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#waronterror

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AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

Speaking of cowardice, complicity, and paving the road for fascism, let us not forget that the Trump regime's enabling of an ongoing genocide by Israel in Gaza, their fascist kidnapping spree against student protestors, and their quest to control American universities under the guise of "fighting antisemitism" are built on the back of policies, and in particular ideological justifications, provided by a Democratic Party that picked supporting genocide, hunting down migrants, and building out a police state over winning "the most important election in American history."

theguardian.com/commentisfree/

Don’t just blame Trump – Democrats paved the way for this campus crackdown

"For instance, the reason Trump could plausibly refer to Gaza a “demolition site” is because, for more than a year prior to his re-election, his Democratic predecessor (urged on by Schumer and others) supplied unlimited weapons to Israel to carry out a campaign of destruction that has few modern equivalents – a campaign that was not just restricted to Gaza, but also extended to the West Bank, Iran, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria. Biden’s planned successor, Kamala Harris, and her surrogates repeatedly stressed to voters that these policies would continue largely unchanged under her watch.

Even before Trump had a chance to weigh in, Joe Biden immediately characterized the protests at Columbia as “antisemitic” and declared that “order must prevail” on college campuses. Democratic lawmakers put aggressive pressure on the former Columbia University president Minouche Shafik to crush the protests. She ultimately did so with the assistance of New York City’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams (who justified his clampdown via evidence-free statements that the protests were driven primarily by “outside agitators”). Trump celebrated the pictures and videos of students getting roughed up by the NYPDand, upon Trump’s reclaiming the White House, the justice department interceded on behalf of Adams – making his criminal investigation go away in apparent exchange for the mayor adopting a more aggressive posture on immigration – a move that critics claim is a quid pro quo.

In a similar vein, it was Biden who enshrined the IHRA definition of antisemitism into federal guidance, despite the definition’s author repeatedly describing it as a “travesty” to use this definition to regulate speech and behavior. Building on Biden’s introduction, Trump is poised to sign a bill that would implement this same definition into federal anti-discrimination law – and in the meantime, he’s insisting Columbia and other schools adopt this definition in their own codes of conduct. NYU and Harvard have already taken this step, overriding concerns by civil rights and civil liberties organizations – from the ACLU, to Fire and the AAUP, to Israeli civil rights groups – who stressed that IHRA’s definition is extremely vague and provides strong leeway for institutional stakeholders to censor most critical discussion of Israel, Zionism or Judaism more broadly, by Jews and non-Jews alike."

Look, you can criticize me for playing "the blame game" all you like, but every goddamn thing Trump is doing surrounding the US-backed genocide in Gaza, including the domestic installation of fascist ideological policing, was and is facilitated by a Biden administration that was warned all of this - from Trump winning, to deploying War on Terror logic repression on anti-genocide protesters - was on the table if they didn't change course. If you want to know why only fourteen Democrats signed a letter decrying the fascist abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, and only thirty-four Democrat lawmakers signed the letter demanding the release of Rumeysa Ozturk (whose only "crime" appears to be have been writing an op-ed calling for her University to divest from Israel and condemn a genocide) you don't have to look any further than a mainstream Democratic Party leadership class that's fat on AIPAC donations and happily told you student protestors were violent antisemites who endorsed terrorist organizations, demanded colleges take action to suppress the protests, and justified a brutal police crackdown on... college kids who don't want their government to facilitate a genocide. It's kind of hard to criticize all that fascism when your donors love it and you directly made the arguments Trump is using to conduct it, after all.

The Guardian · Don’t just blame Trump – Democrats paved the way for this campus crackdownBy Musa al-Gharbi
#Fascism#Trump#Israel
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AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

As I've argued (with mixed success) on the other account, the Trump regime "Signalgate" scandal has political relevance for folks who want this fascist government to fail, even if you, like me, do not give one flying fuck about "national security." Trump's warmonger division willfully broke multiple laws, got caught lying about it, and currently look incompetent enough that they'd struggle to run a taco stand, let alone a government. This isn't breaking news to anyone who has been paying attention, but it has inspired the larger liberal establishment to finally make *some* effort to push back against the Trump regime, and I'd rather have them doing that than meekly accepting the boot; which is precisely why the entire fascist manufacturing consent machine in and around TrumpWorld is flailing so hard to justify the regime's actions and make this go away.

For whatever value Signalgate does (or doesn't) have in slowing the Trump regime's agenda down however, I think it says a lot about why we're facing down a fascist government requested by roughly 75M voters, that the "national security" discussion has taken overwhelming precedence over acknowledging that the attack on Yemen itself was unconstitutional, and the leaks also reveal the administration confessing to a war crime.

1) commondreams.org/news/us-strik

A Reminder Amid Group Chat Outrage: US Strikes on Yemen Are Unconstitutional

"The advocacy groups Just Foreign Policy, DAWN, and Action Corps released a joint statement Thursday calling on Congress to take action to stop U.S. military action in Yemen by upholding "its sole authority to declare war under Article I of the Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR)."

The chat messages sent between officials including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz stunned the public and Washington insiders this week because they had accidentally also been sent to Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, but the three groups pointed out that they also included an admission from Vance that the strikes were not defensive—contrary to claims by President Donald Trump."

2) truthout.org/articles/democrat

Experts: Leaked Messages Show Waltz Admitting to War Crime in Yemen Strike

"In an exchange after the strikes first hit, as shown in Wednesday’s leak, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz says that the U.S. had collapsed a building that one of their Houthi targets was supposedly inside, calling it “amazing.”

“Their first target — their top missile guy — we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and now it’s collapsed,” Waltz said. Per the screenshots, Vice President J.D. Vance responds, “Excellent.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe says, “A good start.” Waltz then replies with a fist emoji, a U.S. flag emoji and a flame emoji.

According to Yemen Data Project, the first strike killed at least 13 civilians and injured nine on the night of March 15, hitting north of the capital, Sanaa. Yemen Data Project says that this was the bombing deemed “excellent” by the vice president and “amazing” by Waltz.

The messages are “prima facie evidence of at least one war crime applauded by the people who conspired to commit it,” wrote Dylan Williams, Vice President for Government Affairs for the Center for International Policy (CIP), on social media."

To be clear, I'm not saying these crimes by the regime aren't at least coming up on the margins of the liberal establishment; I've seen a few Democrat politicians expressing these critiques, and brief discussions in even the mainstream corporate media have occurred around these topics. The problem is that the vast *majority* of people with a platform to bring these crimes to light simply don't care. We live in a society where illegal military actions based on the thinnest of pretexts, and war crimes against (particularly Muslim) civilian targets are so normalized that it just doesn't move the needle for a political and media establishment that helped normalize this monstrous shit in the first place. If you haven't figured out by now that one of major reasons the Trump regime is (mostly) succeeding in installing a fascist dictatorship in America, is the powers granted to the imperial presidency to protect "national security" and to fight a racist, quixotic "War on Terror," I'm going to have to ask you how long you've been in a coma. A society that empowers and tolerates crimes against humanity abroad under the auspices of "keeping us safe," is a society that will tolerate the same when their leaders invariably bring the violence back home.

Common Dreams · A Reminder Amid Group Chat Outrage: US Strikes on Yemen Are Unconstitutional | Common DreamsLeaked messages reveal Trump officials admitting illegal strikes in Yemen. Advocacy groups demand Congress act to stop unauthorized war. Are lawmakers more concerned with protocol breaches or the lives lost in Yemen?
#Signalgate#Trump#Vance
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MikeDunnAuthor

Today in Labor History February 22, 2004: Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation’s largest teachers union, National Education Association (NEA), a terrorist organization. No teachers were killed or imprisoned for belonging to the union under the Bush administration, but the government did use the epithet to justify imprisoning citizens and non-citizens indefinitely without trial for being “terrorists.” And the 20-year “war on terror” that Bush initiated led to at least 900,000 deaths, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project (brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/cost). However, Professor Catherine Lutz, co-author of report, called this a vast undercount. She said that “one has to multiply that direct death number… by an estimated two to four times to get to the total number of people – in the millions – who are dead today who would not have been dead had the wars not been fought.” This would put Bush up there with the top ten most murderous world leaders of the past 100 years.

Currently, the Trump administration is using the “terrorist” epithet to justify the mass deportation of immigrant “criminals.” In reality, they are going after anyone who doesn’t look “white,” including many who have never been accused of a crime. There have already been numerous reports of citizens and legal residents, including Indigenous people, being deported or imprisoned. Trump is also using the epithet to justify flying CIA spy drones over Mexico to surveil drug cartels, in violation of international law. And, in the future, he could start using armed drones to kill people accused of gang affiliation, whether they are in Mexico, El Salvador, or the working-class communities of major U.S. cities, like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Indeed, Todd Zimmerman, the DEA’s special agent in Mexico City, said that U.S. military action in Mexico was on the table (latimes.com/world-nation/story).

If the U.S. government did start targeting its own citizens as “terrorists,” it would nothing new. They are already calling pro-Palestinian activists terrorists, attempting to label all of them as Hamas symps, and threatening deport any who don’t have U.S. citizenship. They prosecuted and imprisoned numerous environmental and animal rights activists as terrorists in the 90’s and early 2000’s. In the 1960s and early ‘70s, they murdered numerous activists from organizations they labeled as “terrorists,” like the Black Panthers and American Indian Movement. And going back at least as far as the 1860s, they were falsely accusing Irish union organizers of being Molly Maguire terrorists, wrongfully executing 10 of them on June 21, 1877, the second largest single-day mass execution in U.S. history, after the 1862 mass execution of 38 Dakota Indians. Considering Trump’s goal of abolishing, or at least gutting, the Department of Education; his hatred of unions; and the anti-union objectives of Protest 2025; it is not hard to see the “terrorist” epithet again being hurled at teacher unions, and at all unions (except, perhaps, those that affiliate with a future pro-MAGA American Labor Front, like Hitler’s German Labor Front).

Or, we could just start arming teachers, as many on the right have demanded, and see where that takes us…

You can read more about the so-called Molly Maguires here: michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/

Cartoon (by Joe Heller) of a teacher being handed a hand gun, as she lugs a mountain of other responsibilities, depicted at words: disciplinarian, fundraiser, travel planner, part-time parent; social worker, nurse, therapist, tutor, mentor, etc.
#workingclass#LaborHistory#terrorism
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AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

Very Serious PeopleTM: "You can't run around pushing alarmist ideas about fascism and saying they're gonna build concentration camps!"

Me: "Are you kidding me? You already live in a fascist police state with a fully-functioning carceral industrial complex that actively profits from racialized warehousing of "undesirables" and nobody even blinks. The camps are already built, they're all around you we just call them prisons!"

Trump: "Lol, no; we're literally gonna build camps and put them in places where there is no law."

commondreams.org/news/gitmo-co

'He's Building a Concentration Camp': Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo

"Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison," said ACLU deputy director of immigrant rights Lee Gelernt. "It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing."

Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, said Friday that expansion of operations at Guantánamo "is especially alarming given its remote location and the decades-long documented history of abuse and torture there, which will only be exacerbated by the well-documented abuse inherent to the ICE detention system, including abuse, unsanitary conditions, and medical neglect. In no uncertain terms—lives are in jeopardy."

I'd say between this and the Trump administration's brazen deal with El Salvador to jail even U.S. Citizens in their "mega-prison" it's very clear what this government's plan for purging people they don't like is, and yes that plan is every bit as cartoonishly fascist as even Trump's most ardent critics have suggested. Furthermore, I would note that as many observers at the time predicted would happen eventually if we embraced a fascist police state to "fight terrorism" in the wake of 9-11, the Trump administration is clearly borrowing heavily from both a bipartisan migrant carceral complex pattern, and a (again bipartisan) history of using offshore prisons in places where American law doesn't apply to commit human rights violations against "bad hombres" - the major difference here is that Trump is now planning on doing that to your neighbors and the lady who works at the nail salon up the street.

"According to critics like Robinson, "There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."

You can't even say Robinson is speaking about a hypothetical situation because the American security state has already done this, for this precise reason, in slightly different circumstances - most people just weren't paying that much attention because "we gotta get Bin Laden." At this point the entire apparatus and justification for that apparatus already exists in "reasonable" American thought along bipartisan lines; the only thing we're missing from the literal Nazi blueprint is organized mass extermination campaigns and are YOU prepared to promise we won't get there? I sure couldn't.

While obviously this must be opposed vigorously, it's going to be pretty hard for a mainstream establishment that embraced the road to concentration camps in the name of national security, and has wholly surrendered to the idea that migrants are a "problem" that must be met with "carceral force" (that happens to make certain people very rich) to argue that this scenario is somehow different than the previous mind-numbingly fascist scenarios our entire state apparatus has supported in the past - both to stop migrants, and to prosecute the so-called "War on Terror."

You can't have a little fascism; and if you try, sooner or later you're going to have a lot more fascism. And boy, we've been trying for a very long time.

Common Dreams · 'He's Building a Concentration Camp': Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo | Common Dreams"There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."
#USPol#Fascism#Trump
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DoomsdaysCW

#ACLU: President #Obama Signs #IndefiniteDetentionBill Into Law

December 31, 2011

WASHINGTON – "President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (#NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had 'serious reservations' about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA, but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill.

"'President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,' said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. 'The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and FUTURE PRESIDENTS to militarily #detain people captured far from any battlefield. The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.'

"Under the #BushAdministration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again. The ACLU believes that any military detention of #AmericanCitizens or others within the United States is unconstitutional and illegal, including under the NDAA. In addition, the breadth of the NDAA’s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war.

"'We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court,' said Romero. “Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the #WarOnTerror was extinguished today. Thankfully, we have three branches of government, and the final word belongs to the Supreme Court, which has yet to rule on the scope of detention authority. But Congress and the president also have a role to play in cleaning up the mess they have created because no American citizen or anyone else should live in fear of this or any future president misusing the NDAA’s detention authority.'"

aclu.org/press-releases/presid

#NDAA #ExpandedPowers
#USPresidency #HR9495 #Terrorists #Activists #Trump

American Civil Liberties UnionPresident Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Bill Into Law | American Civil Liberties UnionFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE...
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Toni Aittoniemi

We aren’t in this situation for nothing. Fascism is rising, the west is weak, Russia is taking advantage, China, Iran too.

That weakness was created. Not on purpose, but by carelessness, empty promises and faulty arguments.

Over the last decade, #SiliconValley has contributed the most to that weakness. Disruptions of our communication, relationships & work has led to rising inequality & insecurity.

Of course, the #WarOnTerror had a hand in it, but big tech really finished the job.

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Estelle Platini

The "Costs of War" project, based at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, estimates that the total death toll in post-9/11 wars – including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen – could be at least 4.5-4.7 million:
Stephanie Savell (2023) watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/pa

Blair is one of the Western leaders who shares complicity for this appalling death toll: mondediplo.com/2003/07/01ramon

State lying has been thrown down the memory hole by media outlets who welcome him with open arms.

(to be continued)

Sarkozy and Blair in suits shake hands and smile
#Post911Wars#WarOnTerror#unjustWars
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