On January 11, Witness Against Torture activists pose in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, which is covered in a false facade for repairs. (Flickr/Justin Norman)
One might think this would be over by now. Four years ago, President Obama signed an executive order to close the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, yet it remains open. More than half of the men imprisoned have been cleared for release by the Obama administration’s Guantánamo Review Task Force but continue to languish for years after the fact. In the past two and a half years, 13 prisoners have been released and two have died in custody — including the recent and tragic case of Adnan Latif.
Yesterday, over 100 human rights activists — myself included — tied 166 orange ribbons to the White House fence, one for each of the prisoners who remain. The activists also hung a banner that read “Inaugurate Justice: Close Guantánamo.” The unpermitted action followed a coalition-organized protest in which over 300 people marched from the Supreme Court to the White House to mark the 11th anniversary of the prison’s opening. More than 100 Witness Against Torture activists undertook a seven-day, liquids-only fast for the fifth year in a row while orchestrating daily vigils, penning letters to prisoners, leafleting and hosting film screenings and discussions.
As President Obama is poised to begin his second term next week, the prison serves as a visceral reminder of the failure of Congress, the courts and the president to end the detention regime that started under the Bush administration. National security and legal experts have little hope that the prison will close anytime soon, pointing to provisions in the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). President Obama signed the 2013 NDAA into law on January 3, making it nearly impossible to close the prison due to restrictions on necessary funding.
A small but committed coalition continues to push for an end to torture, indefinite detention and illegal prisons. The campaign to close Guantánamo includes lawyers, human rights advocates, military and defense experts, journalists, former prisoners and families of victims of the 9/11 attacks.
British journalist Andy Worthington, who has spent the past six years telling the stories of the imprisoned men, spoke passionately about the moral failings of Guantánamo remaining open at yesterday’s rally.
“Frankly,” he said, “the prison remains open because it was politically inconvenient for Obama to fulfill his promise as president. The facts at Guantánamo: Over half those remaining have been cleared for release.” Continue reading Does it pay to keep fighting Guantánamo?
The report finds that U.S. temperatures will continue rising 2 degrees F to 4 degrees F in most areas in the coming decades, and calls for effort to increase resilience to changes that cannot be avoided.
But it’s unclear how high temperatures will climb. The report provides a range of 3 degrees F to 5 degrees F by century’s end if global emissions are reduced sharply after 2050, and up to 10 degrees F if they’re not.
Average U.S. temperatures have risen roughly 1.5 degrees F since 1895, and more than 80 percent of that increase has occurred since 1980, the report concludes.
The report was written by more than 300 government scientists and outside experts, but German reports: “Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, said in a statement Friday that he plans to vet climate science in the new Congress.” Smith is a devout Christian Scientist and trained as a lawyer…
Meanwhile, a White House blog post reminded us all that the Obama administration’s not exactly tripping over itself to take action either. The report is to be seen as simply ”a scientific document” which ”makes no policy recommendations”.
With ten degrees of possible warming and a hotter, drier, more disaster prone nation in our grandchildren’s future if we don’t take urgent and radical action, you’d think the policy recommendations would write themselves. Infrastructure investment, alternative energy, energy conservation, food and water security, massive emmissions reductions, reign in the profiligacy of the capitalist consumer economy. What we should do about climate change isn’t exactly rocket science – it’s just bad-tasting medicine that’s politically unpopular and so short-termist politicians will continue to kick the can down the road.
James Joyner, writing for the Atlantic, has a great piece up on Republican intransigence over Hagel’s nomination. He looks at the foreign policy statements Hagel has made and describes them as firmly in the Eisenhower tradition. He writes:
Susan Eisenhower , Ike’s granddaughter and a Republican foreign policy leader in her own right, argues that “the impact of the Hagel nomination could well be about the future of the Republican Party.” She reasons:
The Republican Party is now at a crossroads. Over the last decade moderate Republicans have felt increasingly out of place in its ranks. If the GOP confirms Hagel, it could bolster the idea of a ‘big tent’ Republican Party. A GOP-led rejection of a Republican war hero with impeccable centrist credentials, however, could well be a fatal blow to that concept, along with some of the party’s longest and most successful traditions.
She is right.
Lindsey Graham notwithstanding, Hagel’s views on most foreign policy issues of the day are well in the mainstream of the professional foreign policy establishment. It’s why so many legends of the business — Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, Zbigniew Brzesinski, Robert Gates, Jim Jones, and so many more — have lauded his nomination.
Problematically, while Scowcroft, Powell, and Eisenhower are admired by professionals in their field, their party’s leadership views them as Republicans in Name Only — if not outright apostates. It’s a status they share with Richard Lugar, George H.W. Bush, Jon Huntsman, and, yes, Chuck Hagel.
Either the Republican Party has to re-embrace its traditional foreign policy agenda, or those of us who have been left on the outside looking in will have to conclude that it’s no longer our party.
While the transition has been remarkably fast, today’s Republican Party is simply not the party of Dwight Eisenhower or even Ronald Reagan. Scowcroft advised Presidents Nixon, Ford and George H.W. Bush. Hagel and Huntsman both served in the Reagan administration. But, just as the Tea Party is now the de facto domestic policy face of the GOP, the neocons are its foreign policy face.
Unless there’s a course correction and soon, those of us who describe ourselves as “Eisenhower Republicans,” “Chuck Hagel Republicans,” or “Jon Huntsman Republicans” will have to face up to the fact that the modifier negates the noun.
Gian P. Gentile reviews Fred Kaplan’s The Insurgents: “The story of Petraeus’ triumphalism has become the stock narrative for many writers on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars”:
 Mr. Kaplan’s The Insurgents is a peculiar book. At the end of the book he points out “the modern age itself has reduced much of the whole Coin concept to folly.” This, as Mr. Kaplan notes was the “dark side of counterinsurgency” Petraeus and his crew of dissidents helped to put in place with the Surge of Troops in Iraq and then carried directly over to Afghanistan a few years later.
Mr. Kaplan is exactly right: It has been “folly” to think a bundle of methods derived from unsuccessful counterrevolutionary wars of the 1960s could be applied by the American army to transform Islamic societies at the barrel of a gun.
The peculiarity of The Insurgents is that Mr. Kaplan raises this fundamentally correct criticism in the concluding handful of chapters of the book, but the preponderance of the book is nothing more than a paean to Petraeus and the Coin experts.
Update: As JDP notes in comments, Col. Gentile has been a longtimepublic critic of Petraeus & US counterinsurgency policy. Whatever one’s personal feelings about COIN and the cult of Petraeus, a book review shouldn’t be used to further sharpen an already well-ground ax without full disclosure (and even then it is still poor form to essentially commission a hatchet job).
 Linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky remains as vigorous as ever at the age of 84. His popularity – or notoriety as some would say – endures because he is still criticising politicians, business leaders and other powerful figures for not acting in the public’s best interest. At the heart of Chomsky’s work is examining the ways elites use their power to control millions of people, and pushing the public to resist. In this episode of Talk to Al Jazeera, Noam Chomsky sits down with Rosiland Jordan to talk about the two main tracks of his life: research and political activism.
I’d figured Richard Seymour of Lenin’s Tomb would be a hard-line SWP member and defend the current diseased regime. I was wrong. Good. Not only is he refusing to knuckle under to the SWP don’t discuss it order, he’s telling SWP members to fight and overturn their current, corrupt leadership.
This is the thing that all party members need to understand. Even on cynical grounds, the Central Committee has no strategy for how to deal with this. A scandal has been concealed, lied about, then dumped on the members in the most arrogant and stupid manner possible. The leadership is expecting you to cope with this. This isn’t the first time that such unaccountable practices have left you in the lurch. You will recall your pleasure on waking up to find out that Respect was collapsing and that it was over fights that had been going on for ages which no one informed you about. But this is much worse. They expect you to go to your activist circles, your union, your workplaces, and argue something that is indefensible. Not only this, but in acting in this way, they have – for their own bureaucratic reasons – broken with a crucial component of the politics of the International Socialist tradition that undergirds the SWP. The future of the party is at stake, and they are on the wrong side of that fight. You, as members, have to fight for your political existence. Don’t simply drift away, don’t simply bury your face in your palms, and don’t simply cling to the delusional belief that the argument was settled at conference. You must fight now.
The.problem with doing a roundup of insanely ignorant and/or stupid right-wing crazies is that the constant need for updates can keep you from getting anything else done:
Larry Ward, chairman of the national Gun Appreciation Day gun rights advocates have planned for the weekend of President Obama’s second inauguration, told CNN Friday that there never would have been slaves in America if black people had guns.
“I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history,” Ward said.
There are so many things wrong with the above that untangling and articulating them all would require a lot more time than I have at the moment, but here is just one that leaps to mind: By the time this country was founded, in 1789, slavery had been in existence for 170 years.
Some lefties ask “why do you need a 19 round clip for your handgun? 10 should be enough” to which I’d reply “why do you need a 50 inch TV? Wouldn’t a 37 be fine?” Alternatively, I could go with “why? What’s it to you? Mind your own business.”
Because thinking about the blood-soaked and bullet-ridden bodies of 20 five- and six-year-old children in a kindergarten classroom is, and should be, objectively more horrifying to normal human beings than thinking about an aborted fetus, Ann. That’s why.
Biden actually said: “There is nothing that has pricked the consciousness of the American people (and) there is nothing that has gone to the heart of the matter more than the image people have of little 6-year-old kids riddled – not shot, but riddled, riddled – with bullet holes in their classroom.”
Like it’s all a matter of the capacity to visualize gore.
If we picture a bloody mincemeat of fetuses, then do we get to take away abortion rights?
Phil Gingrey: Why do people think I said that women lie about rape, and why do they think I said women who say they were raped should not be allowed to have abortions, just because that’s what I said?
Michele Bachmann: If you worked on my presidential compaign, and you want to get paid, you’ll have to agree not to tell on me about all the illegal and unethical things I did. Because I am a sincere and devout Christian.
National Review: Sure, we’re fucking disingenuous hypocritical assholes, but we’re your fucking disingenuous hypocritical assholes.
A restaurant owner in Florida hates same-sex couples, and isn’t afraid to say so to their faces — right after they’ve paid him for the meal they ate in his restaurant.
Calls started coming in to 911 dispatchers shortly before 2 p.m. Wednesday. Callers said two men with guns strapped to their backs were walking through the area of Southeast Seventh Avenue and Spokane Street in Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood.
Officers arrived in the area and contacted both 22-year-old men. They were carrying rifles openly on their backs and were valid concealed handgun license holders in Oregon.
The men told officers they were hoping to educate the public about gun rights.
Officers explained that they were likely to continue generating 911 calls from alarmed people in the area, which would require a police response. Officers reported neither man seemed interested in those concerns.
Fresh off watching the Karzai-Obama presser, I’m wondering why they bothered. Both of the two most crucial steps in determining any post-2014 US presence in Afghanistan got punted – there was no deal yet on giving US troops the immunity from Afghan prosecutions for whatever naughty stuff they might do that Obama is insisting on, and therefore there cannot yet be a decision on how many troops the US will continue to keep there. Even if Obama had decided how many troops he’d like to keep there, which he says he hasn’t.
Okay, so a deal was announced that all detention centers and prisons would be returned to Afghan control – leaving Obama with a thorny question of what to do with the detainees at Bagram he’d rather not turn over because the Afghans will just release them – and that U.S. and coalition forces will move to a support role in the Afghan conflict this spring.
Mr. Obama told reporters. “Our troops will continue to fight alongside Afghans when needed, but let me say it as plainly as I can: Starting this spring our troops will have a different mission — training, advising, assisting Afghan forces. It will be an historic moment and another step for full Afghan sovereignty.”
We all know from Iraq that ”support role” means anyone killed gets barely a line in the media.  The latter comes sooner than expected, and suggests a smaller rather than a larger residual force is being considered by the White House, plus Karzai seems to think it means US and coalition forces will return to their main bases rather than going out to Afghan villages, which he says he can parlay into an immunity deal when he talks to his people. Still, everything that’s really important is up in the air and the rest could have been done with far less pomp and circumstance.
“With regard to post-2014, we’ve got two goals — and our main conversation today was establishing a meeting of the minds in terms of what those goals would be,” Mr. Obama said. He described those goals, which include training, assisting and advising Afghan forces, and “making sure that we can continue to go after the remnants of al Qaeda or other affiliates that might threaten our homeland,” as “a very limited mission.”
Obama did say that the US has now won, or nearly won, its multi-billion dollar war against a handful of Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, which is nice, but he didn’t say anything about winning a war on the Taliban, or AQ in Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, The Maghreb or anywhere else – because the $4 trillion-and-counting Great War On Terror isn’t even close to accomplishing any of those. and Karzai did confirm he wouldn’t stand for office in 2014, which heads of a possible constitutional crisis in Afghanistan but raises the possibility of a multi-factional election which elects a president with a tiny minority of actual support. Oh, and Karzai got the opportunity to say corruption in Afghanistan was introduced by foreigners – by which I assume he means himself and his parachuted-in ilk.
So yeah, ummm - the presser set out Obama’s spin: he’s bringing the war in Afghanistan to an honorable close just as he did in Iraq (yeah, right) and that he presided over the final defeat of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (did I mention he killed Osama binLaden?). Karzai seems mainly have to been summoned to D.C. as a prop for those talking points. Afghanistan is still broken, has gotten more broken by the US and its allies trying to fix it, and will stay broken in the post-2014 aftermath as it returns to the civil war of the post-Soviet occupation, but who’s quibbling, eh? At least today Americans and their media will have paid a little attention to their longest-running war EVAH, and that – I’m afraid – is the bright side.
President Francois Hollande says French troops are taking part in operations against Islamists in northern Mali.
French troops “have brought support to the Malian army to fight against the terrorists”, Mr Hollande said.
He said the intervention was in line with international law, and had been agreed with Malian President Dioncounda Traore.
Armed groups, some linked to al-Qaeda, took control of northern Mali in April after a coup in the capital, Bamako.
The militants said this week that they had advanced further into government-controlled territory.
Mr Hollande said French military action had begun on Friday afternoon and would last “as long as necessary.
I’d say there was zero chance France did this without informing its NATO allies in advance and I wonder if there will soon be calls for those allies to get involved.
Update: Oh look. The EU is sending 200 troops to Mali too, to train the army there. If anyone knows which nations are providing trainers for this force, I’d appreciate a link in comments.
French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian wrote on his Twitter account: “On the phone with (US Defense Secretary) Leon Panetta about the Malian crisis. This afternoon with my European counterparts.”
Residents who live near an airport about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the captured town of Konna reported hearing planes arrive throughout the night. They could not say who, or what the planes were bringing.
…A top French diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said that France is now able to deploy military assets — notably air power — over Mali “very quickly.”
Update 2:Hayes Brown at Think Progress writes that France sending forces to Mali may make it easier for the U.S. to decide on striking AQIM.
Shorter  Jim DeMint: If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
P.M.Carpenter notes some of the big lies DeMint is telling, while Booman writes that “his plan is to research how to best distort people’s perception so that they accept his alternative reality. He doesn’t plan on using his think tank to come up with new ideas that might appeal to the voters, but, instead, to change what they want.”
Remember,the Heritage Foundation asked DeMint to be their new president, he wasn’t forced on them. This is the beginning of an attempted reconcilliation between the neocons and the tea partiers, to find a common ground between the domestically-focussed and socially conservative far right and the warmongering, hawkish far right as the core of the Republican party going forward. That core will involve trying to change (co-opt)Â the bigotry of the tea partiers into something the neocons can work with. Bill Kristol will also be there with bells on.
This is the best idea the hard right can come up with to avoid the death of their party. Moderates will not be required.
It has been suggested that Danielle Pletka is sniffing glue. It has also been suggested that it is an outrage and a smear to call the world’s dumbfuckiest defense policy analyst a glue-sniffer.
For my part, I don’t know. But these accusations and defenses have come from serious people.
Oh gosh, the Socialist Workers Party UK is undergoing yet another of its regular blood-lettings. Their Stalinist central committee demands thought control and departing from their directives is not permitted, even if rape allegations have been made against one of them. After all, they’ve  investigated themselves and declared themselves pure as the driven snow and are just gobsmacked that some people believe them to be duplicitous, hypocritical weaseldicks.
The Party is demanding loyalty oaths from members. Walker notes that Party workers are being told that they must guarantee not to mention the case again at the pain of losing their job.
I was a member of a similar far left group here in the US until I was purged (I was walking away from them anyway.) In retrospect, it all seems a bit comical. A central committee of humorless zealots imposes their views on members and deludes themselves into thinking they are the vanguard of the revolution. In reality, the working class they fancy themselves leading generally thinks Marxist ideologues are idiots, when they think about them at all.
This is why the far left is basically dead. They have no support among the general population and mostly just engage in fratricidal infighting. I’m beginning to suspect most of their leaders don’t really want to lead a revolution when they can be tin pot dictators over their itty bitty empires instead.
It has also been suggested that it is an outrage and a smear to call the world’s dumbfuckiest defense policy analyst a glue-sniffer.
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