Fuck Obama

[chlamor]

Report: Bush admin. skirted probe of mass Afghan slayings
Obama administration sees no legal basis for investigation
Stephen C. Webster



In a 2001 mass killing, bodies were said to have been buried at a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili.

July 11, 2009

Afghanistan massacre -- the convoy of death pt. 1 of 6



Afghanistan massacre -- the convoy of death pt. 2 of 6



Afghanistan massacre -- the convoy of death pt. 3 of 6



Afghanistan massacre -- the convoy of death pt. 4 of 6



Afghanistan massacre -- the convoy of death pt. 5 of 6



Afghanistan massacre -- the convoy of death pt. 6 of 6

(SEE VIDEOS AT LINK BELOW)

Report: Bush admin. skirted probe of mass Afghan slayings


Stephen C. Webster

July 10, 2009

Update (at bottom): Obama administration sees no legal basis for investigation

When CIA-backed Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum had up to ’several thousand’ Taliban prisoners sealed and suffocated to death in metal shipping containers just days after the United States invaded the country, it did not go unnoticed by the White House.

They simply chose not to do anything about it and quietly worked to discourage efforts to uncover the truth, according to a late Friday report by The New York Times.

" 'At the White House, nobody said 'no’ to an investigation, but nobody ever said 'yes,’ either,’ said Pierre Prosper, the former war crimes ambassador for the United States," reported the Times. " 'The first reaction of everybody there was 'Oh, this is a sensitive issue. This is a touchy issue politically.’’ "

"During Afghanistan’s tortured 30 years of war, Dostum served in the Soviet occupation forces and backed the pro-Moscow Najibullah government before switching sides," noted Global Research. He joined with the US-backed Islamist militias that overthrew Najibullah, then was part of the fierce factional rivalry for power in Kabul before the Taliban finally took control."

Dostum, a key ally of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, is expected to be reappointed as Karzai’s military chief of staff, the paper noted. Dostum ran for President of Afghanistan in 2004.

Update: Obama administration sees no legal basis for investigation

In spite of Friday’s revelation that the Bush administration suppressed an investigation into what is potentially the worst war crime of the Afghanistan occupation, the Obama administration will not seek an inquiry.

"Asked about the report, Marine Corps Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said that since U.S. military forces were not involved in the killings, there is nothing the Defense Department could investigate," reported the Associated Press late Friday night.

An unnamed Justice Department source also reportedly told the AP that the FBI would not be able to investigate because the crimes were not committed within its jurisdiction.

Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, called the administration’s position "absurd," according to the report.








U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.’s Died

by JAMES RISEN, NYTimes

July 10, 2009



WASHINGTON — After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.

"At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either," said Pierre Prosper, the former American ambassador for war crimes issues. "The first reaction of everybody there was, 'Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ "

It is not clear how — or if — the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.

The question of culpability for the prisoner deaths — which may have been the most significant mass killing in Afghanistan after the 2001 American-led invasion — has taken on new urgency since the general, an important ally of Mr. Karzai, was reinstated to his government post last month. He had been suspended last year and living in exile in Turkey after he was accused of threatening a political rival at gunpoint.

"If you bring Dostum back, it will impact the progress of democracy and the trust people have in the government," Mr. Prosper said. Arguing that the Obama administration should investigate the 2001 killings, he added, "There is always a time and place for justice."

While President Obama has deepened the United States’ commitment to Afghanistan, sending 21,000 more American troops there to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, his administration has also tried to distance itself from Mr. Karzai, whose government is deeply unpopular and widely viewed as corrupt.

A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, had told Mr. Karzai of their objections to reinstating General Dostum. The American officials have also pressed his sponsors in Turkey to delay his return to Afghanistan while talks continue with Mr. Karzai over the general’s role, said an official briefed on the matter. Asked about looking into the prisoner deaths, the official said, "We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated."

The Back Story

While the deaths have been previously reported, the back story of the frustrated efforts to investigate them has not been fully told. The killings occurred in late November 2001, just days after the American-led invasion forced the ouster of the Taliban government in Kabul. Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to General Dostum’s forces, which were part of the American-backed Northern Alliance, in the city of Kunduz. They were then transported to a prison run by the general’s forces near the town of Shibarghan.

Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.

A recently declassified 2002 State Department intelligence report states that one source, whose identity is redacted, concluded that about 1,500 Taliban prisoners died. Estimates from other witnesses or human rights groups range from several hundred to several thousand. The report also says that several Afghan witnesses were later tortured or killed.

In Afghanistan, rival warlords have had a history of eliminating enemy troops by suffocating them in sealed containers. General Dostum, however, has said previously that any such deaths of the Taliban prisoners were unintentional. He has said that only 200 prisoners died and blamed combat wounds and disease for most of the fatalities. The general could not be reached for comment, and a spokesman declined to comment for this article.

While a dozen or so bodies were examined and several were autopsied, a full exhumation was never performed, and human rights groups are concerned that evidence has been destroyed. In 2008, a medical forensics team working with the United Nations discovered excavations that suggested the mass grave had been moved. Satellite photos obtained by The Times show that the site was disturbed even earlier, in 2006.

"Our repeated efforts to protect witnesses, secure evidence and get a full investigation have been met by the U.S. and its allies with buck-passing, delays and obstruction," said Nathaniel Raymond, a researcher for Physicians for Human Rights, a group based in Boston that discovered the mass grave site in 2002.

Seeking an Investigation

The first calls for an investigation came from his group and the International Committee of the Red Cross. A military commander in the United States-led coalition rejected a request by a Red Cross official for an inquiry in late 2001, according to the official, who, in keeping with his organization’s policy, would speak only on condition of anonymity and declined to identify the commander.

A few months later, Dell Spry, the F.B.I.’s senior representative at the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been "stacked like cordwood" in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry recalled. They told similar accounts of suffocations and shootings, he said. A declassified F.B.I. report, dated January 2003, confirms that the detainees provided such accounts.

Mr. Spry, who is now an F.B.I. consultant, said he did not believe the stories because he knew that Al Qaeda trained members to fabricate tales about mistreatment. Still, the veteran agent said he thought the agency should investigate the reports "so they could be debunked."

But a senior official at F.B.I. headquarters, whom Mr. Spry declined to identify, told him to drop the matter, saying it was not part of his mission and it would be up to the American military to investigate.

"I was disappointed because I believed that, true or untrue, we had to be in front of this story, because someday it may turn out to be a problem," Mr. Spry said.

The Pentagon, however, showed little interest in the matter. In 2002, Physicians for Human Rights asked Defense Department officials to open an investigation and provide security for its forensics team to conduct a more thorough examination of the gravesite. "We met with blanket denials from the Pentagon," recalls Jennifer Leaning, a board member with the group. "They said nothing happened."

Pentagon spokesmen have said that the United States Central Command conducted an "informal inquiry," asking Special Forces personnel members who worked with General Dostum if they knew of a mass killing by his forces. When they said they did not, the inquiry went no further.

"I did get the sense that there was little appetite for this matter within parts of D.O.D.," said Marshall Billingslea, former acting assistant defense secretary for special operations, referring to the Department of Defense.

High-Level Conversation

Another former defense official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, recalled that the prisoner deaths came up in a conversation with Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense at the time, in early 2003.

"Somebody mentioned Dostum and the story about the containers and the possibility that this was a war crime," the official said. "And Wolfowitz said we are not going to be going after him for that."

In an interview, Mr. Wolfowitz said he did not recall the conversation. However, Pentagon documents obtained by Physicians for Human Rights through a Freedom of Information Act request confirm that the issue was debated by Mr. Wolfowitz and other officials.

As evidence mounted about the deaths, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell assigned Mr. Prosper, the United States ambassador at large for war crimes, to look into them in 2002. He met with General Dostum, who denied the allegations, Mr. Prosper recalled. Meanwhile, Karzai government officials told him that they opposed any investigation.

"They made it clear that this was going to cause a problem," said Mr. Prosper, who left the Bush administration in 2005 and is now a lawyer in Los Angeles. "They would say, 'We have had decades of war crimes. Where do you start?’ "

In Washington, Mr. Prosper encountered similar attitudes. In 2002, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, then the White House coordinator for Afghanistan, made it clear that he was concerned about efforts to investigate General Dostum, Mr. Prosper said. "Khalilzad never opposed an investigation," Mr. Prosper recalled. "But he definitely raised the political implications of it."

Mr. Khalilzad, who later served as the American ambassador to Afghanistan, did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Prosper said that because of the resistance from American and Afghan officials, his office dropped its inquiry. The State Department mentioned the episode in its annual human rights report for 2002, but took no further action.



www.uruknet.info?p=55887

[sunny]

Did DOJ retaliate against Siegelman whistleblower?

In a nine-page June 1, 2009 letter to her boss, Attorney General Eric Holder, Tamarah Grimes, a member of the Justice Department team that prosecuted former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, itemized an astonishing list of acts of misconduct by her colleagues as they developed what they called “the Big Case.”


[These included]: Two key witnesses were cajoled, coached, and pressured to change their testimony to better support the charges. This specifically included the key evidence given by one witness on which Siegelman was convicted. But, as Grimes notes, the witness in fact had no recollection of the events–he was pressured to recount them in a way that suited the prosecutors....
Members of the prosecution team communicated directly with a pro-prosecution juror while the case was pending and afterwards...
Every aspect of the case was overseen by U.S. Attorney Canary. She had nominally recused herself from the case because her husband, a friend of Karl Rove and the most prominent G.O.P. elections advisor in Alabama, was advising a campaign against Siegelman for which the prosecution provided essential grist.

Eight days after submitting these meticulously documented complaints, many of which echo concerns stated by others in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Montgomery, Grimes received a reply of sorts. She was fired. Grimes notes in a press release that she was informed of her dismissal in a letter from Terry Derden of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys.



http://harpers.org/archive/2009/07/hbc-90005308

[lightningBugout]

From http://www.newsweek.com/id/206300

Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that [Eric Holder] is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter.

[Nordic]

From http://www.newsweek.com/id/206300

Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that [Eric Holder] is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Even then, it might be a whitewash.

[lightningBugout]

From http://www.newsweek.com/id/206300

Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that [Eric Holder] is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Even then, it might be a whitewash.

Agreed though I think it would fit squarely with the great O's overall strategy if it turned out he was giving Holder the go-ahead from behind the scenes.

[ninakat]

From http://www.newsweek.com/id/206300

Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that [Eric Holder] is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Even then, it might be a whitewash.

Agreed though I think it would fit squarely with the great O's overall strategy if it turned out he was giving Holder the go-ahead from behind the scenes.

Ya think? The "great O's overall strategy" has actually been quite successful. He's still got millions of people conned into believing he's on their side. Well, ignorance is bliss.... until it's not.

[lightningBugout]

From http://www.newsweek.com/id/206300

Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that [Eric Holder] is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Even then, it might be a whitewash.

Agreed though I think it would fit squarely with the great O's overall strategy if it turned out he was giving Holder the go-ahead from behind the scenes.

Ya think? The "great O's overall strategy" has actually been quite successful. He's still got millions of people conned into believing he's on their side. Well, ignorance is bliss.... until it's not.

My only point is that Obama continues to serve as a mirror of most of our expectations (pro or con) and that I think it will be many years before we make complete sense of what was going on out front as well as behind the scenes. I'm not naive about him (I place him squarely to the right of Bill Clinton) but I am very skeptical of those people who seem to have nudged GWB out of his place, pushed Obama in and quickly re-commenced with generating a laundry list that makes him look like Mephistopheles.

[chlamor]

Obama: Demystifying Change in Foreign Policy

by Bryann Alexandros

.
Global Research, July 13, 2009


President Barack Obama, former American senator and constitutional law professor, busied himself the past couple months amending America's sunken world image. Traveling abroad, Obama conveyed freedom and friendship to sovereign nations while renouncing George Bush's past unilateralist crusade; and back home, he reaffirmed his pledges for a new illustrious era of changes: transparency, accountability, return to the rule of law and the promise to restore the legitimacy of the Constitution.

The fireworks and hosannas had ended since his inauguration, but already within the several months of his official presidency Obama roused up some ruckus with the media that cried foul on the sudden reversal of promises. Columnists, bloggers, and civil watch groups had denounced his backpedaling on torture, wiretapping, and the sudden embrace of Bush-era shenanigans and secrecy. On July 1st of the New York Times, executive director Anthony D. Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union said that despite of the rhetoric, “there is no substantive break from the policies of the Bush administration.”

Probed for some justification, the confronted Obama skillfully argues about shifting realities on the ground, or about looking towards the future and not the past. Despite the rhetorical finesse, many relented and challenged the implied defense of Bush's unconstitutional doctrines and the surrender of justice that was greatly overdue. On the other side of the veneer, Obama's faithful diehards still cooed, countering any criticism of the president's domestic and foreign policies with a fusillade. They charged that Obama was misunderstood, that the perceived missteps were merely a glowing part of his superb flexibility and competency.

Patience was preached for Americans to bear the status quo. If Obama continues the smooth rhetoric while strumming the goodwill of the public, it's likely that people would continue to praise him on flexibility, rather than beating around the bush.

There's much ado about Obama reversing course: it reveals a stunning betrayal of his original vision to end what Bush supposedly started, thus compelling everyone to speculate what changes he's really professing. The brilliant, cosmopolitan, and eloquent Obama may captivate audiences and unite opposing political forces; but rhetoric aside, he had set America for a different and unexpected kind of change.

Torture

The planned January closing of Guantanamo Bay unveiled itself to be one of Obama's symbolic changes on ending torture. However, in a stunning show of defiance and mockery for the rule of law, Obama announced "constitutionally tweaked" military tribunals for Guantanamo prisoners. The scathing news drew fire and a royal lambasting from civil liberty watchdogs and scholars, many who insisted that detainees should instead be swiftly tried in a legitimate federal court. In a statement by executive director Anthony D. Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union, despite these revamped tribunals, "the commissions system is inherently illegitimate, unconstitutional and incapable of delivering outcomes we can trust," insisting that the whole system was designed to "ensure convictions, not achieve justice."

The Obama administration was also drafting an executive order to employ "preventative detention," a new system of imprisonment for terror suspects where the hard-to-charge and hard-to-convict would be whisked away to other detention centers and held indefinitely. What's the incentive of shutting Guantanamo down if this administration opts for preventative detention? This farcical show of virtue with the prison closure is ruefully cosmetic than anything genuine.

Guantanamo became a brilliant symbolic ploy, a strategic cover allowing Obama to preserve other excruciating parts of Bush's old terror policy like the CIA's extraordinary rendition program and the denial of habeas corpus to combatants held in other prisons like Bagram, Afghanistan.

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Obama released a statement on June 26 where he said that his administration was “committed to taking concrete actions against torture and to address the needs of its victims.” This grandiose statement of good intentions doesn't absolve Obama from refusing to prosecute George W. Bush or Dick Cheney for allowing torture in the first place, nor does it absolve him of invoking the "states secrets" privilege to banish legitimate torture lawsuits against the government.



Obama also supported the suppression of newer detainee abuse photos on the basis that it would inflame anti-American sentiment, even though it is known that the growing number of civilian deaths by US Forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, had already triggered such sentiment within the local populaces. It's likely these photographic revelations would prove that torture was a widely systematic operation involving the collusion of other higher ranking officials who wished to avoid prosecution. Obama would successfully shield them from their fates.



This torturous chronicle of theatrics fired up again on July 2nd when The Washington Post reported that the Obama administration continued to use tainted confessions obtained from torture to justify indefinite confinement. Mohammed Jawad, 17, was captured in December 2002 in Afghanistan as an enemy combatant. Since his capture as a juvenile at the age of 12, he had been whisked away to Guantanamo and subject to torture, beatings, and coercive interrogations for many years. According to The Public Record:

“The judge in Jawad's military commission proceedings suppressed statements made by Jawad to Afghan and US officials following his arrest for allegedly throwing the grenade at US soldiers, concluding that [his confessions] were the product of torture and were made after Afghan authorities threatened to kill his family. However, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, continues to rely on those same statements in arguing that Jawad should be held indefinitely.”

It's no mystery why Obama desires to preserve and amplify parts of Bush's terror policy abroad in which his voters had entrusted him to vanquish: he still intends to fight the perpetual war on terror on a newer front: Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Middle East and South Asia

Iraq's Sovereignty Day, conveniently marked alongside America's own Independence Day, was proclaimed on June 30th by the pro-US Iraq government to commemorate the American “troop withdrawal” and hand over control to Iraq's local forces. However doubts arose as Iraq experienced a violent backlash of bombings which continue to blight Iraq.

In an unsurprising turn of events, the purported withdrawal hyped by the US media was only a farce: US Troops were merely relocating and retiring to other military outposts outside of Iraq's major cities, not departing from the country entirely. According to McClatchy, Obama's plan would keep a force between 35000 to 50000 troops well after August 2010 to advise Iraq's local forces. US Forces are not primed to withdraw from Iraq until Dec 2011 according to the Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA), but even this date can be extended indefinitely.

The Obama promise of “ending the war” must've been a knee-slapping jest for neo-conservative war planners and think-tanks. The word “Sovereignty” is a euphemistic term for hand-holding and puppetry by its country's occupiers; just as a country being “pro-democractic” is a euphemism for any pro-Western satellite nation that is hopelessly subservient to its interlopers.

But there's much reason to believe that the US won't be retreating so soon even as the declared pullout date approaches. The US Had invested billions of dollars to build a complex military infrastructure here, including the largest embassy in the world that houses more than a thousand personnel to advise and influence every administrative aspect of Iraq. To dispel the myth of complete withdrawal, the July 9th Mother Jones highlights the incredible stake Washington holds here:

“Such a concentration of foreign officialdom in such a gigantic regional command center—and no downsizing or withdrawals are yet apparent there—certainly signals Washington's larger imperial design: to have sufficient administrative labor power on hand to ensure that American advisors remain significantly embedded in Iraqi political decision-making, in its military, and in the key ministries of its (oil-dominated) economy.”

Because of US militaristic interventionism, the unstable, war-ravaged and ethnically splayed Iraq remains devoid of peace with more than a million Iraqis dead since the occupation.

As Obama plucked heartstrings and played on hopes to “end” the Iraq war, albeit differently, Obama had intensified operations in Pakistan's northern provinces, and surged the troop count in Afghanistan to almost 70000. In late June, a US Drone attack killed as many as 70 people in Warziristan, prompting Pakistan to call an end to the indiscriminate strikes. Cornering Pakistan in an uncomfortable position against its own people, Obama had been bombing the remote provinces of Pakistan since the first days of his presidency killing scores of innocent civilians.

The ultra-traditional Pashtun people residing in Waziristan, bracing themselves every night at the creeping prospect that they may be ripped apart by missile strikes the next day, are poignantly aware of the Pakistani government's complicity who command a joint offensive operation that contributed to the deaths and displacement of their people. The civilian government also long denied its duplicity in the missile strikes, merging their voices with the afflicted as if to feign sympathy while they declare the attacks should be halted and Pakistan's sovereignty respected. Back in February 2009, the Predator drones were revealed to have originated from a secret US Base in Pakistan, confirming the deeper counter-terrorism and security symbiosis between the two nations. It's no wonder Pakistan desires to shy itself away from its American counterpart during the bad press.

The continued bombing and offensives in Waziristan primes an inescapable chain of events: as Jihadist charities and groups here continue to console the afflicted while fomenting anti-Western support, anti-American sentiment would engulf the region in a violent fervor, finally forcing angry Pashtuns to capitulate to an insurgency to repel the broader occupation. As they vow to extract vengeance, Pakistan is pitted into a state of peril; Pakistan becomes a parallel of Iraq where civil war arises and the rest of the nation is driven into political and economic instability. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal becomes endangered, and neo-conservative think-tanks and war sympathizers would finally flaunt this as a pretext to justify denuclearization, a plethora of troop escalations or even a full-scale invasion of Pakistan.

The myth about Pakistan “not being serious” about terrorism, thus justifying an American intervention, must be shamefully put to rest: the Talibanization and terrorism of these remote provinces is due solely to the American presence. Imran Khan, Pakistani opposition politician and leader of Movement of Justice, revealed on Democracy Now that the growing instability was a direct result of America's meddling in the region:

“...there was no terrorism in Pakistan, we had no suicide bombing in Pakistan, [until] Pakistan sent its troops under pressure from the US. General Musharraf capitulated under the pressure and sent Pakistani troops into the tribal area and Waziristan. So it was that that resulted in what was the new phenomenon: the Pakistani Taliban. We had no militant Taliban in Pakistan, until we got in—we were forced into this US war on terror by a military dictator, not by the people of Pakistan...”

The Real Meaning of Change

Obama might've thought he'd be cut some slack from other foreign policy blunders: like supporting rose-revolution Georgia while mistakenly accusing Russia as the aggressor in the South Ossetia war, or failing to condemn Israel's disproportionate attacks on Gaza last winter that resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians. However, coupled with his overall progress in Middle East foreign policy, all of this isn't a sign of incompetence or flexibility, but evidence that he intends to stay the course with the imperial war machine while deliberately crafting rhetoric to pretend otherwise.

Blaming Obama as just a cunning politician is only part of the grander picture. There's an existential significance on why such a smart and glowing man like Obama engages in a quiet tactical repackaging of all his political endeavors, especially in a time when America's image languishes at an all-time abysmal low. Anthony Arnove in an interview with Socialist Worker puts it into perspective:

“Essentially, during the Bush administration, whole sections of the left acted as if empire began with George W. Bush. As if it was something managed only by a handful of people: George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, sections of the neo-conservative movement, perhaps even the Republican Party more generally. That takes the events of the last eight years out of the context of a history of US empire and aggression and intervention in global affairs going back to the 19th century. So in a sense, [Obama] does continue some of Bush's policies, minus unilateralism, but ultimately is preserving the neo-conservative foreign policy agenda.”

That must be the meaning of change. The goal was not to restore the rule of law and constitutional legitimacy, but to transcend the Bush administration's cowboy unilateralism and tactfully reassert a neo-conservative normalcy in America's foreign policy. America unwittingly received a repackaged war program for those so hyperfocused on Bush-era crimes that they forgot these imperialistic dreams of American empire existed past the times of the Bushes. Obama coddled and kept his war hawk administration, continues the destabilization of Pakistan, and marches on with the broader war on terror.

It's no mystery why he continues the mimicry of due process yet engages preventative detention, the further suppression of abuse photos, and the denial of habeas corpus to foreign enemy combatants. The Iraq withdrawal facade and his funneling of troops and resources into Afghanistan and the Pakistani frontier, reveals that while preaching good intentions and a faux openness with the public, he still cannot escape the bipartisan war agenda.

Promises are lofty and bittersweet until voters realize that the two-party system is a dead construct with only counterfeit solutions. For Obama, change is just politics as usual.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=14355

[Percival]

I love that this thread is still going strong, every time I open RI and see it at the top it brings a big smile to my face and restores my hope for humanity.

Fuckem!

[Nordic]

I love that this thread is still going strong, every time I open RI and see it at the top it brings a big smile to my face and restores my hope for humanity.

Yeah, that a few dozen people in the backwaters of the Internet can see through the bullshit gives you hope for humanity .....

Okay ......

I'm just giving you shit. I'm glad you feel that way, but I've pretty much given up completely on humanity. That's a new thing for me, I used to think that people would largely do the right thing, like about 2/3 of them usually, but now I realize the number is far far smaller, mainly because nobody has any fucking CLUE what the right thing is, because the inputs to their brains are almost 100% controlled by the corporatocracy.

We're like the guys with the magic glasses in "They Live". Very few of us.

[chlamor]

Obama’s war
17 July 2009

With Obama approaching the end of his sixth month in the White House, there is growing evidence that his administration is in only the first stages of what is shaping up to be a major and sustained escalation of the US war in Afghanistan.

Elected in large part because of the hostility of American working people to the militarist policies of the Bush administration, Obama and the Pentagon are waging an intensified and brutal counter-insurgency campaign that has the potential of dwarfing the carnage in Iraq and dragging on for another decade.

July, little more than half over, has already become the deadliest month for US-led forces since the war began nearly eight years ago. A total of 46 occupation troops have been killed, 24 of them Americans. This death toll—approximately three a day—is equivalent to what took place during the heaviest fighting in Iraq.

For Afghan government forces, the toll is far higher, with the regime in Kabul reporting that between six and ten members of the country’s national police are being killed daily.

As always, the greatest price is paid by the Afghan people themselves, who are being killed in growing numbers and more directly subjected to the conditions of foreign occupation, as US troops carry out their “clear and hold” operations.

A telling indicator of the violence that is being employed against the Afghan people came last week from the US Air Force, which reported that it had dropped 437 bombs on Afghanistan in June. Close-air support missions flown thus far in 2009 by US warplanes had risen to 17,420 by the end of June, the Air Force command reported. This compares to 19,092 for all of 2008.

The increasing reliance on aerial bombardment is symptomatic of a ground force that is stretched dangerously thin. Its effect on the civilian population has been a succession of horrific massacres, including the slaying last May of over 140 people torn to pieces by a US bombing raid against two villages in Afghanistan’s western Farah province.

The initial escalation of the American-led intervention will more than double the number of US troops in the country, from 32,000 to 68,000. This is in addition to 36,000 troops from other NATO countries.

The most visible aspect of this troop buildup is the deployment of 4,000 US Marines, together with thousands of British troops, in an offensive in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, considered a stronghold of the insurgency.

Operation Khanjar, as the offensive has been dubbed, is shaping up as a fiasco, with the large US force unable to carry out any major engagements with the insurgents. The latter have melted back into the population, while conducting guerrilla attacks that have exacted a heavy toll, particularly among British troops.

In the areas in which the US-led force operates in Helmand, the insurgents reenter the civilian population or retire to safe havens across the border in Pakistan. But the size of the occupation force is entirely inadequate to hold the areas or prevent the insurgents from returning once it has left.

The threat of a far bloodier war has emerged clearly in the recent statements of senior US military commanders.

Among the bluntest were those of Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who visited the US headquarters at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul Wednesday. Mullen warned that the US forces faced “very difficult fighting” and said he did not know how long the war would continue.

“I know it’s got progressively worse over the three, three-and-a-half years since 2006,” he told the BBC. “And the Taliban has got much better, they are much more violent, they are much more organized and so there’s going to be fighting that is associated with it.”

If after eight years, conditions for the American-led occupation forces have grown “progressively worse” and the insurgency has become “better,” “more violent” and “more organized,” this can only be a measure of the Afghans’ hostility to the occupiers, which assures a growing number of insurgents and broad popular support for their struggle.

The US escalation has been severely hampered by its inability to mobilize any significant Afghan force to fight alongside American troops. While US commanders had envisioned one Afghan soldier for every American in the Helmand offensive, just 650 have been deployed alongside the US force of 4,000.

The American escalation has also failed to gain the support it sought from Pakistan’s military, which it had hoped would be deployed to block Taliban fighters seeking to cross the border. Pakistani troops remain tied down by the US-instigated campaign in the country’s northwest, which turned some 2.5 million people into internal refugees.

While US commanders portray the escalation in Afghanistan as an effort to win over the population, the reality is that massive military violence is being unleashed against an impoverished people in order to force it into submission.

The original pretexts given for waging the war in Afghanistan have fallen by the wayside. The authorization of the use of military force legislation passed by the US Congress in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington and New York City was predicated on the American military being used to hunt down those blamed for these atrocities—Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, a name that now goes virtually unmentioned in official Washington circles.

As for Bush’s purported desire to bring democracy to the Afghan people, Obama has explicitly rejected such a goal as unrealistic. Instead, Afghanistan is headed for elections on August 20 in which it is universally accepted that the immensely unpopular President Hamid Karzai will be re-elected thanks to the web of corruption that ties him to warlords and criminal elements. The inevitable result will be intensified popular anger against the regime in Kabul and the US troops that protect it.

The only reason left for what is now clearly Obama’s war is the real and original one—the utilization of American military might to assert Washington’s dominance over the oil-rich and geo-strategically vital region of Central Asia.

The American military brass is openly lobbying for more troops to accomplish this aim. The implications of these demands were made clear Thursday when Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he is considering a proposal to increase the size of the US Army by 30,000 soldiers in order to relieve the stress caused by the Afghanistan buildup and the continued US occupation of Iraq.

There could be no clearer indictment of the Obama administration. Brought into office on a wave of antiwar sentiment, his administration is preparing to expand the US military in order to prosecute a dirty and protracted colonial war. Meanwhile, the country’s top military commanders exert their considerable influence over the government even more directly and openly than under the Bush administration.

American militarism under Obama enjoys support from the entire political establishment. The Democratic Congress votes to fund the wars, the US mass media parrots the war propaganda of the White House and the Pentagon, and the so-called “left” organizations that previously oriented towards protest politics have stopped their protests and tacitly backed Obama’s war.

Nonetheless, there remains deep hostility to war among masses of American working people, who will ultimately be forced to pay the price for militarism, through deepening attacks on their living standards, a growing toll of dead and wounded soldiers, and, ultimately, the drafting of working-class youth to fill the ranks of the expanding army. The struggle against war can be taken forward only through the independent mobilization of the working class against the Obama administration and the capitalist profit system that gives rise to militarism.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul20 ... -j17.shtml

[8bitagent]

Damn good article, and its a crying shame articles exposing the truth of the Afghan war only appear on alternative left sites. Though I credit Democracy Now and Jeremy Scahill.

So funny how the mainstream left is COMPLETELY silent on the Afghan issue. The silence, is quite defeaning, as is the support.

Add to this brand new article:

Newsweek: Has Pakistan's Offensive Failed?
http://www.newsweek.com/id/207032

I also encourage everyone to see the soul crushingly powerful new documentary exposing all the horrors, lies and corporate theft going on in "Rethinking Afghanistan", a 5 part film
http://rethinkafghanistan.com/videos.php

[chlamor]

Eshu’s blues: Obama in Africa
Submitted by michael hureaux... on Mon, 07/13/2009 - 23:55


“Six months after his ascent to power, Barack Obama has proven to be exactly the nightmare we at BAR have long predicted he would be.” His recent visit reveals Obama has as much contempt for Black Africans as for African Americans. “Just days ago in Ghana, the First Black President of the Empire of the United States delivered a speech laden with homilies on responsibility and 'democratic values' that could have been written by speech writers for Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.”


“The First Black President of the Empire of the United States delivered a speech laden with homilies that could have been written by speech writers for Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.”

“These are the big fish who always try to eat down the small fish,
Just the small fish.
I tell you what: they would do anything
To materialize their every wish, oh yeah.
Say: woe to the downpressors:
They’ll eat the bread of sorrow! Woe to the downpressors!
They’ll eat the bread of sad tomorrow!”—BobMarley, “Guiltiness”

Many of the people who post here at Black Agenda Report are veterans of a generations-long effort to build black critical agency in U.S. politics, and a pan-African consciousness that reaches across borders. We have maintained this perspective as participants who come from many a political perspective, but always as black activists who have made ourselves understand fully the warning made by Brother Malcolm X shortly before his death that “any black political struggle which defines its existence solely by events transpiring within the borders of the United States is doomed to irrelevance.” As anyone who has read articles at this site for awhile knows, we have been attempting to warn about the threat posed to an independent black working class politics by Barack Obama since his emergence on the national political scene at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

Obama was placed in the White House through the electoral machinations and public relations skills of a “soft” branch of the U.S. ruling class earlier this year, confirming a political prognosis made here many times since Obama’s aforementioned keynote appearance in 2004. Some of us maintained that a large section of the ruling elite of the United States would bend over backwards to keep any black candidate for the presidency alive and thriving, so long as that candidate was a loyal servant to the empire. Further, we argued that Barack Obama represented the slickest and best marketed version of the sort of capitulation that the ruling class of the United States has supported in black political leadership since the days of Booker T. Washington. To paraphrase comedian Dave Chapelle, the ruling class of the United States loves Barack Obama because he makes Bryant Gumble look like Malcolm X.

“Barack Obama represented the slickest and best marketed version of the sort of capitulation that the ruling class of the United States has supported in black political leadership since the days of Booker T. Washington.”

It is no exaggeration to say that the eventual election of Obama caught mainstream and orthodox black politics completely by surprise, given the inability of these old schools to grapple with race and class dialectics in this country. The imperial system of the United States, steeped as it is in a pattern of corruption, theft, and mass murder that is committed with impunity - and moreover, criminal in a proportion unparalleled by any other period in its history with the exception of the period of primitive capital accumulation of its formation and consolidation - had nothing to lose in allowing Barack Obama the presidency. It was in the best interest of the empire to give itself a facelift through the symbolic elevation of a black political figure whose charisma continues to fool a lot of people who really ought to know better, and who, in many cases, actually do.
Six months after his ascent to power, Barack Obama has proven to be exactly the nightmare we at BAR have long predicted he would be. He has not upheld the rights of black workers or any other workers in this economy, but rather, he has lent his immense political prestige to a massive ponzi scheme that will save the capitalist system at the expense of every form of public financial expenditure and public resource. He has not stood for any form of single payer or national health plan for the disenfranchised mass, but instead, has deliberately shut down and turned a deaf ear to the constituency for public health, in favor of a plan that will further enrich insurance companies. He has not stood in tandem with the international campaign to end the U.S. imperial crusade in the Middle East, but has chosen to expand a war that has led to massive death and dislocation of populations of the working poor in that region that is no less shameful then the carnage that followed the imperial partition of Pakistan and India in 1949. He has granted credibility to continued toxic intrusions upon the natural order through his support for an energy policy that will feature expansion of reliance on coal, deforestation, and nuclear energy.

He has not even stood for so basic a human right as human intimacy, as can be seen in his support of that atrocity called the “Defense of Marriage” act. Barack Obama, in short, has proven to be Reaganism and Bushism in humanitarian pose.

“He has not upheld the rights of black workers or any other workers in this economy.”

This week, Obama has been touring Africa, playing to the controlled crowds that are a perennial feature of imperial politics wherever it tracks its bloody hooves in the world today. Just days ago in Ghana, the First Black President of the Empire of the United States delivered a speech laden with homilies on responsibility and “democratic values” that could have been written by speech writers for Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. This glorified “Son of Africa”, as the boojwah press call him, had the arrogance to stand near the dungeons of Cape Coast Castle, and declare flatly that “the end of slavery had come through winds that always blow in the direction of human progress.”

Never mind Toussaint Ouverture. Never mind David Walker, or Nat Turner. Forget the sacrifices of the Colored Regiments of the Union Army, or their officers like Martin Delaney and Harriett Tubman, who understood better than any white regiment the consequences of failure in the U.S. Civil War.
Forget WEB Dubois, or Marcus Garvey, or George Padmore, or David Sobukwe, or Albert Luthuli, or Bessie Head, or Wole Soyinka, or Birago Diop, or Jean Joseph Rabearivelo, or Fannie Lou Hamer, or Fela Kuti, or Marlon Riggs, or Audre Lorde, or June Jordan, or any of the thousands of black rank and file soldiers of struggle who went out and got themselves bloodied and beaten for black freedom, both in the United States and internationally, while Barack Obama was learning the finer and cheaper tricks of boojwah political rhetoric about freedom and progress that allegedly floats on the wind.

“Barack Obama, in short, has proven to be Reaganism and Bushism in humanitarian pose.”

Oh yes, we all saw the spectacle, the crowds who gazed at Barack adoringly as the prodigal son returned to Africa, and we were impressed, to be sure. The cat’s got a good hustle, of that there is no doubt. But we know that somewhere, in the hearts of those massive crowds, there beats a pulse of resistance that Barack Obama has never had to know anything about, not really, a pulse which still shouts to the world, in the words of that great political poet and prophet Robert Nesta Marley:

We’re the survivors, a black survival
In this age of technological inhumanity
Scientific atrocity, atomic mis-philosophy, nuclear mis-energy
It’s a world that forces lifelong insecurity
We got to survive, we got to survive
But to live as one equal in the eyes of the almighty. --- “Survival”

And we know that, however good a salesman the Oba Man is, whichever dog in the manger hustle he chooses to implement in his defense of an imperial system that has outlived its day, there will always be those in those massive crowds, quiet and patient, biding their time, who simply aren’t buying. That’s what we know. That’s our faith. It is wide. It knows no boundaries. So high you can’t get over it. So low you can’t go under it. We will win. Venceremos.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=con ... ama-africa

[chlamor]

Obama task force backs indefinite detention without trial
By Tom Eley
22 July 2009

On Monday, an Obama administration task force announced it would delay for six months release of a report that was to outline plans for the prosecution of inmates at its Guantánamo Bay prison camp and future prisoners seized in the “war on terror.” In its stead came an interim report and a White House press briefing that together indicate President Barack Obama is likely to rely on military tribunals or indefinite detention without trial in cases where evidences against “terror suspects” is scant or tainted by torture.

The interim report and the accompanying press briefing—where four high-ranking White House officials spoke under the proviso that the media would not reveal their names—point to the formation of a threefold approach to dealing with the 229 remaining Guantánamo detainees as well as future captives. Of those who cannot be shifted to other nations or detention facilities, some may face criminal trial under US law, some would face military commissions, and some would be placed in indefinite detention without any sort of trial.

Criminal trials will be the least likely route for prisoners, the preliminary report and the press briefing seem to suggest. The report declares that criminal courts will be used “where feasible,” but leaves no doubt that what it means by “feasible” is the a priori certainty of a guilty verdict.

“Federal courts have on many occasions proven they can meet the challenges of international terrorism prosecutions and the legitimacy of their verdicts is unquestioned,” according to the report. The passage boasts of the criminal code’s “extraterritorial reach” through anti-terrorism legislation, and says that “experienced prosecutors often find ways to overcome any challenges” to the introduction of legally-dubious evidence.

Much of the report is a defense of military commissions, which it claims are “no less legitimate” than civilian courts. Unlike criminal courts, “[m]ilitary commission can allow for the protection of sensitive sources and methods of intelligence-gathering...and take into account the realities of the battlefield and the particular challenges of gathering evidence during military operations overseas,” the report explains. This is a remarkable passage. “Methods of intelligence-gathering” and the battlefield “challenges of gathering evidence,” refer, of course, to evidence extracted through torture. And the “protection of sensitive sources” no less obviously refers to the US agents who carried out this torture.

Then there is the third option, indefinite detention without trial. When prosecution is “not feasible in any forum,” an accompanying document states, “the cases may be referred for other appropriate disposition”—i.e., indefinite detention. The administration finds some prisoners “too difficult to prosecute in federal court or before a military commission,” according to a reporter present at the White House briefing. An official explained that these prisoners would be “placed in some system of prolonged detention,” but that Congressional approval would first be sought to grant an air of legitimacy to the practice.

The media has presented the Detention Policy Task Force as primarily concerned with resolving the fate of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners. This is not the case. As the interim report states, what is involved are “policies in the future regarding apprehension, detention, and treatment of suspected terrorists,” and “rules and boundaries...for any future detentions....”

At the press briefing, an Obama official explained the administration is seeking a “framework for dealing with the detainees at Guantánamo and future detainees captured in the fight against terrorists.”

The interim report makes explicit the policy indicated in previous speeches by Obama and other administration officials. The new Democratic administration intends to institutionalize what was one of the most reactionary and anti-democratic claims made by the Bush White House: that the US president has the right to condemn those allegedly suspected of terrorism to indefinite imprisonment without charges or trials.

Significantly, not only does the interim report make clear that the use of military commissions and indefinite detention will not end with the current detainees, it also makes no distinction between alleged terrorists captured abroad and US citizens, meaning that these same methods could be used against those deemed domestic “enemies” of the state.

Whatever its final contents, the six-month delay in the Detention Policy Task Force report’s issuance throws into further doubt President Barack Obama’s professed intention to close “Gitmo.” Shortly after taking office, Obama issued an executive order declaring that by January 1, 2010, he would shut down the prison camp on the US military base in Cuba. At the time, this was considered essential in order to effect the appearance of “change” with the Bush administration’s despised policies in the “war on terror.”

However, this quickly raised two questions: what would be done with the hundreds of inmates who remained at Guantánamo, and what would be the legal implications for future prisoners taken in the “war on terror.”

Of the 229 remaining prisoners, Washington has been able to link only a few names with terrorist activities, and even in these cases major doubts and tainted evidence remain. The majority of the prisoners have nothing to do with al Qaeda; they were abducted by the US military or its accomplices from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and many other nations, and spirited away through a network of secret flights, prison “black sites,” and torture chambers en route to Guantánamo. At Guantánamo, they have been subjected to various forms of torture and abusive conditions for years.

There have been no formal charges made against the vast majority of the prisoners, and none have been allowed to see or contest whatever evidence the US might have against them. For years the Bush administration claimed that, as “enemy combatants,” the prisoners had no legal recourse to either the US judicial system or to the international laws of war governing the treatment of prisoners. Their fate was entirely at the mercy of the US president.

While formally dropping the term “enemy combatant,” the Obama administration has carried on, in all its essentials, this unspeakably antidemocratic and inhumane policy. The Obama administration refuses to grant the prisoners their day in court, not because the inmates are “dangerous” or because of technical difficulties, as has been repeated ad nauseam in the US media.

Rather, the problem for the Obama administration is that Guantánamo is filled with innocent men and boys. Any fair court proceeding would not only reveal this, but would also likely expose, in graphic detail, the countless war crimes committed against their bodies and minds by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US military.

The Obama administration opposes such a development every bit as much as former Bush administration officials, such as Vice President Dick Cheney. Obama’s interim report tacitly confessed as much, stressing the need to protect US agents and noting the “evidentiary problems that might attend prosecution” in civilian courts. “Evidentiary problems” is, of course, a euphemism for hearsay evidence and evidence extracted through torture.

Yet Obama still wishes to present a changed face of US imperialism to the world. Hence his dilemma over Guantánamo. Third-party countries have been reluctant to receive the prisoners, and after a right-wing scare campaign led by Republican politicians and figures close to the military-intelligence apparatus, it has become politically unpalatable for Obama and leading Democrats to try them in the US or place them in prisons on US soil.

Reaction to the preliminary report from civil rights groups has been muted. The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Anthony Romero, warned Obama against continuing Bush administration policies. “The Obama administration must not slip into the same legal swamp that engulfed the Bush administration with its failed Guantánamo policies,” he said. “Any effort to revamp the failed Guantánamo military commissions or enact a law to give any president the power to hold individuals indefinitely and without charge or trial is sure to be challenged in court and it will take years before justice is served.”

A separate White House committee, the Special Task Force on Interrogation and Transfer Policies, tasked with making recommendations on US “interrogation policy,” has also been given a two-month reprieve to issue its report.

There was little explanation accompanying this delay. The postponement is rather ominous. The Special Task Force on Interrogation and Transfer Policies was formed as the result of another early Obama executive order that the media claimed ended torture. It did no such thing. It ordered the task force “to study and evaluate whether the interrogation practices and techniques in Army Field Manual...provide an appropriate means of acquiring the intelligence necessary to protect the Nation, and, if warranted...propose new interrogation techniques beyond what is allowed in Army Field Manual.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul20 ... -j22.shtml

[chlamor]

Obama escalates assault on public education
By Tom Eley
25 July 2009

On Friday, President Barack Obama announced an assault on public education that would go beyond the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” program. He outlined an education “reform” that would link teacher pay to the test performance of students and force state governments to shift funding from established public schools to so-called charter schools.

Obama spoke on Friday at the Department of Education, unveiling a $4.3 billion “competition” among the states for federal grants, named “Race to the Top.” Money from the fund would be awarded to only a handful of states that best promote “innovation”— charter schools and merit-based pay among teachers. States that forbid these policies, such as California, New York, and Wisconsin—home of the nation’s highest-ranked education system—would be barred from consideration.

Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan presented the $4.3 billion as if it were an extraordinary amount of money. But it is tens of billions less than has been doled out to individual banks, such as Goldman Sachs, in Obama’s bailout of the finance industry. It is also less than the personal fortunes of about 90 Americans, according to the Forbes 400 list of 2008. Nor does it meet the desperate needs of cash-starved public education; the Detroit public school system alone has a deficit of $400 million.

This relative pittance would do little even if it were distributed equitably. But that is not Obama’s intention, as he made clear. “Rather than divvying it up and handing it out, we are letting states and districts compete for it,” he said. “That’s how we can incentivize excellence and spur reform and launch a race for the top in America’s public schools.”

Like a master dropping a bone among his starving dogs, the Obama administration is openly provoking a bitter competition among states and school districts for paltry funding.

Obama outlined three “strategies” for so-called underperforming schools, all of them reactionary. “One strategy involves replacing the principal, replacing much of the staff, and giving the school a second chance,” he said. “Another strategy involves inviting a great nonprofit to help manage a troubled school. A third strategy involves converting a dropout factory into a successful charter school. These are public schools funded by parents, teachers, and civic or community organizations with broad leeway to innovate.” The second and third strategies—featuring “great nonprofit” groups and “community organizations”—indicate that Obama may see a role for religious groups in public education.

Duncan, speaking before Obama, said that Race to the Top would be used to encourage states and school districts to fire teachers. They “must be ready to institute far-reaching reforms, replace school staff, and change the school culture,” he said. “We cannot continue to tinker in terrible schools where students fall further and further behind, year after year.”

Duncan outlined three other funds, a collective $4.8 billion, that will also be awarded only to those states and school districts “willing to turn around their lowest-performing schools,” as Duncan put it.

Obama and Duncan implicitly laid the blame for the problems of public education at the feet of “bad” teachers.

While it is certainly the case that the US has among the worst public education systems in the industrialized nations—with high drop-out rates and poor accomplishment in key subject areas—this is not the fault of teachers. It is the outcome of decades in which public education has been starved of resources, while the wealth of the country has been channeled ever more openly into the coffers of the very rich.

Merit-based pay for teachers will only discourage educators from taking positions at disadvantaged schools and among students who need the most help. Its practical effect, like No Child Left Behind, will be to shift funding out of the schools that need it most. It is a giant step toward the privatization of public education in America and the formalization of a two-tier, class-based education system.

Already, the quality of eduction for American children depends largely on the affluence of the area in which any given school is located. Much of US school funding is based on property taxes and other forms of local revenue, and certain states make available far more money per student than others. In this set-up, the public schools in the wealthy neighborhoods and suburbs are vastly superior to those in the inner cities, small towns, reservations, and other financially starved areas. Rich and upper-middle class families may also bypass public education altogether by sending their children to expensive private or parochial schools. Obama’s policies will serve to deepen, and make official, these disparities.

In an interview in the Washington Post, Obama claimed that evaluation tests could be crafted in such a way as to avert this. Tests might be used to measure improvement, rather than comparing students in poor and rich schools, he said. Yet in a society in which social misery is mounting, where more and more children go to school homeless and hungry, a growing number of students will not show improvement on standardized tests—whose value, in any case, has been placed in doubt by countless pedagogues and teachers.

Make no mistake, Obama has proposed a class-based system of education. For the children of workers and the poor—who will not perform as well on standardized tests as the children of the rich—there will be financially starved schools and overworked and underpaid teachers. This will, of course, only worsen the education of the students, which will be reflected once again in worsening test scores. They and their teachers will pay the price through the reallocation of resources to the better-performing “charter” schools, which, like private schools, have no obligation to accept all students who might wish to enroll, and which routinely dispense with old union work rules and dismissal practices for teachers.

Obama has promoted time and again the example of the Chicago public schools, touting the record of Duncan, who was the system’s “chief executive officer” beginning in 2001. This should be taken as a threat. Duncan in fact decimated public education in Chicago, shuttering dozens of schools, carrying out massive layoffs among teachers and staff, and undermining tenure. The results? In 2008, only 55 percent of Chicago high school students managed to graduate. Another telling statistic is 26, the number of Chicago students murdered in 2008, mostly as a result of finding themselves in hostile gang territory great distances from the old schools Duncan had axed.

The assault on school teachers and public education is another front in the Obama administration’s ruthless class war on the living standards, social position and democratic rights of the working class that is already deeper and more sweeping than that of the Reagan administration and its successors. So far, Obama’s education proposals have received less media attention than his bailout of Wall Street, his forced bankruptcy of the auto industry, and his so-called health care “reform” which is in fact an effort to create an openly class-based health care system. But his proposals for education will prove just as costly to workers and their children.

He has encountered no resistance from the the teachers unions, who have for years denounced incentive-based pay and charter school proposals from the Bush administration and Republican governors, and have handed over tens of millions to elect Democratic candidates, including Obama.

“This is poking teachers’ unions straight in the eye,” Mike Petrilli, of the education policy group the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, told the New York Times.

Not judging by the reaction of the unions. The two biggest teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have mounted no resistance to Obama’s plans and quickly endorsed them after their formal announcement.

AFT President Randi Weingarten declared, “The era of teacher union-bashing was over today,” and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said that Obama and Duncan “want to work with us, and not do things to us.”

Their speedy capitulation to Obama demonstrates the essence of the union executives’ earlier “opposition” to Bush. They are contented by the fact they have “a seat at the table” in the dismantling of public education. This, they sense, can be converted into revenue streams, perks, and think-tank positions for them and their colleagues. They have no interest in defending the wages and security of the teachers they purport to represent, much less public education as a whole.

Obama’s education proposals demonstrate that social inequality in America is so advanced, and the power of the financial aristocracy so immense, that no public service or program, including education, that is not openly based on class privilege and status can long survive.

The ideal of an egalitarian public education system has historically been a central component of the democratic impulse in the US. From the early 19th century, the more farsighted of the US political and business elite recognized the value of a system of free public schools. The great advocate of this perspective was the Massachusetts educator Horace Mann (1796-1859), who called education “the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery” and “our political safety” without which “all is deluge.”

And every social movement for equality has inscribed on its banner the demand for equal education. Again and again, historians find that a central driving force behind the great labor struggles of the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century was workers’ desire that their children might aspire to a fuller and richer life through education; that their children would not be forced to work from a young age. Indeed, workers were prepared to abide by certain deprivations, so long as they felt their children might live better one day.

In the wake of the Civil War, contemporaries spoke of an unquenchable thirst among the freed slaves for education that had been denied them. It is little accident that the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s took aim first at the “separate but equal” doctrine of racial segregation in the Southern public school system that had condemned African Americans to inferior schools.

Now the Obama administration is promoting education “reform” that will deepen a new system of segregation in education—along class rather than racial lines.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul20 ... -j25.shtml