Heck of a Job, Brennan

Dear Mr. President,
The Senate Intelligence Committee, responsible for oversight of military and CIA activities, under Charwoman Feinstein has been a disaster, turning a blind eye to your war crimes. Only Senator Wyden has raised objections to your assassination program. For a year he’s been asking for a list of countries where the CIA is actively killing people. Stonewalled. For months he’s asked for the classified legal memo justifying the killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi. Denied. And now, with the release of the “White Paper” we see why; the legal justification is as flimsy and specious as Bush’s was for torture. Now, with your nomination of the architect of drone wars and targeted assassinations to head the CIA, we finally get a little light on this dark corner of foreign policy. But very little since Feinstein, a national security warhawk, is a Brennan admirer. Yesterday, she cleared the chamber when protests broke out and the next session will be held behind closed doors. And after yesterday’s hearing she parroted Brennan’s lie that civilian casualties from drone attacks are in the single digits. Astounding! Is the Washington bubble so impenetrable that no outside information gets through? The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Long War Journal, the Stanford/NYU study, many sources document nearly 1,000 civilian casualties. Over the past 11 days, my letters to you, which are also cc’d to Senator Feinstein, list the names of 80 children and 25 adults. Either she’s not reading her mail or she dismisses me as she dismissed Code Pink – and everyone else – from the hearing room yesterday. What’s really appalling, though, is your administration’s arrogant violation of domestic and international law, the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the fundamental principles of democracy and common humanity. You have embraced war rather than peace and made no attempt to investigate or correct the injustices of our foreign policy that resulted in 9/11. Your drone wars have made America more hated, made the world less stable, made us less safe. You’ve wasted trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives on an unjust war without purpose or end and the architect of it all is your man Brennan, a slam-dunk to head the CIA, his reward for a job well-done. Sort of like Bush’s “Heck of a job, Brownie,” after the Katrina disaster only more chilling. Feinstein should be impeached and Brennan – and you – tried for war crimes.

John Brennan defends drone strikes

John Brennan is met by protesters as he arrives for hearings on his confirmation as CIA chief. Photo: Jewel Samad, AFP/Getty Images

Obama's Brennan, Hitler’s Eichmann

Dear Mr. President, 
Well, Brennan survived the first round of questioning in his quest to head the CIA. Imagine, 4 years ago he had to withdraw because of protests over torture, but apparently extra-judicial assassination in your campaign of terror is okay. How fitting that Code Pink protested today and was cleared from the hearing room and how typical that Senator Feinstein cleared the room so the public once again is kept in the dark. But you did release that secret legal memo that justifies killing Americans without a trial. Of course, it was under duress, since some of the committee threatened to filibuster Brennan’s nomination unless you let them see it. I liked Saxby Chambliss’ questioning of Brennan about why he prefers killing terrorists over detaining them. Brennan insisted “I never believe it is better to kill a terrorist than to detain him. We want to detain as many terrorists as possible so we can elicit intelligence from them” to stop future attacks. Chambliss asked twice, “how many high value targets have been arrested, detained and interrogated by the United States” during Brennan's tenure and never got a straight answer. Finally, Chambliss declared, the answer is "one." This is why he–and you–are so dangerous, Mr. President. Evasion and secrecy suround everything you and he do. You promised the most transparent administration ever, but you’ve done just the opposite. Typical of your MO. Sell one concept to the public, do the opposite and trust nobody notices. I thought Mary O’Connell’s Op Ed piece in this morning’s NYT pretty much nailed the whole issue of targeted assassinations, covert wars and the secrecy surrounding the justification for all of it. “Secret law” she wrote, “is an oxymoron. The rule of law is the basis of our democracy and the foundation of international relations. Facts like operational details may properly be kept confidential, but not the law itself.” O’Connell ripped the White Paper leaked to NBC News as being in the same category as Bush’s justification for torture, warrantless wiretapping and indefinite detention, a sham and a fraud, a spurious effort to justify the unjustifiable. We already know the secret memo will be twisted logic, redefinition of terms and evasion of existing law and the Constitution. Brennan’s your boy, just the kind of guy you want running the CIA, a secretive cold-blooded technocrat killer who follows orders and believes 110% in the righteousness of what he’s doing. Just like Hitler’s Eichmann.

What are the odds she'll block his nomination to be CIA Director?

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D, CA)  meets with John Brennan, nominee for CIA Director, on Capitol Hill in Washington January 31, 2013. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

John O. Brennan's War on Children

Dear Mr. President,
A long article in today’s NYT on Death-by-Drone Brennan, your choice to head the CIA, sheds a little light on some very dark corners. Brennan, a defender of torture during the Bush years is the architect of Kill Lists, targeted assassinations, drone wars and, most recently, cyberwars. A versatile guy if you want to terrorize a village, a region or a country. His old CIA connection with Saudi Arabia got us that secret drone base there, handy for sending drones and Hellfire missiles into neighboring Yemen. Brennan sees al-Qaeda affiliates everywhere but he’s especially obsessed with Yemen which he’s using as a test case for his theories on drone warfare. It’s pretty obvious his theories are self-destructive; there are more al-Qaeda militants now than when he started the attacks in 2009. Even retired generals say the drone strikes are the best recruiting tool al Qaeda has. The first attack on Yemen was a disaster. On December 17, 2009, Cruise missiles carrying cluster bombs struck a tiny mountain village and killed 41 people including 21 children and 14 women. Here’s a link to a photo of 2 survivors of that attack, Sumaia Abdullah Louqye, 4, and Nada Mokbel Louqye, 5. Their entire families were wiped out. Take a good look at the fear and confusion in their young faces, Mr. President, it’s the face of war: http://www.trust.org/alertnet/multimedia/pictures/detail.dot?mediaInode=df398f9e-9c84-40e5-a608-b3618bb6d67f The second attack in June 2010 killed a popular deputy governor and incited anti-American riots and since then it hasn’t gotten much better. Last August, a Hellfire missile incinerated  5 men including Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, a 40-year-old cleric and his policeman cousin, outspoken opponents of al Qaeda who were arguing with 3 low level “militants.” And a few weeks ago on January 23, another CIA drone attack killed Saleem Hussein Jamal, a 21-year old university student and his 33-year old schoolteacher cousin who gave 5 strangers a ride to the next village. The strangers, it turned out, were low-level members of al-Qaeda. These are all war crimes, Mr. President, and all on your watch, orchestrated by the man you want to head the CIA. He is the modern day equivalent of Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s architect of the Holocaust. He is an architect of torture, of terrorism and of crimes against humanity. He should be in the dock at the ICC charged with war crimes not in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee for a confirmation hearing.

Sumaia Abdullah Louqye, 4, (L) and Nada Mokbel Louqye, 5, look on as they stand outside their family's hut in the mountainous village of al-Ma'jalah, in the southern Yemeni province of Abyan, February 2, 2013. The two girls are the only survivors among the members of their families that were living in a rural community at the time that it was hit by a U.S. missile strike on December 17, 2009, according to local authorities. The attack left 41 people, including 21 children and 14 women dead in the highest civilian death toll of any U.S. strike in Yemen to date, according to an Amnesty International report. Nada lost her mother, three brothers, sister and several other extended family members, and Sumaia lost her parents, three sisters, a brother and an uncle and several other members of her extended family, according to tribal community leaders. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

Bush Detained Children, Obama Kills Them

Dear Mr. President,
A few comments on that 16-page unsigned, undated InJustice Department memo made public Monday. First, it’s not the really secret stuff, the “official” legal justification for assassinating American citizens without benefit of a trial; that’s still too “sensitive” for even your sycophants on the Senate Intelligence Committee to see. But it does shed a little light on the thinking that went into the justification for you to order the murder of anyone you want murdered. The most striking part is this: “But the document emphasizes that the decision to kill a citizen in certain circumstances is not one in which the courts should play any role, asserting that judges should not restrain the executive branch in making tactical judgments about when to use force against a senior Qaeda leader” (today’s NYT, p. A6). I’m not a constitutional law professor like you, Mr. President, but that strikes me as a clear violation of the Constitution and a disingenuous way to avoid the checks and balances necessary for democracy to function. It also gives you a free hand to finger anyone you want assassinated without clear evidence of wrongdoing or “imminent threat” or even that the person is a “high level member of Qaeda.” No oversight, no responsibility, no problem. So my question is this: What evidence was there that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a high level leader of al Qaeda? What evidence that he was a member of al Qaeda? He was a 16-year-old boy, born in Denver, Colorado, searching for the father he had not seen in 2 years. His only crime was that his father, also an American citizen, was on your Kill List. How did you make the leap that Abdulrahman was an imminent threat to the United States? Where does your intelligence come from? Bush rounded up some 2,500 children and detained at least 500 in Iraqi detention centers, some at Bagram in Afghanistan and 15 - 20 in Guantanamo (one, a 15-year-old Canadian boy spent 10 years in Guantanamo before finally being released last year). Some of those children at Guantanamo were as young as 13 at the time they were detained. At least one child committed suicide, and one was found guilty of war crimes (none of the real war criminals have ever had to answer for their war crimes). But at least Bush didn’t kill them. You are responsible for the murder of hundreds of children, no less a war criminal than Bush. If they can strip Lance Armstrong of Tour de France medals, surely they can strip you of that Nobel Peace Prize.

Abdul Salam Ghetan,

citizen of Saudi Arabia 

detained at age 17, sent

to Guantanamo Jan. 2002

Released June 2006

Omar Ahmed Kadr

Canadian citizen

detained at age 15

sent to Guantanamo Oct. 2002

First child ever convicted as a

war criminal by military tribunal. 

Returned to Canada Sept. 2012

Fahim Quireshi and Sadaullah Wazir: Child Victims of Drones

Dear Mr. President,

This morning’s NYT reports that you and your evil Rasputin, John Brennan, have just given the president authority to launch pre-emptive cyber attacks against “perceived enemies.” Of course, the legal justification for this, like the justification for drone attacks, is too secret to share with We the People and no one in Congress is willing to challenge you, so Executive power continues to expand and evolve in frightening ways. With cyberwar however, no one actually gets killed or maimed like they do in drone strikes. At least not yet. In addition to the secrecy surrounding legal justification and the rules for a pre-emptive cyberstrike, what really bothers me is that, like drone strikes against “suspected militants,” no proof needed to launch a pre-emptive strike, just the perception of threat. And like drone strikes, the intelligence is questionable at best, outright wrong most of the time. Like that missile strike on January 23, 2009 that killed 9 “militants” in Waziristan who turned out to be civilians. Fahim Quireshi survived that attack and described what it was like for the Stanford/NYU study, Living Under Drones. Neither he nor any of the 4 members of his family who died were militants. He was a 14-year-old boy who loved soccer and school. He lost an eye, hearing in one ear, and shrapnel ripped through his body. He no longer attends school or plays soccer. He has limited mobility and suffers from post traumatic stress, as do most of those who witnessed or survived the attack. Or take the case of Sadaullah Wazir. He was 15 when a Hellfire missile killed 3 members of his family in Waziristan and mangled both his legs so badly they had to be amputated. No one killed or wounded in that attack was a militant either but the U.S. has never acknowledged the injustice or apologized or offered compensation to Sadaullah or Fahim so they’ve joined a lawsuit against the CIA for these illegal acts. So far, the courts of Pakistan and the U.S. have refused to hear their case. Injustice on top of injustice. The Obama legacy grinds on: perpetual war; secrecy and suppression of information; no accountability for war crimes past or present. And all this from a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Here’s a picture of Sadaullah with his new legs: http://www.channel4.com/media/images/Channel4/c4-news/MAY/09/sadaullah_wazir_drones_k.jpg. And here’s a picture of Fahim taken late last year with his new glass eye: http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m95z9kC9oq1qhvwfc.png

Fahim Quireshi, drone victim at 14

Sadaullah Wazir, drone victim at 15

Names of the Dead: Malik Daud Khan + 23 More

Dear Mr. President,

Eventually our sins come back to haunt us. Today’s NYT reports that a Milan Appeals Court ruled that a former CIA station chief, Jeffrey Castelli and 2 other American CIA agents, Betnie Medero and Ralph Russomando, did not have diplomatic immunity and convicted them in absentia for the 2003 abduction and rendition to torture of an Egyptian-born cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, on Feb. 17, 2003. Castelli was sentenced to 7 years in prison, the other two to 6 years. 23 other CIA agents had already been convicted and sentenced in absentia for their roles in the kidnapping. This was a Bush war crime but on March 17, 2011, two days after the CIA thug, Ray Davis, was released from jail after murdering 2 Pakistanis on the streets of Lahore, a drone strike killed 42 Pakistani civilians and wounded 14. The CIA still claims no civilians died in the attack. One U.S. official stated: “The fact is that a large group of heavily armed men, some of whom were clearly connected to Al Qaeda and all of whom acted in a manner consistent with A.Q.-linked militants, were killed.” The truth is that this was not a gathering of militants but an officially sanctioned jirga, tribal elders gathered to resolve a land dispute. The U.S, Ambassador tried to stop the attack but was overruled by the CIA and at least 5 Hellfire missiles were fired at the men gathered in two circles at the local bus depot. Local police and government officials also attended. Here’s the names of some of the civilians killed in that attack, taken from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism website: Malik Daud Khan, the leader of the jirga; Sharabat Khan, the leaseholder of the Chromite mine in dispute; Gul Akbar; Mohammad Sheen; Lewanai; Mir Zaman; Din Mohammad; Malik Tareen; Noor Ali; Zare Jan; Sadiq; Mustaqeem; Khangai; Gulnaware; Faenda Khan; Ismail Khan, Hajji Babat, Khnay Khan, Gul Mohammed and his son Ismael.. Five policemen also died in the attack: Dindar Khan, Umark Khan, Wali Khan, Sadar and Bakhtar. Milik Daud Khan’s son, Noor, is suing the British government for their role in the murder of his father. British intelligence feeds information to U.S. intelligence which the CIA uses to target victims. The British courts have denied the right to sue for more than a year but this week a high court is considering Noor’s appeal. It’s giving the Brits heartburn. It should be giving you heartburn as well. There is no escaping the war crimes committed by you and your assassins at the CIA.

Malik Daud Khan, Age 45, Tribal Elder Killed March 17, 2011 in a CIA Drone Attack on a Jirga Gathered to Resolve a Land Dispute