“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
Less than one month after the attacks of Sept. 11, a senior FBI official, Ronald Dick, told the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, “Due to the vital importance of water to all life forms ... the FBI considers all threats to attack the water supply as serious threats.” In 2003, a UPI article reported that an al-Qaida operative “(does not rule out) using Sarin gas and poisoning drinking water in U.S. and Western cities.’” Where the terrorists have failed to mount any attack on a water supply, the Michigan state government has succeeded. In the city of Flint, lead-poisoned water has been piped into homes and offices since 2014, causing widespread illness and potentially permanent brain damage among its youngest residents.
Michigan has one of the most severe “emergency manager” laws in the country, allowing the governor to appoint an unelected agent to take over local governments when those locales or institutions have been deemed to be in a “financial emergency.” Republican Gov. Rick Snyder pushed for and obtained two bills that strengthened the law, and has used it aggressively to impose his version of fiscal austerity on cities like Detroit, Benton Harbor, several large school districts and, now most notoriously, on Flint. In every case but one, the emergency manager has taken over cities that are majority African-American. The emergency manager is granted sweeping powers to override local, democratically elected governments and to make cuts to budgets, sell public property, cancel or renegotiate labor contracts and essentially govern like a dictator.
In April 2014, Darnell Earley, the fourth of five Flint emergency managers appointed by Snyder, unilaterally decided to switch Flint’s water source from Detroit’s water system, with water from Lake Huron that they had been using for 50 years, to the long-contaminated Flint River. Flint residents immediately noticed discoloration and bad smells from the water, and experienced an array of health impacts, like rashes and hair loss. In October 2014, General Motors decided it would no longer use Flint city water in its plants, as it was corroding metal car parts. Later, trihalomethanes, a toxic byproduct of water treatment, were found in the water. Despite that, the water was declared safe by officials. At the same time, as revealed in an email later obtained by Progress Michigan, the state began shipping coolers of clean, potable water to the state office building in Flint. This was more than a year before Gov. Snyder would admit that the water was contaminated.
Ongoing activism by Flint residents whose children were sick attracted the involvement of water researchers from Virginia Tech, who found that 10,000 residents had been exposed to elevated lead levels. It took out-of-state researchers from Virginia to travel all the way to Michigan to conduct the comprehensive tests needed. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha then got involved. She is the director of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Children’s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at Michigan State University. She discovered an alarming connection between rising blood lead levels in Flint’s children with the switch to the Flint River as a water source.
“The percentage of children with elevated lead levels doubled in the whole city, and in some neighborhoods, it tripled,” she told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “And it directly correlated with where the water lead levels were the highest.”
Rather than going after the problem she identified, the state went after her. “We were attacked,” she recalled. “I was called an ‘unfortunate researcher,’ that I was causing near hysteria, that I was splicing and dicing numbers, and that the state data was not consistent with my data. And as a scientist ... when the state, with a team of 50 epidemiologists, tells you you’re wrong, you second-guess yourself.” Within weeks, state authorities were forced to admit she was right. Soon after, she was standing at the governor’s side, and has just been appointed to run a new public health initiative to help those exposed to the contamination.
A chorus of Flint residents and allies are demanding immediate action to ensure safe, clean water to the people of Flint. Many are calling for Gov. Snyder to resign, or even to be arrested. The FBI and the Justice Department are now investigating to see if any laws were broken. This week, the House held a hearing on the crisis, during which Houston Congressmember Sheila Jackson Lee compared the poisoning of Flint residents to the 1978 mass suicide and murder in Jonestown, Guyana. There, cult leader Jim Jones ordered his 900 followers, 300 of them children, to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Those victims died instantly. In Flint, the tragedy will unfold over decades.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,300 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan, of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
The American public has been shocked to discover that the people of Flint, including children, have been being poisoned with lead by their municipal water supply since April of 2014. The questions of who took the decision to draw water from the heavily polluted Flint River, and why, have been fiercely debated in recent months. But one thing seems clear. The Flint public was deprived of an effective voice and had difficulty being heard. In essence, Flint’s population was under colonial rule because its local democratic institutions were sidelined by the state. For similar reasons, the population of Gaza, under Israeli occupation and blockade, is facing a severe water crisis. In both places, local people have been deprived of autonomy, and they face a severe public-health crisis as a result. Michigan has become more and more immune to public input. The state once had a Michigan Water Resources Commission, a Michigan Toxic Substance Control Commission, and a Michigan Environmental Review Board. A Republican governor established the latter in the 1970s to ensure that there would be “a public forum where citizens had standing without hiring a lawyer.” In the 1980s and 1990s Governors James Blanchard and John Engler gutted those commissions and the MERB. Other than the rich, Michiganders lost standing. Then when Governor Rick Snyder came into office, he split the Department of Natural Resources from the Department of Environmental Quality, which had the effect of making the latter more technocratic and less open to public feedback. He also immediately reduced their total funding by nearly 11 percent, telegraphing his lack of interest in things like state water quality. As a matter of political philosophy, the MDEQ was pervaded by a dislike of regulation, so that department officials took a minimalist approach to water purity and disputed any challenge to their consensus that Flint water was just fine. The Michigan Republican Party in 2011 passed the notorious Emergency Manager Law, which allowed the governor effectively to seize control of municipal governments and school boards with budget over-runs, and to appoint an outsider with a charge to impose austerity and fiscal discipline. Michiganders, outraged, struck the law down by a referendum vote in 2012. The Republican majority in the state legislation reinstated the law and forbade further referendum challenges. Critics charged that the law was implemented in a racially invidious manner. By 2013 half of the state’s African-American population was being ruled by the governor’s appointed viceroys. Moreover, the conviction of the emergency managers that there was enough money in some of these communities to provide the governance necessary to residents’ well-being, if only it was properly managed, was misplaced. Austerity is not always compatible with effective police, fire departments, and public health. Snyder’s appointment of a series of emergency managers for Flint took many important decisions out of the hands of local government. While mayors and city councils still existed, they were inclined to go along with EM decisions (their votes were merely symbolic, in any case, since the governor had castrated them politically). And, of course, the EMs themselves answered to the governor’s office. Indeed, at some point in the process of switching from the Detroit Water and Sewage Department-provided water to the Flint River for the city’s water supply, Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz was advised by the MDEQ not to resort to the highly polluted river, and very possibly was over-ruled on this issue by Governor Snyder himself. Local voters, who had had their franchise stolen from them, were incredulous at the idea of drinking Flint River water, having watched GM and other industries dump toxic pollutants into it for decades. But Flint is not a city full of wealthy people, and the cost of drinking only bottled water drove many to make their peace with the foul-smelling tap water. They lost hair, developed rashes, and experienced other obvious symptoms of lead poisoning, and raised these concerns with officials. The emergency managers and the governor turned a deaf ear. It did not help that MDEQ staffers did not insist on the corrosive water’s being treated before being put into ancient lead pipes, and later did a shockingly poor job of testing the water. In spring of 2015, a year into one of the great public-health debacles in American history, the Flint City Council staged a symbolic protest vote in favor of abandoning Flint River water and spending $12 million a year to reconnect with the Detroit Water and Sewage Department. The emergency manager dismissed the demand as incomprehensible. The city council was powerless. Only when physicians and scientists like Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha went public was the governor finally forced to acknowledge the crisis and begin taking steps to address it.
It is clear that both the initial decision making and the subsequent studied dismissal of public and expert concerns derived from a form of colonial government. Flint was being run from Lansing, for the priorities of a Republican governor and legislature suspicious of regulation and convinced that government should be small and inexpensive. They also believe that elected municipal officials (apparently especially if in minority-dominated cities) need oversight because of an innate tendency to irresponsibility. Just as Flint residents were disenfranchised by the Emergency Manager Law and had their access to a basic staple like clean water denied by decisions made by bureaucrats they did not elect, so the Palestinians of Gaza lack the basic rights of citizenship. Israel invaded Gaza and ruled it directly from 1967 to 2005. It still prevents Palestinians from farming one-third of its land, denies it a seaport and an airport, and closely controls building and other materials going into the surrounded territory. Palestinians do not control their land, their water, or the air over their heads. Since 2007, the people of Gaza have been under siege by the Israeli government, which is recognized as the occupation power. The Geneva Convention on the treatment of occupied populations of 1949 were enacted to forestall further crimes of the sort the Axis powers committed in the places they occupied during World War II. The convention makes occupying powers responsible for the health and well-being of the peoples they dominate. The Israeli government’s fiction that it withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and may now treat the small strip and its trapped population as a belligerent independent state, has been repeatedly rejected by the international community. Israel is responsible for the Palestinians of Gaza.
The residents of Gaza would immediately recognize and empathize with the woes of the people of Flint. Over 90 percent of the water in the Strip is undrinkable. Umm Ibrahim Amna Abdel’al complained to RT, “We can’t drink it, cook with it, or wash in the kitchen with it…. We are forced to buy all the clean water separately.” The Israeli assaults, with massive aerial bombardments, of 2008-9 and 2014, did extensive damage to sewage and water pipes and other water infrastructure. In the 2014 Israeli assault, about 12 percent of Gaza’s wells were damaged or ruined in Gaza City, Beit Hanoun, and Deir al-Balah. Some 33,000 meters of water and sewage networks were damaged in Khan Younis and 6300 meters in Gaza City. Raw sewage was unleashed by Israeli bombs onto farmland and into pools and the sea. Broken drinking-water pipes are susceptible to its contamination. Power is often not available to pump water and run the sewage-treatment plants. Israeli restrictions on import of materials necessary to reconstruction have interfered with building and infrastructure repairs. Pipes are so damaged and leaky that even when Israel tried to send in extra water last spring, in accordance with its obligations under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian water system was unable efficiently to deliver it to residents. Salt water is seeping into the water supply, as are nitrates. Nitrate contamination poses a special danger to pregnant women and infants and produces “blue baby syndrome,” interfering with the ability of the child’s blood to carry oxygen. Sodium in water can cause nausea, vomiting, convulsions, and cerebral and pulmonary edema (water on the brain or in the lungs), and can aggravate congestive hear failure in adults. In infants with gastrointestinal infections, whose kidneys do not flush the sodium so effectively from the body, it can cause permanent neurological damage. A UN agency concluded last fall that Gaza, with 1.8 million inhabitants, could be uninhabitable by 2020, in part because of lack of potable water. Were the Palestinians to be forced out of their homes yet again (a majority of families in the Strip were expelled from what is now Israel by Zionist forces in the 1948 war), they certainly would join the tragic stream of refugees heading for Europe over the treacherous Mediterranean. Israeli complaints that Gaza is controlled by the party-militia, Hamas, freely elected in 2006, and that Hamas fires (mostly small, home-made and ineffectual) rockets into Israel, are irrelevant to the requirement that civilian noncombatants in Gaza be provided with basic staples by the occupying authority. Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas militants, but may not do so with reckless disregard for noncombatant life. The international law of occupation requires that, “To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the occupying power must ensure sufficient hygiene and public health standards, as well as the provision of food and medical care to the population under occupation.” Half of the population of Gaza is children, who are not exactly members of or decision-makers in Hamas. The problem for Palestinians is that they are stateless. A people with a state would have a port through which to import reconstruction material. It would have the sovereignty to operate that port. It could set its own development agenda. Its complaints would be heard by local officials capable of acting, whose hands were not tied by distant decision-makers in Tel Aviv.
Both in Flint and in Gaza, people are suffering from lack of clean water. In both places, the ultimate crisis is a crisis of democracy and full citizenship. Emergency managers appointed from a distant capital are no more cognizant of local conditions or responsive to popular complaints than are military governors of an occupying Power. Water is too necessary and human life too precious to allow them to be subordinated to other considerations, of abstract political philosophy or forms of exclusive ethnic nationalism. All human beings have a right to clean, free water. Leaders not only fail but discredits themselves when they do not provide a framework allowing the achievement of that goal.
Frustrated with the New York Times’ unfair coverage of Israel and Palestine, human rights campaigners took matters into their own hands on Tuesday, printing and distributing a stunning 10,000 parody versions of the paper that imagine the premier news outlet as responsible and balanced.
Titled “Rethinking our 2015 Coverage on Israel-Palestine: A Supplement,” the satirical issue hit the streets of New York blaring headlines such as “In the Footsteps of Mandela and King: A Non-Violent Movement Gains Ground Ten Years On,” a reference to the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel. Other articles are titled, “Congress to Debate U.S. Aid to Israel” and "IDF Generals Blame Israeli Government for Recent Violence."
One story reveals that, following his trip to Israel, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio will hold a conference on Islamophobia at Brooklyn College. Another article announces that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has decided to ditch her presidential bid and will instead become director of the nonprofit Human Rights for All Women Foundation, which is based in Ramallah, New York, Nairobi and Charleston.
10,000 parody versions of the New York Times hit the streets Tuesday. (Image: Jewish Voice for Peace)
The prank paper even goes so far as to include an advertisement for the company Shalom Cement, which builds “the finest separation walls.” The spoof continues: “No walls say ‘apartheid' like Shalom Cement.”
The prank includes an important Corrections section, which notes: “It has come to our attention that the vast majority of articles about violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories have failed to include the names of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.”
The stunt quickly captured attention and headlines, with the Village Voice speculating that the paper was the work of the Yes Men, who produced their own spoof New York Times edition in 2008 announcing the end of the Iraq war. But the mystery was put to rest Wednesday when groups including Jewish Voice for Peace New York, Jews Say No! and two other unnamed New York organizations “devoted to justice in Palestine and Israel" claimed responsibility in a press statement which was first reported by Salon.
“The articles highlight Israel’s ongoing policies of military occupation, displacement, and oppression, and ‘facts on the ground,’ such as settlement expansion, the rise in settler violence, discriminatory anti-democratic laws targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel and the increase of right-wing voices in the Knesset,” the organizations declared.
“As a leading source for news in the United States and in the world, the New York Times has a responsibility to its readers to provide fair, balanced, and fact-based coverage. Our paper reflects the news that we wish the Times and other papers would report,” said Jewish Voice for Peace New York organizer Candace Graff. “It includes the context and facts too often missing from the New York Times and other U.S. media outlets.”
Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for Common Dreams, Sarah co-edited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare.
The GOP Choice in Iowa is Carpet-Bombing Jesus Loving Ted Cruz:
Washington (CNN)The top U.S. commander for the fight against ISIS on Monday slammed the idea of "carpet bombing" the terror group.
Army Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who directs the coalition fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria, provided the most detailed military criticism to date about the concept and detailed why it's militarily unacceptable.
"Indiscriminate bombing where we don't care if we are killing innocents or combatants is just inconsistent with our values," he said in response to a question from CNN on the possibility of using carpet bombing.
Though MacFarland didn't mention any political candidates by name in his answer, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas while on the campaign trail has called for employing the practice against ISIS.
The US is killing more civilians in Iraq and Syria than it acknowledges
The immediate aftermath of a coalition airstrike on Syria in October, 2015.
Al Gharra is a mud-brick village built on hard, flat Syrian desert and populated by the descendants of Bedouin. It is a desolate place. Everything is dun colored: the bare, single-story houses and the stony desert they stand on. There is not much farming — it is too dry — just a few patches of cotton and tobacco.
Before the war, villagers got a little money from the government to look after the national park on Mount Abdul-Aziz, a barren rock that rises 3,000 feet behind the village and stretches miles into the distance. Mount Abdul-Aziz is named after a lieutenant of the 12th-Century Muslim warrior Saladin, who built a fort to dominate the plain below. There is a military base there today too, which changes hands according to the fortunes of Syria’s civil war. In 2011, the regime of Bashar al-Assad held the base; next it was the rebels of the Free Syrian Army; then the so-called “Islamic State” (IS); and finally the Kurds, who advanced and took the mountain last May under the cover of American warplanes.
Abdul-Aziz al Hassan is from al Gharra, his first name the same as the mountain’s. He left the village while the Islamic State was in charge, but it is because of a bomb from an American plane that he cannot go back. What happened to his family is the story of just one bomb of the 35,000 dropped so far during 10,000 missions flown in the US-led air war against the Islamic State.
Al Hassan is in his 20s, small, soft-spoken, with chestnut-brown skin. He said the war did not affect al Gharra much back when the regime or the Free Syrian Army occupied the mountain’s military base. But he remembers the day that the Islamic State came. “I was sitting in front of the house when a jeep passed by and stopped at the shrine to Saladin’s commander,” he said. “They gathered all of the people. One said: ‘We are the Islamic State. We are here to create an emirate based on Sharia [Islamic law].’” From that day, they decreed, men had to be in the mosque, the women at home. If a woman wanted to go to the market, she had to walk with a husband, brother or son. No one outside the family could see women uncovered, even at home. “It wasn’t as if we didn’t know what Islam was. But they didn’t even like the way we prayed. Everything we did was wrong in their eyes.”
Still, the presence of Islamic State fighters in the village was rare. They largely stayed within the base. “We managed to live normal lives most of the time. We had family and friends and loved ones around us. We entered each others’ houses for gatherings or parties. We shared the same happiness and sadness.” The US-led coalition occasionally launched airstrikes in the distance. The ground shook “like an earthquake;” sometimes a house fell down. But it wasn’t the bombs or even the dictates of the Islamic State that made al Hassan first leave home. It was the grinding poverty, worsened by war.
‘There was no bread and no work,” he said. He took his wife and daughter and drove to Turkey. “My father stayed there to keep the house. The moment you leave, IS takes it. All our belongings are there.
While al Hassan was in Turkey, as spring turned into summer last year, the war took another turn. Kurdish fighters of the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, controlled territory that stopped just short of the mountain. Backed by American air power, they began an offensive to recapture it from the Islamic State. Al Gharra stood in the way. The road to the nearest town — Hasaka, held by the Kurds — was about a mile away from the village. The first bomb fell on that road between 10 and 11 in the morning on May 6 . Then a plane started circling over the village. People were afraid to stay in their homes. They ran into the open. Al Hassan’s father, Ismail, tried to run as well. But he was too late. The villagers remember seeing the plane point its nose down and dive, dropping a bomb. It then climbed away. Al Hassan’s father lay on the ground in a crumpled heap, dead, in front of the ruins of his house.
An uncle phoned to tell al Hassan what had happened. He rushed back to the village from Turkey. His father had died on the first day of the Kurdish offensive to take the mountain. It was still going on when al Hassan returned. “Most of the people had fled because a drone was still roaming around. The airstrikes didn’t stop … one every 15 to 30 minutes,” he said. There were more bombs as the Kurdish forces advanced. “Any village would be heavily bombed until the Kurds managed to get inside. Then they’d let it be. The airstrikes were unbelievable. It was complete destruction. They kept bombing until they got to the mountain.”
The Kurds told reporters covering the offensive that there were a thousand Islamic State fighters at the mountain base. But Al Hassan is adamant that no Islamic State fighters were in the village when his father died. “The Islamic State were not there at the time of the bombing,” he said. “Whenever they expected a strike, they would leave the villages.” And anyway, he went on, they had already sent their troops to try to block the Kurdish advance at the frontline close to Hasaka. “During the airstrikes there was no one. There is no need to lie about this. I don’t support any of the groups fighting this war. The only thing that matters to me is my family’s security.”
There were no independent witnesses in al Gharra to say whether or not Islamic State fighters were there. The YPG general commanding the assault on what the Kurds call Mount Kezwan thought so, or at least he was inclined to see villagers and Islamic State fighters as one and the same. He was quoted as saying that “many of the local villages are Arab and they often support IS [the Islamic State].” And in the offensive against the jihadist group, the Kurds are often fighting for land they would claim as part of their own future state. They see the Arabs in some of the towns and villages they have captured as aliens with no right to be there.
Al Hassan left his village for the second time — again with his family — a day before the Kurdish forces took full control of the area. They fled over the mountain and drove through Raqqa, the place the Islamic State calls its capital, before crossing the Turkish border. “When the Kurds arrived, they kicked everybody out under the pretext that IS had littered the village with booby traps,” he said. “So the entire village left. Almost half of the village was destroyed — then it was completely empty.”
Before they left, they buried his father in a simple grave in the village’s small cemetery. Ismail was 55 and left behind 10 children. Al Hassan was the eldest. “Death comes for all of us. But he wasn’t old and he was the entire family’s provider.” His father’s house — now a pile of rubble — had been home for the whole extended family. “Even if we went back, where would we live? In our destroyed house?” Al Hassan asked bitterly. “Does the American government think we have money? Do they think I can just go back and rebuild our house?” He and the rest of the family are now stuck in Turkey … refugees.
A pair of US Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles fly over northern Iraq in the morning of Sept 23, 2014 after conducting airstrikes in Syria. (Reuters)
The US military could not confirm whether or not bombs were dropped on al Gharra (also known as al Gharba). A spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, the name of the US-led military campaign against the Islamic State, offered a vague response to our questions. He simply said the coalition had “conducted a number of airstrikes near al Hasaka” on May 6 and 7. When pressed about whether the mountain or the village was hit on those days, the spokesman replied: “We can confirm that Abdul-Aziz mountain is geographically close enough to be considered ‘near al Hasaka.’ However, we do not have a record of striking that particular mountain.”
As a result of al Hassan’s testimony provided by GlobalPost, US Central Command — CENTCOM — said it would look again at whether it did bomb the village. For now, the United States has no record of killing any civilian in al Gharra. GlobalPost found other instances of US airstrikes — detailed below — that probably killed civilians but which were not officially investigated, or which were investigated and dismissed. In almost a-year-and-a-half of bombing Iraq and Syria, the United States admits to killing just 22 innocent people. An independent monitoring group says the real figure could be more than a thousand.
The explanation for the US military’s impossibly low number can be found in the very way it investigates its own airstrikes. A CENTCOM spokesman told us that all civilian casualties were investigated — even if something as insubstantial as an anonymous post to Twitter was the only source. But some US investigations were cursory at best, amounting to what appears to be willful blindness. In an airstrike on one Syrian village — also detailed below — it seems that simple confusion over place names meant that civilian casualties were never investigated and were left uncounted. A coalition spokesman eventually said that CENTCOM would review that case too, after GlobalPost pointed out the village on a map.
Standing orders — the Rules of Engagement — give every mission in Operation Inherent Resolve the goal of causing zero civilian casualties. But given the immense firepower deployed in Iraq and Syria, killing civilians is frighteningly easy, especially from the air. American pilots and their commanding officers are heavily dependent on information from Kurdish troops. In several cases we have looked at, witnesses say civilians were at the scene but the pilots — or the Kurds calling in the strike — thought they were Islamic State fighters. In the few cases where the United States admits killing civilians, the explanation is often the same: the civilians ran into the target area just after the pilots pulled the trigger.
It is difficult — almost impossible — to visit territory controlled by the so-called Islamic State. But we know about airstrikes from witnesses, survivors, human rights activists, video uploaded to YouTube and even lists of the dead published on Facebook. If you believe that evidence, many more civilians are dying in American airstrikes than the US government acknowledges. People in Iraq and Syria can see what is happening. And so can the enemy. The Islamic State portrays the conflict as a war on Sunnis and a war on Muslims. When the coalition kills civilians — and does not investigate and apologize — the Islamic State fills the void with propaganda. The war against the Islamic State is ultimately a war for Sunni public opinion. Things look very different from the ground.
War will always result in civilian casualties — and some in the US military want the strategy to recognize that. Those in uniform cannot state their views openly but a former US Air Force general, David Deptula, argues that the current policy is imposing restrictions on the fighting men and women in the field well beyond the laws of war. “The laws of armed conflict do not require, nor do they expect, a target of zero unintentional civilian casualties,” he told me. “There is no such thing as immaculate warfare, it’s a horrible thing, an ugly thing, and … we need to finish it as rapidly as possible…What is the logic of a policy that restricts the use of air power to avoid the possibility of collateral damage, while allowing the certainty of the Islamic State’s crimes against humanity?”
The Pentagon press secretary, Rear Adm. John Kirby, has said: “No other military on Earth takes the concerns over collateral damage and civilian casualties more seriously than we do.” Yet as the examples below show there has been no honest official estimate of how many civilians the United States has killed in Iraq and Syria. Even if civilian casualties are an inevitable part of a “just” war, the Western public is being fed the comforting illusion that war can be fought without shedding innocent blood.
And that is simply not the case.
Al Khan
A Syrian boy looks out from a window inside the bullet-riddled facade of his home after what activists said were overnight US-led airstrikes against the Islamic State in Raqqa on Nov. 24, 2014. (Reuters)
What may be one of the worst tragedies of the campaign against the Islamic State is said to have taken place on another part of Syria’s Hasaka front in December. Al Khan is a tiny village. Most of the people have fled to Lebanon or Turkey. Perhaps a hundred stayed behind. They say the village was hit by rockets and strafed in the early hours of Dec. 7, killing some 47 civilians, half of them children. We spoke to one of the residents by phone, an Arab man in his 30s who, fearing reprisals from the Kurds, wants to be known only by his nickname, Abu Khalil. The war against the Islamic State here is, again, being waged by American aircraft above and Kurdish militia forces on the ground. Abu Khalil accepts that there was an Islamic State presence in al Khan. But he said: “There were fewer than 10 fighters in the village, including two locals. And they all stayed together at one place.”
Abu Khalil does not support the Islamic State. He is a former civil servant in the Syrian education ministry and once served in the regime army (he deserted). “People in al Khan didn’t like IS and always avoided talking to them,” he said. The villagers even tried to expel them. According to one report, there was an altercation that escalated into an exchange of fire. The Islamic State apparently responded by sending reinforcements to the village. This convoy, it seems, was spotted by the Kurds, who no doubt thought they were seeing a big movement of troops to the frontline — and called in air support. If this version of events is true, it is a bitter irony for the villagers. It would mean their brave opposition to the Islamic State resulted in a brutal attack by American aircraft.
“It was past midnight. We were sleeping. We were suddenly wakened by a huge explosion. The house shook. The windows shattered. There was shrapnel in the walls. I ran out and saw my neighbor’s house completely destroyed. He told me, ‘Abu Khalil, I managed to rescue my wife and son but I can’t find my six-month-old baby. Help me!’ I could hear people calling from underneath the rubble. My neighbor’s mother was crying out. She’s 70. I pulled her out, along with a boy and his mother. They were all OK.
“My mother and my aunt both came running to help dig through the rubble. But while we did this, a helicopter — an Apache — came overhead. It fired. They had machineguns with explosive bullets. I was hit. I still have the shrapnel in my body. I fell into the hole made by the airstrike. That was what saved me. The helicopter circled round again and fired a second time. My mother and aunt were killed. The woman and her son I’d rescued were killed. Everyone but me was killed.
“Three powerful rockets were used in the first airstrike. They left a two-meter deep hole in the ground. Anyone could see the hole until the Kurdish militia filled it. They don’t let anyone go near the place or take pictures. Nineteen people died in that one house.
“It was the Americans. For the past year-and-a-half, the only aircraft that fly over our area have been American.”
The US military emphatically denied that they bombed al Khan on Dec. 7, though a spokesman said there were airstrikes in the area of al Hawl, a small town a few miles away. But when the spokesman showed us a map marking the location of the airstrike, it was in the same area where a group of local activists had told us al Khan was located. This was where the locals said the rocket attack had taken place. Confusion over place names happens often enough for the US military to plausibly deny responsibility for civilian casualties and to avoid launching a full investigation.
There are still many things that are unclear about the events in al Khan. How many Islamic State fighters were there? How many of them were killed? Were they close to the house that was hit? As in al Gharra, the village in the shadow of the mountain, there are no independent witnesses. In both cases, the airstrikes were almost certainly called in by Kurdish spotters. Information from the Kurds is passed on to a coalition “targeting cell.” Though the coalition’s aircraft are capable of striking with great precision, what they hit — who they hit — depends on the quality of that information. The coalition rarely has eyes and ears on ground. It is left to the pilots to confirm the target, from thousands of feet up.
Al Hatra
Iraqi children run inside an ancient temple in the historic city of Al Hatra, during a more peaceful time. (Reuters)
The limitations of the pilot’s view are clear in the very first report the US published about civilian deaths caused by Operation Inherent Resolve. A family died because two pilots could not see they were there. The report says the pilots simply did not know they were firing on civilians. It was published in November 2015. Until then, the US military had not admitted to causing a single civilian casualty despite 15 months of bombing.
The report described an attack on March 13 of last year against an Islamic State checkpoint outside al Hatra in northern Iraq. Al Hatra is the site of one of the world’s oldest cities, dating back to the 3rd Century BC. Saddam Hussein restored the ruins, laying bricks stamped with his name into the ancient walls. When the Islamic State arrived, they used sledgehammers, Kalashnikovs and a bulldozer to demolish what they believe are the city’s “idolatrous” statues. Then they turned the site into a training camp, installing a checkpoint on the road nearby.
Two US aircraft were given permission to fire on that checkpoint because it seemed — to the pilots and to everyone involved in the so-called “kill chain” — that no civilians were in the strike area. But a Kia sedan and a Chevy Suburban had been stopped at the checkpoint. They were there long enough for the pilots to think that the vehicles were helping the fighters there. Evidence emerged later that members of a family were in the car: two women and three children. The Suburban is thought to have had at least one other civilian and perhaps too, a family group. Through the dense thicket of military acronyms and jargon in the report, the horror of what happened emerges. The planes were A-10 “Warthogs,” snub-nosed aircraft used against tanks. The A-10s are built around a huge seven-barrel machine gun, like a Gatling gun, the “GAU Avenger,” which fires 50 to 70 rounds a second. Each shell is the size of a bottle of beer and the nose is weighted with a third of a kilogram of depleted uranium. One bullet can cut a human being in half; a stream of them can punch through armor or turn a person into red mist.
The Warthog’s cannon makes a distinctive, terrifying noise during an attack. The gun fires so rapidly it sounds like fabric tearing, or a piece of heavy furniture being dragged across a wooden floor (as one journalist described it while watching A-10s over Baghdad in 2003). The two Warthogs in al Hatra came in on their strafing run. They would have fired in two-second bursts, hitting the vehicles and checkpoint with at the very least 200 rounds, probably more. According to the report, four people got out of one of the vehicles just after the cannon was fired. The bullets hit the vehicles, which exploded in a ball of fire, incinerating everyone close by. “Post strike, both vehicles are on fire and it appears like there is one person still moving at the rear of the sedan,” the report said.
As in al Gharra and al Khan, the victims may well have been people who opposed the Islamic State. The women and children were killed as they were trying to leave territory held by the militant group, according to an email sent to the US military by an Iraqi woman. (The email was sent to claim compensation for the destroyed vehicles.) Prompted by the email to investigate further, the US military found its own evidence that non-combatants had been at the scene. Analysis of video from the Warthog’s camera in the “targeting pod” on the wing showed people getting out of the car and: “One of the persons observed … presents a signature smaller than the other persons. This was assessed as a possible child.” Officials determined this by measuring the height of the shadow when the image was blown up on a large screen.
The pilots could not have done such analysis in flight and the report says: “There is no evidence the aircrew had any opportunity to detect civilians prior to their strike.” The spokesman for US Central Command, Col. Patrick Ryder, told reporters by video-link from Baghdad: “It’s safe to say … that if we knew there were civilians we would not have conducted a strike.” The report into al Hatra concludes, in its strangulated military language: “The NCV [Non-Combat Victims] = 0 objective was not met.”
US forces, then, have orders to try not to kill civilians — it is a mission objective. But that is not the same as an absolute prohibition. And the National Security Council spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, has said that bombing in Iraq and Syria would not be held to the same safeguards used in Afghanistan, which only allow strikes when there is “near certainty” of no civilian casualties.
A US Air Force B-1B bomber flies over northern Iraq. (Reuters)
While the standard for strikes may be rigorous — a goal of zero civilian casualties — a target can be ruled free of non-combatants based on little more than an educated guess by the pilots. The pilots’ methods are reminiscent of the CIA’s controversial “signature” strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those strikes are called in based not on certain intelligence but because targets have suspicious patterns of behavior, "signatures" of terrorists. Being present in a militant area could be enough.
This is exactly the kind of judgment the Warthog pilots used when targeting the two vehicles held at the Islamic State checkpoint. The report into al Hatra also said that one of the planes dropped a 500-pound bomb on a shack at the checkpoint. “Prior to weapon impact but after weapon release a single adult sized PAX (person) is seen slowly moving to the north,” the report said. “This person is knocked down by the weapon impact and not seen moving again.” Was that a fighter, or a farmer? It is impossible to say.
One other revealing finding of the report is that the people getting out of the car were glimpsed only after the pilot had fired. It would have taken three or four seconds for the cannon rounds to hit the checkpoint. Even if the pilot had realized in that time that they were civilians, he could not have done anything about it. This is the theme of several other US government reports into civilian casualties published in January 2016. Here are three excerpts from a Pentagon press release (Italics added by GlobalPost):
On June 19, 2015, near Tall al Adwaniyah, Syria, during a strike against two ISIL vehicles, it is assessed that one civilian was injured when appearing in the target area after the US aircraft released its weapon.
On June 29, 2015, near Haditha, Iraq, during strikes against one ISIL tactical unit and two ISIL vehicles, it is assessed that two civilians were injured. After the US aircraft engaged the target and two seconds prior to impact, a car slowed in front of the ISIL vehicles while a motorcycle simultaneously passed by.
On July 4, 2015, near Ar Raqqah, Syria, during a strike against an ISIL High Value Individual, a car and a motorcycle entered the target area after the weapon was released. It is assessed that three unidentified civilians were likely killed.
In all these cases, the Pentagon’s reporting says that people wandered into the firing line after the pilot had squeezed the trigger. That is a consequence of fighting in built up areas.
Taking all the published investigations so far, the US military acknowledges causing the sum total of 22 civilian deaths in the campaign against the Islamic State. Such a low number is wildly implausible. Airwars, an independent monitoring group that tracks allegations of civilians casualties, says that at least 862 and as many as 1,190 non-combatants have died in coalition strikes in Iraq and Syria. The Airwars count is made by collating reports from several sources for each strike: human rights activists and the media, Facebook posts, and testimony from survivors and relatives of the dead. Each casualty report is judged credible based on the amount of detail and whether it is consistent with other evidence.
The head of Airwars, Chris Woods, says the “smart bombs” used by Western air forces have clearly reduced the risk to civilians on the battlefield. Nevertheless, he says that in Afghanistan, for example, more civilians died in airstrikes than were killed by foreign ground troops. Airpower was the single greatest cause of civilian death by international forces, killing one civilian for every 11 airstrikes. In Iraq and Syria, the ratio could be even worse, he says, because there are more attacks on “targets of opportunity” than those based on intelligence. And the campaign is being fought mainly in built-up areas where it is hard to distinguish the enemy.
“In the end, the generals who ran Afghanistan, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, managed to start getting civilian casualties down by admitting they were killing civilians,” he said. War fighters were only forced to change tactics when confronted with the effects of what they were doing. “Right now, we are in the denial phase with the coalition. They don’t admit to killing civilians and we think that’s wrong. … The military is starting to believe their own myth of absolute precision … this fantasy lulls Western audiences into feeling more comfortable with our countries being at war because we think we don’t kill civilians anymore. I’m afraid the reality is far from that.” He went on: “It is probably fair to say that the coalition is taking more care than we have ever seen in any air war in recent history, but that’s relative precision and civilians are still dying … hundreds of them.”
Kfar Derian
Residents inspect damaged buildings in what activists say was a US airstrike in Kfar Derian on Sept. 23, 2014. (Reuters)
In September 2014, doctors at a hospital in the southern Turkish city of Iskenderun were presented with a mystery. An injured Syrian boy, four or five years old, was brought there in a coma. He had no identifying documents and no parents, or anyone else, claimed him. Doctors wrote a Turkish name on his chart and kept him in intensive care. They would learn later that the child came from a village called Kfar Derian, just over the border. He was a victim of the very first US airstrikes in Syria. How the coalition responded to what happened in Kfar Derian at least partly reveals why official figures fail to show the true extent of civilian casualties.
US airstrikes in Syria began in the pre-dawn hours of Sept. 22, 2014. Two warships, one in the Red Sea and one in the Arabian Gulf, launched waves of cruise missiles, 47 in all. Some of them were aimed at Islamic State targets in Iraq; some at the Islamic State in Syria. But eight of those missiles were for the Khorasan group, which is part of Al Qaeda. One of them — it seems — hit the village of Kfar Derian. “The attack happened at night,” said Abu Mohammed, a 30-year-old from a neighboring village. He remembered seven or eight impacts spread across the mountainous terrain, coming 30 seconds apart, one after the other. “When the Syrian regime attacked, it was always in the day. The explosions were very big. When the people saw this they said the missiles came from the sea.”
Khorasan was unheard of until it was identified as a threat by the US government. The US said its members were experienced Al Qaeda operatives preparing bomb attacks on Western airlines. They were embedded with Al Qaeda’s Syrian ally, the Nusra Front (which is engaged in its own war with the Islamic State). The day after the attack, the Syrian Network for Human Rights reported that a missile hit a Nusra building, killing many fighters. But they said the explosion was so big that the blast wave also demolished a house 100 yards away — a Tomahawk cruise missile packs a 1,000 pound bomb and flies in at 550 mph. It can cause devastation over a wide area. The activists counted the bodies of 13 civilians in the house, including five women and five children. Abu Mohammed, speaking long after these events, put the number of dead much higher — “six families” — and denies there were armed men in the village: “The people were shepherds, nothing else.”
After the attacks he was asked by local people to go to Turkey to look for a mother and son whose bodies could not be found in the rubble. Three days later, he found the mother in a mortuary. After a week, he still couldn’t find the little boy. “We searched everywhere for him.” Then, having almost given up hope, he showed a picture of the boy at a hospital. Doctors recognized him.
The 5-year-old was not registered under his own name, Humam Darwish. “When I first saw him he was in intensive care, no movements, just breathing, inhaling and exhaling, nothing more. They told us they couldn’t do anything for him.”
Humam did not wake up for months. He is now an orphan — his mother, Fatima, and his father, Mohammed, are both gone — living in a children’s home, and very far from the alert, inquisitive little boy he used to be. Abu Mohammed calls him the sole survivor of a massacre. “Houses were bombed,” he said. “Families died. There were no survivors. The only one who lived was that child.” His testimony has differences with the activists’ account, most importantly his claim that no fighters were in the village. But both agree there were civilian casualties in Kfar Derian. The US military says the eight missiles did not even succeed in wiping out Khorasan. The militants slipped away, tipped off by reconnaissance flights before the strike. Abu Mohammed said: “A day before, there was many scout planes over the area that was bombed.
The Pentagon has never accepted that it killed civilians in the Khorasan strikes. Two days afterwards, the Pentagon press secretary, Admiral Kirby, was asked about civilian casualties in Kfar Derian. He replied: “We don't have any credible operational reporting … that would sustain those allegations.” A year later, a declassified internal military document concluded, “no further inquiry required.” This was because: “A review of BDA [battle damage assessment] imagery did not credibly determine that civilians were present at the site. Open source images presented as casualties from the strikes actually came from previous GoS [government of Syria] strikes.”
The monitoring group Airwars say that coverage of Kfar Derian on one English language website did, wrongly, use a picture of a child killed in a regime bombing. But this is the only case they can find of such false reporting, while there were many other genuine images of the strike that Central Command could have used as the basis for an investigation. Woods, the head of Airwars, said such images were ignored for “pure propaganda” reasons — propaganda aimed at Americans, since Iraqis and Syrians already knew people were dying in coalition airstrikes. But Woods says it’s a mistake to think the information can be controlled, when anyone with a camera phone can post video of an airstrike online in minutes. “We know more about the civilian victims of this war, by all parties, than we’ve ever known in any conflict in history. That’s war today.”
He went on: “The Pentagon operates in this weird bubble where it pretends social media hasn’t been invented. It just ignores all these allegations of civilian casualties ... If the coalition are not engaging in that territory [responding to claims of civilian casualties on social media], they are effectively ceding it to the Islamic State. The coalition needs to be more honest with Iraqis and Syrians.”
The conventional wisdom is that bombing must increase support for the Islamic State. The conventional wisdom may be wrong, although it is hard to be sure as there is no way to measure public opinion in the “Caliphate.” In the early days of the campaign in Syria, there were some anti-coalition demonstrations with placards declaring: “This is a war on all Sunnis.” But they may have been orchestrated, with people press-ganged to attend. There have been few, if any, large and spontaneous popular protests against the bombing. That maybe because the coalition has killed relatively few noncombatants in Syria compared to the Islamic State and the regime. In January 2015, a group of Syrian doctors said that indiscriminate air attacks by the regime caused 80 percent of civilian casualties, while the Islamic State caused 15 percent, and the coalition 5 percent.
But those who are directly affected by US bombs are, as you would expect, bitter.
“You build in your countries and destroy in ours?” asked Abdul-Aziz al Hassan, who lost his father in the bombing at al Gharra. “Is this how you bring democracy? Stop it. Really, stop it. People are tired.” Abu Khalil, survivor of the devastating attack in al Khan, said he wanted compensation from the United States for the death of his mother. Abu Mohammed, who spoke to us about Kfar Derian simply condemned the United States as “Zionists,” echoing both jihadi and regime propaganda. He wanted nothing to do with America.
All of them sounded more weary than angry.
Paul Wood is a BBC Middle East correspondent and contributor to GlobalPost’s Longreads on Conflict.
This story was cross-posted by our colleagues at GlobalPost.
Hillary Clinton greets workers at her campaign office Monday in Des Moines, Iowa. (Andrew Harnik / AP)
Hillary Clinton likes to extol her foreign policy credentials, particularly her experience as secretary of state. She attaches herself to Barack Obama’s coattails, pledging to continue his policies. But she is even more hawkish than the president.
Like Obama, Clinton touts American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is better than any other country. In his State of the Union addresses, Obama has proclaimed America “exceptional” and said the U.S. must “lead the world.” Clinton wrote in her book “Hard Choices” that “America remains the ‘indispensable nation.’ ”
It is this view that animates U.S. invasions, interventions, bombings and occupations of other countries. Under the pretense of protecting our national interest, the United States maintains some 800 military bases in other countries, costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars annually. Often referred to as “enduring bases,” they enable us to mount attacks whenever and wherever our leaders see fit, whether with drones or manned aircraft.
Obama, who continues to prosecute the war in Afghanistan 15 years after it began, is poised to send ground troops back to Iraq and begin bombing Libya. His aggressive pursuit of regime change in Syria was met with pushback by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to Seymour Hersh.
The president has bombed some seven countries with drones. But besides moving toward normalization of relations with Cuba, his signature foreign policy achievement is brokering the agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
Although Clinton supports the nuclear deal, she talks tough about Iran. In September 2015, she provocatively declared, “I don’t believe Iran is our partner in this agreement. Iran is the subject of the agreement,” and added, “I will confront them across the board.” She said, “I will not hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon.”
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton promised to “totally obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel. Clinton was, in effect, pledging to commit genocide against the Iranian people.
In an August 2014 Atlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Clinton maintained, “There is no such thing as a right to enrich.” Apparently, she has not read the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which gives countries like Iran the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Article IV of the treaty says, “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.”
One country that does possess nuclear weapons is Israel—which refuses to ratify the NPT. Clinton has consistently and uncritically supported the policies of the Israeli government. In the Atlantic interview, she placed the blame for Israel’s 2014 massacre in Gaza squarely with the Palestinians.
From July 8 to Aug. 27, 2014, Israel killed over 2,100 Palestinians—including more than 400 children—80 percent of them civilians. Sixty-six Israeli soldiers and seven Israeli civilians were killed.
When Goldberg asked Clinton whom she held responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian children, she demurred, saying, “[I]t’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war.” She blamed only the Palestinians, saying, “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict.” Claiming “Israel has a right to defend itself,” she said, “I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets.”
But Israel did not act in self-defense. In the first 10 days of June 2014, Israeli forces abducted 17 Palestinian teenage boys in the occupied West Bank. On June 12, three Israeli teenagers were abducted in the southern West Bank; Israel accused Hamas. After those three were found dead, a group of Israelis tortured and killed a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem. On July 7, Israel launched a large military operation in the Gaza Strip, dubbed Operation Protective Edge. The Israel Defense Forces devastated Gaza. For 51 days, Israel bombarded Gaza with more than 6,000 airstrikes.
The United Nations Human Rights Council subsequently convened an independent, international commission of inquiry, which concluded that Israel, and to a lesser extent Palestinian armed groups, had likely committed violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, some constituting war crimes. “The scale of the devastation was unprecedented” in Gaza, according to the commission.
Yet Clinton was puzzled by what she calls “this enormous international reaction against Israel,” adding, “This reaction is uncalled for and unfair.”
She attributed the “enormous international reaction” to “a number of factors” but only mentioned anti-Semitism, never citing Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands or its periodic massacres in Gaza.
Indeed, just last month, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council it was an “indisputable truth” that “Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process.” He noted that it was “human nature to react to occupation, which serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.”
Clinton didn’t ponder why so many people around the world are participating in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Israeli occupation. Representatives of Palestinian civil society launched BDS in 2005, calling upon “international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel.”
In her November 2015 article titled “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel—and Benjamin Netanyahu,” published in the Jewish newspaper Forward, Clinton vowed to continue to oppose BDS. “As secretary of state, I requested more assistance for Israel every year,” she boasted, adding that she opposed “the biased Goldstone report,” explained below.
After Israel’s 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead, in which nearly 1,400 Palestinians (82 percent of whom were civilians) and 13 Israelis were killed, a U.N. Human Rights Council report by a commission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone concluded that “Disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians were part of a deliberate policy [by Israel].”
Israel responded to the report with threats and harassment against Goldstone, leading him to backtrack on one of the findings in the report that bears his name, namely, that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. But the other members of the commission stood fast on all of the report’s conclusions.
Clinton’s vote in favor of President George W. Bush’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq cost her the 2008 election. It also cost more than 4,500 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives.
Yet Clinton cynically told corporate executives at a 2011 State Department roundtable on investment opportunities in Iraq, “It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.”
The same year, Clinton led the campaign for forcible regime change in Libya, despite opposition by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Responding to the gruesome sodomizing of President Moammar Gadhafi with a bayonet, Clinton laughed and said, “We came, we saw, he died.”
Both the Iraq War and regime change in Libya paved the way for the rise of Islamic State and dangerous conflict in the Middle East. Obama is about to escalate his military involvement in Libya. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said, “The president has made clear that we have the authority to use military force.” The New York Times reports that the expanded campaign is “expected to include airstrikes and raids by elite American troops.”
The Obama administration is reportedly changing the rules of engagement to allow more civilian casualties in the “war” against Islamic State. A senior military official told The Daily Beast, “Now I think you’ll see a little more willingness to tolerate civilian casualties in the interest of making progress.” But the Geneva Conventions prohibit the disproportionate killing of civilians.
Clinton has promised to escalate the wars in Syria and Iraq, including a no-fly zone in Syria. Since Islamic State doesn’t have an air force, her no-fly zone would be likely to capture Russian planes flying over Syria.
Talking tough on ABC’s “This Week,” Clinton declared, “We have to fight in the air, fight on the ground and fight them on the Internet.” She said nothing about diplomacy or an arms embargo to stop sending weapons that end up in the hands of Islamic State.
Although the corporate media fans the flames of fear about Islamic State, only 38 people in the United States have died in terror-related incidents since 9/11, according to Politifact.com. The “war on terror” has cost us more than $1.5 trillion, in addition to U.S. lives and those of untold numbers in other countries.
Nevertheless, there is little doubt that a President Hillary Clinton would continue our “perpetual war.” She would do everything in her power to ensure the robust survival of the American empire.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary-general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her most recent book is “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.” See www.marjoriecohn. Follow her on Twitter at @marjoriecohn.
