SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
leon panetta
Progressive Foreign Policy Expert Says Americans Are Tired of Democrats Being 'Party of War'
"It's time for Democrats to offer Americans a new and affirmative vision of U.S. foreign policy, one that boldly and unashamedly embraces global peacemaking as an essential component of our own security and prosperity."
Jan 09, 2025
"Democrats have become the party of war" and "Americans are tired of it."
That's the message that Matt Duss, a former top aide to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who is now the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, imparted in an opinion piece published Thursday in The Guardian.
"In defending the militarist status quo, Democrats ceded the anti-war lane to Republicans," Duss wrote. "As they enter the political wilderness, it's time to reckon with what they got so wrong."
Among other things, what they got wrong during Vice President Kamala Harris' failed 2024 Democratic presidential bid, according to Duss, was embracing figures like former CIA director Leon Panetta and "torture advocate" Liz Cheney in a bid to woo right-wing and moderate voters.
As President-elect Donald Trump's campaign painted the Republican nominee—who fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise to "bomb the shit out of" Islamic State militants and "take out their families" with devastating results—as the "
candidate of peace," Democrats "left the anti-war lane wide open for him by leaning into a tired, curdled militarism as a substitute for an actual foreign policy vision," Duss said.
"It's time for Democrats to offer Americans a new and affirmative vision of U.S. foreign policy, one that boldly and unashamedly embraces global peacemaking as an essential component of our own security and prosperity," he wrote. "One that insists that keeping Americans safe does not require spending more on defense than the next 10 countries combined."
Duss continued:
Our leaders should be clear about the genuine security threats that our country faces, but decide, at long last, to stop being drawn into dumb bidding wars about being "tougher on Russia/terrorism/China/whatever"—a framing designed to sustain the hawkish status quo. They should broaden the national security conversation to include the challenge of domestic and global inequality and the grievances it powers. They should articulate not just a domestic but a global pro-worker agenda—in addition to a global corporate minimum tax, a global minimum wage, for example. Make clear that a foreign policy fit for this era doesn't pit the security and prosperity of Americans against workers in other countries but recognizes that our security and prosperity are bound together.
"All of this will of course require confronting the various defense, business, and foreign lobbies that distort and constrain our policy discussions, which is why a strong anti-corruption plank is essential for any such platform," Duss said.
That's a tall order. Reflecting on President Joe Biden's term, Duss asserted: "I never imagined I would write this, but by the end of his presidency he will have done more damage to the so-called 'rules-based order' than Trump did. Fifteen months and counting of support for Israel's horrific assault on Gaza has violated virtually every international norm on the protections of civilians in war and left America's moral credibility in tatters. Biden showed that international law is little more than a cudgel to be used against our enemies while being treated as optional for our friends."
"In his 2020 election victory speech, Biden proclaimed: 'I believe at our best America is a beacon for the globe. And we lead not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example,'" Duss recalled. "It's a nice line, but Biden showed that he sees it as little more than that. The question now for Democrats is whether they can actually mean it, or if they even want to."
Addressing the recent phenomenon of Republicans being perceived as the anti-war party of the working class—even if such perception is divorced from reality on both fronts—Duss lamented that "this year's Democratic ticket failed to provide a sufficient response."
"Instead of responding to the right's tech oligarch-funded faux-populism by offering a genuine alternative and attacking the real sources of our country's insecurity, they leaned into a defense of a militarist status quo that most Americans rightly recognize as broken," he added. "They must not make that mistake again."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Netanyahu: 'Nothing Can Stop Us,' Not Even the Majority of Israelis
Furtively booby-trapping a consumer product like a pager or two-way radio opens a new phase of warfare.
Sep 29, 2024
Israel’s Biden-backed war machine is once again bearing down on defenseless Lebanese people. Hostilities on the Israel-Lebanon border have been occurring since the establishment of Israel and the dispossession of Palestinians and their land in 1948. But last week’s war-crime-laden escalation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stunned the world.
It started with bombings followed by the simultaneous booby-trapped “red button” explosion of thousands of pagers and two-way radios inside Lebanon on September 17, 2024, and September 18, 2024, held by or near Lebanese militants, and civilian men, women, children, health workers, storekeepers, etc. Thirty-seven people were killed and 3,700 others were injured—losing hands, eyes, and fingers. Many also suffered internal organ damage.
Such an attack at this scale is unprecedented in human history. While the ambulances and overwhelmed hospitals were taking in the casualties, Israeli F-16s (provided by the U.S.) struck throughout Lebanon, killing over 700 people and injuring thousands, many of them women and children—a staggering total of 1,600 targets in two days.
Computers, motor vehicles, smartphones, and many other electronic products could become weapons of war.
International law experts condemned the mega-raid. They pointed to the war crime of booby-trapping a product, and the vast disproportionate harm to innocent civilians compared to Israel’s military objective to destroy Hezbollah’s militia that has been exchanging unequal missiles with Israel since October 8, 2023.
As has been the case for decades, Lebanese casualties were vastly greater than Israeli casualties. Israel has a modern air defense system that shuts down most of the incoming missiles. Hezbollah’s military might has been long exaggerated by its Israeli adversary to justify regularly bombing Syria, attacking Iran, and getting more weapons from the U.S.
In reality, Hezbollah—a political party and social service organization—has a militia greatly outnumbered and overpowered by the Israeli military in soldiers, destructive weaponry, and money from the U.S.
Furtively booby-trapping a consumer product like a pager or two-way radio opens a new phase of warfare. This savagery prompted Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA and former secretary of defense, in an interview on the CBS “Sunday Morning” news show to charge Israel with “terrorism.” No prominent national security figure has ever assailed Israel this way. Herewith his words:
“The ability to be able to place an explosive in technology that is very prevalent these days. And turn it into a war of terror. Really, a war of terror. This is something new,” said Panetta.
“I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism...This is going right into the supply chain, right into the supply chain. And when you have terror going into the supply chain, it makes people ask the question, what the hell is next?” added Panetta.
Panetta would never have uttered these words without the concurrence of the CIA and the Department of Defense. Still no consequences for Netanyahu by the U.S. government.
These officials now fear a new booby-trap era of warfare. Computers, motor vehicles, smartphones, and many other electronic products could become weapons of war. People all over the world now have this Israeli-triggered anxiety, dread, and fear. Netanyahu has made the push button a trigger for mayhem and murder—acts of large-scale terrorism. He and his predecessors have always characterized offensive acts violating the laws of war as “acceptable” defensive tactics. The supine Congress and White House regularly rubber-stamp their violations of several U.S. laws on behalf of the Israeli government. (See the letter sent to John Kirby on September 12, 2024).
Consider the aftermath. No denunciation by U.S. President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. No condemnation or calls for public hearings by leading Republicans, or leading Democrats in Congress. The Hill reported that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said, “This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict… Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any U.S. assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology,” she added. Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) were also critical of the attack.
Alarmingly, there were no editorials in the following week criticizing Netanyahu in The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Imagine if Hezbollah did this to Israeli society. The devaluation of Palestinian and Lebanese lives can only be called racist.
Biden’s forked-tongue address to the United Nations this week touted peace and democracy while his autocracy funds war.
Biden’s forked-tongue address to the United Nations this week touted peace and democracy while his autocracy funds war. Not a word against what his friend Leon Panetta called Israeli terrorism. Just another feeble fig leaf call for a 21-day truce mocked by the extreme genocidal Israeli regime, funded by coerced American taxpayers.
Hezbollah emerged after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which lasted 18 years with the Israeli army occupying south Lebanon (and its coveted Litani River) where millions of historically downtrodden Lebanese Shia Muslims lived. They were abused by the Israeli army. Hezbollah was formed in 1982 to defend these impoverished, subjugated people.
In an ocean of lies, starting with his mysterious, still officially uninvestigated collapse of the multi-tiered border security system on October 7, 2023, which opened the door to the Hamas attack, Netanyahu has uttered one truth: “Nothing will stop us.” The nuclear-equipped Israeli regional empire dominates the Middle East. But it always needs an enemy for its internal domestic politics and for expanding its very advantageous alliance with the United States empire. Netanyahu is despised by 3 out of 4 Israelis but the next election is not until October 2026. Some in the pages of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz have argued that Netanyahu may be scuttling talk of a cease-fire to avoid his pending criminal trial for corruption.
Iran, a poor nation with about 91 million people and a GDP considerably smaller than the GDP of Massachusetts, has been a target of the U.S. since the CIA overthrew the popularly elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. His crime: he wanted to take control of Iranian oil from the foreign Anglo-Iranian oil company.
It was the U.S. government that supported then-Iraq ally Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1980, which cost Iran hundreds of thousands of lives. It was former President George W. Bush who called Iran one of the countries making up the Axis of Evil and proceeded to encircle it with the U.S. military from Iraq to the Afghanistan borders. Do you wonder why Iran’s rulers are freaked out over its national security and build allies in the face of both punishing U.S. sanctions harming civilian lives and recurrent Israeli sabotage and killings inside Iran?
Violently messing around in other weak countries’ backyards, and backing dictators and coups are the touchstones of empire. Eventually, all empires devour themselves.
In the meantime, are you surprised that the CIA and Department of Defense have teams studying what they call “blowback”—a term they coined before 9/11? You know how that attack convulsed our country, deprived our domestic needs, and intensified Bush/Dick Cheney’s fury into even more countries (e.g., invading Iraq) pushing ever bigger, draining military budgets?
U.S. blowback analysts are apprehensive about the spread of Israeli-style “red button” explosives and the ingenious, and ever-cheaper armed drones. They see such technologies as potential threats within the U.S.
Such is the peril of nations whose leaders wage constant profitable, preventable wars and decline to wage muscular peace with comparable determination.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Feinstein v. the CIA: A Moment of Truth
Mar 13, 2014
It was a truly historic moment Tuesday when Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA's continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our constitutional division of power. By blatantly concealing what Feinstein condemned as "the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed," the spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and the agency's outrages have finally aroused the senator's umbrage.
As Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, chair of the Judiciary Committee that will be investigating Feinstein's charges noted, "in 40 years here, it was one of the best speeches I'd ever heard and one of the most important." That was particularly so, given that Feinstein's searing indictment of the CIA's decade-long subversion of congressional oversight of its torture program comes from a senator who previously has worked overtime to justify the subversion of democratic governance by the CIA and other spy agencies.
But clearly the lady has by now had enough, given the CIA's recent hacking of her Senate committee's computers in an effort to suppress a key piece of evidence supporting the veracity of the committee's completed but still not released 6,300-page study that the CIA is bent on suppressing.
The Senate's investigation began in earnest with the Dec. 7, 2007, revelation in The New York Times that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of its "enhanced interrogation techniques," despite objections from then-President Bush's director of national security and the White House counsel. At that time, then-committee chair Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sent staffers to begin the painstaking process of reviewing the limited material that the CIA was willing to make available; their preliminary report wasn't issued until early 2009.
By then, Feinstein had assumed the chairmanship and, as she recalled in her Tuesday speech, "The resulting staff report was chilling. The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us."
Feinstein on the Intel Committee's CIA ReportSenator Dianne Feinstein spoke on the Senate floor on March 11, 2014, about the Senate Intelligence Committee's study of the ...
Feinstein, ostensibly backed by new President Barack Obama, who had campaigned as an opponent of the CIA's methods, obtained the committee's bipartisan backing for an expanded investigation. But the CIA, led at the time by Obama appointee Leon Panetta, the former Democratic congressman, put numerous logistical obstacles in the way of the Senate investigation.
As Feinstein pointed out, "the CIA hired a team of outside contractors--who otherwise would not have had access to these sensitive documents--to read, multiple times, each of the 6.2 million pages of documents produced, before providing them to fully-cleared committee staff conducting the committee's oversight work. This proved to be a slow and very expensive process."
It was so slow that the committee's investigation has only now been completed. Along the way, documents that Senate staffers found interesting would then mysteriously disappear from the system. One such set of disappeared documents, referred to as the "Internal Panetta Review," is now at the center of the CIA hacking scandal.
The Panetta Review became relevant in June, when the CIA offered its critique of the Senate study. But as Feinstein points out, "Some of those important parts that the CIA now disputes in our committee study are clearly acknowledged in the CIA's own Internal Panetta Review. To say the least, this is puzzling. How can the CIA's official response to our study stand factually in conflict with its own Internal Review?"
Relations between the Senate committee responsible for oversight of the CIA and the agency were so poor that, as Feinstein states, "after noting the disparity between the official CIA response to the committee study and the Internal Panetta Review, the committee staff securely transported a printed portion of the draft Internal Panetta Review from the committee's secure room at the CIA-leased facility to the secure committee spaces in the Hart Senate Office Building."
Feinstein defended the committee staff's spiriting information away from the CIA:
"As I have detailed, the CIA has previously withheld and destroyed information about its Detention and Interrogation Program. ... There was a need to preserve and protect the Internal Panetta Review in the committee's own secure spaces."
The response of the CIA was to hack the computers that Senate staffers had been using at the CIA off-site location, and the agency's acting general counsel filed a crimes report with the Department of Justice against the Senate committee's staff.
That was too much for Feinstein, who outed the CIA's counsel:
"I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center--the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official termination of the Detention and Interrogation Program in January 2009, he was the unit's chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study. And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff--the same congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers--including the acting general counsel himself--provided inaccurate information to the Justice Department about the program."
Enough said, except that White House spokesman Jay Carney put the president on the side of those like current CIA Director John Brennan covering up torture: "The president has great confidence in John Brennan and confidence in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA." It's something that George W. Bush would have said.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular