Basically, a finding is one of the principal forms by which the president authorises secret operations by the Central Intelligence Agency.

As an Iraq [...]]]> Yesterday, news broke that President Obama had signed a secret order – called a ‘finding‘ – which authorised the covert support of the United States government for the Libyan rebel forces.

Basically, a finding is one of the principal forms by which the president authorises secret operations by the Central Intelligence Agency.

As an Iraq War veteran, I’ve approached our increasing involvement in the Libyan civil war with a gradually escalating sense of foreboding. The lack of clarity in what we want to achieve in Libya, and how we intend to achieve it, is eerily reminiscent to me of our entanglement in Iraq. Part of me will always be that team leader in Iraq in 2003, trying to discern my commander’s intent.

There are a few things that come to mind here, now that we are ‘covertly’ supporting the Libyan rebels.

1. Colour me totally unsurprised here. Matter of fact, from a foreign internal defence perspective, I’d believe it negligent to the point of incompetence if we didn’t have people on the ground from various, um, agencies on the ground already. That’s probably who’s calling in air strikes. I’m pretty certain that the UK has folks there, and so do the French – the French most of all, since North Africa was their version of Mexico/the Caribbean.

2. When I first saw the news of our covert involvement break, I was pretty ticked off at the leak – you just don’t go yapping about what the covert community is doing. The more I thought about it, though, this sounds like a deliberately engineered leak.

So, what now? Why do I continue to feel such unease about our Libyan War?

My guess, based on following the conflict and talking to various folks/listening to various folks? The Libyan rebel army doesn’t exist. Let me say that again:

The Libyan rebel army doesn’t exist.

What you’re seeing on CNN/MSNBC/BBC/your evening news is a rabble. A gang. Those guys on pickup trucks? They’re, at best, military tourists. You maybe have about 1,000 people in the Libyan rebel rabble that could compose the nucleus of a fighting force. It’s not just a question of providing them with arms. By now, the Libyan countryside is swimming with weapons. The rebels have access to weapons, and they have access to ammunition.

What they don’t have is the training needed to use those arms effectively, and to hold any ground that they capture. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that every single time the rebels retake, say, Misrata, the very moment that they come under bombardment, whether it’s by mortars or artillery, they immediately surrender that ground. That, to me, is a mark of an untrained fighting force.  I could go on, and on, and on…but really, what you all should do is read this by Gulliver at Ink Spots: http://tachesdhuile.blogspot.com/2011/03/arming-libyan-rebels-its-not-only.html

It goes into a lot of detail as to why arming the Libyan rebels is a very, very bad idea, and other subjects as well.

Also, if you’re following me on Twitter, you’ve seen me line up along with guys like Andrew Exum of CNAS and our own Richard Allen Smith, among others, in being very concerned about our war in Libya. Part of it is because a part of me will always be that forward observer in Balad, Iraq, in 2003, trying to discern my commander’s intent.

But part of it is because we’re trying to discern the Commander-in-Chief’s intent, and we’re failing to do so. Let’s say the goal is regime change, which the President has stated. I don’t have any doubt that Gataffi will fall. Nato has committed itself to seeing that happen, in effect, regardless of what UN Resolution 1973 says. The problem right now is that at least two things aren’t clear at the moment:

• how we get from where we are currently, with a disorganised rabble not doing much more than barely surviving against what looks like an 8,000-to-10,000 strong Libyan government force, to the fall of GDiddy’s government;
• more importantly – what does Libya after Khaddafy look like? Simply, we don’t know jack about who will take power in Libya once Qadafi falls. There’s a multiplicity of groups and interests at work here, not necessarily in sympathy with providing the people of Libya a greater voice in government, regardless of whether that voice is friendly to our interests or not.

Right now, it really does seem as though the Administration is fighting this war by the seat of its pants. It really does feel as though people expected that the initial Nato involvement would serve as the decisive factor, allowing the rebels to defeat Kazzafi without the need for added military aid. I don’t think that was ever going to happen, nor was I the only one.

So now, the next stage of the debate is going to take place. The longer the rebels take to defeat Qadhdhafi, the greater the chances are that you’ll see ground forces deployed to Libya, regardless of what President Obama says. I’m already seeing the precursors of the arguments for that eventuality being made by folks like Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Judis, among others.

That’s why I stated earlier that maybe that disclosure of CIA presence in Libya was a planned leak. Now we have CIA on the ground. The next step will be disclosing that Special Forces are on the ground. Let’s say that it’s June of 2011, and we’re still watching the rebels futz around, which wouldn’t be surprising. You’ll see the President make another address, saying that we’re now deploying Nato forces to assist the Libyan rebels in a final push against Gheddafi’s forces…

But I digress. The bottom line is that we own Libya now, for the long term. We won’t abandon the rebels, regardless of how utterly feckless they are. We also own the Libyan aftermath – and we have no idea of how that looks like. We have a lot of hopes for what it may look like, but as we learned in Iraq, hope is not a plan. And that’s why those of us who served in Iraq and Afghanistan were so bloody reluctant to get involved in Libya – because in some key respects, it bore a highly uncomfortable resemblance to what we experienced.

A new human rights initiative may be the stuff of which peace is made.

The Satellite Sentinel Project is an unprecedented effort [...]]]> Earlier this year, a new initiative called the Satellite Sentinel Project launched a new era in peace activism and the prevention of genocide. I wrote at the time:

A new human rights initiative may be the stuff of which peace is made.

The Satellite Sentinel Project is an unprecedented effort led by Not on Our Watch (an advocacy group of leading Hollywood figures) and the anti-genocide Enough Project of the Center for American Progress.

For the first time in history, they intend to provide peace groups with the capacity to monitor potential war zones via commercial satellites. The goal is nothing less than to stop wars and war crimes in their bloody tracks.

A pilot project will try to help head off a potential civil war in Africa’s largest nation — Sudan.

The project will monitor the border area between north and south Sudan, which have been engaged in an intermittent civil war for 50 years. An uneasy truce has prevailed since 2005, but there is a potential for further war in the run-up to a Jan. 9 referendum, when the oil-rich south will decide whether to secede from the north.

Border villages in the south have already reportedly been bombed, though the north has denied responsibility.

This situation underscores the potential value of independent groups being able to provide pictures of the smoking guns.

The satellites will also be able to document such features of war as burned villages, masses of people fleeing and movements of troops and tanks.

Much has happened since then — including a cover story in Newsweek.

Satellites are now sending daily images that have documented, among other things, the massing of troops and heavy military equipment on the border, and most recently broke the story of how whole villages near the border between Northern and Southern Sudan had been burned to the ground.

The government of Northern Sudan is led by internationally wanted war criminals, whose atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan shocked the conscience of the world, underscoring what may be at stake in the current crisis.

Satellite imagery and video of the burned villages in the Abyei region obtained by the anti-genocide Enough Project were featured on the PBS News Hour on March 17th.

Jonathan Hutson of the Enough Project told the News Hour:

…for the first time outside the national security sector, non-profits are now making use of high-resolution satellite imagery to track the buildup and movements of troops near a border.

We can keep an eye on it and give some early warning to the world, and give people a chance to get involved, to pressure policy-makers, to press for quick and immediate responses.

After we launched the project on Dec. 29, the government of Sudan put out an official press release, and they decried Clooney for being a celebrity activist and for using his name, his cash and his clout to focus world attention on the tense situation to try to get help. They didn’t like it one bit. But then, you can’t please all the war criminals all the time.

Hutson said that for the first time, ordinary people can have access to near-real-time information on the world’s most dangerous places.

We’re not telling the president of the United States something that he doesn’t already know. We’re not telling leaders of other nations something that they don’t already know through their own satellites.

What’s new and transformative here is that we can share high-resolution commercial satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe, so that you can see the same information that lands on the president’s desk during his daily Sudan briefings.

Watch the five minute PBS News Hour segment on You Tube.

While the use of the [...]]]> An important diary at Daily Kos today reports that Rush Limbaugh described “leftists” and President Obama as “cockroaches” during a recent show. The diarist goes on to remind us that in the run-up to the Rwandan genocide in the 90s, “cockroaches” was the favored term of Rwandan radio provocateurs.

While the use of the term is more than coincidental, the analogy to Rwanda remains remote. Limbaugh et al are not yet pounding out eliminationist themes in proportion to the Rwandan media of the 90s. (Here is the clip.) And no one is, as far as we know, openly arming themselves with machetes or other weapons for mass killings. When making comparisons of this sort, it is important to consider the differences as well as the similarities in order to arrive at a proportional understanding of the situation.

That said, Limbaugh’s eliminationist theme is unmistakable and it is worth considering the anti-democratic implications if his entire three minute tirade as he tells his audience that they are in a “war.”

Eliminationism has been building on right-wing hate radio in America for a long time, and the potential for political violence beyond isolated incidents is evident.

Dave Neiwert details how this can happen this in his book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, which I reviewed awhile back:

“What motivates this kind of talk and behavior,” Neiwert writes of the sometimes surprising viciousness from otherwise ordinary people, “is called eliminationism: a politics and a culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas in favor of the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.”

Neiwert stresses that eliminationist rhetoric “always depicts its opposition as beyond the pale, the embodiment of evil itself, unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus worthy of elimination. It often further depicts its designated Enemy as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and disease-like cancers on the body politic. A close corollary—but not as nakedly eliminationist—is the claim that opponents are traitors or criminals and that they pose a threat to our national security.” [emphasis added]

“The history of eliminationism in America and elsewhere,” he writes, “shows that rhetoric plays a significant role in the travesties that follow. It creates permission for people to act out in ways they might not otherwise. It allows them to abrogate their own humanity by denying the humanity of people deemed undesirable or a cultural contaminant.”

Crossposted from FrederickClarkson.com

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of [...]]]> Let us take a moment to recall Pope Benedict’s view of what caused the Holocaust:

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a reductive vision of the person and his destiny.

It was a ballsy statement coming from a man who was once a member of the Hitler Youth and now leads the Catholic Church, but the argument is not uncommon. ‘What is morality to a Godless atheist?’ is a common refrain among ‘radical clerics’ of every faith.

Anyhoo …

The Catholic Church in Rome made the extraordinary admission yesterday that it is aware priests from at least 23 countries have been sexually abusing nuns.

Most of the abuse has occurred in Africa, where priests vowed to celibacy, who previously sought out prostitutes, have preyed on nuns to avoid contracting the Aids virus.

Confidential Vatican reports obtained by the National Catholic Reporter, a weekly magazine in the US, have revealed that members of the Catholic clergy have been exploiting their financial and spiritual authority to gain sexual favours from nuns, particularly those from the Third World who are more likely to be culturally conditioned to be subservient to men.

The reports, some of which are recent and some of which have been in circulation for at least seven years, said that such priests had demanded sex in exchange for favours, such as certification to work in a given diocese.

In extreme instances, the priests had made nuns pregnant and then encouraged them to have abortions.

I don’t get how they could be so sleazily predatory without the moral relativism.

Cross-posted at AlterNet and on my butt-ugly personal blog.