Since the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the U.S. has used its base at Guantanamo, Cuba, to carry out the incarceration and torture of foreign nationals suspected of terror activity. The first detainees arrived in Guantanamo in 2002, after the U.S. ascertained it could without all legal rights, including preventing them from legal recourse against their indefinite detention. Most detainees had been subjected to the CIA blacksites for several years before their incarceration in Guantanamo.

This month marked 20 years since Guantanamo started being used by the U.S. as a torture and detention centre. In 2008, while campaigning for the U.S. presidential elections, Barack Obama had declared he would close down the detention facilities within a year, and instead transfer the detainees to indefinite detention in the U.S. The outcome would have seen Obama bring U.S. atrocities home, sparking opposition from lawmakers.

U.S. lawyer and diplomat Lee Wolosky described the Guantanamo situation as “self-inflicted” in a recent article: “a result of our own decisions to engage in torture, hold detainees indefinitely without charge, set up dysfunctional military commissions and attempt to avoid oversight by the federal courts.”

The ”war on terror” rhetoric no longer holds sway globally as it did a decade ago, yet the U.S. is still to close down the detention facilities – a move unlikely to occur during the Biden administration’s tenure. In December last year, the New York Times reported that the facilities would expand to build a $4 million courtroom. Out of 780 men detained in the facility, 39 remain.

On the anniversary of the first detainees’ arrival in Guantanamo, the Cuban government called upon the U.S. to close the prison, noting that only 12 out 780 detainees have been charged with war crimes. Human rights organisations, former detainees and U.S. lawmakers have reiterated the call.

For the Cuban government, closing down Guantanamo would be just one step in its resolve to have the illegally occupied territory returned to Cuba.

Guantanamo is the oldest U.S. military base abroad. While the use of the facilities has sparked outrage globally, there has been no similar outcry for an end to the U.S. military occupation of Cuban territory. It is the blockade that captured international attention through the UN General Assembly’s non-binding and therefore ineffective, resolutions. But world leaders are intent on ignoring the fact that Cuba is still indefinitely partly occupied by the U.S. – a relic of earlier exploitation of the island at a time when the island faced both U.S. and Spanish intervention against their sovereignty.

Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Cuban government has consistently denounced the U.S. illegal occupation of Guantanamo. As U.S. efforts

to destabilise Fidel Castro’s revolutionary rule increased, Guantanamo was used as a base from which violations against the island would be carried out, including provocation of Cubans which the U.S. hoped would lead to a direct confrontation. Several Cubans employed at the military base were tortured and murdered by U.S. soldiers stationed at Guantanamo.

Since 1960, a year after the Cuban Revolution’s triumph, the Cuban government has refused the U.S. payments for its use of Guantanamo, signalling the government’s opposition to the U.S. occupation of its territory.

Apart from the brief thaw in relations between Cuba and the U.S. during the Obama administration, when the Cuban Five were released in exchange for USAID subcontractor Alan Gross, the U.S. has maintained a hostile policy against Cuba, exacerbated by the Trump administration and, so far, upheld by current U.S. President Joe Biden.

Article 10 of Cuba’s 1976 Constitution clearly states, “The Republic of Cuba repudiates and considered illegal and null the treaties, pacts or concessions agreed upon in unequal terms that ignore or diminish its sovereignty over any possession of the national territory.”

The U.S. perception of Cuba has not altered since the earlier intention to exploit the island, while the international community has simplified Cuba in terms of the humanitarian impact of the illegal U.S. blockade on the island. While the immediate implications of Guantanamo with regard to the U.S. violations at the base are of paramount importance, the focus on this relic of the U.S. war on terror must not be dissociated from Guantanamo’s earlier history.

On October 29 a Guantanamo Bay prisoner was reported as having testified about the torture inflicted on him over many years in CIA “black sites” and the U.S. military base in Cuba where among other things he was “suspended naked from a ceiling beam for long periods, doused repeatedly with ice water to keep him awake for days. He described having his head held under water to the point of near drowning, only to have water poured into his nose and mouth when the interrogators let him up. He was beaten, given forced enemas, sexually assaulted and starved…”

A week earlier, on United Nations Day, the Biden White House announced that the United States is committed “to the original vision and values enshrined in the United Nations Charter” which involved “creating a rules-based international order” and ensuring “adherence to international law.” The declaration was made two months after a U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed ten civilians, including seven children. As the International Red Cross points out, the “arbitrary deprivation of the right to life” includes “unlawful killing in the conduct of hostilities, i.e., the killing of civilians and persons hors de combat not in the power of a party to the conflict not justified under the rules on the conduct of hostilities.” Consequently, according to Washington’s “rules-based international order”, it is unlawful to kill civilians.

But all the Pentagon has done about the Kabul kid-killing is to eventually and with reluctance admit that it did indeed slaughter an innocent man and many of his family — and it is most unlikely that anything would have been divulged if it hadn’t been for the work of the New York Times, which smelled a rat.

All that has happened, however, is that the Pentagon is wriggling round saying it is sorry and will throw money at the problem. On September 20 General Kenneth McKenzie told the media that the drone-fired missile “struck the vehicle at 4:53 PM, which produced an explosive event and follow-on flames significantly larger than a Hellfire missile would have been expected to produce.”

The general probably doesn’t realise the preposterous inanity of the phrase “an explosive event” and his declaration that “we are exploring the possibility of ex gratia payments” is even more absurd. That Pentagon Hellfire “event” killed most of the family of the vehicle’s driver, Zemerai Ahmadi, who had “worked for 15 years for Nutrition & Education International, a California-based non-profit aimed at countering malnutrition in Afghanistan”.

AP News reported that “the family said when the 37-year-old Zemerai, alone in his car, pulled up to the house, he honked his horn. His 11-year-old son ran out, and Zemerai let the boy get in and drive the car into the driveway. The other kids ran out to watch, and the missile incinerated the car, killing seven children and an adult son and nephew of Zemerai.” And then, as recorded by the NYT, the usual lies were trotted out, and “almost everything senior defence officials asserted in the hours, and then days, and then weeks after the August 29 drone strike turned out to be false.” The Pentagon liars struck again.

Yet President Biden keeps telling us, as in his September remarks prior to the UN session, that “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.” He regretted that “we lost 13 American heroes and almost 200 innocent Afghan civilians in the heinous terrorist attack at the Kabul airport”, but there wasn’t a word about the seven kids killed by his drone-fired missile.

The Hellfire “explosive event” that killed Zemerai Ahmadi and his young son and the other children who were greeting him excitedly is far from the first slaughter of innocents by U.S. missiles. Freedom, justice and peace have been blown apart by many a drone strike, not one of which has resulted in prosecutorial action following the killing of innocent civilians.

Back in May 2016, after President Obama had discovered the beauty of drone strikes that could demonstrate U.S. policy around the world, I wrote in these columns about the murder by drone of a Pakistani taxi driver called Mohammad Azam who was earning his tiny daily wage by picking up passengers who crossed the border from Iran into Pakistan. Usually he would take them only to nearby villages, but one day he picked up a man who wanted to go to the city of Quetta, eight hours drive away. He drove off in his Toyota Corolla, and a few hours later, when he stopped for a rest, Obama’s Hellfires struck and blasted the car to twisted shards of metal — and reduced Azam and his customer to smoking corpses.

Azam’s passenger was the evil Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor who was travelling under a false name. His sought-for anonymity didn’t do him much good, because he had been traced and tracked, and while he was in Iran or when he was going through border crossing examination on the Pakistan side it’s likely that a U.S.-paid agent planted a chip on him or in his baggage that signalled his whereabouts to the drone-controlling video-gamers.

Azam the taxi-driver didn’t know Mullah Mansoor and was not associated with the Taliban or any such organization. He was an entirely innocent man trying to earn enough money to feed his family — his wife, four small children and a crippled brother who stayed with them.

The Pentagon stated that “Mansur has been an obstacle to peace and reconciliation between the Government of Afghanistan and the Taliban, prohibiting Taliban leaders from participating in peace talks with the Afghan government that could lead to an end to the conflict.” So they killed him. And without the slightest hesitation they also killed the entirely innocent taxi driver Mohammad Azam.

If a person in a foreign country that can’t retaliate to drone strikes is considered an enemy of the United States there is no question of arrest, charge and trial. When possible, they are killed by a Hellfire missile. In this case, five years ago, the explosive event was personally authorized by President Obama who stressed that there must be “near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed,” and that the U.S. “respects national sovereignty and international law.” His version of respect for international law has been embraced by President Biden who strongly advocates “freedom, justice, and peace in the world.”

While killing eleven year-old boys who are driving daddy’s car in their house driveway is as obvious a war crime as blasting an innocent taxi-driver to smithereens and as blatant an abomination as torturing a captive for years, there is even more to these violations of human rights than the obvious legal and moral aspects. There is the blowback factor.

President Biden may genuinely believe that Washington’s drone strikes and torture contribute in some fashion to justice and peace, but the effects of these atrocities on the wider world cannot be calculated. We can measure the number of innocent people killed by Hellfire missiles, but we can’t measure the hatred created by their deaths.

Washington can break international law with impunity so far as instant reaction is concerned, be that on the part of international institutions or those affected by the havoc — but it has been encouraging revulsion, loathing and determination to gain revenge. Although the long-term consequences are measureless, there is no doubt that “explosive events” will blow back for a long time to come.

Nearly two decades ago, the Central Intelligence Agency began its sadistic program of torture and abuse, and the Department of Defense created a prison at Guantanamo to evade U.S. law. We are still learning about the horrors of the Global War on Terror. On July 16, military prosecutors finally asked to erase information obtained through torture and abuse. Several days later, the Biden administration transferred its first detainee out of Gitmo, repatriating a Moroccan man who had been cleared for release five years ago. These two items provide an opportunity to document the inadequacy and the errors of the mainstream media’s coverage of  CIA’s unconscionable crimes.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken audaciously claimed that it is difficult to transfer detainees until the United States receives assurances that the “rights of these people will be protected in that country.” In other words, the senior diplomat of the country that tortured and abused hundreds of captives; violated various Geneva Conventions by kidnapping individuals and turning them over to countries such as Syria and Pakistan that conduct torture and abuse; created secret prisons throughout East Europe and Southeast Asia; and used Guantanamo to circumvent U.S. laws is now concerned about the health and safety of these abused individuals.

Over the years, false statements from government officials have been treated as facts by the mainstream media.  Perhaps Blinken is unaware that many U.S. captives who were turned over to third countries were actually released by those countries for lack of sufficient evidence of culpability.  Blinken should familiarize himself with the Inspector General report on Khalid al-Masri, who was a victim of an erroneous rendition.  If it hadn’t been for al-Masri’s German citizenship and the intervention of National Security Adviser Condi Rice, then CIA director George Tenet may never have sanctioned the release of al-Masri who was being held in Afghanistan.

In 2004, the CIA’s Inspector General completed a study of the torture and abuse that was used  in CIA’s secret prisons, but various CIA directors have argued against the findings of the report. Former CIA director General Michael Hayden lied about every aspect of the torture program in his briefings to Congress, including the genesis of the program; the number of detainees; the intelligence allegedly obtained from coercive tactics; and the illegal conduct of the interrogators.  He asserted that “fewer than 100” detainees were moved through the CIA’s detention program, but that is an understatement.

Moreover, some individuals were moved or rendered from one country to another or to the U.S. military and therefore not counted as part of the CIA program.  Hayden also stated publicly that “fewer than a third” of the detainees were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Orwellian term for torture and abuse.  Far more detainees were subjected to elements of the program, including sleeplessness, shackling, and constant light and noise.  There were numerous examples of detainees who were rendered by mistake who were tortured. Of course, he was probably comfortable lying to members of the intelligence committee who had been briefed on the program several years earlier and did nothing to stop it.

The entire process was criminal, but the mainstream media failed to highlight what were essentially war crimes.  The CIA had legal protection with memoranda from the White House and the Department of Justice, but media failed to note that the torture and abuse began before the memoranda were prepared and that the torture techniques exceeded what the DoJ  considered legitimate.  CIA officers served as accusers, investigators, renderers, interrogators, judges, juries, and jailers.  There was no appeals process, and no oversight by CIA lawyers and managers.  Some individuals were rendered on the basis of information from a single source to a single, unvetted asset.  Too many innocent people were kept in custody long after there were reasons to do so. We will probably never know how many of these people ended up in Guantanamo.

The decline of congressional oversight of the intelligence community and the weakening of the role of the Inspectors General throughout the intelligence community have enabled the CIA to escape accountability for its role in conceptualizing and implementing an unconscionable program of torture and abuse.  President Barack Obama had the best opportunity to address the issue of accountability, but he said that he would “look forward, not back” at the crimes of the Bush administration and its global war on terror.  Senior CIA officials pressed the White House to place limits on the role of the CIA IGs, and Obama honored these demands.

CIA director Tenet who approved the torture program left government with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can be given to a civilian.  Whenever Tenet was asked about CIA torture, his standard reply was “We don’t do it and I’m not going to talk about it.”  Tenet’s immediate successors, Representative Porter Goss and General Hayden had no interest in accountability. Goss defended the “techniques” as “unique and innovative ways, all of which are legal and none of which are torture.”  Hayden lobbied for a CIA exemption in any legislation to ban torture and abuse. (Tenet received his Presidential medal along with Paul Bremer, who probably did more to create chaos and havoc In Iraq than any American other than the war’s sponsors: President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.)

The CIA committed serious crimes in the 1960s and 1970s during the Vietnam War, but at least the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House exposed the assassination plots and the secret intrusions against U.S. citizens.  Laws were written to stop the kinds of assassinations that had been approved by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and the Senate and House intelligence oversight committees were created, three decades after the creation of the CIA itself.  It took an additional fifteen years and the crimes of Iran-Contra to create a statutory Inspector General at the CIA.  The torturers should have been prosecuted, and the crime of torture and abuse should have led to stronger oversight of the CIA.

At its peak, Gitmo held more than 675 men.  According to the New York Times, there are currently 39 men in the prison; only 11 have been charged with crimes.  There have never been charges against the other 28 individuals, and a federal parole-like panel has approved transfer for ten of them, including a 73-year-old Pakistani with heart disease.  President Obama failed in his efforts to close Guantanamo and transfer the detainees to a U.S. prison; the 2022 budget proposal of the Biden administration has restored the proposal to close Gitmo and transfer the detainees.  (The Times’ Carol Rosenberg deserves kudos for her outstanding coverage of Guantanamo over a twenty-year period, filling in the vacuum created by the failure of congressional and governmental oversight to do so.)

The only accomplishment of the torture program was the degradation of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency.

counterpunch.org

President Joe Biden says he is proud that the United States “is back” to being prosperous, visionary, and with enormous military forces to be reckoned with on the world stage (although they didn’t do terribly well in Afghanistan). He is a positive sort of person, even though his outlook has understandably been influenced by considerable personal grief during his long life. Certainly he has made mistakes, the latest being to slap down a CNN reporter who asked him an awkward question, but he followed up by declaring he thinks that media reporters have “got to have a negative view of life, it seems to me. The way you all, you never ask a positive question.”

That’s a pretty ingenuous statement, but he’s absolutely right, and the tenor of U.S. mainstream reporting concerning the Putin-Biden meeting was redolent with regret that there hadn’t been a shouting match. There was frustration that there had been agreement about some matters, albeit modest. Then the topic of the U.S.-Russia summit meeting dropped off the West’s front pages and out of the broadcasting stream simply because it had not been a disastrous failure. It had been an annoying outcome for many people, and especially for supporters of the U.S.-Nato military alliance which is desperately engaged in trying to justify its existence by conjuring up threats around the world.

As American and Nato forces scuttle away from their twenty-year war in Afghanistan, where, as I’ve written before, “they’ve been beaten into the ground by a bunch of raggy-baggy militants who don’t have any strike aircraft or drones or tanks or artillery”, the European leader of Nato, its Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, prodded and supported by the Pentagon, continues to scoot round the world to promote the survival and even expansion of his creaking empire. He stayed home, however, to meet with President Biden on June 14, and it was ironic, to put it mildly, that the main media photograph was of the two of them outside the billion dollar palace that is Nato’s new headquarters in Brussels.

At Mr Biden’s media conference following the Nato summit he carried on highlighting the theme of democracy and declared that “the democratic values that undergird our alliance are under increasing pressure, both internally and externally. Russia and China are both seeking to drive a wedge in our transatlantic solidarity.” Of course, neither Russia or China would give a fig about U.S.-Nato solidarity if it wasn’t specifically intended to threaten both of them. But it must be vexing to be continually lectured by Washington on the subject of democracy.

There is democracy in the United States, and in general it covers the country from north to south and from west to east, from San Francisco Bay to Chesapeake Bay. But democracy doesn’t extend to Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. colonial enclave, military base and detention centre in the Republic of Cuba.

Guantanamo Bay’s prison was established by President GW Bush in 2002 and after a high of 780 prisoners has now 40. Nine died and the others were released. The New York Times of 9 June 2021 reported that of the remaining 40 prisoners “12 are being handled by the military commissions war court — three are facing proposed charges, seven are facing active charges and two have been convicted. In addition, 19 detainees are held in indefinite law-of-war detention and are neither facing tribunal charges nor being recommended for release. And nine are held in law-of-war detention but have been recommended for transfer with security arrangements to another country.” This is not democracy, and it is understandable that the constant preaching from Washington rings false to the point of absurdity.

In Russia there is a detained prisoner called Alexei Navalny, a politician and lawyer who in 2013 and 2014 was awarded a suspended sentence for embezzlement. He is in jail because he was judged to have violated his parole conditions. (This followed his poisoning, allegedly by a toxic agent. The western media have covered the matter in detail, even noting President Putin’s rebuttal of accusations of official involvement.) But Mr Navalny, unlike the hundreds of prisoners who have passed through, died, or remain in Guantanamo Bay, had a trial in an open court of law. Washington’s prisoners in Guantanamo are denied the right to trial, but this and other evidence of vicious persecution are ignored by Mr Biden in favour of criticising Russia over the Navalny detention, such as when he declared in the White House on 14 June that “Navalny’s death would be another indication that Russia has little or no intention of abiding by basic fundamental human rights.”

“Basic fundamental human rights” are most important, but the United States isn’t consistent in applying them or even recognising them. It was, however, encouraging when twenty-four Democratic senators sent a letter to the president on 16 April, stating, among other things, that “indefinite detention at Guantanamo is at its core a human rights problem – one that demands solutions rooted in diplomacy and that uphold U.S. human rights and humanitarian law obligations. . .”

This handful of U.S. legislators noted that all of the 40 prisoners remaining in Guantanamo have suffered “years of indefinite detention without charge or trial; a history of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; and multiple attempts at a thoroughly failed and discredited military commission process.”

And in few cases has suffering been more acute and long-lasting and totally destructive than that of Saifullah Paracha who has been in the Guantanamo concentration camp for fourteen years.

In May, Al Jazeera noted that the 73 year-old Mr Paracha, who has diabetes and heart disease, “lived in the U.S. and owned property in New York City, and was a wealthy businessman in Pakistan. Authorities alleged he was an al-Qaeda ‘facilitator’ who helped two of the conspirators in the September 11 plot with a financial transaction. He says he did not know they were al-Qaeda and denies any involvement in terrorism.” And in spite of trying for fourteen years to prove that Paracha was a terrorist, the entire U.S. intelligence system has failed to bring a case against him.

As recorded by reprieve.org, “Saifullah was on his way to Thailand for a meeting with buyers for the retail giant Kmart, in the summer of 2003. He landed in Bangkok, but he never made it to the meeting… He was picked-up at Bangkok airport in an FBI-led operation and rendered to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.” He wasn’t charged, but was brutally tortured along with countless others in ways described in a definitive report in the New York Times 18 months ago. Democracy, anyone?

U.S. democracy does not extend to Guantanamo Bay or any of the hideous ‘black sites’ where the CIA and its international partners conducted torture. (And torture may well continue, for nobody knows what happens, for example, at the CIA-partnered centres in Lithuania, Romania and Poland which are said to be closed.) The “basic fundamental human rights” so valued by Mr Biden are not much in evidence, and there isn’t any democracy in Guantanamo Bay. Mr Biden says he is proud that the United States “is back”, but it’s up to him to bring back democracy and he’s not had much success, so far.

Last week, Abu Zubaydah, who has been imprisoned at Guantanamo for 14 years without being charged with a crime, appeared for the first time before the U.S. military Periodic Review Board, which determines whether Guantanamo detainees will continue to be held as “enemy combatants.”

Zubaydah argued he should be released because he has “no desire or intent to harm the United States or any other country.” During his hearing, Zubaydah also said he had been tortured by the CIA, an allegation confirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report. The U.S. government maintains he is an enemy combatant.

Dan Coleman, a leading FBI expert on Al Qaeda, said Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” Coleman’s observations were communicated to President George W. Bush. Nevertheless, the President scolded CIA Director George Tenet, saying, “I said [Zubaydah] was important, You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?”

Zubaydah was tortured repeatedly at the “black sites,” where the CIA subjected him to waterboarding 83 times. On one occasion, Zubaydah had to be resuscitated. An observer at the scene was quoted in the Senate torture report as saying Zubaydah was “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”

In 2005, after the Abu Ghraib torture photos came to light, the CIA destroyed several hundred hours of videotapes of the interrogations of Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The tapes likely depicted waterboarding.

Waterboarding is designed, according to Bush lawyer (now federal judge) Jay Bybee, to induce the perception of “suffocation and incipient panic,” i.e. the perception of drowning.

The Bush administration claimed it only used waterboarding on three individuals (the third being alleged 9/11 organizer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed). But a footnote in Bush lawyer Stephen Bradbury’s memos says waterboarding was utilized “with far greater frequency than initially indicated” with “large volumes of water” rather than small quantities as required by the CIA’s rules.

The CIA also withheld Zubaydah’s medication (as he recovered from severe injuries), slammed him into a wall, threatened him with impending death, shackled him in uncomfortable positions, and bombarded him with continuous deafening noise and harsh lights.

In one of his memos, Bybee wrote that the CIA told him, “Zubaydah does not have any pre-existing mental conditions or problems that would make him likely to suffer prolonged mental harm from [the CIA’s] proposed interrogation methods.”

Coffin-like Box

Bybee granted the CIA’s request to confine Zubaydah in a cramped box with a harmless insect and tell him it will sting him but it won’t kill him. Even though the CIA knew that Zubaydah had an irrational fear of insects, Bybee decided there would be no threat of severe physical pain or suffering if it followed this procedure.

“[Zubaydah] spent a total of 266 hours (11 days, 2 hours) in the large (coffin size) confinement box and 29 hours in a small confinement box, which had the width of 21 inches, a depth of 2.5 feet, and a height of 2.5 feet,” according to the Senate torture report.

The torture of Zubaydah did not yield useful information. FBI agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated him, wrote in the New York Times that any useful information Zubaydah provided was given before the “enhanced interrogation techniques” — Bush-speak for torture — were used.

In response to the torture, Zubaydah told his interrogators that Al Qaeda was planning terrorist attacks against the Brooklyn Bridge, Statute of Liberty, shopping malls, banks, water systems, supermarkets, nuclear plants and apartment buildings. He said Al Qaeda was close to building a crude nuclear bomb. None of this was ever corroborated.

The Torture Statute punishes conduct, or conspiracy to engage in conduct, specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. “Severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from either the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering, or from the threat of imminent death.

It is undisputed that waterboarding constitutes torture, which is considered a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act. Cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is also outlawed by the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty the United States has ratified.

Despite his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” President Barack Obama refuses to bring the Bush officials who tortured Zubaydah and others to justice.

Donald Trump has pledged to keep Guantanamo open and advocates a resumption of waterboarding. Indeed, he promised a Trump administration would “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”

Hillary Clinton opposes waterboarding. She said torture is an “open recruitment poster for more terrorists,” and “over the years, Guantanamo has inspired more terrorists than it has imprisoned.”

Meanwhile, Zubaydah languishes at Guantanamo, with no hope of release.

Joseph Margulies, one of Zubaydah’s lawyers, said his client is “the poster child for the torture program, and that’s why they never want him to be heard from again.”

consortiumnews.com

As he arrived onboard Air Force One with his family, Obama announced: «I look forward to meeting and hearing directly from the Cuban people».

Such hubris. One can imagine the uproar in Washington if Cuban President Raul Castro made a similar condescending appeal to the American public, bypassing their rulers.

The New York Times headlined: «Obama lands in Cuba with a pledge to listen to its people».

It all sounds momentous and conciliatory. Sadly, it is not. US media hype belies the fact that Washington’s view of Cuba is one-sided and grotesquely distorted.

The fact is that Washington continues to impose a brutal trade embargo on the impoverished island of 11 million people. That is nothing short of economic warfare and for alleged reasons that many people can’t even remember. The official justifications for the embargo are suitably forgettable because the real reason is simply this: might is right, to crush any form of political dissent in Washington’s presumed backyard.

The US also continues to occupy Cuban territory with its military base-torture center at Guantanamo Bay.

On both counts, these fundamental violations of Cuban sovereignty are not up for discussion, according to imperious Washington.

But Cuba is expected to give way on US allegations of crimping democratic rights and freedom of speech. In any case, those Cuban offenses are relatively minor in the scale of world-class crimes committed by Washington, from its relentless subversion of foreign countries to all-out wars of aggression.

That dissonance in reality captures the nub of the problem: official US arrogance and self-entitlement to trample over weaker nations, without a hint of remorse.

Official US hubris is so rampant that Obama’s tour of Cuba is turned into a farcical narrative of Washington bringing change and hope, instead of it being a moment for Americans to genuinely reappraise their country’s history and its pernicious role in international relations.

Fawning media reports on Obama’s visit tell us it is the first time since a sitting American president visited the Caribbean island state in nearly 90 years. That was when Calvin Coolidge landed in 1928 – aboard a US warship. That little bit of information tends to be overlooked, yet it hints at the sinister background.

US-Cuba relations are indeed replete with historical significance. When the US took possession of Cuba in 1898 after the Spanish-American War, it marked the rise of Yankee imperialism in the hemisphere under which Latin American countries would be routinely carved up and subjugated to Wall Street capitalism. Dictators and death squads abounded and millions were consigned to horrific violence and deprivation.

When Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Fidel’s brother Raul led the Cuban revolution in 1959 they managed to extricate the country from a US-backed tyrant. Like so many other US-backed despot-regimes, Cuba had been a byword for poverty and barbarity for the masses.

The Cuban revolution defied this fate and became a model for social development, a country where hunger and disease would become abolished, and where free education and healthcare were enshrined. Today, despite more than five decades of a vicious economic blockade, Cubans have a life expectancy better than most US citizens.

Socialist Cuba embraced the Soviet Union only after the island was attacked by the US in the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. That failed invasion was an embarrassing fiasco for the Central Intelligence Agency. Nevertheless, it was an act of war by the US against its southern neighbor.

Over the next decades, there would be countless other acts of war committed by the US on Cuba, including dozens of attempted assassinations on President Fidel Castro, acts of terror and sabotage, such as the blowing up of a Cuban civilian airliner in 1976, as well as large-scale poisoning of agricultural crops and animals.

Another historical connection conveniently omitted by mass media is that Cuba was pivotal in the rise of the modern US «deep state». The real, shadow government of the US – dominated by the military-industrial complex, Wall Street banks and corporate power – was born out of the obsession to crush the Cuban revolution.

The CIA under director Allen Dulles and the US ruling clique never forgave President John F Kennedy for refusing to send in a large-scale military invasion to salvage the Bay of Pigs debacle. JFK’s subsequent policy of rapprochement with Castro, as with other Third World revolutionary governments at the time, was seen by the CIA, the bankers and industrialists as a betrayal of American capitalism. It would cost Kennedy his life when CIA snipers blew his head off in Dallas in November 1963.

It is arguable that for the past 50 years, US democracy has ceased to exist. Presidents come and go like so much puppets, while the unelected, unaccountable deep state exercises the real power. Is it any wonder that US social conditions continue to deteriorate year after year, with poverty and inequality at runaway record levels? Because since the CIA coup in 1963, US democracy is a window-dressing charade to conceal the wielding of corporate power against the interests of the people.

Cuba is central to the hidden history of the demise of US democracy. But you would never know from reading mainstream media coverage of Obama’s «historic» visit to the island this week.

The refusal to end the US trade embargo on Cuba and return Guantanamo Bay are key indicators that Washington remains an unrepentant offender regime.

The lineup of presenters at Human Rights First’s Closing Guantanamo event earlier this month promised to provide the inside scoop on how Obama is going to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and what the key roadblocks might be. But what I heard did nothing to allay my alarm that the Obama administration will continue the policy of indefinite detention of many “war on terror” detainees and will do nothing to hold accountable those who orchestrated and oversaw the torture of Muslim men in U.S. custody.

The two administration special envoys to close Guantanamo (the Pentagon’s Paul Lewis and Lee Wolosky of the State Department) and their predecessor, State’s Clifford Sloan, laid out the President’s plan for dealing with the remaining 91 detainees. Wolosky explained that the plan’s key objective is to complete the Periodic Review Board reviews and whittle down the number of “non-releasable” prisoners to a “mere” 30 or 40, thus making the job of dealing with a smaller group much easier.

The plan for prisoners who are not released or charged is to hold them in indefinite detention inside the U.S. Wolosky asserted that under no circumstances will the detainees being held under law of war authorities be released. He insisted that they are not entitled to more or fewer legal rights than other law of war detainees and would not have more rights if transferred to the U.S. than they now enjoy in Guantanamo, including habeas corpus rights.

Never mind that this seems to be in conflict with the concerns of Gregory G Garre, U.S. Solicitor General when he argued in 2008 that the Uighur detainees should not be brought into the United States to allow their habeas petitions to be heard in U.S. court.

The other two speakers, U.S. Marine Major General Michael Lehnert — who initially set up the prison — and Alberto J Mora — who as General Counsel for the Navy early on opposed the use of torture at Guantanamo prisoners — both challenged the legality of indefinite detention.

Lehnert said it was a grave mistake not to have applied an appropriate judicial process as soon as the prison was opened as demanded by the Geneva Convention and that this has fed into the narrative that we’re not a nation of the rule of law. He asserted that the prisoners’ extralegal status is inconsistent with U.S. law.

Lehnert also told us that the military at Guantanamo swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, not the bidding of the president. Allowing enhanced interrogation, which he called a euphemism for torture, was beneath us and is a blight on the United States.

Mora listed mistakes committed by the George W. Bush administration, including establishing indefinite detention, using torture as a weapon of war, opening Guantanamo to detain prisoners beyond the protection of U.S. law, treating officials as though they are above the law, and using a judicial process lacking in independence and due process. He added that Obama’s decision to hold no one accountable for torture is largely responsible for the sad fact that 58 percent of Americans believe that torture is acceptable.

Mora’s and Lehnert’s counterpoints to administration policies were reinforced by the retired generals who attended the forum. There was a complex discussion about the number and fate of prisoners who were deemed too dangerous to release but for whom there is no good evidence with which to prosecute, either because the men were tortured or there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

U.S. Army Brigadier General Stephen N Xenakis, a psychiatrist, challenged the validity of attempts to predict detainees’ “dangerousness” and said that predicting such future behavior is no better than the flip of a coin. In response, Lewis defended the criteria the government uses to determine how much of a threat a given detainee poses and claimed the U.S. has a right to keep enemies off the battlefield.

U.S. Army Lt. General Robert G Gard strongly challenged the use of Guantanamo to lock up a handful of prisoners indefinitely because they might be dangerous: “Looking at the broad security challenge of there being 25,000 to 30,000 radicals in ISIL, what possible marginal impact would there be to releasing these men, whom the U.S. cannot try because of its own misbehavior?”

Gard added that he deeply resents the holding of prisoners deemed too dangerous to release but who cannot be prosecuted because of tainted evidence, pointing out that every day prisoners in the U.S. are released for precisely that reason.

Moderator Elisa Massimino, president of Human Rights First, noted that some criticize the closing of Guantanamo because “high value” terrorist suspects who might have valuable information are being killed by drone strikes rather than being captured and interrogated. She added that a suspected senior-level terrorist was recently captured in Iraq and is now being interrogated; so, what is the policy?

Lewis asserted that we need a detention policy going forward and that using Article III interrogations on a case-by-case basis without torture can be very effective, there being lots of incentives that can be used to extract intelligence.

Moderator Carol Rosenberg, Military Affairs Correspondent of The Miami Herald, pushed the question of why accountability was not being pursued. Journalist Charles Savage of The New York Times pointed out that we came close to establishing a means of accountability after the Senate Torture Report was published, when a truth and reconciliation process was explored, but that the idea never made it beyond the Justice Department.

Mora maintained that even if individuals are not prosecuted some form of accountability is needed, such as a U.S. admission of wrongdoing and compensation of victims, as with the Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps during World War II. However, he also said, “It is legally unthinkable that there won’t be accountability, but it’s politically unthinkable that there will be [accountability].” This speaks volumes coming from Mora, who was in the forefront of those few lawyers resisting the use of torture.

My interpretation of the President’s plan is that in essence the U.S. will continue to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists (mostly Muslim men) based on an assessment of their future dangerousness and that this is considered justified under the law of war.

Somehow this has been expanded to cover persons who 1) have been captured under circumstances not defined by the agreed-upon laws of war (including that soldiers wear uniforms, represent and claim allegiance to a nation-state, fight on a battlefield or at least in a war zone); and 2) have been held at great distance from the conflict where they happened to be captured (Guantanamo for prisoners from Afghanistan, for example). The law of war is meaningless if it is arbitrarily amended to suit the State’s purposes.

But now, in this presidential election year, when bigots are whipping up racist hatred and fear with the help of mainstream media, I can fast-forward in my mind to a time when those same unconstitutional precedents are the basis for concentration camps for much larger groups of people than are presently locked up in Guantanamo.

Remember:  the German people elected Hitler. Laws were passed to protect the German way of life from the likes of Jews, homosexuals and gypsies and those laws incrementally reinforced the xenophobic mentality instilled in the general population. In a remarkably short period of time, Germany went from being an open democratic society to one in which people who did speak out against the state lost their jobs, were rounded up, and some of them ultimately executed. And the lawyers, and the generals, and even the churches acquiesced.

I am more afraid of those in power who erode the rule of law in the name of state security than I am of “suspected terrorists.” I am watching the U.S. become a state in which police who gun down unarmed black people continue to go free, Muslim communities are surveilled, individuals are recruited to spy on one another, and innocent young Muslims who are entrapped by the FBI accept guilty convictions rather than risk serving life sentences for crimes they did not commit.

To those colleagues who say I’m being alarmist, I suggest that you start reading what Muslim communities and communities of color reveal is happening to them. Start listening to people who have resigned from military and government posts so that they can speak out about what they have witnessed. Question the truth of the state’s slander of whistleblowers, as well as how it is played up in the mainstream media.

Too many remain silent regarding the fact that Obama’s plan not only perpetuates but strengthens the mechanisms by which basic Constitutional protections are being circumvented. The very existence of Guantanamo represents the flouting of basic legal standards our nation is founded on. Closing the prison will be worse than meaningless if we simply import into the U.S. the practice of indefinite detention without charge, while refusing to hold accountable those responsible for torture.

consortiumnews

After the September 11 tragedy, the Muslim countries which joined the Bush’s fake global war on terror became the target of the US state terrorism which still continues in one way or the other.

The US-led troops, supported by CIA have carried out indiscriminate mass round-ups in catching up suspected Muslim men and women in Afghanistan and Iraq, including some Arab countries without evidence. Israeli secret agency Mossad has helped the CIA officials in arresting the Muslim men, having beard and ladies, wearing scarves. Besides Guantanamo Bay and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, CIA torture cells were present in several Islamic countries and were set up even in ships where US secret agencies and military personnel employed various methods of torture on the militants and suspected persons like physical violence and even murder.

In this regard, in March, 2013, an investigative report by the British Guardian/BBC pointed out that acting under the direction of the top US officials; the CIA utilized a global network of secret prisons, foreign intelligence agents and torture centers in various Islamic countries including Belgium etc. where torture was conducted directly by American intelligence operatives.

The report which also mentioned Bagram and Guantanamo, links US high officials to atrocities carried out in Iraq—unleashed a deadly sectarian militia which terrorized the Sunni community and germinated a civil war, and claimed tens of thousands of lives.

But, under the pretext of American so-called counterinsurgency programme, and while implementing the anti-Muslim policy of his predecessor, the US President Barack Obama has broken all the record of human rights by extrajudicial killings of the innocent people through CIA-operated drone attacks in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen etc. in general and Pakistan in particular, while, the United States claims to be protector of human rights not only inside the country, but also all over the world.

On March 11, 2014, Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, who conducted an investigation into targeted killings, and examined legality of drone strikes, presented his report on drone strikes to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC). His report examined 37 drone strikes as sample—the US, UK and Israel have launched in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Gaza, which resulted into civilian casualties.  Emmerson told the HRC, “These strikes require a legal duty on the relevant states to provide…a justification for the use of deadly force…to disclose the results of their own fact finding inquiries, why no such inquiries have taken place.”

Emmerson also referred to an interactive website, produced by Forensic Architecture teem which marked the location of 30 drone strikes which helped in his final report.

In this context, Professor Eyal Weizman, the Principal Investigator of the Forensic Architecture project said, “Studying buildings hit by drones reveal much of consequences of a strike. The work we do is essential because states undertaking drone strikes, such as the US and Israel, attempt to hide actions and even deny them outright.”

In another report, issued by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner For Human Rights (OHCHR) on September 14, 2015 pointed out that since 2002 between 156 and 365 civilians including children have been killed in drone attacks in Yemen.”

In this connection, some classified US intelligence documents, obtained by The Intercept-an anonymous whistleblower, published on October 15, 2015 as the Drone Papers shed light on the secretive drone programme which has become a staple of United States counterterrorism policy since the attacks of September11, 2001. The papers indicated, “Drone strikes have often been based on thin intelligence, kill a large number of unintended people and refer to people inadvertently killed by strikes as “enemies killed in action” (EKIA), even when their identities were unknown.”

As regards these revelations about drone strikes, civil liberty groups strongly condemned the US Administration for a lack of accountability and transparency in national security decisions. Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is involved in several Freedom of Information Act lawsuits about the legal basis and the targets of America’s drone program said, “These eye-opening disclosures make a mockery of U.S. government claims that its lethal force operations are based on reliable intelligence and limited to lawful targets.”

Naureen Shah, the director of the security with human rights program at Amnesty International USA, stated, “These documents raise serious concerns about whether the USA has systematically violated international law, including by classifying unidentified people as ‘combatants’ to justify their killing.”

It is notable that in 2013, first time, a US Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch supporter of the predator attacks, openly admitted that 4,700 people have been killed by the raids of America’s secretive drone war. The number exceeds some independent estimates of the death toll.

According to the research of London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “Between June 2004 and September 2012, these unmanned aerial vehicles killed between 2,562 and 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom between 474 and 881 were civilians including 176 children.” In this respect, in a report, The Guardian disclosed on August 11, 2011, “The CIA claims that there has been not one non-combatant killed in the past year…it is a bleak view: more people killed than previously thought.”

Nevertheless, details collected by the Pakistani journalists show that civilian casualties through unmanned aircraft are higher as indicated by the US officials—more than 5000 innocent civilians and only 22 Al-Qaeda commanders have been killed by these aerial attacks.

While justifying these air strikes by the spy planes, counterterrorism advisor to Obama, John Brennan who had faced a Senate confirmation hearing for his nominee as CIA director is the main player, advising Obama on which strike, he should approve.

Especially, during his first presidential campaign, Obama had pledged to reverse excesses of the Bush era in relation to terrorism. He also promised to reformulate a counterterrorism policy in accordance with the legal and moral values of the US. Contrarily to his assertions, Obama followed the Bush’s approach of counterterrorism in its worst form by expanding and accelerating the predator strikes.

Notably, The New York Time on May 26, 2011, in an article which was written with assistance of several counterterrorism advisers of the administration revealed, “President Obama has become personally involved in the process” and “has normalised extrajudicial killings from the Oval Office, taking advantage of America’s temporary advantage in drone technology. Without the scrutiny of the legislature and the courts, and outside the public eye, Obama is authorising murder on a weekly basis.”

It is of particular attention that American constitution explicitly grants the right to declare war to the Congress so as to restrain the president from chasing enemies around the world, based solely on his authority as commander-in-chief by waging a secret war. But, instead of capturing militants alive and to avoid giving the right of due process of law to them in a court, President Obama has openly acted upon a ruthless policy of targeting killings by supervising the CIA-controlled drone warfare.

Besides, a report of the New America Foundation had disclosed that President Obama has “authorised 193 drone strikes in Pakistan, more than four times the number of attacks that President Bush authorised during his two terms.” The report explained, “When the US drones attack Pakistan’s tribal areas, it is not just the 10, or 50 innocent civilians they kill, these killings provide reason to the youngsters for joining terrorist groups waging war against US and of course Pakistan…while killing 10 militants, the US has murdered more than 1400 Pakistanis, not involved in any terrorist activities. Could it not imply that it gave birth to another 1400 militants?”

Based on research, a report, “Living Under Drones,” prepared by experts from Stanford Law School and the New York University School of Law had revealed that the US campaign of drone “strikes in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt is terrorising civilians 24 hours a day and breeding bitter anti-American sentiment…have killed thousands of people…even stopping their children going to school for fear of being targeted.” The report urged Washington to rethink its drone strategy, arguing it was counterproductive and undermined international law.

Citing unnamed US officials, The Washington Post reported on January 21, 2013, “The Obama administration is completing a counterterrorism manual that will establish clear rules for targeted-killing operations…the guidebook would contain a major exemption for the CIA’s campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan to continue striking Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan.”

The then Defense Minister Leon Panetta had defended these attacks on Pakistan’s tribal areas under the pretext of North Waziristan-based Haqqani militants whom they blamed for several assaults on American and NATO bases in Afghanistan. On the other hand, US-led coalition forces had failed in stopping incursions of heavily-armed insurgents in Pakistan from Afghanistan’s side, who killed more than 100 personnel of the Pakistan’s security forces in 2011, 2012 and 2013, while targeting the infrastructure of the tribal areas. In fact, US wanted to make Pakistan’s North Waziristan areas, a scapegoat of NATO’s defeat in Afghanistan by continuing illegal mass murder of the innocent people through CIA-operated drones.

It is mentionable that Pakistan’s then Director General of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Lt. Gen. Zaheerul Islam who visited America in August, 2012, emphatically told the then CIA Director David Petraeus that predator strikes which are violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty must be stopped. He pointed out that these strikes are proving counterproductive, giving a greater incentive to the fundamentalist and extremist elements in Pakistan, and are increasing anti-US sentiment among the people.

However, setting aside the parliament resolution, rallies and processions of Pakistan’s political and religious parties, while ignoring the Pak-US rapprochement, and without bothering for any internal backlash, these aerial attacks have kept on going on the tribal regions.

In fact, America’s such a duplicity contained a number of covert designs. The continued wave of strikes by the pilotless aircraft has thwarted the offer of militants and Pakistani government for peace talks. And the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) accelerated subversive activities in the country. These aerial attacks provoked the tribal people against Pakistan’s security forces by increasing recruitment of insurgents. Another aim was to create a rift between Pakistan’s armed forces on one side and the political and religious parties on the other. Besides, Pakistan is the only nuclear country in the Islamic World. Hence, US, India and Israel are determined to destabilise it. Drone campaign is also part of this game.

It is noteworthy that Pakistan’s armed forces have successfully achieved their objectives in the ongoing military operation Zarb-e-Azb which started on Jun 15, 2014 against the militants in North Waziristan Agency and Khyber Agency, and fight now is moving into last few pockets close to Afghan border. What the US-led NATO forces could not do in the last 14 years in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s armed forces did within 14 months, while, geographically, the North Waziristan is the largest Agency and has the same topography like Afghanistan. Even, the US and other NATO countries have praised the capabilities of Pak Army in defeating the terrorists. But, the US did not stop drone attacks which have shown American double game with Islamabad.

Nonetheless, in one of the major drone attacks, more than 40 civilians and policemen were killed on March 18, 2011 in Datta Khel area of North Waziristan.

On the one side, US top officials have repeatedly stated that America needs Pakistan’s help not only for peace process with the Afghan Taliban, but also for stability in Afghanistan in the post-withdrawal scenario of NATO troops, but on the other, CIA-operated unmanned planes on Pak tribal regions have been undermining international efforts of stability both in Afghanistan and Pakistan including peace dialogue with the Afghan militants.

US ex-presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have opposed Obama’s faulty drone strategy. Even, Secretary of State John Kerry has also criticised unabated use of unilateral drones in Pakistan, saying, “US engagement with the world is not just about drones.”

Apart from widespread criticism from some US allies and human rights groups which have remarked that these aerial attacks are illegal and unethical, and violation of the targeted countries’ sovereignty, the United Nations Charter, universal declaration of human rights and international law, the US warrior President Obama remains obstinate to continue extrajudicial killings through CIA-operated drones.

veteranstoday

Muslim-Americans are living in a totalitarian police state with worsening harassment, profiling, and surveillance. The United States’ government may claim liberty and justice for all; however, in practice, towards Muslims, it exhibits all four major characteristics of a totalitarian state: a war on terror that targets Muslims abroad, a totalitarian police state at home, public executions by drones and gulags outside the rule of law, and a strong reliance on propaganda and political demagoguery.

The hallmark of fascism was state oppression of certain targeted non-privileged groups. Today, Muslims are bearing the brunt of America’s totalitarian police state.

Despite FBI records showing that since 9/11, Muslims have committed far less domestic terror attacks than white supremacists, it is the American-Muslim community that is under unprecedented levels of surveillance and government intrusion. Muslims in America are unquestionably experiencing a fascist system of surveillance, operating at the same level that East Germans faced under the Stasi spy agency. Researcher, Arun Kundnani, has shown how the FBI has one counterterrorism spy for every 94 Muslims in the U.S., which approaches Stasi’s ratio of one spy for every 66 citizens.

Clearly racism, as much as oil, fuels the War on Terror. White Christians rarely have to worry that an undercover agent or informant has infiltrated their churches, student organizations or neighborhoods. The simple fact that U.S. law enforcement has not infiltrated and spied on conservative Christian communities to disrupt violent rightwing extremism, which is the biggest terrorism threat in America, confirms what Muslims in American know in their bones: to worship Allah is to be suspect.

Federal judges recently ruled that suspicion-less surveillance of Muslims is permissible under the U.S. Constitution. The NYPD has admitted that Mosques, student groups, restaurants, even grade schools, have all been under surveillance. By rapidly increasing both government policies of secrecy and surveillance, Mr. Obama’s government is increasing its power to watch its citizens, while diminishing its citizens’ power to watch their government.

The threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism has been largely manufactured, so that the so-called War on Terror can promote multi-billion dollar, corporate-sponsored militarism abroad and the erosion of two hundred-year-old civil liberties at home.

Muslim-Americans are not only facing increasing oppression from the state, but they are also facing growing prejudice from their fellow countrymen, as hate crimes and civil liberty violations against Muslims continue to precipitously rise.

A recent Pew Forum Poll established that Muslims are by far the most disliked minority in America. According to FBI statistics, anti-Muslim hate crimes soared by an astounding 50 percent last year. Muslims constitute 1 percent of the U.S. population, but they are 13 percent of the victims of religious-based hate crimes. Islamophobia and xenophobia now seem as American as apple pie. Intolerance of Muslims is often inverted, depicting Muslim customs as an insult to Western customs.

One major aspect of American totalitarianism, shared by fascist regimes, is the nation’s enormous military budget. In 1933, Nazi Germany’s military spending was 2 percent of their national income; by 1940, it was 44 percent.

Today, America spends more on her military than the rest of the world combined. America has expanded its military into having 662 foreign military bases, according to the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report. The War on Terror has cost $6 trillion, the equivalent of $75,000 for every American household, calculates Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Another hallmark of totalitarianism is the creation of a prison system outside the rule of law that is largely designed to imprison and torture one minority group. The Guantanamo Bay gulag is unquestionably a crime against humanity. There is unlimited cruelty in a system that seems to be unable to free the innocent and unable to punish the guilty.

In April 24, 1934, a People’s Court, just like Guantanamo was established, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely in isolation and were tortured and subjected to show trials. The People’s Court was signed into law by Adolf Hitler.

In 2007, a politician who was vehemently against the human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay, explained what he would do about the torture camp if he ever became President:

“When I am President, I will close Guantanamo. It is a moral outrage, a blight upon America’s conscience. It is the location of so many of the worst constitutional abuses in recent years. From inception, Guantanamo was a laboratory for unlawful military interrogation, detention, and trials.”

The politician who uttered these words was Senator Barack Obama. Ironically, under President Obama’s tenure, conditions for Guantanamo detainees, from both a physical and legal standpoint, have become markedly worse.

Public executions are perhaps one of the most overt and odious symbols of totalitarianism. In totalitarian Spain, under General Franco, mass public executions were the norm, and were often carried out in bullrings or with band music and onlookers dancing in the victims’ blood. With Hitler and Mussolini supplying arms to Franco, some 200,000 men and women were publically executed during the war and bombed from overhead.

Nowadays, drones are the ultimate totalitarian technology. Washington both uses drones for what amount to public extra-judicial executions of Muslims abroad, and for spying on American Muslims at home.

Most Americans believe that drones are targeted and therefore humane. Nothing could be further from the truth. By all accounts, drones have killed more children than terrorists. According to a new report from The Intercept, nearly 90 percent of people killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan are civilians.

By 2018, some privacy experts believe law enforcement will likely control over 35,000 drones that the government will use to monitor Americans from the skies.

Integral to the rise of the America Muslim Totalitarian State is propaganda. Sheldon Wolin has poignantly pointed out that, whereas the production of propaganda was crudely centralized in Nazi Germany, in the United States, it is left to highly concentrated media corporations, thus maintaining the illusion of a “free press”.

The American propaganda machine is highly sophisticated. It does not rely upon the radio addresses, speeches, and leaflets disseminated by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, nor does it rely on the crude censorship or harassment of free press ordered by a Politburo. The propaganda of America’s “one percent” is subtle yet pervasive; it relies not only on government diktats but also on the mass media, art, pop culture and Hollywood.

American cinema and music have always been a remarkably effective means of whipping up xenophobic wartime sentiment. For example, the highest grossing war film in history, American Sniper, and President Obama’s favorite television show, Homeland, both engage in an overly broad generalization of Islam, and depict Muslims and terrorists in a way that is indicative of widespread Islamophobia in American culture.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee reported a spike in Islamophobia and hate crimes after the release of American Sniper, which culminated in the recent slaying of three young Muslims in North Carolina, who were shot in the head sniper execution style. American Islamophobia operates in the service of American militarism and American militarism abroad, and in turn, ratchets up Islamophobia against minorities at home.

The media determines our language, our language shapes our thoughts, and our thoughts determine our actions. Language is the fulcrum of a society’s perception. Whosoever controls the public’s language, controls the public’s perception.

The corporate elites who sit on media editorial boards control said language. In 1983, fifty companies owned ninety percent of U.S. media. Today, only six media giants control a staggering ninety percent of what the American public listens to, reads, and watches. “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play,” once remarked Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda.

For Muslim-Americans the media’s Orwellian totalitarian language is clear: Drones are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Torture is Enhanced Interrogation. Occupation is Liberation.

Donald Trump’s recent call to ban Muslims from entry into the U.S. is not without precedent. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 effectively banned all Chinese immigration to the US. This racist law remained in place for five decades and required all Chinese to carry identification certificates or face deportation. When Trump endorsed identification cards to be worn at all times by American Muslims, his popularity jumped almost 3 percentage points. If Donald Trump’s policies are viewed by Americans as odious and un-American, then why has he consistently gained popularity after every anti-Muslim outburst?

America’s history is stock full of totalitarianism and popularized, irrational fear of “the other”. It began when the settler pioneers feared Native Americans and united against them by slaughtering millions in order to quell that fear. As settlers began to unite around a common identity they feared the British Monarchy and rebelled against it. Americans then fought against Mexico, France and various other countries for vast land control. Five hundred documented revolts on slave ships and the fact that plantation owners were greatly outnumbered by slaves, cemented the role of fear that perpetuated slavery for centuries. With greater fear comes greater violence, and with greater violence comes a greater need to justify that violence by ratcheting up the fear.

After the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were forced into interment camps on American soil. Vietnamese Americans were then targets of xenophobia in America during the Vietnam War, and then there was the “Red Scare”, which targeted Russian-Americans throughout the Cold War.

From the ashes of the Soviet Union arose the terrorists from the oil-rich Middle East, who became America’s new number one enemy and so the legacy of American xenophobia continues. Today, as the deliberately unending war on terror rumbles on abroad, Muslim, Arab, and Sikh Americans fear that they are living in a totalitarian state.

After the latest, and sadly, all too regular and predictable gun massacre on an American college campus in Oregon on Friday October 2nd, Obama called a Press Conference to fume and vent his anger and demonstrate his heartache. However, this has become a consistent pattern of Obama's. He reacts, rather than acts. He talks a great talk, rather than leading with action and delivering results. It is not enough to simply talk about gun problems in America, as Democratic Presidential Candidate Mrs Hillary Rodham Clinton has said. It is not enough to call a Press Conference. President Obama and Vice-President Biden have had almost seven years to actually do something about the disturbing level of gun violence in America and reform the nonsense and dangerous gun laws. 

At every turn Obama and Biden have been outsmarted and outmuscled by the Republican Party and the crazed National Rife Association. As the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said of her all male Cabinet: «If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman». President Obama and Vice-President Biden have spent the last near seven years «Speaking» and «Talking» and delivering «Speeches» on a range of major policy issues, from closing Guantanamo Bay, to a Cap and Trade Climate Change Bill, to closing the gap between the richest and poorest Americans, to reforming gun laws and curbing gun violence.

Obama-Biden are all mouth and no do, or in that Texan saying: «All hat and no cattle.» Obama spent his first year in power faffing around with what turned out to be a half-baked «Affordable» Health care Bill, with no public option. Then the Obama-Biden administration botched the roll out of the new health care system, spending $300 million on a website that did not even work, with the costs of the website ballooning to an eventual cool $2 billion plus. No wonder most Americans came to view Obamacare sonegatively. Obama's supposed master strategist, Mr David Axelrod, presided over a public relations and communications disaster regarding the selling and roll out of Obamacare to the American public, while Obama/Biden/Axelrod have presided over the largestnet losses for the Democratic Party at a Congressional and State Governorship level in the history of their party, even bigger than the debacle on Capitol Hill suffered by President Bill Clinton during the autumnal mid-term Congressional elections of 1994.

Likewise, just as Obama-Biden have been consistently outsmarted, outmuscled and (forgive the pun) outgunned, by their Republican Party opponents at home, so too has Obama demonstrated what a vacuous and vain lightweight he is abroad. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has consistently outmaneuvered Obama, in particular over Syria policy. Obama's Syria policy is for all the world to see, an abject failure and a powerful paradigm in how not to conduct foreign relations and Global Geopolitics. Obama could learn a thing or two from a superior geo-political strategist like President Putin. 

President Putin has run rings around the Obama administration. If the Obama administration had listened to Russia in the United Nations Security Council at the beginning of the Syrian civil war in March 2011 and sought to partner and work with Russia, Syria might be a very different place today. Russia wisely refused to join in the American led chorus of demanding immediate regime change in Damascus while the fighting was raging on the ground in Syria, instead calling for the Assad family to step down immediately rather than adopting the Russian position of creating a framework and forum for political negotiations and political dialogue for an orderly transition and transfer of power to a future for Syria perhaps without Assad in power in the long term. Obama's policy has been all over the place on Syria and a total mess. After refusing to train and arm Syria's moderate opposition forces such as the Free Syrian Army during 2011 and 2012 and 2013 Obama reversed course.

Yet the American train and equip «programme» which has cost the US taxpayer roughly $500 million is a farce. A hundred men completed a 54-day training program in Jordan and returned to Syria in late June 2015. On 12 July 2015, the first class of 54 fighters of the New Syrian Forces trained in Turkey, crossed the border back into Syria. Despite extensive US-air support, within the first 24 hours of their deployment the majority of the recruits were either dead or missing and their leader had been captured by the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front. 

Al-Nusra Front posted photos on social media the next day showing American weapons and equipment that they had captured from the group. By September 2015, the Pentagon acknowledged that there were only «four or five» US-backed rebels left. Seventy-five Syrian rebels trained by the United States and its allies to fight Islamic State have entered northern Syria since September 2015. Reports indicated that the rebels had crossed into Syria from Turkey with 12 vehicles equipped with machine guns. Soon afterwards however, there were reports that the group handed over their brand-new trucks, weapons and ammunition to the al-Nusra Front, almost immediately after crossing the border back into Syria.

Similarly, Obama's policy on the use of Syrian Chemical Weapons has been a joke. After declaring that if the Assad regime used any of it's chemical weapons arsenal in combat, whether on civilians or rebel forces in Syria, this was a self imposed Obama «red-line» which could not be crossed. When an American President publicly declares a «red-line» normally the world pays heed, takes attention and does not cross such a «red-line». However, Obama made a mockery of himself and the United States, as well as the authority of the American Presidency by failing to follow through on his own self-imposed red line. After almost launching air strikes on the Assad regime, Obama buckled under pressure and pathetically climbed down. 

The message went out to the whole world that this man Obama is not to be taken seriously, is naive and lacking back bone to follow through on and back up his very own words. His credibility, if he ever really had any on the World Stage, was shot through and lay in tatters, particularly in the sands of the Middle East where face is everything. The American President had to rely on the foreign policy brilliance of the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's genius idea to ship out and eliminate Syria's Chemical WMD arsenal to defuse the crisis and get Obama off the hook which he had pegged himself upon. Who would have thought during the heady days of 2008 and 2009 that the American President, Barack Obama, would end up taking his cues from the Russian Foreign Minister? How humiliating for Obama and the America people.

Again, Obama has had rings run around him by Russia and the master-strategist President Putin regarding Syria. As the whole world saw at the latest United Nations General Assembly in New York, it is President Putin who is setting the agenda on Syrian policy, not the Obama administration. The American President has never looked more weak and impotent in the face of an assertive, confident and muscular Russian President. Under President Putin's leadership Russia is now emerging as the key external foreign power broker in Syria and likely will hold most, if not all the cards, when it comes to sorting out the post-civil war «New Order» in Syria, whenever that day will come. 

Indeed, President Putin is successfully undoing the strategic work of Dr Henry Kissinger, who led the foreign policy removal of the Soviet Union as a major strategic player in Middle Eastern affairs in the early 1970s, when Kissinger brought Anwar Sadat's Egypt over into the American Cold War camp. Under President Putin, Russia is now on course to become a major force in the Middle East not seen since the days of the early 1970s, as exemplified by the master stroke of the anti-ISIS intelligence sharing agreement and informal coalition President Putin masterminded between Russian, Syria, Iran and Iraq. Both the Republican Party within America and the Russian President Vladimir Putin outside America have shown to the world that Obama is nothing more than an empty swank. Will history remember this period as Obama or Obambi?