Shocker: Military Insiders and War Profiteers Will Be Reviewing the Horrendous Private Immigration Prisons for Homeland Security

By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet

Agency’s announcement sheds light on questionable composition of DHS Advisory Council.

http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/shocker-military-insiders-and-war-profiters-will-be-reviewing-horrendous-private

The DHS declared on Monday that it will review its widespread use of for-profit immigrant detention centers, in what amounts to an implied acknowledgment that human rights abuses plague its prisons, some of which house mothers with their children.

If the announcement translates into meaningful action, it could help chip away at the political power of a private prison industry that has aggressively lobbied for harsh immigration policies, including the congressional immigrant detention quota, which today directs Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold an average of 34,000 people in detention on a daily basis. Meanwhile, the announcement left many wondering whether the federal agency will also revisit mass detentions and deportations of refugees, immigrants and migrants, which have soared torecord levels under the administration of President Barack Obama.

However, a critical aspect of the DHS announcement has gone overlooked. The federal agency’s plan is contingent on a review process initiated by the so-called “Homeland Security Advisory Council.” Here is what DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said that process will look like:

On Friday, I directed our Homeland Security Advisory Council, chaired by Judge William Webster, to evaluate whether the immigration detention operations conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement should move in the same direction.

Specifically, I have asked that Judge Webster establish a Subcommittee of the Council to review our current policy and practices concerning the use of private immigration detention and evaluate whether this practice should be eliminated. I asked that the Subcommittee consider all factors concerning ICE’s detention policy and practice, including fiscal considerations.

The Advisory Council that will steer this process is a roll call of war profiteers, torture defenders, human rights abusers and private sector heavyweights. Meanwhile, as Bob Libal, the executive director of the advocacy organization Grassroots Leadership, noted in an interview with AlterNet, “There is a severe lack of any immigrant or immigrant advocacy representation on the committee. I don’t think there is anyone who has been impacted by detention, let alone private detention.”

Webster, the only person to have served as the director of both the FBI and the CIA, played a critical role during the late 1980s in covering up the Iran Contra scandal. He later founded the mercenary company Diligence, which provided security for corporations that profited off of the U.S. occupation of Iraq post-2003, before retiring as a partner of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, LLP.

The vice chair of the council is NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton, a nationally influentialarchitect of draconian “broken windows” policing who recently warned of unspecified terror threats to wrangle large purchases of military-style gear for his department. Bratton’s career includes extensive ties with corporate surveillance firms that have sparked accusations of conflicts of interest. Bratton recently announced that, in September, he will step down in September from his position at the helm of the NYPD and will be taking a lucrative private security with the Teneo Holdings firm.

Retired Marine General John Kelly is also included on the council. As chief of U.S. Southern Command, he vigorously defended U.S. torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, including advocating force feeding of prisoners on hunger strike as recently as 2014. Before that position, he served in high-ranking posts overseeing the occupation of Iraq. Kelly is not the only council member to serve as a general who enforced U.S. occupation. Retired Marine general John Allen, also included on the council, oversaw the occupation of Afghanistan and, more recently, the nebulous U.S. war against ISIS.

The council also includes many who have built their careers and fortunes off of profits from U.S. wars and conflicts. Thad Allen is the current executive vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a mercenary and private intelligence contracting company that, notably, has wonlucrative contracts from DHS. Norman Augustine is the retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp, the largest weapons company in the world.

The council even includes Chuck Canterbury, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police who has emerged as a prominent advocate of a change in federal law to make attacks on police hate crimes. Michael Nutter, the former mayor of Philadelphia who oversaw the gutting and privatization of the city’s public school system, is also included among the council’s members.

It is too soon to determine what the subcommittee, to be appointed by the advisory council, will find during its review process, and human rights campaigners like Libal are still holding out hope that the body will strike a blow against the power of the private prison industry. But at the very least, Johnson’s announcement sheds light on the revolving door between the DHS and powerful players in the mercenary sector, law enforcement and military.

According to Johnson, “a subcommittee of the HSAC will undertake this review, and the full HSAC will provide to me and the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement its written report of its evaluation no later than November 30, 2016.”

The statement indicates that, once the review takes place, key decision-making power will rest with Johnson, who has overseen an escalation in raids and deportations this summer targeting refugees fleeing Central America, including teenagers on their way to school and children as young as four.

The full membership of the Advisory Council is as follows:

William Webster (Chair)- Retired Partner, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, LLP

Commissioner William Bratton (Vice Chair) – Police Commissioner, City of New York

Art Acevedo – Chief of Police, Austin Police Department, Texas

Steve Adegbite – Chief Information Security Officer, E*TRADE Financial Corp.

John R. Allen – General, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.)

Thad W. Allen- Executive Vice President, Booz|Allen|Hamilton

Norman Augustine- Retired Chairman and CEO, Lockheed Martin Corp.

Ron Barber- Consultant for Government Relations, Policy Analysis, Legislative Advocacy and Customer Relations, Public and Private entities

Chuck Canterbury- National President, The Fraternal Order of Police

Richard Danzig- Senior Advisor, John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

Elaine C. Duke- Principal, Elaine Duke & Associates, LLC

Marshall Fitz- Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress

Paul Goldenberg- President and CEO, Cardinal Point Strategies, LLC

Lee H. Hamilton- Director, Center on Congress, Indiana University

Jane Harman, President and CEO, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Elizabeth Holtzman- Co-chair, Herrick’s Government Relations Group,

Jim Jones, Chairman- ManattJones Global Strategies

Juliette Kayyem- Founder of Juliette Kayyem Solutions, LLC

Gary Kelly- President and CEO, Southwest Airlines

John Kelly- General, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.)

Carie A. Lemack- Cofounder and CEO of DreamUp

Wilson Livingood- President and Partner, Livingood Advisors, LLC

Jane Holl Lute- Special Coordinator on Improving United Nations Response to sexual exploitation and abuse

John Magaw- Consultant, Domestic and International

Christian Marrone- CoS to the CEO, VP of Government Relations, CSRA Inc.

David Martin- Professor of International Law- University of Virginia School of Law

Jeffrey Miller- Senior Vice President, MSA Security

Jeff Moss- Founder of Black Hat and DEF CON Conferences

Dr. Ned Norris Jr.- Former Chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation

Michael Nutter- Former Mayor of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Mathew Olsen- President of Consulting and Co-Founder, IronNet Cybersecurity

Farah Pandith- Adjunct Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations

Annise Danette Parker- Former Mayor, City of Houston, Texas

John S. Pistole- President, Anderson University

Robert Rose- Senior Advisor to the CEO, Securonix

Harold A. Schaitberger- General President, International Association of Firefighters

Ali H. Soufan- Chairman and CEO, The Soufan Group LLC

Paul Stockton- Managing Director, Sonecon LLC

Karen Tandy- Administrator (Ret.), Drug Enforcement Administration

Lydia W. Thomas- Retired President and CEO, Noblis, Inc.

Also not standing during national anthem

The Koch Brothers' Right-Wing Trojan Horse: Institutes for "Well-Being"

Thursday, 01 September 2016

By Donald W. Harward,

Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/37447-the-koch-brothers-right-wing-trojan-horse-institutes-for-well-being

It is essential that all of us -- current scholars and teachers, public leaders of thought and those supporting learners at all levels -- examine the connections of well-being to higher education: what that means, what it suggests and why it is important to all involved. Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of editing a volume of 35 original essays by leaders of thought in higher education that does just that: Well-Being and Higher Education.

As a former college president and current director of a higher education nonprofit, I have long been interested in the issue of well-being on college campuses, so I was alarmed to learn from Jane Mayer's New Yorker article "New Koch" that the Koch brothers and their conservative network are funding a long-term effort to promote the right-wing fundamentalist free-market ideology by presenting it "as an apolitical and altruistic reform movement to enhance the quality of life -- as a movement for well-being." And I was dismayed to learn that the Koch brothers intend to implement that strategy with a particular strain of "well-being institutes," spreading them to multiple universities.

Mayer quotes Allen Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute as claiming that Republicans just needed different packaging for their message: "In other words, if you want to be seen as a moral, compassionate person, talk about fairness and helping the vulnerable." Professor James Otteson, the executive director of the BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism at Wake Forest University, which runs the Koch-funded Eudaimonia Project, is quoted by Mayer in his enthusiasm about the persuasive possibilities: "Who can be against well-being?"

This strategy, playing on the proclivity of institutions of higher education to accept gifts, uses its seemingly noble and apolitical movement in pursuit of well-being as the benign cover -- the Trojan Horse -- hiding its underlying message that a "free market" and reduction of government involvement will "forge a path to happiness."

Just a few months later, Rob Schofield's article in NC Policy Watch echoed this sentiment, describing the Koch brothers' efforts to ideologically "frame" well-being so as to advance the "hard right market fundamentalist ideology by cloaking it in a warm and fuzzy language and to thereby grace it with the veneer of academic legitimacy."

It appears that Schofield and Mayer are right in describing the strategy and the intent. However, they overlook an even more damning critique of this deceptive and manipulative tactic. The ascription of the fundamental source and values of well-being to the market ideology of the far right, and the lodging of its practice in the academy by establishing "Well-being Institutes" ignores the history, the community of practices, the research and the multiple available analyses of the complexity of well-being.

Furthermore, the Kochs' strategy misconstrues the very meaning of well-being -- failing (perhaps purposely) to recognize the reductive narrowness and transient nature of defining it solely through dimensions of "feelings," including feelings of financial success. Their strategy ignores what constitutes the manifestations of well-being expressed in experiencing higher learning. In so doing, it also ignores what institutions of higher education can do to facilitate those manifestations of well-being in students: connecting them to higher education's core purposes of open inquiry, the practice of civic and moral responsibility, and self-realization through the fulfillment of one's human, individual and communal capacities.

The effort being made in funding these institutes to ideologically frame (better, capture) the meaning and implications of well-being is simplistic and shallow. This effort assumes that if this framing is voiced frequently enough and offered without examination, it will stick as the adopted framework. This is the logic of propaganda. When a university agrees to open an institute that is established to promote an ideology -- be it the ideology of unregulated free enterprise, or one espousing state control -- it has abandoned the principles of academic inquiry and critical thought that give it legitimacy, prejudging the very questions it would claim to investigate.

It is worth noting the discussion surrounding the significance of the recent nomination of John Schnatter (founder of Papa John's Pizza and the namesake of Ball State's well-being Institute) to the Board of Trustees of the University of Louisville by the conservative governor of Kentucky, following Schnatter's and the Koch brothers' combined $12 million donation to the University of Kentucky. Does that discussion, and the many others that will likely occur in regards to other campuses, get contextualized as part of a pattern? Isn't vigilance needed when any gift appears? Shouldn't we ask how a gift to a university will influence the integrity of the institution's core purposes?

Institutions of higher education are, at their essential level, about the pursuit of knowledge, evidence, truth, justice and well-being. Colleges and universities are unique in upholding these qualities and must do so with integrity. Doing so should reveal (contrary to what the Kochs and their network may assume) that complex constructs, such as these, rest on neither market values, nor individual self-interest. Rather, constructs such as justice and well-being are rooted in relational experience and the values of open exploration and the common good.

That is just what the serious examination of the rich trans-historical and cross-cultural meanings of "well-being" suggests. True well-being is antithetical to the propagandizing provided by the gift of these Trojan Horse institutes. We must contextualize the Kochs' effort to capture "well-being" and distinguish it from altruistic efforts to further the real purposes of higher education.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

DONALD W. HARWARD

Donald W. Harward is president emeritus of Bates College and has directed the Bringing Theory to Practice Project since its founding in 2003 with S. Engelhard Pingree.

Hillary Clinton, the Podesta Group and the Saudi Regime: A Fatal Menage a Trois

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/01/hillary-clinton-the-podesta-group-and-the-saudi-regime-a-fatal-menage-a-trois/

SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

by MEDEA BENJAMIN

If I told you that Democratic Party lobbyist Tony Podesta, whose brother John Podesta chairs Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, is a registered foreign agent on the  Saudi government’s payroll, you’d probably think I was a Trump-thumping, conspiratorial nutcase. But it’s true.

The lobby firm created by both Tony and John Podesta in 1988 receives $140,000 a month from the Saudi government, a government that beheads nonviolent dissidents, uses torture to extract forced confessions, doesn’t allow women to drive, and bombs schools, hospitals and residential neighborhoods in neighboring Yemen.

The Podesta Group’s March 2016 filing, required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, shows that Tony Podesta himself oversees the Saudi account. At the same time, Tony Podesta is also a top campaign contributor and bundler for Hillary Clinton. So while one brother runs the campaign, the other brother funds it with earnings that come, in part, from the Saudis.

John and Tony Podesta have been heavyweights in DC insider politics for decades. John Podesta served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, founded the influential DC think tank Center for American Progress (which regularly touts Saudi “reforms”), and was counselor to President Obama. Tony Podesta was dubbed by The New York Times as “one of Washington’s biggest players” whose clients “are going to get a blueprint for how to succeed in official Washington.”

The brothers seem to have no problem mixing their roles into the same pot. Tony Podesta held a Clinton campaign fundraiser at his home featuring gourmet Italian food cooked by himself and his brother, the campaign chairman. The fundraiser, by the way, came just days after Tony Podesta filed his Saudi contract with the Justice Department, a contract that included an initial “project fee” payment of $200,000.

The Saudis hired the Podesta Group in 2015 because it was getting hammered in the press over civilian casualties from its airstrikes in Yemen and its crackdown on political dissidents at home, including sentencing blogger Raif Badawi to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for “insulting Islam.” Since then, Tony Podesta’s fingerprints have been all over Saudi Arabia’s advocacy efforts in Washington DC. When Saudi Arabia executed the prominent nonviolent Shia dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, causing protests throughout the Shia world and inflaming sectarian divisions, The New York Times noted that the Podesta Group provided the newspaper with a Saudi commentator who defended the execution.

The Podesta-Clinton-Saudi connection should be seen in light of the recent media exposes revealing the taudry pay-to-play nature of the Clinton Foundation. Top on the list of foreign donors to the foundation is Saudi Arabia, which contributed between $10 million and $25 million.

What did the Saudis get for their largesse and access? Wikileaks revealed a 2009 cable by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying: “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Lashkar e-Tayyiba and other terrorist groups.” Instead of sanctioning the Saudis, Clinton did the opposite: She authorized enormous quantities of weapons to be sold to them. On Christmas Eve in 2011, Hillary Clinton and her closest aides celebrated a massive $29.4 billion sale to the Saudis of over 80 F-15 fighter jets, manufactured by Boeing, a company which coincidentally contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation. In a chain of enthusiastic emails, an aide exclaimed that it was “not a bad Christmas present.” I’m sure the Yemenis at the receiving end of the Saudi bombings would not be so enthusiastic.

The Clintons have said that if Hillary Clinton gets elected, the foundation will stop taking foreign donations. But what about no longer taking campaign contributions from people who are paid by the Saudi government to whitewash its image? The Podesta Group should be blacklisted from contributing to Clinton’s campaign until they drop the monarchy as a client and return their ill-gotten gains. If Hillary Clinton wants to be a meaningful symbol for human rights and women’s empowerment, her campaign must live up to the values she claims to represent, and this would be one step in the right direction.

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Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK and the human right organization Global Exchange. Follow her on twitter at @MedeaBenjamin.

US Arms Makers Invest in a New Cold War

September 1, 2016

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/01/us-arms-makers-invest-in-a-new-cold-war/

Exclusive: Behind the U.S. media-political clamor for a new Cold War with Russia is a massive investment by the Military-Industrial Complex in “think tanks” and other propaganda outlets, writes Jonathan Marshall.

By Jonathan Marshall

The U.S. military has won only a single major war since the end of World War II (the Gulf War of 1990-91). But U.S. military contractors continue to win major budget wars in Congress nearly every year, proving that no force on earth can resist their lobbying prowess and political clout.

Consider the steady march to victory of the biggest single weapons program in history — the planned purchase of advanced Lockheed-Martin F-35 jets by the Air Force, Navy, and Marines at a total projected cost of more than $1 trillion.

The Air Force and Marines have both declared the Joint Strike Fighter ready for combat, and Congress is now forking over billions of dollars a year to acquire what is slated to become a fleet of 2,400 jets.

Yet the world’s most expensive fighter bomber still doesn’t work properly and may never perform as advertised. That’s not “dezinformatsiya” from Russian “information warfare” specialists. That’s the official opinion of the Pentagon’s top weapons evaluator, Michael Gilmore.

In an Aug, 9 memo obtained by Bloomberg News, Gilmore warned senior Pentagon officials that the F-35 program “is actually not on a path toward success but instead on a path toward failing to deliver” the aircraft’s promised capabilities. He said the program “is running out of time and money to complete the planned flight testing and implement the required fixes and modifications.”

The military testing czar reported that complex software problems and testing deficiencies “continue to be discovered at a substantial rate.” As a result, the planes may fail to track moving targets on the ground, warn pilots when enemy radar systems spot them, or make use of a newly designed bomb. Even the F-35’s gun may not function properly.

Devastating Assessments

The internal Pentagon assessment was just the latest in a long list of devastating critical assessments and development setbacks for the plane. They include repeated groundings of the plane due to fires and other safety issues; the discovery of dangerous engine instability; and helmets that can cause fatal whiplash. The plane even got soundly beaten in a mock engagement with a much older (and cheaper) F-16.

Last year, an article in the conservative National Reviewargued that “the biggest threat the U.S. military faces over the next few decades is not the carrier-killing Chinese anti-ship ballistic missile, or the proliferation of inexpensive quiet diesel-electric attack subs, or even Chinese and Russian anti-satellite programs. The biggest threat comes from the F-35 . . . For this trillion-dollar-plus investment we get a plane far slower than a 1970s F-14 Tomcat, a plane with less than half the range of a 40-year-old A-6 Intruder . . . and a plane that had its head handed to it by an F-16 during a recent dogfight competition.”

Likening the F-35 to a previous failed fighter jet program, retired Air Force Colonel Dan Ward observed last year, “Perhaps the truly best scenario for the Joint Strike Fighter is for it to follow in the footsteps of the F-22 and provide a combat capability that is irrelevant to actual military needs. That way, when the whole fleet gets grounded because of an unsolvable flaw, the impact on our defense posture would be nil.”

Lockheed’s “Pay-to-Play Ad Agency”

Coming to the program’s defense most recently was military analyst Dan Goure, in the blog of the respected magazine, The National Interest. Goure belittled critics in the Pentagon’s Operational Test and Evaluation Office as “green eyeshade people, like the goblins at Gringott’s in the Harry Potter series.”

Describing the F-35 as “a revolutionary platform,” he declared, “Its ability to operate undetected in hostile airspace, gathering information and even targeting data on enemy air and ground targets, before launching surprise attacks demonstrates a decisive advantage over existing threat systems. . . . The Joint Strike Fighter test program is making progress at an accelerated rate. More to the point, even before it has completed the rigid performance template laid out by DOT&E, the F-35 has demonstrated capabilities that far exceed any current Western fighter.”

If that reads a bit like a Lockheed-Martin marketing brochure, consider the source. In his article, Goure identified himself only as a vice president of the Lexington Institute, which bills itself as “a nonprofit public-policy research organization headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.”

What Goure didn’t say — and the Lexington Institute doesn’t generally disclose — is that “it receives contributions from defense giants Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and others, which pay Lexington to ‘comment on defense,’” according to a 2010 profile in Politico.

Earlier the same year, Harper’s contributor Ken Silverstein called the widely quoted think tank “the defense industry’s pay-to-play ad agency.” He added, “Outfits like Lexington produce the press conferences, position papers and op-eds that keep military money flowing to defense contractors.”

Goure’s indirect association with Lockheed gives a hint as to why programs like the F-35 continue to thrive despite performance failures, gigantic cost overruns, and schedule delays that would otherwise trigger headline-grabbing congressional investigations and produce streams of indignant rhetoric from Fox News commentators about government failure.

Promoting the New Cold War

Think tanks like the Lexington Institute are prime movers behind the domestic propaganda campaign to revive the Cold War against the diminished Russian state and justify weapons programs like the F-35.

As Lee Fang observed recently in The Intercept, “The escalating anti-Russian rhetoric in the U.S. presidential campaign comes in the midst of a major push by military contractors to position Moscow as a potent enemy that must be countered with a drastic increase in military spending by NATO countries.”

Thus the Lockheed-funded Aerospace Industries Association warns that the Obama administration is failing to spend enough on “aircraft, ship and ground combat systems” to adequately address “Russian aggression on NATO’s doorstep.” The Lockheed- and Pentagon-funded Center for European Policy Analysis issues a stream ofalarmist reports about Russian military threats to Eastern Europe.

And the highly influential Atlantic Council — funded by Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, the U.S. Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines, and even the Ukrainian World Congress — promotes articles like “Why Peace is Impossible with Putin” and declares that NATO must “commit to greater military spending” to deal with “a revanchist Russia.”

Origins of NATO’s Expansion

The campaign to portray Russia as a menace, led by contractor-funded pundits and analysts, began soon after the Cold War ended. In 1996, Lockheed executive Bruce Jackson founded the U.S. Committee on NATO, whose motto was “Strengthen America, Secure Europe. Defend Values. Expand NATO.”

Its mission ran directly contrary to promises by the George H.W. Bush administration not to expand the Western military alliance eastward after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Joining Jackson were such neo-conservative hawks as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Robert Kagan. One neocon insider called Jackson — who went on to co-found the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq — “the nexus between the defense industry and the neoconservatives. He translates us to them, and them to us.”

The organization’s intense and highly successful lobbying efforts did not go unnoticed. In 1998, the New York Times reported that “American arms manufacturers, who stand to gain billions of dollars in sales of weapons, communication systems and other military equipment if the Senate approves NATO expansion, have made enormous investments in lobbyists and campaign contributions to promote their cause in Washington. . . .

“The four dozen companies whose main business is arms have showered candidates with $32.3 million since the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the decade. By comparison, the tobacco lobby spent $26.9 million in that same period, 1991 to 1997.”

A spokesman for Lockheed said, ”We’ve taken the long-term approach to NATO expansion, establishing alliances. When the day arrives and those countries are in a position to buy combat aircraft, we certainly intend on being a competitor.”

The lobbying worked. In 1999, against Russian opposition, NATO absorbed the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In 2004, it added Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Albania and Croatia joined next in 2009. Most provocatively, in 2008 NATO invited Ukraine to join the Western alliance, setting the stage for the dangerous conflict between NATO and Russia over that country today.

The fortunes of American arms makers soared. “By 2014, the twelve new [NATO] members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons,” according to Andrew Cockburn, “while . . . Romania celebrated the arrival of Eastern Europe’s first $134 million Lockheed Martin Aegis Ashore missile-defense system.”

Last fall, Washington Business Journal reported that “if anyone is benefitting from the unease between Russia and the rest of the world, it would have to be Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp. (NYSE: LMT). The company is positioned to make large profits off what could very well be an international military spending spree by Russia’s neighbors.”

Citing a big contract to sell missiles to Poland, the newspaper added, “Officials from Lockheed aren’t explicitly declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adventurism in Ukraine is good for business, but they aren’t shying away from recognizing the opportunity that Poland is presenting them as Warsaw continues to embark on a massive military modernization project — one that has accelerated as tensions grip Eastern Europe.”

Lockheed’s Lobby Machine

Lockheed continues to pump money into the American political system to ensure that it remains the nation’s largest military contractor. From 2008 to 2015, its lobbying expenditures exceeded $13 million in all but one year. The company sprinkled business from the F-35 program into 46 states and claims that it generates tens of thousands of jobs.

Among the 18 states enjoying a claimed economic impact of more than $100 million from the fighter jet is Vermont — which is why the F-35 gets the support even of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

As he told one town hall meeting, “It employs hundreds of people. It provides a college education for hundreds of people. So for me the question is not whether we have the F-35 or not. It is here. The question for me is whether it is located in Burlington, Vermont or whether it is located in Florida.”

In 1961, President Eisenhower observed that the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” had begun to influence “every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.”

In his famous farewell address to the nation, Eisenhower warned that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

How right he was. But not even Ike could have imagined the extravagant costs to the nation of failing to hold that complex at bay — ranging from a trillion-dollar fighter jet program to the needless and far more dangerous resurrection of the Cold War a quarter century after the West achieved victory.

Jonathan Marshall is author or co-author of five books on international affairs, including The Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War and the International Drug Traffic (Stanford University Press, 2012). Some of his previous articles for Consortiumnews were “Risky Blowback from Russian Sanctions”; “Neocons Want Regime Change in Iran”; “Saudi Cash Wins France’s Favor”; “The Saudis’ Hurt Feelings”; “Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Bluster”; “The US Hand in the Syrian Mess”; and “Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War.” ]

Using human shields as a pretext to kill civilians

by NEVE GORDON - NICOLA PERUGINI

By claiming that the other side is using human shields, the attacker provides itself with a pre-emptive legal defence.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/08/human-shields-pretext-kill-civilians-160830102718866.html

Human shields have been making headlines for some time. Before the recent fray between the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) and Iraqi army in Fallujah, the United Press International released an article entitled “Iraqi forces halt Fallujah advance amid fears for 50,000 human shields”.

Indeed, not a day has passed in the past several months without an array of newspapers mentioning human shields in different theatres of violence: Fom Syria, where ISIL fighters fled Manbij in convoys apparently using human shields; through Kashmir, where “army and police used civilians as human shields in operations against militants”; to Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists were accused of using international observers as shields.

Moreover, the phrase human shields is not only used to describe the use of civilians in the midst of war, but to depict civilians in protests, from Ferguson in the United States, to Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.

Liberal democratic states are not the only ones who are warning the world of the increasing use of human shields; rather authoritarian regimes as well as a variety of local and international organisations of different kinds, from the Red Cross and human rights NGOs to the United Nations, are invoking the term.

In a recent confidential UN report, Houthi rebels were blamed for concealing “fighters and equipment in or close to civilians … with the deliberate aim of avoiding attack.”

Allowing killing

Although different forms of human shielding have probably been conceptualised and mobilised since the invention of war, its quotidian use is a completely novel phenomenon. Why, one might ask, has this term suddenly become so pervasive?

Legally speaking, human shields refer to the use of civilians as defensive weapons in order to render combatants or military sites immune from attack. The idea behind the term is that civilians, who are protected under international law, should not be exploited to gain a military advantage.

While most people will undoubtedly be familiar with this definition, less known is the fact that international law not only prohibits the use of human shields but also renders it legitimate for militaries to attack areas being “protected” by human shields.

The US Air Force, for example, maintains that “lawful targets shielded with protected civilians may be attacked, and the protected civilians may be considered as collateral damage, provided the collateral damage is not excessive compared with the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated by the attack.”

Along similar lines, the 2013 document on joint targeting published by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff underscores the importance of the principle of proportionality, it also notes that, “otherwise lawful targets involuntarily shielded with protected civilians may be attacked … provided that the collateral damage is not excessive compared with the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated by the attack.”

(PDF)

What all this means, quite simply, is that human shields can be legally killed so long as the deployment of violence does not breach the principle of proportionality – which requires belligerents to refrain from causing damage disproportionate to the military advantage to be gained.

It now appears that police forces the world over are adopting a similar perspective as they confront protests and riots.

The motivation behind the adoption of such guidelines by domestic and international actors is clear: It allows security forces to relax the rules of engagement, while framing those who deploy shields as morally deplorable and in breach of international law.

Pre-emptive legal defence

Given the strategic and pervasive adoption of the phrase human shields, it seems clear that the term is not only being deployed as a descriptive expression to depict the use of civilians as weapons, but also as a kind of pre-emptive legal defence against the accusations of having killed or injured them.

Put differently, if any one of Fallujah’s 50,000 civilians is killed during an anti-ISIL onslaught, then it is not the US-backed attacking forces that are to blame, but rather ISIL itself, which illegally and immorally used civilians as shields.

Moreover, it increasingly appears that it is enough to claim – in advance – that the enemy is using human shields in order to warrant the killing of non-combatants.

Even though it is undeniable that many militaries and non-state armed groups do, in fact, use human shields, the potential ramifications of the mere accusation are extremely worrisome.

In other words, by claiming that the other side is using human shields, the attacking force provides itself with a pre-emptive legal defence.

To understand fully the implications of this framing it is imperative to take into account that urban areas, as Stephen Graham from Newcastle University put it, “have become the lightning conductors for our planet’s political violence.”

The fact that warfare currently shapes urban life in many areas around the globe means that civilians occupy and will continue to occupy the frontlines of much of the fighting.

This leaves them extremely vulnerable to being framed as human shields, since it would be enough to say in advance that the residents of a city are shields for their deaths to be legal and justified.

Insofar as this is the case, then the pre-emptive legal defence may very well be used as part of a horrifying process aimed at legalising and normalising the massive slaughtering of civilians.

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