Philip Giraldi

The recent killing of 16 Egyptian military police by militants in Sinai, part of an unsuccessful attempted penetration of the nearby Israeli border using a captured armored personnel carrier, appears to have been carried out by jihadi groups from the north of the peninsula along with Palestinians infiltrated from Gaza.

But is the accepted narrative true? For a number of years both Egypt and Israel have been having problems with Bedouin tribes in Sinai and across the border inside the Jewish state. The tribesmen, generally regarded as bandits, have carried out kidnappings, sabotage, and have killed Egyptian officials when the opportunity has arisen. Recently, the situation in Sinai has deteriorated due to a weakening of security in general as a consequence of the Arab Spring.

Al-Qaeda affiliated militants carried out a spectacular attack on hotels in the southern resort area of Sharm el-Sheikh in 2005, but there is some legitimate skepticism as to whether the group has much of a permanent presence in Sinai. It is particularly interesting to note that the attackers in the latest incident, eight of whom were reported killed by the Israelis, have not been identified, while no one has claimed responsibility.

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Philip Giraldi

Does anyone remember Otto, the brain damaged ex-CIA assassin played so deliciously by Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda? Otto cruised around London in a massive old Chrysler, driving on the right and forcing British drivers off the road while screaming that they were a**holes. Described by one reviewer as a walking id, Otto’s most famous line was “Oh, you English are so superior, aren’t you? Well, would you like to know what you’d be without us, the good ol’ US of A to protect you? I’ll tell you. The smallest f**king province in the Russian Empire, that’s what! If it wasn’t for us, you’d all be speaking German! Singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’….”

Exit Otto, who is a fictional character, enter stage right Mitt Romney, who is, unfortunately, all too real. Mitt demonstrated his international savoir faire shortly after arriving in London by telling NBC’s Brian Williams that he had concerns about the preparations for the Olympics. This presumably was at least in part intended to highlight the splendid job he did in Salt Lake City after receiving massive subsidies from the federal government to prevent the total collapse of the enterprise. He wanted to compare that well-oiled machine to the work of the hapless Brits who, per Mitt, seem to be unable to control their own labor unions. Labor unions are a bit scarce in Utah. Unfortunately, the hapless Brits found out about the interview and Romney learned that the first rule in visiting foreign countries is not to insult your hosts.

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Philip Giraldi

So the upshot is that we will likely have a war in the Middle East only because Mitt Romney wants to become president and is willing to sell out every U.S. vital interest to succeed in that goal. Obama has already walked down that road, leaving little hope for the rest of us to cling to.

The shameful spectacle of American politicians trying to outdo each other in demonstrating their love for Israel played out again last week. The sparring began before the Olympic Games in London. Israel asked for a moment of silence at the opening ceremony to commemorate the 11 Israeli athletes who were murdered in Munich 40 years ago. President Obama obligingly endorsed the proposal and Romney followed, even though it was none of their business, but the British organizers turned it down. They also refused to provide special protection for Israeli athletes, arguing that the security was adequate for everyone involved in the games, which it was.

Preparing to leave for London, Mitt Romney then upped the ante at the Veterans of Foreign War convention in Reno Nevada on July 24, stating to tepid applause that “President Obama is fond of lecturing Israel’s leaders. He was even caught by a microphone deriding them. He has undermined their position, which was tough enough as it was. And even at the United Nations, to the enthusiastic applause of Israel’s enemies, he spoke as if our closest ally in the Middle East was the problem. The people of Israel deserve better than what they have received from the leader of the free world. And the chorus of accusations, threats, and insults at the United Nations should never again include the voice of the president of the United States.” Mitt also castigated Russia before going on to his real target, “There is no greater danger in the world today than the prospect of the ayatollahs in Tehran possessing nuclear weapons capability.”

Note that Romney was adopting the neocon and Israeli demand that Iran should not even have the capability to create a nuclear weapon even though it already is able to do so, as are a number of other countries. That means that going to war is already on the table. Mitt then continued “The same ayatollahs who each year mark a holiday by leading chants of ‘Death to America’ are not going to be talked out of their pursuit of nuclear weapons. … A clear line must be drawn: There must be a full suspension of any enrichment, period.”

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Philip Giraldi

National Security Agency building in Fort Meade, Maryland

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) established a panel of judges (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) who were empowered to issue warrants to federal government organizations, including the National Security Agency, to enable them to listen in on the conversations of American citizens or residents who were speaking to foreign nationals overseas or between two foreigners if the communications were intercepted at a hub located in the United States. As originally construed, there had to be a foreign intelligence angle to the investigation and the activity would be limited to the monitoring of agents of foreign countries and their contacts. The intention of FISA was to protect against egregious violations of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee that Americans should have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” while avoiding the complications resulting from constitutional standards for what constitutes a legal search, i.e., that there be probable cause, that the court should know the name of the target, and that a fixed time frame for the activity be established. FISA lowered the bar of probable cause in general because of the supposed involvement of foreign governments, requiring only suspicion of possible illegal activity rather than demonstrating that a crime had been committed or was being planned, which was the normal basis for issuing a warrant. Fishing expeditions in which numerous communications lines were monitored in an attempt to find something incriminating were forbidden.

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Philip Giraldi

Many Americans will cast their ballots in November based on their reckoning of which candidate would be less dangerous. Unfortunately, the disappearance of Rep. Ron Paul from the campaign will inevitably mean that the two contenders will not discuss foreign policy in any meaningful way, instead preferring to boast of how tough they would be on America’s enemies.

Given the fact that there will be no actual debate on substantive issues, thoughtful Americans who realize that it is precisely the foreign and security policy nightmare that has evolved over the past 10 years that has fueled the domestic crisis might want to consider which of the two candidates will actually make the situation worse. Based on what the candidates are saying and have actually been doing, it is possible to get some idea of what might await us in 2013.

Mitt Romney is more easily categorized. He knows nothing about foreign policy, is almost willfully ignorant, and is completely dependent on his advisers, most of whom are neoconservatives who held positions in the administration of George W. Bush. There are reports of dissent among his advisers on some key issues, but Romney has invariably personally opted to take positions that might be regarded as more extreme in that they choose to rely on military might and confrontation rather than negotiation and accommodation.

Romney was unique among the gaggle of Republican presidential candidates in calling for increasing the size of the military budget and the armed forces in order to confront America’s enemies, including Iran, Russia, and China. He also joined some other Republicans in emphasizing American exceptionalism, which confers on the United States the role of world leader together with the apparently God-given authority to act unilaterally. It is significant that Romney was recently the recipient of largess derived from a fundraiser organized by Dick Cheney.

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Philip Giraldi

A RQ-4 Global Hawk drone aircraft (Photo: Reuters)

The principal function of government since 9/11, even if unintentional, has been to develop strategies to reduce individual liberties and transfer power to the government while not appearing to do so. Of course, neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama actually explains it in those terms. They say instead that they are making Americans safer, but their actions belie their words, as today’s United States is if anything less safe, more authoritarian, and far poorer. Every expansion of the imperial mission overseas, which of course is being sold as a war against terrorists, has been accompanied by new legislation in the United States that has made all Americans less free. The most recent anti-terror legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act, enables the government to detain indefinitely any American citizen suspected of involvement in terrorism, without any due process and without any right to trial.

Drones are the new tool of American hegemony. They are described by administration spokesmen, when they are mentioned at all, as having a constabulary function. That means that the American lawman in the form of a mechanical drone is delivering justice in a part of the world where the local government is either too weak or unwilling to do its own policing. It is easy to see the flaw in the argument. Sending a U.S. marshal to arrest someone after due process has been observed and a warrant has been issued is quite different from sending a machine into some other nation’s airspace and killing from several thousand feet up a suspect who might well be an American citizen traveling with family members (who will also die). So drone policing is essentially both immoral and illegal, a conclusion that has finally been reached by the United Nations, among others.

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Philip Giraldi

I recently read a fascinating article by Scott McConnell, “The Special Relationship With Israel: Is It Worth the Cost?,” which appeared in the spring 2012 Middle East Policy Council Journal. Even for those of us who have closely followed the issue of Israel’s asymmetrical relationship with the United States, Scott provides some unique insights. He observes, for example, that the result of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel has been the wholesale adoption of Israeli policies and viewpoints by Washington’s policymakers and pundits. As Scott puts it, there exists “a transmission belt, conveying Israeli ideas on how the United States should conduct itself in a contested and volatile part of the world. To a great extent, a receptive American political class now views the Middle East and their country’s role in it through Israel’s eyes.”

I would add that Israel has not only shaped America’s perceptions, it has also supported policies both overseas and domestically that have fundamentally shifted how the United States sees itself and how the rest of the world sees the United States. This is most evident in failed national security policies, damaging interactions with the Muslim world, and the loss of basic liberties at home because of legislation like the PATRIOT Act. Israel and its powerful lobby have been instrumental in entangling Washington in a constant state of war overseas while at the same time planting the seeds for a national security state at home. In short, the end product of the relationship is that the United States has abandoned many liberties, constitutional restraints, and its rule of law to become more like Israel.

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Philip Giraldi

Is it possible that Americans are finally waking up to the dangers resulting from Washington’s involvement in Israel’s foreign policy?

In the New York Times on June 24th there was an astonishing feature opinion piece by Professor Misha Glenny writing from London about “A Weapon We Can’t Control.” The editorial slammed the “decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility,” describing the development as a “significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the internet.” Glenny warned that to use such a devastating weapon in peacetime will “very likely lead to the spread of similar and still more powerful offensive cyberweaponry across the Internet,” also noting that “virus developers generally lose control of their inventions, which will inevitably seek out and attack the networks of innocent parties.”

Glenny also mentioned the second generation Flame virus, developed jointly by Israel and the US, and which has now spread to computers throughout the Middle East.

On the same day in the same issue of the Times, Jimmy Carter chimed in with an op-ed, “A Cruel and Unusual Record,” which asserted that “Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended.” Carter did not mention Israel or name President Obama, but the decade long transition of the United States into a nation that believes itself to be above the law, following the Israeli example, would have been all too clear for the reader.

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Philip Giraldi

Foxman sees prejudice against Jews everywhere he looks, but has trouble seeing bias within himself.

Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, would be unemployed if he couldn’t demonstrate that the world is awash in anti-Semitism. In his latest foray in self-justification, he was interviewed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on June 12.

Foxman states that 30% of Americans believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than they are to the United States. He does not cite the evidence for that statement and fails to indicate how exactly the question was phrased or the poll conducted. There are many possible ways to frame the issues related to the connection that American Jews feel with the state of Israel. Was the query really “Are Jews more loyal to Israel than to the United States?” That is a question that deliberately elicits an answer without any nuance.

One wonders why anyone should be asking these types of questions anyway and to what purpose, and it might well be that Foxman himself commissioned the polls to keep support for his organization at a high level. If anything has become clear over the past several years, it is that there is a diversity of Jewish opinion, most particularly about the relationship of Jews to the state of Israel. Many Jews do not relate to Israel at all, while others, like Foxman, are unbalanced in how they regard it. I suspect that if Foxman’s poll had been conducted with questions that were more nuanced, a large majority of Americans generally would agree that most American Jews put U.S. national interests first even if some do not, and the polling might also reveal that most understand that there is no such thing as a monolithic Jewish viewpoint on the subject of Israel.

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Philip Giraldi

The most recent issue of the National Counter Terrorism Center’s annual Report on Terrorism [.pdf] came out last week, covering the year 2011. I would like to say that it is well worth a read, but actually it is quite tedious. For those who are interested, it is essentially a statistical and analytical breakdown of the terrorism phenomenon derived from the U.S. government–maintained Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, or WITS, which is based on publicly available open-source material reporting alleged terrorist activity around the globe. Most often the analysis is bare bones and avoids political coloration, not, for example, going deeply into the motives of the various terrorist groups but instead providing information in a pie chart and chronological fashion. This year’s report is 33 pages long.

The United States is engaged in what most Americans still refer to as a global war on terror or, in shorthand form, a war on terror. The Obama administration avoids the expression because it is a legacy of the Bush years and because it uses the expression “war,” so it refers to “overseas contingency operations,” which has a nicer sound and does not appear to be so preemptive or premeditated. It also fudges the reality of what is taking place by pretending that the process is reactive, which it is not. The unrelenting expansion of U.S. military intervention is in response to many diverse overseas developments, most of which are not genuine threats. This was recently demonstrated by the White House decision to extend the U.S. terrorism fight to the entire continent of Africa.

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