Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

The NYPD: America’s Secret Police

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Misconduct by the NYPD (with or without the apparently irrelevant backing of the law, based on their recent disrespect for their elected leader) extends from the individual level – stop-and-frisk encounters or the chokehold killing of Eric Garner – to the systemic and massive.

As a reminder: It took until April 2014 for the NYPD to shutter a terrifying surveillance program against Muslim communities, which was established after the 9/11 attacks.

That program not only sent undercover spies to Muslim neighborhoods in the city to track ordinary New Yorkers going about their daily lives, but it extended across the entire northeastern United States – well beyond the bounds of New York City.

The program was advised by the CIA (see previous link) but acted without the knowledge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In true Orwell fashion, it was named the “Demographics Unit.”

Such “secret police” behavior – down to the inscrutably euphemistic name – is like something out of Tsarist Russia.

Such programs — or indeed national security in general — are not supposed to be the role of a municipal police force. Activities by the NYPD in the past decade and a half suit the secret police forces of a 19th century reactionary monarch in Europe far more than a 21st century American liberal democracy.

Flag of the New York City Police Department

Flag of the New York City Police Department

2,000 “feared dead” in raids by Boko Haram in NE Nigeria

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Last weekend, I posted a story on Boko Haram’s rout of a multi-national force and capture of a Nigerian base in the country’s northeast:

Nigeria’s strategically significant military base at Baga, near the border of Chad, fell to Boko Haram in a clear rout for the multi-national force stationed there, who apparently put up no resistance.

 
Some residents, who escaped the fall of the town and fled across Lake Chad and the national border, had reported at the time that Boko Haram had set the town of Baga on fire and was killing people indiscriminately. (Baga was previously also the site of a massacre by government counter-insurgency forces in 2013.)

The reports filtering out since then, about what happened next, are even more grim:

Boko Haram razed at least 16 villages in northern Nigeria, leaving 2,000 people unaccounted for and feared dead since Monday, Nigerian officials said Thursday.

It’s possible some of the missing are in hiding or are outside the country and uncounted (about 2,500 refugees crossed the border this week), but things look bleak on that possibility:

Borno state lawmaker Ahmed Khalifa told NBC News that “towns are just gone” and that the the villages along Lake Chad are “covered in bodies.” The village attacks reportedly began after militants seized a key military base and chased residents out of the area. After clearing the villages, they returned to kill survivors and burn down town structures.

 
TIME magazine reports this alarming development:

Boko Haram […] controls an estimated 30-35,000 square kilometers, roughly the same amount of terrain as Syria and Iraq’s Islamic State.

 
It’s pretty telling about U.S. priorities, over-reactions, and under-reactions in different parts of the world that the response to ISIS last year was sharply different — which is to say, not even on the same scale of magnitude — from the response to Boko Haram, even as they now control the same land area by size.

Mass executions by ISIS in Syria and Iraq have so far reportedly topped out at 700 people in a two week killing spree (although the total figures across incidents over the past year are significantly higher). If the civilian body count estimates coming out of north Borno state in northeast Nigeria prove correct, Boko Haram will have already significantly exceeded the August 2014 massacres by ISIS.

Keep in mind, however, that public official/government reports on the insurgency in Nigeria have often proven greatly exaggerated or altogether false, and information coming out of the Baga area is likely to be very sketchy at best right now. At minimum, though, the intensity and frequency of Boko Haram’s attacks on military and civilian targets (especially near the border regions) appear to be picking up steam.

Added January 9 at 7:33 PM ET: — Report from Amnesty International via the AP:

Hundreds of bodies — too many to count — remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International suggested Friday is the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Boko Haram.
[…]
District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents.

“The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defense group that fights Boko Haram, told The Associated Press.

He said the civilian [self-defense] fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies. “No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by now,” Gava said.

 

Also: The BBC reports that nearby Niger’s troops will no longer be participating in the multi-national force in Borno state due to the deteriorating security situation (which seems a bit counter-intuitive since they’re supposed to be helping with that exact problem):

Soldiers from Niger had been there [at Baga base] but were not present when it was attacked.

Niger Foreign Minister Mohamed Bazoum told the BBC Hausa service: “We have 50 soldiers there and decided to withdraw them after Boko Haram captured Malamfatori town in October and continued to operate in the area with impunity.

“As you know, Baga is under [the control of] Boko Haram terrorists and unless the town is recaptured from them, we will not send back our troops.

 

Still image (via AFP) from a Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

Still image (via AFP) from a Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

Other police mutinies in U.S. history: Mississippi

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As the NYPD turns its back on its elected government and unilaterally refuses to enforce the law, let’s look back at another mutinous, anti-democratic police force that refused to uphold the law — Mississippi’s secret police.

For nearly two decades following the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling against school segregation, a secret state-level agency called the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission conducted surveillance on “subversive individuals and organizations that advocate civil disobedience” – i.e. civil rights activists.

Their primary mission was to resist the implementation of Federal government orders and laws on desegregation in Mississippi. This included aiding county governments in preventing African-Americans from registering to vote. Worse, their surveillance efforts have also been linked to the infamous lynching murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.

You can learn more about this secret police force from the Mississippi Department of Archives.

Flag of the State of Mississippi

Flag of the State of Mississippi

#BlackLivesMatter means just that, not that police lives don’t

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It shouldn’t need to be said that Black lives matter. If, in the US, all men (and women) are created equal, then it should be a given that Black people’s lives hold just as much value as any other life in this country. However, it seems that with each passing week it’s becoming more and more evident to the public eye that this isn’t the case.

With the murder of Mike Brown – and the subsequent actions by police after – many in Ferguson, Missouri were fed up and decided to take action. Soon after, other cities joined in protest, adding the names of those who had been killed in each location to a long list of Black and Brown people who’d been killed in recent months and years, including Eric Garner’s. All of them by the police who are supposed to serve and protect them.

Yet it seems that many people think that acknowledging the value of Black life — i.e. that #BlackLivesMatter — is in opposition to the lives of the police. That they are somehow mutually exclusive. In many places “pro-police” counter-protests have popped up with the slogan “Blue Lives Matter.”

The NYPD even went on an unofficial protest after they were upset to hear that Mayor Bill de Blasio advised his son (who is Black/biracial) to be careful in his interactions with the police. They say de Blasio teaching his son this fuels distrust in the police and could endanger their lives — and that it indirectly leads to incidents like the shooting of the two NYPD officers that happened in December.

In protest, they stopped making minor arrests, and began instead to make arrests or issue summonses only when absolutely necessary, meaning things like parking violations won’t result in confrontations with police. It also potentially means no Stop-And-Frisk, which Mayor de Blasio hadn’t ended completely, despite that being a central campaign promise.

It seems odd (read: racist) that the idea of valuing Black life is automatically thought of as devaluing the lives of police officers. It seems odder still that while police counter the main protests with the contention that “Blue Lives Matter,” they ignore the fact that many Black police officers – who should also count as “Blue” lives – often feel the brunt of racial profiling done by their own co-workers.

In an additional irony, in their counter-protest, the NYPD seems to have forgotten that Eric Garner’s death resulted from an unnecessary arrest for a minor purported violation. Garner was approached by the NYPD for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, which certainly didn’t warrant the use of force in the attempted arrest. So perhaps this unofficial protest has done more good than the harm they expected. Either way, when people say “Black Lives Matter” what they mean is Black lives matter. They don’t mean that anyone else’s lives matter less. Hopefully soon police forces across the country will realize this too.

Police Chiefs in at least two cities seem to recognize the meaning behind these protests. In Nashville, Police Chief Steve Anderson responded to a message left on the police departments website challenging the commenter’s idea of what constitutes a the city being safe, and expressing respect for the rights of the protesters in Nashville. In Pittsburgh, Police Chief Cameron McLay showed his support for protesters with a sign pledging to “challenge racism at work.” Both are White.

In the latter case, the response to this chief’s display of solidarity with the community has gotten negative attention from the president of the police union in Pittsburgh who says the chief’s stance makes the police force look “corrupt and racist.” Chief McLay stood by the message on the sign.

Whether they realize it or not, some police seem to have stumbled onto the solution to their constant and fatal confrontations with Black people. When people are treated as people and not criminals, crime rates don’t increase, even as the people are policed less. When protesters are treated with respect, there is less likely to be a violent confrontation between them and the police. When Black lives are given the value they deserve, the relationship between them and the police improves.

Things to think about as Sri Lanka votes

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Early presidential elections in Sri Lanka — between the incumbent (increasingly dictatorial) president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and his former Health Minister, Maithripala Sirisena — have unexpectedly become a nail-biter race.

Some of the Western coverage has focused on the frivolous and bizarre. (For example, the New York Times’s “As Vote Nears, Astrologer for Sri Lanka’s President Faces Ultimate Test of His Skills”.) Some has focused on the president’s troubling alliance with extremist Buddhist/Sinhalese nationalism.

But most importantly, there are reflections on President Rajapaksa’s appalling war crimes during his decisive but extremely violent conclusion to Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war:

By the first few months of 2009, with the [Tamil] Tigers in hopeless retreat, the government declared a series of what they called “no fire zones”, into which they encouraged as many as 400,000 Tamil civilians to gather “for their own safety”.

Government forces then relentlessly shelled these zones and, as a later UN report concluded, systematically denied them food and humanitarian supplies. The UN estimates that there were “as many as 40,000 civilian deaths in a matter of weeks, most as a result of government shelling. There was also a World Bank estimate that 100,000 civilians were missing after the war.

 
It takes a special kind of monster to urge civilians into safe zones and then direct military to shell those zones.

President and Mrs. Obama in an official photo with President and Mrs. Rajapaksa at the September 2013 UN General Assembly in New York. (White House Photo)

President and Mrs. Obama in an official photo with President and Mrs. Rajapaksa at the September 2013 UN General Assembly in New York. (White House Photo)

The US seems pretty optimistic about Afghanistan’s army

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BBC summary of now widely quoted remarks on 60 Minutes:

Gen John Campbell, who commands the coalition’s remaining forces in Afghanistan, told 60 Minutes separately he was confident Afghan security forces could prevent the country falling into the hands of militant groups like Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

“With the military they have here… this is not Iraq,” he said. “I don’t see [IS] coming into Afghanistan like they did into Iraq. The Afghan security forces would not allow that.”

The Afghan military, he argued, was now the “number one respected institution in Afghanistan”.

“Couple years ago, I probably wouldn’t have said that but today it is,” he said, speaking in Kabul.

Critics have in the past questioned the morale and discipline of the Afghan security forces in the face of Taliban attack. At least 4,600 of their members were killed last year.

 
First off, it’s good to know that our new benchmark for success in training and preparing the new Afghan Army is now whether it’s more or less competent than the Iraqi Army, consistently one of the world’s worst major military forces for the past 25-30 years running. And that glowing U.S. confidence in the ability of the Afghan military to “not allow” an insurgent takeover like in Iraq is not really shared by the Afghan officers themselves:

Brig. Gen. Dr. Mohammad Asif Bromand sits behind a large desk in a hospital at Camp Thunder, an Afghan base in the eastern province of Paktia, listening on a speakerphone to a call for staff from military hospitals across the country. The air is heavy with the tang of cigarette smoke.
[…]
“I don’t know what the politicians think, but as an Afghan general, I think it’s too early to transfer the security responsibility from the U.S. to Afghanistan,” he said. “From each and every aspect, the Afghan army isn’t ready.”

 
Oh good!

Second, congratulations to America for leaving behind another country where the “number one respected institution” is the military — not the parliament, not the presidency, not the court system, etc. This is a real recipe for future disaster. We probably would have done better, at this point, to have re-installed the monarchy in 2001.

Third, I don’t know about a “couple years ago,” but I do remember almost exactly five years ago when NBC broke the story — from leaked U.S. reports — that the 90,000-strong Afghan Army effectively didn’t exist, despite years and years of training and funding. So did it suddenly shape up and show up just in the last 2 years. Did they finally get sky-high absenteeism and opium usage under control in a bigger army, after they couldn’t do so when the army was a fraction the size?

Supposedly, if one also throws in police and other security, Afghanistan’s total security forces are now 350,000-strong, but even that seems like overly optimistic and manipulative math. According to the Associated Press in October 2014:

The Afghan army has about 195,000 troops mostly financed by the U.S. But Wardak has long argued that Afghanistan doesn’t have enough forces to satisfy the U.S. military’s own counterinsurgency manual. That formula would see between 600,000 and 700,000 troops.

Including police and other security units, Afghanistan has about 350,000 Western-funded security forces.

 
And besides the “ghost army” problem of chronic absenteeism that has plagued the Afghan National Army, much like the Iraqi Army, there’s another pretty huge problem reported by the AP:

All that Western money has led to a clearly improved military, said a former army general, Jawed Kohistani. But Kohistani also pointed out why the West might be hesitant: Taliban fighters join the army as new recruits, undergo training, get issued new weapons and then defect back to their insurgent force.

 
As a reminder, we in the United States are spending an estimated $3.6 billion per year to achieve this little, possibly even actively harmful, result. With no viable domestic funding source of a comparable amount, this is expected to continue until at least 2024 (nearly a decade from now!) if not indefinitely beyond that.

Soldiers of the Afghan National Army during a ceremony, April 2010. (US Air Force Photo)

Soldiers of the Afghan National Army during a ceremony, April 2010. (US Air Force Photo)

Also don’t forget the huge friendly-fire problem of Afghan troops accidentally or intentionally killing their foreign partners, trainers, and supervisors. That came to a head this past August:

For the first time since Vietnam, a United States Army general was killed in an overseas conflict on Tuesday when an Afghan soldier opened fire on senior American officers at a military training academy.

The slain officer, Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, was the highest-ranking member of the NATO-led coalition killed in the Afghanistan war […]

He was one of the most senior officers overseeing the transition from a war led and fought by foreign troops to one conducted by Afghan forces. His specialty was logistics — he was a longtime acquisitions officer — and he was dispatched to Afghanistan to help the Afghan military address one of its most potentially debilitating weaknesses: inability to manage soldiers and weaponry.

[…] A German brigadier general and a senior Afghan commander also were among the wounded, Afghan and coalition officials said…

 
None of the points I’ve raised above are, in my mind, an argument for staying. It’s just further evidence that this has been a complete catastrophe almost from the start, and that we should have left five years ago when it was just about as bad but with five years less money and five years fewer lives lost.

You can’t invade your way to women’s rights

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U.S. Marines in Afghanistan in November 2001. (US Marine Corps Photo)

U.S. Marines in Afghanistan in November 2001. (US Marine Corps Photo)

We’ve had compelling, public evidence for at least five full years that the minuscule progress achieved for Afghan women just after the invasion had already been rolled back to essentially square one by about 2008.

Nevertheless, over the past five years, Afghan women have been rhetorically — usually not even visually or in person — trotted out as props to justify a continued (failed) U.S. presence. Even now, women are cited as the only reason the U.S. invasion and occupation was a justifiable success, despite the fact that this is itself a blatant lie.

Here’s an article on the pseudo-feminism of the American war effort, by Rafia Zakaria, a columnist for Pakistan’s “Dawn” newspaper.