaida and Taliban militants in the tribal belt, particularly in Waziristan.

Washington politicians have warmly embraced the drone strikes, which allow them to target elusive enemies in remote parts of the world with little risk to US personnel. In Pakistan, drone strikes have killed 2,500 people since 2004, according to higher estimates.

Military analysts say they represent the future of airborne warfare. Ground personnel help the pilotless craft take off, but control quickly passes to remote-control pilots stationed thousands of miles away in the US.

The CIA drones are controlled from a suburban facility near the spy agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, while military drones are controlled from airbases in Texas, Nevada and elsewhere.

Shamsi was built by Arab sheikhs for falcon hunting trips, but has been occupied by the CIA since at least 2004, when Google Earth images showed Predator drones parked on the runway.

Pakistani defence ministry officials said they were closing the base in retaliation to slowed payments from the coalition support fund – a multibillion-dollar US subsidy for Pakistani military operations.

A senior US official in Islamabad said the government was engaging in "diplomacy by headlines" but Pakistan's leaders are also responding to hostile public opinion. A recent Pew poll found that just 3% of Pakistanis favoured drone strikes.

The CIA is likely to continue its Pakistan campaign from its Afghan bases. In unusually direct comments on Wednesday, Obama's counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan said the US would continue to "deliver precise and overwhelming force against al-Qaida" in the tribal areas.

The widening drone campaign has elicited concerns from human rights activists about civilian casualties, and from legal experts about the consequences of an unaccountable form of warfare. Last year a senior UN official warned of the risks of a "PlayStation warfare" mentality.

These attacks are legal - Until Obama Declares War

Independent

There exists no legal justification for Barack Obama's use of drones in Pakistan and other states where there is no declared war. Yet his Administration, in an effort to justify its behaviour, has argued that because the US is at war with al-Qa'ida, the Taliban and associated forces it may "use ... lethal force, to defend itself" and it is "not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force."

This absurd rationalisation mimics the self-serving arguments behind the discredited US detention and interrogation policies at places including Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and in CIA black sites across eastern Europe. The Administration has also failed to address crucial legal issues, most notably including who exactly may be targeted by the drones and what is the precise scope of the conflict. Instead, the Obama Administration has attempted to ward off the human rights community by keeping the drone programme shrouded in secrecy.

Philip Alston, as UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, has condemned the "continuing refusal ... to provide the international community with the information that would satisfy its obligations in relation to transparency and accountability" and cautioned that the US role as "the most enthusiastic and prolific proponent of targeted killings" would result in "grave damage ... to the legal framework that the international community has so painstakingly constructed to protect the right to life."

But the Administration cannot keep the law at bay for much longer. Reprieve has partnered with Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar to bring civil and criminal litigation for families of drone victims. If the illegality fails to prick President Obama's conscience, the emergence of evidence in various courts just might. 

Tara Murray is a staff attorney at Reprieve