{ texts for nothing }

It’s been clear since early in his campaign for the presidency that Barack Obama is committed to escalating the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has added 21,000 troops to the American military presence in Afghanistan since taking office, and is currently contemplating how many more to send (one of his generals wants an additional 60,000 soldiers). The immediate goal of Obama’s Afghan policy is to prop up Hamid Karzai — a man whose legacy so far includes widespread corruption, election rigging, and the legalization of rape — and, of course, to continue the war against the Taliban. Genuine, lasting peace in Afghanistan is not on anyone’s agenda.

Meanwhile, just over the border, Obama has been expanding the war into Pakistan with a series of air strikes, killing innocent civilians (including children) and threatening Pakistan’s already-fragile political stability — which seems like a pretty stupid thing to do if you want to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of those wacky Islamic fundamentalists. Again, it’s hard to see how this policy is doing anything to promote peace in Central Asia.

Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that ordinary people in the region are less than thrilled to learn that Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:

“I don’t know how he can get this prize,” said Najeeb, a 30-year-old shopkeeper attending a friend’s wedding party [in Kabul]. “Maybe it’s been awarded for all the houses they are bombing, or perhaps it’s for all his soldiers that are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Obama’s deployment of the tools of war is not restricted to the Middle East. His administration has also been expanding the American military presence in Latin America. The US claims that the military installations it’s planning to use in Colombia don’t count as new military bases — they’re merely “Cooperative Security Locations” leased from the Colombian state, which somehow makes them completely different and definitely not army bases. True, the troop levels involved are relatively small (the numbers would increase from less than 300 troops to no more than 800), but it’s clear that the intent here is to step up the US drug war in Latin America. Dropping more soldiers into the middle of a 40-year-old guerrilla war is not going to create peace in Colombia or anywhere else.

All in all, it seems that the best way to win the Nobel Peace Prize is to continue with the American imperial project in a manner slightly less offensive than that of George W. Bush. I’d say the decision tarnishes the Nobel prize’s reputation, but these sorts of controversies are not exactly news: Henry Kissinger, for example, was awarded the same prize at the height of the Vietnam War, while Gandhi was overlooked despite multiple nominations. I don’t even think it’s reasonable to hope that this latest prize will lead to serious scrutiny of Obama’s foreign policy: his approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan has been receiving substantial attention and analysis since long before his inauguration, and the Colombian thing is more or less business as usual and will therefore be ignored. All you can really do is shrug your shoulders, admit that some folks in Norway decided to be particularly stupid today, and move on.

When you live in downtown Vancouver, you can’t help noticing what’s on the cover of the Georgia Straight, one of the city’s weekly alternative newspapers. This week’s cover shows Barack Obama and Michael Ignatieff standing close together and grinning at the camera. They look a little bit like old friends at a high school reunion.

It’s a fitting resemblance. After all, as the headline suggests, they’re both “Harvard men.” Obama graduated from Harvard Law School; Ignatieff got his PhD at Harvard and directed the university’s human rights centre for several years before entering Canadian politics (he’s now the Leader of the Opposition).

The Harvard connection is a minor point, but a telling one. Obama and Ignatieff both have ties to Harvard not by some strange coincidence, but because they are both members and representatives of  North America’s political and economic elite. It’s no surprise, then, that there are other, more substantial similarities between the two men on the cover of the Georgia Straight. Politically, they’re both centrists; economically, they’re neoliberals. They’re hawks on Afghanistan, supporters of the War on Terror, and proponents of Western imperialism in general, in the form of what Ignatieff calls empire lite. Neither Ignatieff nor Obama has any intention of questioning the fundamental assumptions of mainstream North American politics.

And we know what happens when you turn those assumptions into state policy. The worst economic crisis in over 60 years. Growing income inequality in both Canada and the United States. The ongoing erosion of civil liberties. Imminent environmental catastrophe. A series of pointless, unwinnable wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, with thousands of dead foreigners as collateral damage (the UN counted 2,118 civilian deaths in Afghanistan alone in 2008; anywhere from 100,000 to well over a million civilians have been killed in Iraq since the invasion). Those are the consequences of the kind of thinking that got Obama and Ignatieff where they are today.

It’s become almost boring to see the same old faces in the news all the time, shilling minor variations on the same old policies on behalf of the same old interests. Obama claimed that he stood for change, but he’s already shown that what he really stands for is a ruling class we can believe in. Ignatieff doesn’t even pretend to represent a break with the past. But a break with the past is precisely what we need. I’d say it’s past time for some real change — the kind of change that doesn’t come from men in suits grinning on the front pages of newspapers.

The Obama administration is using “national security” as an excuse to keep a lid on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Somehow I’m not surprised.

Here’s what happened. Six weeks ago, an American nonprofit filed a Freedom of Information request asking for copies of various documents related to ACTA. Now, in its reply denying the request (PDF), Obama’s foreign trade office is claiming that the documents are “classified in the interest of national security.”

It’s a preposterous claim. ACTA has nothing whatsoever to do with national security. It is a copyright treaty — one that would make penalties for copyright infringement even more severe, and quite possibly invade your privacy and violate your rights in the process. That makes it bad policy, but it’s not even remotely a national security matter. “National security” is simply, and blatantly, being invoked as a quick and easy way to keep a lid on another draconian, unnecessary, and unpopular multilateral trade agreement.

Not that excessive secrecy is anything new when it comes to ACTA. Other parties to the negotations, including Canada and the European Union, have been criticized for refusing to share information about the treaty with their citizens. Last fall, over 100 public interest groups from around the world signed a letter sharply criticizing the secrecy surrounding the treaty process. The EFF is even suing the US government over its refusal to release ACTA-related documents.

Sadly, this sort of closed-door policy development is a growing trend. In the face of several high-profile failures at supposedly “representative” organizations like WIPO and the WTO, not to mention more than fifteen years of broad public opposition, trade negotiations have increasingly been conducted in ways that prevent most of the world’s population from having any real voice. Check out this excellent article on “counterfeit policy-making” for an in-depth analysis of the problem and its consequences. When the White House invokes “national security” to keep ACTA secret, it’s deliberately making international policy development even less democratic than it already was — all for the benefit of the corporate interests that shape government policy in the US and other liberal democracies. Keep that in mind the next time you see a bunch of crazy anarchists marching through the streets: it’s the protesters, not the government policy-makers, who are standing up for your interests.

Ironically, the day after he took office, Obama signed a memorandum committing his administration to “accountability through transparency” and ordering that FOI requests “should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.” But when it comes to defending the profits of big business — and make no mistake, that’s what the copyright battle is really all about: protecting outmoded business models that benefit large corporations at our expense — Obama’s White House isn’t going to let a little thing like the public interest stand in its way.

Remember when the Bush administration conveniently “lost” 5 million emails? Two public interest groups responded by suing the administration for its “knowing failure to recover, restore and preserve millions of electronic communications created and/or received within the White House.” Bush’s people, of course, spent the remainder of their time in office trying to get the lawsuit dismissed.

And now that Obama’s people are in charge, they’re doing the same thing:

The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush’s eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama’s Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration’s bid to get the lawsuits dismissed. [...]

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.

The Justice Department ”apparently never got the message” from Obama, Blanton said.

Because, you know, transparency in government is for the other guys.

In 2007, five victims of Bush’s extraordinary rendition program filed a suit against Jeppesen, the Boeing subsidiary that helped the CIA send them overseas to be tortured. The Bush administration tried to block the suit by claiming the case would reveal state secrets and thus endanger national security — a blatant attempt to use executive privilege to cover up the crimes of the American state.

The case was still going when Obama took office. Within days of his inauguration, Obama signed orders shutting down secret prisons and banning torture. Surely, his supporters said, this showed that he was serious about ending the US government’s disregard for basic freedoms.

Sadly, no. In the Jeppesen case, Obama has explicitly and deliberately upheld Bush’s abuse of the state secrets privilege — much to the dismay of the ACLU:

It isn’t merely that the Obama DOJ is invoking the privilege for this particular case, which contains allegations of torture that are as brutal and severe as any. That’s bad enough. But worse is that they’re invoking the most abusive parts of the Bush theory: namely, that the privilege can be used to block the adjudication of entire cases (rather than, say, justify the concealment of specific classified documents or other pieces of evidence), and, worse still, can be used to prevent judicial scrutiny even when the alleged government conduct is blatantly illegal and, as here, a war crime of the greatest seriousness.

They’re embracing a theory that literally places government officials beyond the rule of law. No minimally honest person who criticized the Bush administration for relying on this instrument can defend the Obama administration for doing so here.

It gets worse. Not only is Obama upholding Bush’s drastic expansion of executive power, he’s continuing the rendition program:

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States. [...]

The decision underscores the fact that the battle with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is far from over and that even if the United States is shutting down the prisons, it is not done taking prisoners.

“Obviously you need to preserve some tools — you still have to go after the bad guys,” said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. “The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice.”

How’s that for change we can believe in?