Capt. Will Swenson, The Kiss & The Medal of Honor

Dear Mr. President,
Tomorrow you’ll bestow the Medal of Honor on former Army Captain William Swenson, a long overdue recognition of this soldier’s bravery under fire to rescue his wounded and dead comrades in a battle in the village of Ganjgal on September 8, 2009. Had it been up to the Army brass, Swenson would never get his medal for he dared criticize his superiors after the battle for failing to provide air support during an ambush that killed 5 Americans, 10 Afghans and left 17 wounded. Swenson was on his 2nd tour in Afghanistan—he served one tour in Iraq—and he was career. But in today’s army you don’t criticize superiors no matter how incompetent and he was forced out; “early retirement” he calls it. He, along with Marine Cpl. Dakota Meyer, were recommended for the Medal of Honor that day. Meyer received his on September 15, 2011, but no mention of Swenson. It took a McClatchy News reporter who witnessed the battle and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) to force the Army to find Swenson’s “lost” nomination packet. But the Battle of Ganjgal and the heroism of Captain Swenson isn’t the real story. Neither is the Army’s attempt to punish Swenson by forcing him out and “losing” his nomination for 4 years. The real story is the simple act of compassion and humanity Swenson showed his wounded buddy, Sgt. 1st Class Kenneth Westbrook after helping carry him to the Medevac helicopter and loading him aboard. The official Army video shows Swenson and Westbrook leaning in toward one another, exchanging a few words and then, before turning to go, Swenson leaned over and kissed his wounded comrade on the forehead, tapped him with one finger in farewell, turned and re-entered the battle. Right there in that simple act is why soldiers fight. Not for country or some abstract ideology, but for their comrades-in-arms. Most soldiers eventually recognize that the war they’ve been sent to fight is not for the reasons they’ve been told but rather, an act of inconceivable brutality fostered, promoted and maintained by politicians for reasons of power, greed, stupidity, insanity. Sgt. Westbrook died 29 days later and his blood is on your hands, Mr. President. So are the other casualties of the Battle of Ganjgal. And so are the tens of thousands of Afghan civilians who have died in a needles war based on lies, ignorance and a thirst for revenge. I hope you mention The Kiss in the award ceremony tomorrow, Mr. President. It is the only decent act that came from that senseless slaughter.

The Abu Anas Caper: Blowback in Libya

Dear Mr. President,

Was the kidnapping and rendition of Abu Anas al-Liby worth it? Today’s NYT reports that the backlash from the raid “could bring down the government of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan.” (“U.S. Officials Say Libya Approved Commando Raids” p. A1) Win the battle, lose the war. As for Libya’s “approval” of the raid, the article reveals that the approval came after months of lobbying by American officials and that it was “tacit.” My dictionary defines tacit as: “understood without being openly expressed; implied.” Not exactly official or legal or whole-hearted. Maybe that’s why they weren’t informed ahead of time or why they didn’t participate in the operation—contrary to official statements yesterday. And the tacit approval occurred weeks, maybe months ago. So here’s Libya which we saved from humanitarian disaster by bombing, droning and strafing Qaddafi’s forces, making sure he was toppled—as in dead—and 18 months later the country is in chaos, militias—militant s, insurgents, jihadists, Al Qaeda affiliates and franchises—control much of the country and now their weak government is about to fall because your action heroes snatched one of their citizens off the street in front of his home. And, it turns out, he wasn’t the real prize in the two Saturday raids, anyway; Abu Anas has been inactive for years and any information he has is dated. The real prize was the one Navy SEAL Team 6 failed to capture in Somalia, Abdikadir Mohamed Abdikadir. (NYT, “Imperfect Intelligence Said to Hinder U.S. Raid on Militant in Somali” p. A10). Abdikadir is active, he plots and carries out raids and his information is current. Abdikadir is also a member of Shabab, a group your overconfident intelligence officials say is supposed to be on the run. “The Somali militant group had lost ground and manpower.” Well, apparently not. Imperfect Intelligence indeed. French Special Forces, the article goes on, also tried to raid a Shabab stronghold earlier this year to rescue a hostage and lost two men and the hostage. We never learn. Not from experience, not from history, not from the example of others. Especially not that violence begets violence. And we’re still at it. The page 1 article reports that “An American surveillance drone has flown virtually every day over Benghazi gathering information” on 6 other Libyans you want to snatch. One, Ahmed Abu Khattala, is accused of the U.S. embassy raid in Benghazi. War without end. Good for business if you’re in the business of war.

Abu Anas al-Liby Meets Obamalaw

Dear Mr. President,

Reading an article in today’s NYT (“How the U.S. Is Interrogating A Qaeda Suspect” p. A9) is like falling down the rabbit hole. When is invading another country not a crime of aggression? When Obama says it isn’t. When is a prisoner of war not a prisoner of war? When Obama says he isn’t. And when do the Geneva Conventions apply? When Obama says they do. So here’s Abu Anas al-Liby, indicted on criminal charges in NYC, an alleged high value Al Qaeda target, a citizen of Libya living in Libya, kidnapped by U.S. commandos off the street in Tripoli and spirited away to the waiting U.S.S. San Antonio in the Mediterranean where he’ll be interrogated without a lawyer present and without being informed of his rights. All this, the raid, the kidnapping, the rendition, the incarceration at sea, violates the Geneva Conventions, violates the sovereignty of another country, violates U.S. law and violates basic human rights. Your Nobel Peace Prize does not put you above the law, Mr. President. How is your refusal to abide by the Geneva Conventions any different than Assad’s? Or any other tyrant? You threatened to bomb Syria for Assad’s violation of the Geneva Conventions when his troops used chemical weapons on August 21. All that self-righteous talk about enforcing international law and the Geneva Conventions and yet you violate them every day with your targeted assassinations and drone strikes and 164 Guantanamo prisoners still held without charges. And now the case of al-Liby shines more light on your arrogant disregard of law. In your twisted logic, no laws protect al-Liby. He’s a member of Al Qaeda and therefore an “enemy combatant,” a category invented by Bush neocons to indefinitely incarcerate and brutalize prisoners. Holding prisoners of war at sea is explicitly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions; but you say al-Liby isn’t being held, he’s on a troop transport “in transit.” (Never mind it took more than 2 months to transit Warsame while he was being interrogated.) And while in transit a special team of agents is interrogating him with no witnesses or legal representation and when they finish with him, what the FBI calls a “clean team” of fresh agents will go through the interrogation process again, this time offering legal representation and informing him of his rights so they can use it in a court of law if they decide to prosecute. Or maybe they’ll take him straight to Guantanamo. Welcome to the world of Obamalaw. Welcome to the rabbit hole.

Abu Anas al-Libi and Obama's Law of War

Dear Mr. President,

Today’s NYT (“U.S. Said to Hold Qaeda Suspect on Navy Ship” p.A1) reports that Abu Anas al-Liby wast taken to the U.S.S. San Antonio in the Mediterranean where he will be questioned “without a lawyer present [which] follows a pattern used successfully by the Obama administration with other terrorist suspects.” The article goes on to recount the case of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame who was held on a U.S. Navy ship in the Gulf of Aden for two months after his capture in 2011 “without being advised of his rights or provided a lawyer… ‘Warsame is the model for this guy’ one American security official said.” A Defense Department statement said Abu Anas was “lawfully detained under the law of war” while the Guardian reports that Kerry said al-Liby was a “legal and appropriate target… I hope the perception is in the world that… [the U.S.] is going to do anything in its power that is legal and appropriate… to enforce the law and to protect our security.” [italics mine] (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/07/obama-al-liby-capture-legal-system) To claim that a raid by U.S. commandos on a country we are not at war with is legal is astounding, Mr. President. Incursions like this have been decried by the U.S. for decades when others do it to our allies. Furthermore, kidnapping a citizen of a foreign country off a street in that country—indicted by a U.S. court or not—rendering him to a U.S. Navy ship and questioning him indefinitely without legal counsel or informing him of his rights, ignores international and domestic law. The law of war? Is this a new law you just made up? The Obama Law of War? To go along with the Obama Doctrine on Foreign Policy? Secret findings, secret courts, secret laws, a secret security state. You have merged Orwell and Kafka to create a New World Order that is nothing like the America I grew up in. When we elected you in 2008, no one expected utopia but no one expected this, either. I now fear my own government far more than Al Qaeda or Al-Shabab. I fear my Congress for the damage they do here at home by funding your wars and defunding our own citizens. I fear the NSA which, by stealth and secrecy, are dismantling, one by one, our privacy protections. I fear our militarized police who kill unarmed mothers driving the streets and are called heroes. And I fear you, Mr. President, far more than Abu Anas al-Liby or Ayman al-Zawahiri, for you are more of a threat to democracy and justice, to peace and freedom than they are.

The Obama Doctrine

Dear Mr. President,

According to today’s NYT (“U.S. Raids in Libya and Somalia Strike Terror Targets” p.A1), 3 vehicles carrying FBI and CIA agents surrounded Abu Anas al-Liby in Tripoli yesterday as he was parking his car and captured him “peacefully.” “A senior American official said the Libyan government had been apprised of the operation and provided assistance.” Al-Liby is “no longer in Libya” he said. But the Guardian reported later that the Libyan government is demanding an explanation for the “kidnapping” of a Libyan citizen by U.S. forces (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/06/libya-kidnapping-citizen-us-forces-raid-somalia). That report also stated that two cars and a bus with blacked-out windows carrying Delta Force commandos pulled up at the family home in a quiet suburb of Tripoli, surrounded al-Liby’s car, smashed the windows, grabbed his gun, dragged him out of the car and sped off with him. Not exactly peaceful but a lot less brutal than the murder of Miriam Carey last Thursday by the Capitol Police. The Guardian also reports that “Pentagon spokesman George Little said al-Liby is “currently lawfully detained by the US military in a secure location outside of Libya.” I realize al-Liby is an alleged leader of Al Qaeda wanted by the FBI, but I remember you condemned rendition and declared it would end. How is this different than the CIA’s kidnapping of an Egyptian-born cleric off the streets of Milan in 2003 and rendering him to a prison in another country? Is rendition under Obama different than rendition under Bush? The NYT article also stated that “Libya has collapsed into the control of a patchwork of militias since the ouster of the Qaddafi government in 2011.” So much for your “humanitarian mission” to Libya to prevent the loss of life. And for your promise of “no boots on the ground” in Libya. There they were Saturday, a busload of them. As for the other raid by Special Forces yesterday, that one didn’t work out so hot. Your Seal Team Six assassins don’t get a Mission Accomplished banner or high-fives from the Prez on the Somalia raid. Swam ashore in predawn darkness like in the movies and advanced on a villa housing their quarry but ran into “unexpected resistance.” A firefight ensued and they withdrew back into the sea from whence they came without a capture or a kill. Our foreign policy seems to be we do whatever we want whenever we want wherever we want. Unless the country is strong enough to resist. That’s the Obama Doctrine.

Miriam Carey: Collateral Damage in the War on Terror

Dear Mr. President,

Miriam Carey was the 34-year-old dental hygienist from Connecticut who thought you were stalking her. She was certainly acting irrational, driving from Stamford, Conn. to D.C., ramming her car into a barrier at the White House, running down a guard in the process, then driving 80 mph down Pennsylvania Ave to ram another barrier at the Capitol. But she was also clearly unarmed, had her one-year old daughter in the back seat, and at the end of the car chase was surrounded by at least 5 Capitol Police officers with guns drawn and no way to escape. All the news reports are about her ramming the barriers, the high-speed car chase, her post-partum depression, her psychiatric treatments and her refusal to stop when ordered to do so by the police. But none of the reports ask why those 5 officers shot her to death while she was apparently still seated in her car. (An initial report suggested she may have gotten out of the car although pictures on the internet show her still in the car.) And not only did they shoot her dead in front of her child, but according to today’s NYT (“Car Chase, White House to Capitol, Has Fatal End” p. A20), “they had trouble identifying her because of the extent of her injuries.”  Her injuries were gunshot wounds by those 5 cops, not the result of a car crash—in the photos her car is intact and shows no sign of damage. What in the world is happening to our country, Mr. President? We seem to have descended into some nightmare state of national hysteria where everyone is a terrorist, guilty until proven innocent, where deadly force is accepted as the norm in our towns and cities, and where citizens wrongfully killed by law enforcement officers are collateral damage just as they are in any war zone. We have lost all semblance of reason, all sense of compassion and all standards of justice. We are a nation under siege, victims of our fear and prejudices and the insanity of 12 years of unjust wars. We have traded our freedoms and our democracy for the illusion of security and it is clear we have neither. Our every move is monitored, we are subject to arrest and incarceration for speaking out in dissent, for whistleblowing, for almost anything the “authorities” don’t like. And sometimes, if we act irrational and don’t obey the orders of “law enforcement” we are subject to extrajudicial execution on the spot like Miriam Carey, a young woman who needed help but got butchered instead, more collateral damage in the War on Terror.

Shutting Down the Government But Not War

Dear Mr. President,

The government shut down today while the crazies in Congress take an ideological stand: Repeal Obamacare! what the pundits call your “signature” achievement. But Obamacare is a watered down version of what should have been. Obamacare is really a gift to the insurance industry with a side benefit for some of the 30 million uninsured Americans. Real healthcare reform would be single-payer healthcare for all, like other industrialized nations but you took that off the table even before negotiations began. I think your signature achievement is not Obamacare but your bureaucratizing and normalizing war. A real signature achievement would have been to end war and normalize peace, understand the causes of 9/11 and remedy them, and conduct a national reconciliation of the lawless Bush years, but you ruled that out soon as you got elected and continued and expanded the phantom War on Terror. When I survey your accomplishments over the past 4 years, 9 months, I see devastation, misery and loss of hope. Your drone wars terrorize villagers in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere, people who have no idea who we are and are no threat; your ongoing militarization of America’s “law enforcement” and the massive surveillance state are harbingers of tyranny and repression; and the erosion of freedoms, the secret laws and secret courts and secret activities of our government are not the acts of a democracy but signs of the totalitarian fascist state to come. And while we spend trillions on wars and tens of billions propping up dictators and repressive, corrupt regimes like the Egyptian military coupmasters, the Saudi princes and Hamid Karzai (is the CIA still delivering bags of Ben Franklins to his office every month?), Detroit, Stockton, San Bernadino and Harrison County, Georgia go broke, pensioners no longer have an income, homeowners lose their homes to robber baron Banksters, and social programs are decimated. All in the name of National Security, the latest false god of the political class. The years of your reign are an unmitigated disaster, Mr. President, worse than your predecessor’s. You are indeed the more effective evil. You found power in making war and you used it. Maybe shutting down government is a good thing, I thought, maybe it will curtail war. But I read this morning that you signed an executive order to continue paying the military regardless. So everything stops except the killing. The Republicans are protesting the wrong thing.