Three Dangers of Biden/Harris Admin, by Glenn Greenwald

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“Empire Politician”: Joe Biden’s Half-Century Record on Foreign Policy, War, Militarism & the CIA
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
APRIL 28, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/4/28/ ... my_scahill

"Empire Politician: A Half-Century of Joe Biden's Stances on War, Militarism, and the CIA"
Image Credit: The Intercept

As President Joe Biden nears his 100th day in the White House, we look at his foreign policy record, both as president and over the past five decades. A new project created by Jeremy Scahill, award-winning journalist and senior correspondent at The Intercept, examines Biden’s stances on war, militarism and the CIA going back to the early 1970s, when he was first elected as a senator in Delaware. We air a video discussing the project, titled “Empire Politician,” featuring Scahill.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: President Biden is addressing a joint session of Congress tonight for the first time. It comes on the eve of his 100th day in the White House. Biden is expected to unveil his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan to expand educational opportunities, child care and paid family leave. He’s proposing to fund the plan in part by raising the capital gains tax for the nation’s wealthiest households and cracking down on wealthy dodgers.

While much of tonight’s speech is expected to focus on domestic issues, we spend the hour today looking at Biden’s foreign policy record, both as president and over the past half-century. The Intercept has just launched a sweeping project examining a half-century of Biden’s stances on war, militarism and the CIA, going back to the early ’70s, when Biden was first elected senator of Delaware. The project is called “Empire Politician.” It was created by the award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill, senior correspondent and editor-at-large at The Intercept, which he helped found. Later in the show, Jeremy will join us, but first we turn to a new video featuring Jeremy Scahill, produced by The Intercept.

JEREMY SCAHILL: We have never had a president with a longer paper trail than Joe Biden. He’s taken so many different positions on the same issues so many times throughout his career that I sometimes wonder if Biden even knows anymore what he actually thinks about a particular issue. Joe Biden might tell you one thing one day and really believe it, and then the next day he’s doing the exact opposite because he’s cut some side deal that maybe we’ll hear about in some years.

Above all, Biden is an empire politician. He is someone who believes that questions of war don’t really matter on a moral level, but how does it impact America’s credibility, security and prestige.

BOB CLARK: The youngest new face in the U.S. Senate next year will be that of Democrat Joseph Biden of Delaware.

JEREMY SCAHILL: When Joe Biden began his run for the U.S. Senate, Richard Nixon was running a lawless administration.

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: We must never allow America to become the second-strongest nation in the world.

JEREMY SCAHILL: The CIA is conducting operations inside of the United States. There’s secret components to the War in Vietnam. And early on in his Senate career, Biden ends up on a subcommittee that is examining the issue of American war power: Who has the right to send the American people into a war? And he becomes an original co-sponsor of one of the most important laws passed by the United States Congress on questions of war.

NEWS ANCHOR: The War Powers Act grew out of the agony of the Vietnam War. Based on its constitutional authority, Congress passed a joint resolution which obliged the president to get congressional approval.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Also, Biden becomes a very early and ardent critic of the CIA for the perception that the White House and the CIA are regularly circumventing the U.S. Congress. And then, on the other side of it, Biden becomes a totally radical warrior against leaking and against whistleblowers.

Jimmy Carter nominates an outsider to be director of the CIA, Ted Sorensen, a friend of the Kennedy family and adviser to JFK. Carter had said he was going to rein in the CIA, shrink it, reduce its budget. But then Biden discovers, oh, Ted Sorensen actually wrote an affidavit in support of Daniel Ellsberg when the Pentagon Papers prosecution was happening and Ellsberg was facing a century in prison under the Espionage Act. And in that affidavit, Ted Sorensen says everybody in Washington takes classified documents home, and they regularly leak far more sensitive documents to the press than the Pentagon Papers. Ted Sorensen’s nomination was dead in the water after Biden joined the Republicans. Biden was more obsessed with some random admission from a Washington insider that they had taken classified documents home than he was about actually reining in the CIA.

REPORTER: Republican audiences love what he has to say.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Reagan and Bush take power in Washington. Biden understands exactly what they want to do. They want to undo all of the oversight mechanisms that were put in place post-Nixon. So Biden becomes the leading opponent of Reagan’s nominee to be CIA director, William Casey. But then, as Biden sort of gets to know people — and, you know, he’s big on personal relationships — he starts to back away from his own supposedly bedrock positions. So he opposes William Casey’s nomination but ultimately then votes for William Casey.

So, throughout Casey’s tenure, which spanned both of Reagan’s terms, you see Biden, on the one hand, blasting Casey in public, and then, privately, literally collaborating to sell covert options as in American national interest — in some cases, to sell wars that were being done without the very laws being followed that Joe Biden co-sponsored. He had supported the invasion of Grenada in 1983. He supported airstrikes that were intended to kill Muammar Gaddafi in 1986. In Nicaragua, the Reagan administration begins financing and arming the Contra death squads, and this would ultimately lead to the Iran-Contra scandal. Biden publicly is railing against the funding of the Contras, but then does what I think can just be called a Biden.

SEN. JOE BIDEN: Joe Biden. How are you?

JEREMY SCAHILL: So, Biden starts to try to broker deals. “Well, we can support the Contras, Mr. Reagan, if we put this restriction on it and that restriction on it.”

SEN. JOE BIDEN: I think I’m looking forward to helping you on this one, too.

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: Well, bless your heart.

JEREMY SCAHILL: He would say, “Oh, well, that’s because I’m a great compromiser.” You don’t compromise with death squads. And, you know, Joe Biden, very, very early on in the Iran-Contra scandal, came out and said, basically, that Reagan probably should resign. Reagan gives this now-infamous speech in which he says that “At the time, I made these statements saying that we didn’t transfer any arms for hostages.”

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Reagan gives this sort of logical gymnastics speech. Who does it resonate with? It resonates with Joe Biden.

SEN. JOE BIDEN: I take the president at his word that he did not know. I accept him at his word.

JEREMY SCAHILL: So, in 1990, 1991, it becomes clear that the United States is going to go to war against Iraq. Joe Biden starts raising holy hell in the U.S. Senate about the War Powers Resolution. Biden gets so furious during this battle with the White House and Bush’s utter disdain for congressional war powers that he takes a principled stand and actually votes against the authorization. And Biden actually lives to regret that he didn’t vote in favor of that war, because it ended up being very popular and was helping to sort of boost the American morale in the post-Vietnam era.

PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: Aggression is defeated. The war is over.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Biden then, almost overnight, transforms into one of the most hawkish figures on Iraq policy in United States Congress. He becomes a leading voice calling for the overthrow of the Iraqi regime.

SEN. JOE BIDEN: And it’s going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking the son of a — the — taking Saddam down.

JEREMY SCAHILL: And so, what you see is Biden emerging from the 1990s as an empire guy. Now, in the case of the war in the former Yugoslavia, Biden was a very early advocate of the U.S. intervening militarily. Biden was among the first to call it a genocide in Bosnia. But at the same time, Biden also sort of rejected notions that this is just a humanitarian cause. Biden would talk about it throughout the ’90s as defending American prestige.

SEN. JOE BIDEN: We should go to Belgrade, and we should have a Japanese-, German-style occupation of that country.

JEREMY SCAHILL: As Biden is agitating for the United States to be militarily involved in the former Yugoslavia, Haitians in the United States are watching as a brutal junta, death squads, overthrow the democratically elected government of the leftist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And Biden gives an interview on Charlie Rose in which he basically says nobody cares about Haiti.

SEN. JOE BIDEN: If Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.

JEREMY SCAHILL: He viewed the stakes in Europe as something that the U.S. could gain by getting involved. In the case of Haiti, it would have been purely humanitarian in nature.

And then the Clinton administration, immersed in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, suddenly starts a series of wars and military actions. So Biden supports all of them. He supports the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. He supports bombing some farm in Afghanistan where maybe Osama bin Laden had been recently.

And when the FBI director comes to testify in front of Congress, Joe Biden is one of the senators who starts saying, “Can you clarify for me: What’s the legality of assassination?” Biden seems to get this — the problem with the idea that America can kill whomever it wants, wherever it wants, however it wants.

Then the 9/11 attacks happen. And the simplest way to put it is that Joe Biden just supports almost everything that the Bush administration wants in the immediate aftermath. Biden not only votes in favor of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, he plays a key role in facilitating a war based on lies.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: No matter how long it takes.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Now as president, Joe Biden is saying he’s going to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I’ve concluded that it’s time to end America’s longest war.

JEREMY SCAHILL: This doesn’t mean that the war is going to completely end. When Biden was vice president, Biden wanted to use the very forces that actually are at the tip of the spear of assassination operations, instead of the large-scale troop deployment. What he’s doing is finally getting the war waged the way he wanted it, which is the CIA, Special Operations Forces, that are going to hunt down and kill the people that he determines are the enemy.

If Biden had become president, you know, 20 years ago, I think that it would have been easier to predict some of his future actions or policy behavior. But because of his age, because of the political moment that we’re in, I think there are some real wildcards in how Biden is going to approach the world, including on questions of war.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a new video produced by Intercept, featuring Jeremy Scahill talking about his sweeping new investigative project, “Empire Politician,” about Joe Biden’s foreign policy record over the past half-century. Jeremy joins us after break.

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Jeremy Scahill: Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Record Shows Evolution of U.S. Empire Since Vietnam War
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
APRIL 28, 2021

GUESTS
Jeremy Scahill: co-founder of The Intercept, where he is a senior correspondent and editor-at-large, and host of the podcast Intercepted.
LINKS
Jeremy Scahill on Twitter
"Empire Politician: A Half-Century of Joe Biden's Stances on War, Militarism, and the CIA"

An investigation into President Joe Biden’s foreign policy record reveals “the history of the evolution of the American empire, from the Vietnam War to the present,” says Jeremy Scahill, award-winning journalist and co-founder of The Intercept, which recently published a project titled “Empire Politician” that examines Biden’s stances on war and militarism. Scahill says Joe Biden is the first president in decades to come to the White House after spending significant time in Congress, but it’s not clear whether that will push him toward greater restraint in matters of war and peace. “Biden has spent his entire life railing against executive overreach, demanding that Congress be in charge of declaring war, and he may well be presented with a conflict around the world where it’s going to really call the question on which Joe Biden shows up: Joe Biden, commander in chief, or Joe Biden who spent most of the past 50 years as a senator demanding that Congress be given its proper authority,” says Scahill.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. By the way, you can sign up for our daily news digest email by texting the word “democracynow” — one word, no space, “democracynow” — to 66866. This is Democracy Now!

As President Biden prepares to address a joint session of Congress, we’re looking today at Biden’s foreign policy record, both in his first 99 days in office and over the past five decades. We’re joined by Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, where he’s senior correspondent, editor-at-large, co-founder. Jeremy is also the host of the podcast Intercepted. He has just launched this new remarkable project titled “Empire Politician: A Half-Century of Joe Biden’s Stances on War, Militarism, and the CIA.” Jeremy is author of several books, including Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, also the name of his Oscar-nominated film.

Jeremy, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Why don’t you just lay out the big picture for us, as you were doing in that video, what this project is doing, and then where — how you see it fitting in to what President Biden represents today?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, Amy, first of all, thank you for having me on. And greetings to you, Juan.

In the big picture, if you study Joe Biden’s history, what you realize is that the history of Joe Biden, particularly on matters of war, the CIA, espionage, the balance of powers between the executive branch and the congressional branch, questions of civil liberties — the history of Joe Biden is really the history of the evolution of the American Empire, from the Vietnam War to the present.

And what I think is significant is that Joe Biden, when he first ran for Senate in 1972, remarkably telegraphed what the sort of thrust of his argument about empire and war would be for the next 50 years. And that was that Joe Biden was not a militant opponent of the Vietnam War. In fact, he had great disdain for antiwar protesters. And he tells a story about walking on his campus when he’s in law school at the height of the Vietnam War with some of his colleagues, and they see fellow students protesting against the Vietnam War, and they call them “a—holes.” Biden says he wasn’t big on flak jackets or tie-dye and that he didn’t really have any moral qualms about the Vietnam War, that his issue was that he thought it was based on lousy policy and was not executed in the correct manner.

And, you know, Biden also really inflated his involvement, which was almost nonexistent, in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He only later was forced to kind of clarify that he personally supported it, but that he wasn’t doing sit-ins himself, after he had made kind of more sweeping claims.

So, what you see as he starts his political career is that Biden is not really part of the civil rights movement, he has great disdain for the antiwar movement, but he thinks that the empire has made some mistakes in how it has extended itself in Vietnam, in particular.

He gets elected to the Senate. He’s one of the youngest people in U.S. history, and the youngest in modern history at that time, to have been elected. He begins serving at age 30 years old. And Biden ends up on a couple of crucial committees at a very crucial time in U.S. history.

The Richard Nixon administration was, of course, a lawless enterprise. You had not only the overt War in Vietnam, but you had secret components to the War in Vietnam. You had the CIA carrying out a spate of assassinations around the world, conducting coups, running guns, cultivating assets who were dictators, thugs, gangsters, criminals. And for the first time since the creation of the CIA in the aftermath of World War II, Congress was finally getting around to trying to confront the CIA and trying to impose restrictions and oversight of Congress.

And Biden ends up in two crucial roles. On the one hand, he ends up being one of the senators studying war powers. And that leads to an extremely important law getting past called the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Biden is a co-sponsor of that. The Nixon White House decides this is a grave threat to executive power, and they veto it. And then the House ends up overriding the veto, so the War Powers Resolution, which says that the Congress has the right to declare war, not the president, and puts restrictions on the president’s ability to conduct military actions and, certainly, to deploy American troops without consulting with Congress. On the other side, Biden was one of the people who helped to create the Senate Intelligence Committee, which would be the first congressional body that was going to have jurisdiction over CIA activities.

And so, Amy, there is a sort of two-prong part of this history. On the one hand, Biden seems to understand very well what Richard Nixon did during his time in office and very well how out of control the CIA was. On the other hand, Biden, as a new senator, starts to get a taste for what it means to have access to power, powerful people, classified information, and he develops this very complicated relationship with the CIA of sort of, in public, being an aggressive interrogator of the CIA, denouncing its secrecy and withholding of information from Congress, and, on the other hand, Joe Biden aids and abets the CIA not only in pushing covert operations and selling wars to Biden’s Senate colleagues, but also aiding the CIA in an emerging, and continuing to this day, war against whistleblowers and leakers.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jeremy, I wanted to ask you — Joe Biden is unique among presidents, I guess, since the post-World War II era, in terms of his understanding of how Congress works, because if you look at the previous presidents, from Nixon, Bill Clinton, George Bush, the second George Bush, Jimmy Carter, they all came into the White House as governors. And Herbert Walker Bush obviously had a long history in the CIA before becoming vice president. You’d have to go back to Lyndon Johnson to find a president who actually knows how Congress works, knows how laws are passed, knows how you reach agreements to get legislation passed. But Biden seems to suffer the same problem that Johnson had. Johnson could pass great domestic policy, but when it came to foreign policy, whether it was Vietnam or his invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, was extremely hawkish in foreign policy. I’m wondering your sense of how you see Biden moving forward in terms of the U.S. expanding the U.S. Empire, if it can be still talked about as an empire with possibilities of expansion.

JEREMY SCAHILL: It’s a great question, Juan. And I’ll just answer it by saying that the White House is pushing, as the sort of premier issue on war regarding Biden, this notion that Biden is going to end the war in Afghanistan. I think it’s really important, just for accuracy’s sake, to recognize that the plan that Biden is implementing now was the plan that was developed by the Trump administration. And it’s basically the plan that was on Biden’s desk when he left office — when Trump left office. And so, Biden said, you know, “I would have done this differently, but agreements are agreements. The Trump administration signed this agreement with the Taliban, so we’re going to abide by it.” Now, there are other policies where Biden says we’re not going to continue on with the path of Trump. So he’s playing a little bit with the notion that the U.S. always keeps its agreement.

But what I think is interesting, Juan, and it cuts to the heart of your question, is that when Joe Biden was vice president under Barack Obama, there were a handful of policy issues where Biden sort of decided that he was in the opposition, and he took a dissenting view. The first one was the first year of the Obama-Biden administration. Obama’s advisers, many of them, wanted to surge U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and they ultimately did that. They wanted to engage in the COIN doctrine, counterinsurgency, which is another way of saying sort of nation-building, that you have this large-scale military deployment, you set up your own infrastructure, and you’re basically running an occupation regime in a country, similar to what the United States did, and other European allies, in Europe in the aftermath of World War II.

Biden says, “Whoa, wait a minute. I don’t like what I’m seeing here. I don’t think we should be having large-scale troop deployments. I think we should use our assassins, essentially — the CIA, the Joint Special Operations Command — in a small footprint, to conduct antiterrorism operations to hunt down people that we determine represent an ongoing threat to our national security.”

Ultimately, Biden loses, in part, that argument, because what happens is that Obama decides to do both. He goes with a large-scale surge, and he starts escalating the use of drones — and not just in Afghanistan, as you know, Juan, but in many countries around the world. And they basically empower the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command as really streamlined implementers of an emerging U.S. assassination policy.

Now that Biden is president, essentially, he is getting the war waged the way he proposed back in 2009. He’s going to pull out the large-scale U.S. military presence. There are a few thousand troops and 16,000 contractors that are on the ground there. But what he’s saying is that he’s going to keep these hit teams in the region to do surgical strikes. And the risk for Biden is that he ends up in a scenario akin to what happened with President Barack Obama in 2014, where he actually has to redeploy U.S. troops to Iraq in the battle against ISIS, after having declared the war over and initiated this made-for-television withdrawal from Iraq in 2011.

So, you know, to wrap this part of it up, Juan, I think it’s fascinating that Biden has spent his entire life railing against executive overreach, demanding that Congress be in charge of declaring war, and he may well be presented with a conflict around the world where it’s going to really call the question on which Joe Biden shows up: Joe Biden, commander-in-chief, or Joe Biden who spent most of the past 50 years as a senator demanding that Congress be given its proper authority?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, I wanted to ask you about another major foreign policy issue that Biden will deal with, and that’s relations with China. There’s a very interesting column in today’s New York Times by Thomas Friedman, who is arguably —

JEREMY SCAHILL: Is that possible?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — one of the most influential — one of the most influential —

JEREMY SCAHILL: That —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Can you hear me?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. Sorry.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Thomas Friedman’s column in today’s New York Times. He’s arguably one of the most influential voices of the U.S. neoliberal elite. And his column is titled “Is There a War Coming Between the U.S. and China?” And he goes on to say, “What has made this return of Chinese, Iranian and Russian aggressive nationalism even more dangerous is that, in each country, it is married to state-led industries — particularly military industries — and it’s emerging at a time when America’s democracy is weakening.” Of course, he doesn’t mention the United States’s major defense industry and how our state is married to our defense industry.

But he goes on to talk about Taiwan as a major producer of the most advanced chips in the world for — in terms of artificial intelligence. And he goes on to say, “And as much as U.S. strategists are committed to preserving Taiwan’s democracy, they are even more committed to ensuring that TSMC” — the big chip maker in Taiwan — “doesn’t fall into China’s hands.” And, “Because,” he goes on to say, “in a digitizing world, he who controls the best chip maker will control … a lot.” It almost sounds like Friedman is urging Biden to draw a line on the issue of Taiwan, when the entire world has already recognized that Taiwan is historically and legitimately a part of China. Your sense of how Biden will act when it comes to relations with China?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, Juan, we just came off of an era, under the Trump administration, where overt xenophobia and racism became official U.S. policy. And the Biden team is still implementing many of the sort of underlying principles of the Trump policy, if you will, but doing it in a more diplomatic manner.

And what’s always absent, and this is certainly — what’s always absent from Thomas Friedman’s columns, for sure, but what is almost always absent from discussions about U.S. relationship with China, U.S. relationship with Russia, is the U.S. role in the world. There is no more hostile, threatening, powerful force in the world right now than the United States government. And you always need to look through the lens of how other nations are responding to the United States. You can’t just say, “Oh, China is aggressively pursuing this technology,” or “China is in countries throughout Africa right now,” and pretend that it’s some ominous development that a major world power with one-seventh of the world’s population would be interested in expanding its influence or securing its future. All discussions about China, all discussions about Russia, regarding U.S. policy, leave out the role that the United States plays in destabilizing the world, but also provoking responses from other nations.

Now, having said that, Juan, I think one of the areas to watch, that does not get a great amount of attention, is the way that the United States, China and other world powers are battling for control of natural resources throughout Africa. The United States has quietly, over the past 10 or 15 years, built up a kind of covert and semi-overt military presence in Africa, while also flooding the zone with a lot of private business and contractors. China is doing the exact same thing. And in fact, China, because it is not bound by any laws requiring that it certify human rights practices, is really taking control of large parts of several African nations’ natural resource supply. And this cuts to the heart of technology, precious metals and an incredibly geostrategical important location in the world.

So, I think that you’re going to see a lot of pressure on Biden to become much more belligerent, much more hostile to China. And the people that are pushing him to do that are going to completely ignore and minimize the role that the United States plays in provoking responses from other powerful nations.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. We’re talking to Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept's senior correspondent, editor-at-large, co-founder. The new project, with more than 50 articles across The Intercept website, “Empire Politician: A Half-Century of Joe Biden's Stances on War, Militarism, and the CIA.” Stay with us.

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Jeremy Scahill on Biden’s “War Against Whistleblowers,” from Daniel Ellsberg to Edward Snowden
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
APRIL 28, 2021

GUESTS
Jeremy Scahill: co-founder of The Intercept, where he is a senior correspondent and editor-at-large, and host of the podcast Intercepted.
LINKS
Jeremy Scahill on Twitter
"Empire Politician: A Half-Century of Joe Biden's Stances on War, Militarism, and the CIA"
"Joe Biden Wanted To Lock Up My Father"

We continue our conversation with The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, who just published a groundbreaking new project on Joe Biden’s decades-long foreign policy record. Scahill says that during his years in the U.S. Senate, Biden “almost never meets a war he doesn’t support,” becoming one of the most hawkish figures in Washington in the 1990s and 2000s. Scahill also discusses Biden’s “war against whistleblowers,” from Daniel Ellsberg to Edward Snowden.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. By the way, you can watch, listen and read transcripts using our iOS and Android apps. Download them for free from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store today. And you can get our daily news digest. Just text the word “democracynow” to 66866.

We’re continuing our discussion with The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill, who has just launched a massive new online investigative project titled “Empire Politician: A Half-Century of Joe Biden's Stances on War, Militarism, and the CIA.”

I wanted to go to the 1980s, Jeremy, and also talk about how that links to Joe Biden today. Now, in his address tonight, his first address to the joint session of Congress, it’s expected he’ll be mainly focusing on domestic policy. There, Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says that President Biden is more progressive than many progressives expected. But we’re talking about his foreign policy.

So, today, in headlines, we talked about a trial that’s going on in El Salvador on the 1981 El Mozote massacre, that horrifying massacre of around 1,000 Salvadorans killed by the Atlacatl Battalion, which was a U.S.-trained Salvadoran military battalion. One of the expert witnesses, Terry Karl, professor at Stanford, detailed the on-site presence of U.S. military adviser Allen Bruce Hazelwood in some of the pretrial testimony. This is extremely significant, what’s happened back then and what’s happening today.

Also, this goes to media criticism. You had Ray Bonner of The New York Times writing, eventually, about this massacre. And within months, because of enormous pressure from the Reagan administration, A.M. Rosenthal, then one of the chiefs at The New York Times, pulls him from covering Central America because he’s exposing what happened in El Salvador.

So, you’ve got the U.S. policy in El Salvador. You’ve got the support for the Contras; in Guatemala, what the U.S. did in its support of the both murderous military and the paramilitary death squads.

And then you look at what’s happening today with, from that very area, the number of immigrants who are fleeing north, and the connection between immigration today and U.S. policy and intervention of the 1980s — not to mention what’s going on with Venezuela with the Biden administration saying they recognize as president not the democratically elected leader, but, in fact, the person that both President Trump and, before that, Democrats also supported. Talk about the policy of yesteryear determining today, and how, in some ways, that isn’t changing, and where you see openings.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I think it’s important to say, because this portion of history often doesn’t get mentioned, that in terms of El Salvador and U.S. administrations, Jimmy Carter emerged, even though he had campaigned on a pledge to sort of confront dictatorships and to respect human rights, as the original supporter of the coup regime that took power in 1979 in El Salvador, and the subsequent killing of protesters started this civil war. Carter, and particularly his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, believed that this is a communist menace, or at least they said that it was. And they said, “Oh, if we don’t support this military regime in El Salvador, we’re going to end up with a Sandinista-style government. Cuba is going to run the deck on Central and Latin America.”

And you have powerful voices in the Catholic Church, such as Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador, who himself was a conservative Catholic until the 1979 coup takes place — he writes to Jimmy Carter, pleading with him not to support the military junta. And Jimmy Carter’s administration ignores Archbishop Romero. And, in fact, Zbigniew Brzezinski writes to the pope, Pope John Paul II, and says, essentially, “You need to shut Óscar Romero up. You know, he’s starting to sound like a communist, and we’ve warned him about this.” Well, a month after Archbishop Romero writes to Carter a personal letter pleading with him not to send weapons and Huey attack helicopters to the junta, Óscar Romero is assassinated, shot through the heart, while he was saying Mass — a month after he writes to Jimmy Carter.

Joe Biden, at the time, was a critic of the military junta in El Salvador, but he also accepted the framework of the war against communism. And Biden could have become a really militant voice, especially as a Catholic. An overtly Catholic politician could have really gone to town on the fact that nuns, Catholic nuns, including U.S. citizens, were being raped and murdered by what was effectively a client state of the United States.

And eventually, Carter temporarily stops the aid to El Salvador, and he is defeated then in the election by Reagan. Biden writes to Reagan, in a very polite manner, saying, “I think we should maybe link our funding and arming of the Salvadoran dictatorship to investigating the murders of American citizens.” Carter, on his way out the door, gives emergency resumption of military gear and weaponry and financing to the Salvadoran junta. And Reagan takes power, and then it’s the gloves come off, and it’s just a massive bloodshed in El Salvador, sponsored in part by the United States.

And what you see is Joe Biden, on the one hand, denouncing the extrajudicial killings and murder, and, on the other hand, trying to tinker on the edges of American policy, proposing, “Mr. Reagan, I’ll support financing this dictatorship, or in the case of Nicaragua, I can agree to support the Contras, if we put this restriction on it or we make sure that they only spend it in this way.”

And I think that this was a crucial point of development for Joe Biden on questions of war. He almost never meets a war he doesn’t support. And the one time he did oppose a war, in 1991, Gulf War, he regretted it and then immediately became any ultra-hawk after it. But in the '80s, Biden was making deals on these really dirty questions of dictatorships and death squads. And he played a significant role, in terms of his position in the Senate, in not having a very clear line in the sand drawn: “We don't support dictators. We don’t support death squads.” Biden helped negotiate compromises with Reagan rather than just militantly opposing it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jeremy, going back to those Carter years, could you talk about when Carter named Ted Sorensen, the former Kennedy adviser, as his CIA director, what happened and how Biden functioned there?

JEREMY SCAHILL: This is a wild story, Juan. So, Ted Sorensen is nominated by Jimmy Carter to be CIA director. And the reason was that Carter has said he basically wanted to cut the budget of the CIA, rein it in. His campaign actually put out a position paper implying that Jimmy Carter intended to prosecute CIA officers who engaged in lawless activity. So, when Carter becomes president, the CIA is not excited, to say the least. And then Carter nominates an outsider, who happens to be a close friend of the Kennedy family. And Kennedy, of course, famously had his conflicts with the CIA.

So, Ted Sorensen is introduced to Joe Biden as the person who’s going to kind of shepherd him through the confirmation process in front of the Intelligence Committee. And Biden says, you know, to Ted Sorensen, “I’m more enthusiastic about you than any other nominee in the Carter — emerging Carter White House.”

Joe Biden, though, starts talking with Senate Republicans, who wanted to kill the Ted Sorensen nomination for a number of reasons. One, because the CIA didn’t want him there. He was a CIA outsider. None of the spooks at the agency wanted Ted Sorensen to be implementing Jimmy Carter’s agenda. Two, there was this sort of whisper campaign that Ted Sorensen was a pacifist who had resisted the Korean War. And three, Ted Sorensen was one of the people involved with the aftermath of the Chappaquiddick incident, where Teddy Kennedy was drunk and drove off a bridge, resulting in the death of a young woman.

But Biden is sort of like playing defense for the Carter White House at the time and trying to resolve those issues. And Biden is tipped off by a Republican colleague that Ted Sorensen had given an — had written an affidavit in support of Daniel Ellsberg during the Pentagon Papers prosecution, where Ellsberg was facing more than a century in prison under the Espionage Act. And Biden gets wind of this. He gets one of his staffers to go and dig up this affidavit, which wasn’t even officially filed. So they had to, like, you know, really dig deep to find Ted Sorensen’s affidavit.

And what that affidavit said, Juan, was, basically, “Everybody in Washington leaks. This is the culture of the elite here.” Ted Sorensen had also said, “I took government documents home when I was writing my biography, Kennedy. You know, this is a common practice. And by the way, many of the things that elite Washington insiders are leaking to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their own reasons are far more sensitive than what Daniel Ellsberg leaked in the Pentagon Papers.”

Well, Biden hits the roof on this, and he starts saying to Jimmy Carter, “This nomination is dead.” And at the end of the day, Joe Biden publicly says of Ted Sorensen, when he kills his nomination with the Republicans, you know, “I don’t know what we should do with you. Maybe you should even be prosecuted under the Espionage Act yourself,” he says about Ted Sorensen, for Ted Sorensen’s crime of stating an open secret, that government officials take home government documents and, at the time, were leaking them for their own political purposes.

That, Juan, then kicks off this relationship between Biden and the CIA, where Biden becomes one of the most aggressive senators in trying to go after leakers and whistleblowers, particularly when Philip Agee comes out, the former CIA operative, and blows the whistle on covert operations around the world. Joe Biden secretly aids the CIA in pressuring the Justice Department to not only go after leakers and whistleblowers, but to go after defense lawyers representing whistleblowers or leakers, who are putting in requests for documents as part of their defense. Joe Biden sponsors legislation to stop this practice of what they called graymailing. Basically, what Biden was saying is, when we arrest leakers or whistleblowers, their lawyers are then requesting in discovery all these documents from the U.S. government about the operations that they were a part of, and this could expose further secrets. So, Biden played a really crucial role in trying to create rules for federal whistleblower cases where defense lawyers were not allowed to subpoena documents that would assist them in the defense of their whistleblower or leaker clients.

Biden also goes on, even though he tries to kill Reagan’s nominee for CIA director — he tries to kill the nomination of William Casey, William Casey, of course, you know, one of the most infamous, notorious spies in American history. And Biden had his number. Biden basically said, “These Reagan people want to undo everything we did in the aftermath of Richard Nixon. They want to get rid of the War Powers Act. They want to circumvent the intelligence committees. And William Casey —

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we have 20 seconds.

JEREMY SCAHILL: “And William Casey is a key player in this.” So, Biden tries to kill it, unsuccessful, votes for Casey, and then aids and abets Reagan’s CIA in pushing covert action, including defending the 1983 invasion of Grenada. So, Biden had a very complicated relationship with the CIA. And his war against whistleblowers endures to this day.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jeremy, congratulations on this massive project, that has just been posted, at The Intercept. And thanks for the exclusive use of running that video at the beginning, which people can watch. The Intercept senior correspondent, editor-at-large, co-founder, and host of the podcast Intercepted — the new project, “Empire Politician: A Half-Century of Joe Biden’s Stances on War, Militarism, and the CIA” — Jeremy Scahill, our guest for the hour.

I’ll be speaking with Dan Ellsberg and Ed Snowden Saturday. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

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U.S. Led 2020 Nuclear Weapons Spending; Now Biden Going “Full Steam Ahead” on Trump’s Nuclear Plans
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
JUNE 10, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/10/ ... ar_weapons

GUESTS
Alicia Sanders-Zakre: policy and research coordinator for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
LINKS
Alicia Sanders-Zakre on Twitter
"Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending"

As President Biden prepares for the G7 and NATO summits and a meeting with Vladimir Putin, we look at how the United States, Russia and other nuclear-armed nations continue to spend billions on nuclear weapons during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite President Biden’s criticisms of the Trump administration’s nuclear policies during his candidacy, his administration is continuing initiatives to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal and is seeking $43 billion for nuclear weapons in his new budget. This comes as a new report from the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons reveals global spending on nuclear weapons increased during the pandemic, and found the world’s nine nuclear-armed countries spent $72.6 billion on nuclear weapons in 2020, with the United States alone spending $37 billion. “We’ve been seeing, from year to year, the spending on nuclear weapons has been increasing,” says Alicia Sanders-Zakre, ICAN’s policy and research coordinator. “Despite Biden’s campaign promises of wanting to work for arms control, wanting to work for disarmament, we’re seeing that in reality he’s going full steam ahead with Trump’s legacy nuclear weapons programs and continuing to spend more money on these weapons of mass destruction.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: President Biden has begun his first European trip as president. After meeting British Prime Minister Boris Johnson today, Biden will take part in the G7 leaders’ meeting in Cornwall, then head to the NATO summit in Brussels. He’ll end his trip in Geneva, where he’ll meet Russian President Vladimir Putin June 16th. On Wednesday, President Biden addressed U.S. Air Force personnel stationed in Britain.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We’re not seeking conflict with Russia. We want a stable, predictable relationship. Our two nations share incredible responsibilities, and among them ensuring strategic stability and upholding arms control agreements. I take that responsibility seriously. But I’ve been clear: The United States will respond in a robust and meaningful way when the Russian government engages in harmful activities.

AMY GOODMAN: The Biden-Putin summit comes just weeks after the Biden administration announced it would not rejoin the Open Skies Treaty, a major international arms control deal signed by the George H.W. Bush administration in 1992. Vladimir Putin then announced Russia would withdraw, as well. As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden criticized Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the treaty. In May 2020, Biden said, “Trump has doubled down on his short-sighted policy of going it alone and abandoning American leadership.”

Biden is also continuing a number of Trump’s initiatives to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In his new budget, President Biden is seeking $43 billion for nuclear weapons, including money to develop a new submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile, which, as a candidate, he described as a “bad idea.”

Meanwhile, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, has just published a report revealing global spending on nuclear weapons increased by $1.4 billion last year despite the pandemic. The report found the world’s nine nuclear-armed countries spent $72.6 billion on nuclear weapons in 2020 — that amounts to nearly $138,000 every minute. The United States spent by far the most — $37 billion — three times more than the next country, China, which spent $10 billion. Russia was next at $8 billion, followed by the United Kingdom, France, India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea. ICAN released this short video to accompany its new report.

ICAN VIDEO: $72.6 billion. That’s how much the nine nuclear-armed states spent on nuclear weapons in 2020, taxpayer money during the worst global pandemic in a century financing weapons of mass destruction. Although most countries support a global ban on nuclear weapons, these countries and companies spend billions to keep nuclear weapons in business — $72.6 billion for government agencies and private companies that build nuclear weapons. These companies fund major think tanks that write about nuclear weapons and hire lobbyists to make sure policymakers approve enormous nuclear weapon budgets the next year. This is the nuclear weapon funding cycle, a shadowy interplay between governments, private companies, think tanks and lobbyists, all complicit in today’s massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. It’s time to stop the cycle. It’s time for the ban.

AMY GOODMAN: That little report produced by ICAN.

We’re joined now by Alicia Sanders-Zakre, policy and research coordinator for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. The organization won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its work on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Alicia is the co-author of the new report, “Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending.”

So you have a world where the wealthiest countries cannot find the means to inoculate the world, to get the vaccines necessary for the world to be protected from COVID-19, but are spending billions on nuclear weapons. Talk about how the whole system works. Talk about your report, Alicia.

ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: Yes. Well, thank you so much for having me on and for sharing the report.

You know, last year we did a report just on how much countries spent on nuclear weapons. We did the methodology to provide that estimate, which hasn’t been done very much in the past. And this year we wanted to show more of the big picture. Why is it that nine countries are spending more than $70 billion on their nuclear weapons in the middle of a global pandemic?

And so we looked at all of the pieces of the puzzle and the flow of money, the cycle of spending on weapons of mass destruction in just one year. And it’s pretty shocking. We saw, after those countries decided to spend $72.6 billion on their nuclear weapons, they gave out billions of dollars, over $27 billion in contracts, to the defense companies that build and maintain these weapons. And then those companies kept spending money to make sure that they kept getting money in years to come. So they spend over $117 million lobbying policymakers to increase spending on defense, and they also spent up to $10 million funding almost all of the major think tanks that research and write about nuclear weapons. So these are all of the actors, all of the players, in this dirty nuclear weapons business that we wanted to highlight and start to hold accountable.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Alicia, you mentioned the companies. Could you name them and tell us how much money they made off these contracts?

ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: Absolutely. So, in the report, we feature all of the more than 20 companies that are currently involved in producing nuclear weapons. So, a lot of these companies have existing contract that they’re still fulfilling on nuclear weapons. But in 2020, 11 of those companies received new or modified contracts to work on existing or new nuclear weapon systems, amounting to a total of more than $27 billion. And there are a number of companies involved — just to name a few, of course, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing. Honeywell International is one not a lot of people might know about. The full list of all those companies and the amounts are in the report, so if you want more details, I’d recommend checking that out.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Alicia, despite the fact that, as you document, the U.S. spent over $37 billion on nuclear arms in the last year, that figure is expected to exponentially increase, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in the coming year because of technological upgrades to the nuclear arsenal in the U.S. Could you talk about what we know about forthcoming increases in nuclear spending here?

ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: Absolutely. So, we’ve been seeing, I mean, from year to year, the spending on nuclear weapons has been increasing. As was mentioned, there was an increase in $1.4 billion on these weapons even in the middle of a global pandemic. And we know that that number is just going to continue to increase because of a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office looking at 10-year nuclear weapons costs, which found that there would be an increase of $140 billion over those 10 years compared to a previous 2019 report. So, you know, despite Biden’s campaign promises of wanting to work for arms control, wanting to work for disarmament, we’re seeing that in reality he’s going full steam ahead with Trump’s legacy nuclear weapons programs and continuing to spend more money on these weapons of mass destruction.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Alicia Sanders-Zakre, about the significance — I mean, he’s going to meet with the G7 countries — and what do nuclear weapons have to do with those countries? — and then the NATO summit. And the report you put out ahead of this summit, ICAN is arguing that members of the transatlantic alliance should embrace the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January. So, talk about how these two summits are critical to nuclear weapons and somehow turning the escalation of them around.

ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, speaking of the NATO summit, in particular, we saw President Biden wrote, in an opinion piece to The Washington Post recently, that a real focus of this trip was to promote democratic values and to bring the power of democracy to these meetings. And I think that’s very relevant when it comes to nuclear weapons issues in NATO countries and in Europe, because, as this other report shows, that we just released today, in most countries across the NATO there is overwhelming support for the country to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, when you ask the people what they think. But despite popular opinion, democratic support for this treaty, for banning nuclear weapons, these governments continue to say that they don’t support the treaty, to refuse to join it. And this is a NATO position that’s really not in line with the democratic — their democratic values and democratic ideals. So, I think this is an opportunity for NATO to really reevaluate their stance as a democracy that listens to what the people want on key issues like nuclear weapons.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Alicia, could you talk about the extent to which, if at all, the Biden administration has departed from the Trump administration on nuclear weapons policy?

ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: I think, so far, we really haven’t seen a departure. And this is clear in the recent 2022 budget request, which, as you mentioned in the introduction, keeps and continues to fund Trump’s additional nuclear weapons programs, as well as kind of the programs of record. So we really need to see more action from President Biden.

I think this upcoming meeting with President Putin is an opportunity for both countries to recognize the increasing risk of nuclear weapons, the devastating humanitarian consequences of these weapons, and take real steps and tangible progress towards nuclear disarmament and towards joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

AMY GOODMAN: Not only the issue of what would happen if a nuclear weapon was used — and, of course, that would be just devastating — but the fact that the money does not go, for example, to dealing with this global pandemic. I wanted to ask you about the report also naming think tanks which receive funding from nuclear weapons manufacturers. The list includes the Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Center for New American Security, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Hudson Institute and the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Can you talk more about the role of think tanks and these nuclear corporations?

ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: Absolutely. I mean, this is really new, I think shocking, research in that it shows that upwards of 10 — in just one year, the companies that produce and work on nuclear weapons spent upwards of $10 million funding really almost all major think tanks that are writing and researching about nuclear weapons. And, you know, it’s not always possible to know exactly the extent of the influence of this funding, but what’s really concerning is, I think, the depth and how widespread this funding is. It’s not just one think tank; as I said, it’s really most of the think tanks that are doing substantial work on nuclear weapons. And I think it’s a systemic problem in the field that, you know, think tanks should be asking themselves, “How can we actually come together and address the perhaps undue influence of nuclear weapon-producing companies in this field, in this sector?”

AMY GOODMAN: As the Biden administration pours billions into developing new nuclear weapons, nuclear resisters are still going to prison for opposing U.S. nuclear policy. On Wednesday, Mark Colville, a member of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, reported to prison. He was sentenced in April to 21 months in prison, breaking into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base April 4th, 2018, on the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King. Colville and six other activists entered the base armed with hammers, crime scene tape, baby bottles containing their own blood, and an indictment charging the U.S. government with crimes against peace. Two other members of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, Martha Hennessy and Carmen Trotta, were recently released from prison. Martha Hennessy is the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement. Your final comments on the role of activism when it comes to nuclear weapons?

ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: I think it’s absolutely essential. You know, at the end of the day, these are weapons of mass destruction, and they have now been made illegal under the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons due to the collaborative work of activists and diplomats and scientists and researchers and people all around the world. And so, it’s really — we really need activism to change the status quo and to finally get rid of these weapons of mass destruction.

AMY GOODMAN: Alicia Sanders-Zakre, we want to thank you so much for being with us, policy and research coordinator for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. And we’ll link to the report, “Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending,” as we continue to cover in the coming days the G7, the NATO summit, the summit with President Biden and President Putin.

Next up, as President Biden pledges to buy half a billion vaccine doses to give to almost 100 countries in the world, we’ll look at why many Americans are refusing to get vaccinated. We’ll speak with Dr. Syra Madad of NYC Health and Hospitals, the nation’s largest public healthcare system, and why healthcare workers, a number of them, are saying no. Stay with us.

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“Do Not Come”: VP Harris Sends Anti-Migrant Message in Guatemala, Visits Mexico Amid Deadly Election
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
JUNE 08, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/8/k ... n_killings

GUESTS
Erika Guevara-Rosas
human rights lawyer and Americas director for Amnesty International.
LINKS
Erika Guevara-Rosas on Twitter

In her first foreign trip as vice president, Kamala Harris is in Mexico City to meet with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after first visiting Guatemala to meet with President Alejandro Giammattei. Harris is tasked by President Joe Biden with stemming the flow of Central American migrants fleeing corruption, violence and poverty, even after the two campaigned on allowing more migrants to apply for asylum along the U.S.-Mexico border, and issued a stern warning to migrants: “Do not come.” Her visit comes after voters cast their ballots in one of Mexico’s largest and deadliest elections in history, as over 80 politicians were killed in the run-up to the election, which had 21,000 local and national seats up for grabs. “This electoral process has been one of the most violent,” says Erika Guevara-Rosas, a human rights lawyer and Americas director for Amnesty International. “It is reflective of the human rights crisis that Mexico has been facing for many years.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

In her first foreign trip as vice president, Kamala Harris is in Mexico City today to meet with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after visiting Guatemala Monday. Harris has been tasked by President Biden with blocking Central American migrants fleeing corruption, violence and poverty from reaching the U.S.-Mexico border, even after the two campaigned on allowing more migrants to apply for asylum.

Harris is the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father who both immigrated to the United States. During a press conference alongside Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, she issued this jarring warning.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come.

AMY GOODMAN: In her remarks, Vice President Harris failed to acknowledge how U.S. intervention and foreign policy in Central America have contributed to the root causes of why people flee in the first place.

Her visit to Mexico today comes after voters cast their ballots Sunday in one of the country’s largest midterm elections in history, with about 21,000 local and national seats up for grabs. Final results are expected next week in what could be a referendum on President López Obrador’s government. Preliminary results show his political party, MORENA, and allies won over half of the 500 seats in Mexico’s lower house but failed to secure a supermajority.

The election is also being described as one of Mexico’s deadliest, after human remains were found Sunday in at least two voting booths in the northern Mexican state of Baja California. Over 80 politicians, including 35 candidates, were killed in the run-up to Sunday’s election, which took place as Mexico continues to battle the COVID-19 pandemic and has one of the world’s highest case fatality rates. This is a Mexican voter.

MEXICAN VOTER: [translated] These are the measures I am taking. I am wearing my face mask, and I have alcohol gel. Although they gave us wipes here, it’s better to be prepared.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on all of this, we go to Mexico City to speak with the human rights lawyer Erika Guevara-Rosas, who is the Americas director for Amnesty International.

Erika, welcome back to Democracy Now! I mean, the story right now in Mexico is devastating. Nearly 100 politicians, what, at least 35 candidates who ran in this election, were murdered in the lead-up?

ERIKA GUEVARA-ROSAS: Yes, Amy. The situation is very complex, and it really represents what has been happening in Mexico for many years. It’s not only the political violence. It’s the violence that is affecting the majority of the states in Mexico. It’s the violence perpetrated by the organized crime, but also it’s the violence perpetrated by security forces that are committing human rights violations all over the country.

This political process, this electoral process, has been one of the most violent. I mean, you just mentioned the numbers. It has been the most violent for women, because out of the 35 candidates who have been killed over the electoral campaign, 21 were women. We have seen hundreds of reports of different type of attacks and violence against candidates and against politicians during the 200 days of electoral campaign.

And unfortunately, we are seeing also a President López Obrador that is denying the reality. I mean, every time that he’s been asked about this political violence, he just mentioned that Mexico is in peace and that this is one of the — not only historical process in terms of the number of people who are being elected for local and federal government, but he also said that it is historical because it’s the first time that democracy is happening in the country, while we are seeing all this type of violence all across the country.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Erika, could you talk about the — of this violence, is there any indication where it’s coming from? Is it particular political groupings that are being targeted, or is it just a random state-of-the-nation problem?

ERIKA GUEVARA-ROSAS: Well, a vast majority of the candidates who were killed and the vast majority of the attacks are against candidates of opposition parties. Politicians for opposition parties are the ones who have been targeted by this violence in different parts of the country. But it is also true that those who have been attacked are in locations where the organized crime has increased its influence over the last few years and also where the human rights situation is worse than ever, precisely because of the strong presence of the security forces of the military. So it’s difficult to say where the violence is coming from, because it’s the same violence that is affecting the general population. But the reality is that it is reflective of the human rights crisis that Mexico has been facing for many years.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to meet today with President López Obrador. Could you talk about the significance of her coming immediately after these elections in a trip to Mexico and also what you would hope that a vice president would tell the president of Mexico at this point?

ERIKA GUEVARA-ROSAS: Yeah. Well, Amnesty International sent a letter to Vice President Kamala Harris as soon as we learned about the trip to Guatemala and Mexico. We raised a lot of our concerns about the human rights situation in both countries. And more important, we raised our concerns about the bilateral relationship between the U.S. and these two countries, particularly because over the last few years we’ve seen an increase in the level of support that these countries are getting to increase the power of the security forces, particularly to prevent migration.

So, we are hoping that Vice President Kamala Harris is going to have an open and honest conversation with President López Obrador, raising concerns about the human rights situation that is affecting, of course, the possibility of people to seek asylum at the border. We also need to acknowledge that many Mexicans are seeking asylum on the U.S. side, precisely because of the human rights situation that the country is facing.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen the results of the visit of Vice President Harris in Guatemala and this very contradicting message of telling people not to come and not to seek asylum, when the reality is that it is a human rights — there is a human rights of people to seek asylum that has been violated precisely because of the cruel and inhumane political policies of the Trump administration, that we are seeing continue to be implemented by the Biden administration, including the closing of the border to migrants and asylum seekers using, in a very unlawful way, this Title 42.

The Biden administration’s contradictory statements on refugees
Washington Post
Apr 23, 2021

The Biden administration changed its story on when and how it would increase the refugee admissions cap six times in three weeks.

So, we hope that the conversation is going to lead in an understanding of the need to come up with different methods and policies to not only support people that are seeking asylum, but to provide protection to those people that are seeking asylum at the border.

AMY GOODMAN: Erika, when Harris met with the Guatemalan president and issued this very jarring warning, “Do not come. Do not come,” to immigrants fleeing poverty, fleeing the climate crisis, fleeing violence, but not acknowledging the U.S. role in this over the decades, what has led to this crisis, a part of the efforts that are being worked out with the Guatemalan government — and, I presume, with the Mexican government, with the presidents — are further militarizing the border. Can you talk about what that means?

ERIKA GUEVARA-ROSAS: Well, that means that they are going to create more risk for people that are trying to seek asylum. You just mentioned that, Amy, these people are being forced to leave their homes, they have been forced to leave their countries, precisely because of the massive violations of human rights that are happening at all levels. It’s not only the inequality, but it’s also the violence and the lack of protection that they are facing from the governments, particularly in Central America and Mexico. So these people are seeking asylum because it’s their right to seek asylum, and governments are obliged by international and domestic law to let people seek asylum, to protect those people who are seeking international protection.

And what we are seeing over the last few years is an increase in the militarization of the response. People that are seeking asylum, people that need international protections, are being treated and seen through the lens of security. And that means that these people are being confronted to a risky reality or of — you know, being confronted by organized crime and all the many risks, because they have been pushed to very risky situations and some of the more dangerous parts of the border, or they are also being confronted by the authorities, who are committing human rights violations against them by committing extortion, or, in very extreme cases, such as in Mexico, these people have been killed, as well, by security forces in collusion with the organized crime.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Erika Guevara, one of the hallmarks, supposedly, of President Biden’s different approach to the refugee and migration crisis was that he was going to embark on a sort of Marshall Plan-type effort to boost the economic life in Central America to induce migrants or those who are seeking to leave to stay in the country. But what’s Amnesty’s assessment of how U.S. foreign aid has been used in regions like especially Central America or Mexico? There was a New York Times report recently about how the bulk of that money that is apportioned out for foreign aid basically goes to U.S. contractors, who take up the bulk of the money, rather than — actually, the money doesn’t make its way down to the folks who need it.

ERIKA GUEVARA-ROSAS: Yeah, historically, we’ve seen how the humanitarian aid or the assistance that has been provided by the United States have been utilized in countries in Latin America to increase the power of security forces, and many times through the use of these private contractors. I mean, we’ve seen this in countries such as Colombia, and we are seeing now the consequences of this technical support and this assistance that the U.S. government has been provided to security forces. And we are seeing the same situation in Central America and Mexico. The vast majority of the resources are not going directly to support people and to address the root causes.

And in spite of this narrative of all efforts to address the root causes, to improve the economic situation, so that people can stay in the countries, the reality is that we are seeing the contrary. People continue to experience massive human rights violations, that have been fed by impunity, corruption, by the climate crisis and the lack of response from the governments. We are seeing now, for instance, in countries such as Guatemala, a backlash against all efforts to address, to tackle impunity and corruption by the [inaudible] government that Vice President Harris met yesterday. So, unfortunately, there is no hope that only the financial assistance that the U.S. is going to be providing to these countries is truly going to address the root causes of why people are forced to leave their countries, their homes, and take all this risk to seek asylum at the U.S.A. border.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we go, Erika, we wanted to ask you about the situation of COVID. In a moment, we’re going to go down to Peru. Peru and Mexico have some of the highest per capita death rates from COVID in the world. It might surprise some to know that AMLO, the Mexican president, took more of the approach of someone like the far-right president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. I mean, he would wear amulets. He would hold mass rallies. Now we have news that 1 million Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines are headed to Mexico from the United States, with most of the shots set to service resort areas and spots along the border. Can you talk about how Mexico and Peru have dealt with COVID?

ERIKA GUEVARA-ROSAS: Well, Latin America really continues to struggle with COVID-19. And we have seen that any effort to try to minimize the impact of COVID has been insufficient. Even in countries such as Chile, where the vaccine rollout has improved over the last few weeks, we are seeing also an increase in the number of cases. Latin America continues to be the epicenter of the pandemic. With only 8% of the population, we have between 32 and 35 of the total death around the world, the number of people who have died because of the virus.

Just recently, a few days ago, Peruvian government acknowledged that the numbers that they were presented were lower, way lower, than the real numbers. I mean, we are talking about more than 180,000 people who have died because of the virus in Peru, when the numbers reported just a few weeks ago were around 70,000.

And in Mexico, there is a similar situation, where the government has acknowledged many times that the numbers that they have presented are lower than reality, precisely because of the lack of testing and the lack of capacity to really track all the cases.

So, the ways that the pandemic has been affected — affected these countries is very reflected of the lack of response and the structural challenges that these countries have been facing in terms of ensuring access to health for its population, for their populations. Right? So, we are seeing now a very slow vaccine rollout in both countries, but also in many countries across the region. People seem to be trapped between the ineffective responses from the governments, the fact of which countries are hoarding all the doses available of the COVID vaccine, but also the impunity and corruption that continue to shadow the efforts of governments to truly address the consequences of the pandemic, not only in terms of the direct impact with the number of cases, but also how the pandemic has been exacerbated the inequalities and the economic situation for millions of people across the continent.

AMY GOODMAN: Erika Guevara-Rosas, we want to thank you so much for being with us, human rights lawyer, Americas director for Amnesty International, joining us from Mexico City.

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Biden’s DOJ Vows to Stop Spying on Journalists Months After Placing Gag Order on New York Times
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
JUNE 07, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/7/j ... lance_fisa

GUESTS
Jameel Jaffer: founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
LINKS
Jameel Jaffer on Twitter
"The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law"

The New York Times has revealed shocking details about an unsuccessful attempt by the Trump administration, and then the Biden administration, to secretly obtain the email logs of four reporters at the newspaper. As part of the campaign, the Biden Justice Department placed a gag order on the Times in March to prevent many at the paper from even knowing about the request until a federal court lifted it. In recent weeks the Justice Department also disclosed the Trump administration had secretly obtained the call records of four journalists at the Times, as well as three journalists at The Washington Post and one at CNN. Jameel Jaffer, founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, says subpoenas for journalists’ records are “really troubling” because of their potential chilling effect on critical journalism. “It’s about the right of the public to have access to information about the government,” he says.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now!

We turn now to look at a fight over press freedom. The New York Times has revealed shocking details about an unsuccessful attempt by the Trump administration — and then the Biden administration — to secretly obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters. As part of the campaign, the Biden Justice Department placed a gag order on the Times in March to prevent many at the paper, including its executive editor, from even knowing about the request. The Times reported on the story Friday after a federal court lifted the gag order. In recent weeks the Justice Department also disclosed the Trump administration had secretly obtained the call records of four journalists at the Times, as well as three journalists at The Washington Post and one, Barbara Starr, at CNN.

On Saturday, the Justice Department reversed course and announced it’s changing its policy and will no longer force media companies to hand over source information as part of its leak investigations.

On Sunday, New York Times reporter Adam Goldman appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources. His phone records were seized by both the Obama and Trump administrations.

ADAM GOLDMAN: It’s certainly disappointing, but I wasn’t surprised. Some of the same prosecutors who were involved in seizing my phone records earlier this year, and unsuccessfully trying get my emails, were involved in secretly obtaining my phone records in 2013 when I worked at the Associated Press. This office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C., has a history of trampling on the First Amendment. So that’s why I wasn’t surprised. They treat the media, they treat newspapers like drug gangs.

AMY GOODMAN: In late May, President Biden spoke out against the seizing of records from journalists at the very time when The New York Times was still under a gag order. He was questioned by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

KAITLAN COLLINS: [Should the government be] seizing reporters’ phone records and emails? And would you prevent your Justice Department from doing that?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Only yours. But beyond yours, OK, for them, no.

KAITLAN COLLINS: But honestly.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: And we should — absolutely positively, it’s wrong. Simply, simply wrong.

KAITLAN COLLINS: So you won’t let your Justice Department do that?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I will not let that happen.

AMY GOODMAN: It was only this weekend that the Justice Department announced they would not do this.

The White House said in a statement late Monday that it was “not consulted” on the Justice Department continuing to defend former President Donald Trump in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against him, the third time the Biden Administration has distanced itself from the DOJ in recent days as President Joe Biden contrasts himself with Trump by emphasizing the department’s independence.

-- White House Distances Itself From DOJ’s Trump Defense As Biden Breaks With His Justice Department — Again, by Alison Durkee

We’re joined now by Jameel Jaffer, the founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, previously the deputy legal director at the ACLU.

Jameel, it’s great to have you back. Can you first respond to what we learned this weekend?

JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah, sure. And thanks for inviting me.

I mean, I guess the first thing to say is that these kinds of subpoenas are really troubling for a number of reasons. It’s not so much about journalists’ rights; it’s about the right of the public to have access to information about the government. And if reporters’ sources are available to the government, then reporters won’t be able to get the information they need in order to write the stories we want them to write. So there’s a real concern that these kinds of subpoenas can have a chilling effect on journalism that is, you know, really necessary, journalism that goes to the ability of the public to hold government officials accountable for their decisions. So, that’s why I think these reports are so disturbing, these reports of Trump administration subpoenas directed at news organizations, intended to uncover the identities of reporters’ sources. And, you know, as your intro noted, we’ve seen now a number of these; just over the last few weeks, a number of these have come to light.

One sort of background fact that’s important to recognize here is that the Supreme Court hasn’t weighed in on this set of issues for 50 years. And the result is that whatever protections journalists have in this context are really a matter of executive grace. They’re a matter of what protections the Justice Department wants to give them, rather than what protections the First Amendment requires. The First Amendment is kind of strangely absent in this context. The relevant set of rules has come, over the last few years, at least, from the attorney general’s guidelines, which were strengthened under President Obama. Attorney General Holder tightened those restrictions — tightened those rules in some ways to make it slightly — not just slightly, more difficult for prosecutors to obtain reporters’ sources, the identities of reporters’ sources.

But even with that kind of tightening, the Justice Department has found it possible to serve these subpoenas, and not just serve these subpoenas, but this most recent report out of The New York Times involves not just a subpoena intended to obtain reporters’ phone and email records, or subpoenas meant to obtain those records, but a gag order on Times executives that prevented, initially, the Times's lawyer, David McCraw, from disclosing the fact of the subpoena and court order to other Times officials. And that, I think, is a kind of independent First Amendment problem, not just the subpoena directed — you know, intended to uncover the reporters' sources, but then a gag order that prevents the Times from sharing that kind of information even within the organization, let alone with the public.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, we don’t know if there are — though the Biden Justice Department says they’re not going to engage in these, whether there are any more of these gag orders out there, because people can’t talk about them. And what do you make of — I mean, Goldman and Matt Apuzzo had been — the Justice Department had gone after them both under the Obama administration — they worked for AP, and now they’re working at The New York Times — and him saying, “They treat us like drug gangs. They’re using the same laws”?

JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah. Well, I mean, I do think that there’s a real risk here that people will come to see journalists as kind of extensions of law enforcement or extensions of the intelligence agencies, and then, you know, would-be sources won’t go to people like Apuzzo or Goldman with information that is crucial for the public to have. So I do think that the concerns are justified.

I know that President Biden has now said that his administration won’t tolerate these kinds of subpoenas, and the Justice Department has said that it’s going to implement that direction, which is obviously a good thing. You know, what I would say about that, though, just to temper it a little, number one, is, again, it’s really troubling that all of this is a matter of executive grace rather than constitutional law. There should be some set of rules, that is independent of whoever’s in office right now, that limits what kinds of information the Justice Department can get, and when, in these kinds of investigations.

But the other thing I’d say is just that there are real questions about implementation. You know, the definitions matter. Like, who counts as a journalist? What counts as a leak investigation? The attorney general’s guidelines have historically had exception for foreign intelligence investigations. And that means that subpoenas and court orders served under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or national security letters that are sometimes served on technology companies or telecoms, those are essentially exempt from the attorney general guidelines that were put in place under the Obama administration. So there’s a real question now — you know, great that the Biden administration seems willing to go in a different direction, but I think we should ask some questions about the precise scope of the commitment that the Justice Department has now made.

AMY GOODMAN: Would it be up to Congress to pass laws?

JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah, well, you know, many states have shield laws that protect journalists when state law enforcement seeks access to their records. There is no federal shield law, so, you know, again, we have no background First Amendment law, or almost no background First Amendment law. There’s a 1972 case, Branzburg v. Hayes, which is the last time the Supreme Court weighed in, in this context. But that case is very, very muddy, sort of notoriously muddy. It doesn’t really give journalists any kind of real confidence that their records can be kept secret. So you’ve got that, and, on the other hand, you have no federal shield law. There’s no congressionally enacted protections for journalists.

So, again, what that leaves journalists with is really just whatever protections the Justice Department wants to give. And I don’t think that’s really defensible in a society that is committed to press freedom. You know, you can’t call yourself a society that’s committed to press freedom if the only press freedom that exists is the press freedom that the government wants to provide or the executive branch wants to provide.

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DOJ Announces it will Defend Donald Trump in Defamation Lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll
by Glenn Kirschner
Jun 8, 2021

In a disappointing turn of events, the Department of Justice filed a motion in federal court yesterday defending Donald Trump in the defamation lawsuit brought against him by E. Jean Carroll. The court had ruled that the allegedly defamatory statements by Trump about Ms. Carroll were not within the scope of his official presidential duties or employment. The DOJ disagrees and has come to Donald Trump's defense.

Here's is some of what's at stake by the DOJ taking this troubling position.




*****************

DOJ's Position in the E. Jean Carroll Case Explained
by Glenn Kirschner
Jun 9, 2021

President Biden's Department of Justice under the leadership of Attorney General Merrick Garland has been a mixed bag. This video reviews several recent DOJ decisions, from police department "Pattern or Practice" investigations, civil rights prosecutions and high profile subpoenas of folks like Rudy Giuliani to DOJ's decision in the lawsuit for the clearing of protestors from Lafayette Square and the recent decision in the E. Jean Carroll case. Specifically, this vide contains a review of the DOJ's legal rationale for filing an appeal in the Carroll case and the pros and cons of the position DOJ has decided to take in that case.

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White House Distances Itself From DOJ’s Trump Defense As Biden Breaks With His Justice Department — Again
by Alison Durkee
Forbes Staff
Jun 8, 2021,11:12am EDT

TOPLINE

The White House said in a statement late Monday that it was “not consulted” on the Justice Department continuing to defend former President Donald Trump in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against him, the third time the Biden Administration has distanced itself from the DOJ in recent days as President Joe Biden contrasts himself with Trump by emphasizing the department’s independence.

KEY FACTS

The Trump-era Justice Department tried to intervene in a defamation lawsuit that Carroll brought against Trump for comments he made after she accused him of sexual assault, asking to represent Trump in the case because his denial of Carroll’s allegations was allegedly part of his presidential duties.

After a judge denied the Trump DOJ’s attempt to join the case and the Justice Department appealed the ruling, the Biden DOJ said in a court filing that while it didn’t support Trump’s “crude and disrespectful comments,” it still believed Trump’s response to Carroll’s allegations were answers to questions “posed to him in his capacity as President.”

The White House “was not consulted by DOJ on the decision to file this brief or its contents,” spokesman Andrew Bates said in response to the filing, noting that Biden and his team “have utterly different standards from their predecessors for what qualify as acceptable statements.”

Biden also disputed the DOJ defending a Trump-era Social Security Act provision for Puerto Rico residents in a U.S. Supreme Court filing Monday, saying the provision the Justice Department was backing—part of their “longstanding practice” to defend federal statutes—“is inconsistent with my Administration’s policies and values.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki also distanced the administration from the DOJ’s practice of using gag orders when seizing records from journalists, saying in a statement they were unaware of it before a New York Times report Friday.

The Justice Department will no longer subpoena reporters’ records because doing so is “not consistent with the president’s policy direction to the department,” Psaki said.

TANGENT

Biden also attacked Trump having the Justice Department defend him in Carroll’s lawsuit ahead of the presidential election, saying during a town hall the case was an instance of Trump using the DOJ as his “own law firm.”

CHIEF CRITICS

Carroll and attorney Roberta Kaplan have heavily criticized the Biden DOJ’s decision to wade into her case against Trump, which Kaplan said Monday was “truly shocking” and “legally” and “morally wrong.” “As women across the country are standing up and holding men accountable for assault — the DOJ is trying to stop me from having that same right,” Carroll said in a statement.

KEY BACKGROUND

After Trump faced criticism throughout his presidency that he was using his Justice Department and U.S. Attorney General William Barr to do his bidding, Biden has repeatedly emphasized his intention to keep his administration’s judiciary arm as independent as possible. "The Justice Department in my administration will be totally independent of me," Biden said on the campaign trail in September, calling the DOJ’s “politicization” under Trump “the most dangerous thing that's happened so far” during Trump’s presidency. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has vowed to be impartial in his work at the department, saying after being confirmed that the “essence of the rule of law” is that there should not be “one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans, one rule for friends, another for foes.” In addition to the Carroll lawsuit, the Biden Administration has also pointed to the DOJ’s independence to justify not getting involved in questions of whether Trump should face prosecution for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building, with Psaki saying in February that the issue will be “up to the Department of Justice to determine.” “We’re doing something new here, and there’s going to be an independent Justice Department,” Psaki said.

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Biden's Lawless Bombing of Iraq and Syria Only Serves the Weapons Industry Funding Both Parties
U.S. citizens derive no benefit, but instead suffer great loss, from endless war in the Middle East. But their interests are irrelevant to decisions of bipartisan Washington.
by Glenn Greenwald
Jun 28, 2021


US President Joe Biden salutes along with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin before delivering an address at the 153rd National Memorial Day Observance at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day in Arlington, Virginia on May 31, 2021. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

For the second time in the five months since he was inaugurated, President Joe Biden on Sunday ordered a U.S. bombing raid on Syria, and for the first time, he also bombed Iraq. The rationale offered was the same as Biden's first air attack in February: the U.S., in the words of Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, “conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region.” He added that “the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense.”

Embedded in this formulaic Pentagon statement is so much propaganda and so many euphemisms that, by itself, it reveals the fraudulent nature of what was done. To begin with, how can U.S. airstrikes carried out in Iraq and Syria be "defensive” in nature? How can they be an act of “self-defense"? Nobody suggests that the targets of the bombing campaign have the intent or the capability to strike the U.S. "homeland” itself. Neither Syria nor Iraq is a U.S. colony or American property, nor does the U.S. have any legal right to be fighting wars in either country, rendering the claim that its airstrikes were "defensive” and an “act of self-defense” to be inherently deceitful.

The Pentagon's description of the people bombed by the U.S. — “Iran-backed militias groups” — is intended to obscure the reality. Biden did not bomb Iran or order Iranians to be bombed or killed. The targets of U.S. aggression were Iraqis in their own country, and Syrians in their own country. Only the U.S. war machine and its subservient media could possibly take seriously the Biden administration's claim that the bombs they dropped on people in their own countries were "defensive” in nature. Invocation of Iran has no purpose other than to stimulate the emotional opposition to the government of that country among many Americans in the hope that visceral dislike of Iranian leaders will override the rational faculties that would immediately recognize the deceit and illegality embedded in the Pentagon's arguments.

Beyond the propagandistic justification is the question of legality, though even to call it a question dignifies it beyond what it merits. There is no conceivable Congressional authorization — none, zero — to Biden's dropping of bombs in Syria. Obama's deployment of CIA operatives to Syria and years of the use of force to overthrow Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad never had any Congressional approval of any kind, nor did Trump's bombing of Assad's forces (urged by Hillary Clinton, who wanted more), nor does Biden's bombing campaign in Syria now. It was and is purely lawless, illegal. And the same is true of bombing Iraq. The 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq, which the House just last week voted to repeal, has long since ceased to provide any legal justification for ongoing U.S. troop presence and bombing campaigns in that country.

In its statement justifying the bombing raids, Biden's Pentagon barely even bothered to pretend any of this is legal. It did not cite either the 2002 AUMF for Iraq or the 2001 AUMF authorizing the use of force against those responsible for 9/11 (a category which, manifestly, did not include Iran, Iraq or Syria). Instead, harkening back to the days of John Yoo and Dick Cheney, the Biden Defense Department claimed that “as a matter of international law, the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense,” and casually asserted that “as a matter of domestic law, the President took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to protect U.S. personnel in Iraq."

Those claims are nothing short of a joke. Nobody seriously believes that Joe Biden has congressional authority to bomb Syria and Iraq, nor to bomb “Iranian-backed” forces of any kind. As The Daily Beast's long-time War on Terror reporter Spencer Ackerman put it on Sunday night, discussions of legality at this point are "parody” because when it comes to the U.S.'s Endless Wars in the name of the War on Terror, “we passed Lawful behind many many years ago. Authorization citations are just pretexts written by lawyers who need to pantomime at lawfulness. The U.S. presence in Syria is blatantly illegal. Such things never stop the U.S.”

That is exactly right. The U.S. government is a lawless entity. It violates the law, including its own Constitution, whenever it wants. The requirement that no wars be fought absent congressional authority is not some ancillary bureaucratic annoyance but was completely central to the design of the country. Article I, Section 8 could not be clearer: “The Congress shall have Power . . . to declare war.” Two months after I began writing about politics — back in December, 2005 — I wrote a long article compiling the arguments in the Federalist Papers which insisted that permitting the president unchecked powers to wage war without the approval of the public — through their representatives in Congress — was uniquely dangerous for ushering in the kind of tyranny from which they had just liberated themselves, and another article in 2007 which did the same:

The Constitution -- while making the President the top General in directing how citizen-approved wars are fought -- ties the use of military force to the approval of the American citizenry in multiple ways, not only by prohibiting wars in the absence of a Congressional declaration (though it does impose that much-ignored requirement), but also by requiring Congressional approval every two years merely to have an army. In Federalist 26, this is what Alexander Hamilton said in explaining the rationale behind the latter requirement (emphasis in original):

The legislature of the United States will be obliged by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. They are not at liberty to vest in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence.

Public opposition is the key check on the ill-advised use of military force. In Federalist 24, Hamilton explained that the requirement of constant democratic deliberation over the American military is "a great and real security against military establishments without evident necessity". . . .

Finding a way to impose checks on the President's war-making abilities was a key objective of the Founders. In Federalist 4, John Jay identified as a principal threat to the Republic the fact that insufficiently restrained leaders "will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for purposes and objects merely personal, such as a thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people."

But as Ackerman says, even discussing legality at this point is meaningless, an empty gesture, a joke. It gives far too much credit to the U.S. ruling class, as it implies that they care at all about whether their posture of endless war is legal. They know that it is illegal and do not care at all. Many have forgotten that President Obama not only involved the U.S. in a devastating regime-change war in Libya without congressional approval, but so much worse, continued to do so even after the House of Representatives voted against providing him authorization to use force in Libya. Obama ignored the House vote and kept troops in Libya anyways as part of a NATO mission, claiming that NATO and U.N. authorization somehow entitled him to do this despite his own country's Congress voting against it, reflecting overwhelming opposition among the citizenry. (The U.N. authorization — even if it could somehow supplant the U.S. Constitution — only allowed the use of force to protect civilians, not to overthrow the Libyan government, which quickly and predictably became the NATO mission, making it clearly illegal).

House of Representatives votes against US Libya role, by BBC News, June 24, 2011
The US House has refused to give President Barack Obama Authority to continue US participation in the Nato-led operation in Libya, but rejected a bid to cut off money for the conflict.

This is one reason I found the Trump-era discourse so suffocatingly dishonest and fraudulent. I began writing about politics in 2005 in order to document the systemic lawlessness that had become the fully bipartisan Bush/Cheney War on Terror. The executive power theories that were adopted — that the president has the right to do whatever he wants under Article II regardless of congressional laws or any other acts by courts or the citizenry, even including spying on American citizens without warrants — was the pure expression of authoritarianism and lawlessness. That lawlessness not only continued but escalated severely under the Obama administration, with the war in Libya, the claimed right to assassinate anyone in the world without due process, including U.S. citizens, and the CIA's covert regime-change war in Syria.

Unclaimed Territory, by Glenn Greenwald, Jan. 6, 2006
An Ideology of Lawlessness

***



Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of U.S. citizens, by Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian, Feb. 5, 2013

Having to watch the Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden operatives who ushered in this permanent state of illegality and lawless wars prance around during the Trump years as noble defenders of the sacred rule of law — all while being celebrated and profiting greatly — was nauseating in the best of times. American elites do not care about the rule of law or the Constitution. Ignoring it is how they empower themselves at the expense of the citizenry. That is why very few will care about the fact that Biden (indulging the fiction for a moment that it was he) ordered the bombings on two countries without the slightest whiff of legal authority to do so.

While it feels frivolous even to raise questions of legality — since so few in Washington care about such matters — the real overarching question is the simplest one. Why does the U.S. continue to have a military presence in Iraq and Syria? What conceivable benefits redound to American citizens from the massive expenditures required to keep U.S. troops stationed in these two countries, the risk of those troops’ lives, the endless acquisition of bombs and other weapons to fight there, and the obvious but severe dangers from triggering escalation with powerful militaries that — unlike the U.S. — actually have a vital interest in what takes place in their bordering countries?

While the ordinary American only suffers from all of this, there are definitely some sectors of U.S. society which benefit. The corporation that Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin left in order to run the Pentagon — Raytheon — needs ongoing troop deployment and permanent warfare for its profitability. According to The New York Times, it was “Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, [who] briefed Mr. Biden on attack options early last week,” after which "Mr. Biden approved striking the three targets.” So Gen. Austin's colleagues on the Raytheon Board of Directors, as well as his comrades on the Boards of General Dynamics and Boeing, are surely thrilled with this attack.

Raytheon Technologies
Board of Directors
Lloyd J. Austin, III
General, U.S. Army (Ret.) and Former Command of U.S. Central Command
Lloyd J. Austin III is a member of the Raytheon Technologies Board of Directors. He brings expertise in government, senior leadership and international affairs.

Indeed, anyone invested in endless war in the Middle East — including the entire U.S. intelligence community and the weapons industry which feeds off of it — must be thrilled by all of this. Each time the U.S. "retaliates” against Iran or Iraqi militias or Syrian fighters, it causes them to "retaliate” back, which in turn is cited as the reason the U.S. can never leave but must instead keep retaliating, ensuring this cycle never ends. It also creates a never-ending supply of angry people in that region who hate the U.S. for bringing death and destruction to their countries with bombs that never stop falling and therefore want to strike back: what we are all supposed to call "terrorism.” That is what endless war means: a war that is designed never to terminate, one that is as far removed as possible from actual matters of self-defense and manufactures its own internal rationale to continue it.

But what is beyond doubt is that this illegal, endless war in the Middle East does nothing but harm American citizens. As they are told that they cannot enjoy a sustainable let alone quality standard of living without working two or three dreary hourly-wage, benefits-free jobs for corporate giants, and while more Americans than ever continue to live at home and remain financially unable to start families, the U.S. continues to spend more on its military than the next thirteen countries combined. This has continued for close to two full decades now because the establishment wings of both parties support it. Neither of them believes in the Constitution or the rule of law, nor do they care in the slightest about the interests of anyone other than the large corporate sectors that fund the establishment wings of both parties. The bombs that fell on Syria and Iraq last night were for them and them alone.