Two separate bipartisan reports with surprising pronouncements, and a cable news debacle, highlight similar themes

(updated below - Update II)

Today is a travel day for me, so I'll use this opportunity to note some brief though significant items:

(1) It's hardly news that the US instituted and for years maintained a systematic torture regime, but the success of the Obama administration in blocking all judicial proceedings has meant there has been no official decree that this is so. A comprehensive report just issued by a truly bipartisan group of former high-level Washington officials (including military officials) is as close as we are likely to get to such an official proclamation.

The Report explains that the impetus behind it was that "the Obama administration declined, as a matter of policy, to undertake or commission an official study of what happened, saying it was unproductive to 'look backwards' rather than forward." It concludes - in unblinking and definitive fashion - that "it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture"; this finding is "offered without reservation"; it is "not based on any impressionistic approach" but rather "grounded in a thorough and detailed examination of what constitutes torture in many contexts, notably historical and legal"; and "the nation's highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture." It also debunks the popular claim that torture was confined to three cases of waterboarding, documenting that more than three people were subjected to that tactic and that the torture includes far more than just waterboarding.

This is not only a historical disgrace for the US and the responsible officials, but, as the New York Times article on this report inadvertently suggests, also shames two other institutions:

(1) the New York Times itself, which steadfastly refused to use the word "torture" to describe what was being done (unless it was done by other countries) and continues to justify that refusal through its then-Executive Editor Bill Keller (Andrew Sullivan ably demolishes Keller's reasoning, while the paper's public editor, Margaret Sullivan, wrote this week that this choice merits "some institutional soul-searching"); and,

(2) President Obama, who barred all criminal prosecutions for Bush officials and other torturers and thus brazenly violated at least the spirit and probably the letter of the Convention Against Torture. That treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988 (exactly 25 years ago to the day: Happy Anniversary!), compels all signatories who discover credible allegations that government officials have participated or been complicit in torture to "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution" (Art. 7(1)). It also specifically states that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture" and "an order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture" (Art. 2 (2-3)).

The disgrace of the American torture regime falls on Bush officials and secondarily the media and political institutions that acquiesced to it, but the full-scale protection of those war crimes (and the denial of justice to their victims) falls squarely on the Obama administration.

Dan Froomkin has more on the significance of this report here. In sum, if you're the NYT or Obama, how do you reconcile your conduct with this establishment finding that it is "indisputable" that the US government, at its highest levels, instituted a worldwide regime of torture?

(2) One of the most commonly voiced objections to my Monday column about the Boston bombing was that, contrary to my claim, there were no real media attempts to suggest that the perpetrators were Muslim. That objection was voiced despite the multiple examples I cited where precisely that was done by the most mainstream news sources. It was voiced despite the grotesque media attempt to convert a Saudi victim of the bombing into "the suspect", as brilliantly analyzed by the New Yorker's Amy Davidson. And now we have yet another example: probably the worst of the bunch.

On Tuesday afternoon, CNN humiliated itself as badly as it ever has (which is saying quite a bit). The network's anchor John King, and its "terrorism expert", former Bush homeland security adviser Fran Townsend, both "reported" - as part of a "Breaking News" scoop that CNN loudly and excitedly trumpeted - that an arrest had been made in the Boston case and that the person was, as King put it, "a dark-skinned individual" (more or less simultaneously, Fox also reported the arrest). An hour later, it became clear that this was totally false. Raw Story details what happened here, and BuzzFeed (which one might at this point reasonably say is a level or so above CNN in the news reliability department) has the very amusing and appropriate mockery here.

But the best commentary on this debacle came from Chris Hayes' top-of-the-show seven-minute scathing monologue on MSNBC last night, where he not only crystallized why this was so journalistically reckless but, more importantly, explains exactly why CNN repeatedly said that the arrested person was "dark-skinned":

Townsend has built up quite a history at this point. It was she who visited Abu Ghraib in 2003 and put pressure on the prison officials there to extract more information. She then served as one of the paid shills for the then-designated terrorist group Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MeK), even as she used her perch at CNN to cheer for broad interpretations of the "material support for terrorism" statute that sent American Muslims to prison for decades for far less involvement with such groups than she had with the MeK. And now she's at the center of this reporting disaster. Good job, CNN: nobody could have guessed that a Bush terrorism official would produce outcomes like this.

(3) A different report from a bipartisan cast of official Washington was issued today, this one on the Obama administration's Iran policy. Although it affirms the DC convention that Iran is some sort of serious threat to the US - a prerequisite for being viewed as Serious among its target audience - it surprisingly, and quite cogently, calls into serious question the wisdom of the sanctions regime imposed by the US. As this good New York Times summary of the report notes, the report explains that sanctions have "contributed to an increase in repression and corruption within Iran" and "may be sowing the seeds of long-term alienation between the Iranian people and the United States".

The most important conclusion is that Obama must rely far less on bluster, threats and sanctions - none of which is likely to achieve anything - and instead do far more to engage the Iranians and find a negotiated settlement to the multiple issues between the two countries. That is the same conclusion publicly advocated by Obama's own former Iran adviser Vali Nasr, who has harshly criticized the president for failing to engage in real diplomacy with Tehran, as well as former national security officials Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett. That these same warnings now issue from such an establishment group as the one that produced this report is a compelling sign of just how misguided Obama policy has been. That does not, of course, mean, that he can or will change it. That's because, as Foreign Policy Community maven Les Gelb recently explained in the Daily Beast, what drives Iran policy more than anything else is this:

"Administration officials would never admit it, but the main reason for their being tougher on Iran than North Korea seems tied to American domestic politics as much as or more than anything else, specifically the standing of Israel and oil versus Korea and Japan. On strictly foreign-policy and national-security grounds, Democratic and Republican officials surely regard Seoul and Tokyo as important as the Mideast, certainly now with the growing importance of Asia. In American politics, however, Israel and oil count for much, much more. It's notable that President Obama made his strongest pronouncements about employing force to stop Iranian nukes at the annual meeting of AIPAC, the very potent group of American-Jewish backers of Israel."

Still, the more light shined on the fact that US belligerence toward Iran helps only Israel and hurts the US, the better.

(4) Also related to Monday's column on the Boston bombing: the Associated Press apparently woke up this morning and realized that the term "terrorism" has no real, fixed, or consistently applied meaning. This has long been clear, but it's nice to see this truth recognized in such a mainstream outlet:

"In times of tension and uncertainty, words can become malleable vessels - for cultural fears, for political agendas, for ways to make sense of the momentous and the unknown. In 2013 America, the word 'terrorism' exists at this ambiguous crossroads. And the opinions you'll find about it - this week in particular - often transcend mere linguistics."

Precisely. But what's most amazing about it is that the term, though essentially impoverished of fixed meaning, is incomparably significant when it comes to legal, political and cultural assumptions. It's a word that means nothing, yet justifies everything those in power do.

(5) The issue of the composition of the Guardian's readership often is raised in the comment section here and elsewhere. Yesterday, the paper's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, sat for an interview with Mathew Ingram and revealed, among other things, that 1/3 of the Guardian's readership is British, 1/3 is American, and 1/3 is from the rest of the world. He also discussed the Guardian's expansion into the US, the impressive increases in US readership it has seen, and the Guardian's journalistic and financial strategies. Those interested in such matters matters may find the interview worthwhile.

(6) I'll be speaking at a couple of events this week, including the annual dinner of CAIR in New York this Saturday, April 20, entitled "Upholding Our Constitution" (ticket and event information here), and at the University of Illinois College of Law on Monday, April 22, where I'll debate the topic of domestic drones with the Heritage Foundation's James Carafano (for information, contact the local ACLU, one of the event sponsor's, at law-aclu@illinois.edu). I'll also be doing some media appearances, including on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show on Friday night at roughly 8:00 pm, presumably to discuss several of these issues, and on Bill Moyers' PBS show in the middle of next week.

Also, a bit later today, I intend to add one item here on the growing hunger strike at Guantanamo, complete with an extraordinary video from the truly great documentarian Laura Poitras.

The hunger strike at Guantánamo continues to grow, even by the Pentagon's own admission. The New York Times' Charlie Savage cites two military officials as saying that "two detainees recently have tried to commit suicide by hanging themselves." Laura Poitras interviewed one former detainee, Lakhdar Boumediene, who engaged in hunger strikes while at the camp; watch this extraordinary two-minute video to see what happened to him:

Related to this, the Atlantic's Andrew Cohen interviewed another former detainee who was tortured at the camp, the Libyan national Omar Deghayes, to get his reaction to the new torture report I described in Item 1. His reactions are well worth hearing.

I noted above (via commenter David Mizner) the remarkable coincidence that today is the 25th anniversary of the date the US signed the Convention Against Torture (April 18, 1988). Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts commemorated the occasion with a truly perfect visual, particularly compelling in light of this week's new report decreeing it "indisputable" that the US government maintained a systematic torture regime:

That would make an excellent exhibit in the Obama presidential library, marking one of the most significant aspects of his legacy.

• Torture

As usual, the limits of selective empathy, the rush to blame Muslims, and the exploitation of fear all instantly emerge

(updated below [Wed.])

There's not much to say about Monday's Boston Marathon attack because there is virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why. There are, however, several points to be made about some of the widespread reactions to this incident. Much of that reaction is all-too-familiar and quite revealing in important ways:

(1) The widespread compassion for yesterday's victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid. My Guardian colleague Gary Younge put this best on Twitter this morning:

Juan Cole this morning makes a similar point about violence elsewhere. Indeed, just yesterday in Iraq, at least 42 people were killed and more than 250 injured by a series of car bombs, the enduring result of the US invasion and destruction of that country. Somehow the deep compassion and anger felt in the US when it is attacked never translates to understanding the effects of our own aggression against others.

One particularly illustrative example I happened to see yesterday was a re-tweet from Washington Examiner columnist David Freddoso, proclaiming:

Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil?"

I don't disagree with that sentiment. But I'd bet a good amount of money that the person saying it - and the vast majority of other Americans - have no clue that targeting rescuers with "double-tap" attacks is precisely what the US now does with its drone program and other forms of militarism. If most Americans knew their government and military were doing this, would they react the same way as they did to yesterday's Boston attack: "Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil?" That's highly doubtful, and that's the point.

There's nothing wrong per se with paying more attention to tragedy and violence that happens relatively nearby and in familiar places. Whether wrong or not, it's probably human nature, or at least human instinct, to do that, and that happens all over the world. I'm not criticizing that. But one wishes that the empathy for victims and outrage over the ending of innocent human life that instantly arises when the US is targeted by this sort of violence would at least translate into similar concern when the US is perpetrating it, as it so often does (far, far more often than it is targeted by such violence).

Regardless of your views of justification and intent: whatever rage you're feeling toward the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that's the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel toward the US for killing innocent people in their countries. Whatever sadness you feel for yesterday's victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs. However profound a loss you recognize the parents and family members of these victims to have suffered, that's the same loss experienced by victims of US violence. It's natural that it won't be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression would go a long way toward better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate.

(2) The rush, one might say the eagerness, to conclude that the attackers were Muslim was palpable and unseemly, even without any real evidence. The New York Post quickly claimed that the prime suspect was a Saudi national (while also inaccurately reporting that 12 people had been confirmed dead). The Post's insinuation of responsibility was also suggested on CNN by Former Bush Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend ("We know that there is one Saudi national who was wounded in the leg who is being spoken to"). Former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman went on CNN to grossly speculate that Muslim groups were behind the attack. Anti-Muslim bigots like Pam Geller predictably announced that this was "Jihad in America". Expressions of hatred for Muslims, and a desire to do violence, were then spewing forth all over Twitter (some particularly unscrupulous partisan Democrat types were identically suggesting with zero evidence that the attackers were right-wing extremists).

Obviously, it's possible that the perpetrator(s) will turn out to be Muslim, just like it's possible they will turn out to be extremist right-wing activists, or left-wing agitators, or Muslim-fearing Anders-Breivik types, or lone individuals driven by apolitical mental illness. But the rush to proclaim the guilty party to be Muslim is seen in particular over and over with such events. Recall that on the day of the 2011 Oslo massacre by a right-wing, Muslim-hating extremist, the New York Times spent virtually the entire day strongly suggesting in its headlines that an Islamic extremist group was responsible, a claim other major news outlets (including the BBC and Washington Post) then repeated as fact. The same thing happened with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, when most major US media outlets strongly suggested that the perpetrators were Muslims. As FAIR documented back then:

"In the wake of the explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Office Building, the media rushed — almost en masse — to the assumption that the bombing was the work of Muslim extremists. 'The betting here is on Middle East terrorists,' declared CBS News' Jim Stewart just hours after the blast (4/19/95). 'The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East,' ABC's John McWethy proclaimed the same day.

"'It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,' wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer (Chicago Tribune, 4/21/95). 'Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working,' declared the New York Times' A.M. Rosenthal (4/21/95). The Geyer and Rosenthal columns were filed after the FBI released sketches of two suspects who looked more like Midwestern frat boys than mujahideen."

This lesson is never learned because, it seems, many people don't want to learn it. Even when it turns out not to have been Muslims who perpetrated the attack but rather right-wing, white Christians, the damage from this relentless and reflexive blame-pinning endures.

(3) One continually encountered yesterday expressions of dread and fear from Arabs and Muslims around the world that the attacker would be either or both. That's because they know that all members of their religious or ethnic group will be blamed, or worse, if that turns out to be the case. That's true even though leading Muslim-American groups such as CAIR harshly condemned the attack (as they always do) and urged support for the victims, including blood donations. One tweeter, referencing the earthquake that hit Iran this morning, satirized this collective mindset by writing: "Please don't be a Muslim plate tectonic activity."

As understandable as it is, that's just sad to witness. No other group reacts with that level of fear to these kinds of incidents, because no other group has similar cause to fear that they will all be hated or targeted for the acts of isolated, unrepresentative individuals. A similar dynamic has long prevailed in the domestic crime context: when the perpetrators of notorious crimes turned out to be African-American, the entire community usually paid a collective price. But the unique and well-grounded dread that hundreds of millions of law-abiding, peaceful Muslims and Arabs around the world have about the prospect that this attack in Boston was perpetrated by a Muslim highlights the climate of fear that has been created for and imposed on them over the last decade.

(4) The reaction to the Boston attack underscored, yet again, the utter meaninglessness of the word "terrorism". News outlets were seemingly scandalized that President Obama, in his initial remarks, did not use the words "terrorist attack" to describe the bombing. In response, the White House ran to the media to assure them that they considered it "terrorism". Fox News' Ed Henry quoted a "senior administration official" as saying this: "When multiple (explosive) devices go off that's an act of terrorism."

Is that what "terrorism" is? "When multiple (explosive) devices go off"? If so, that encompasses a great many things, including what the US does in the world on a very regular basis. Of course, the quest to know whether this was "terrorism" is really code for: "was this done by Muslims"? That's because, in US political discourse, "terrorism" has no real meaning other than: violence perpetrated by Muslims against the west. The reason there was such confusion and uncertainty about whether this was "terrorism" is because there is no clear and consistently applied definition of the term. At this point, it's little more than a term of emotionally manipulative propaganda. That's been proven over and over, and it was again yesterday.

(5) The history of these types of attacks over the last decade has been clear and consistent: they are exploited to obtain new government powers, increase state surveillance, and take away individual liberties. On NBC with Brian Williams last night, Tom Brokaw decreed that this will happen again and instructed us that we must meekly submit it to it:

"Everyone has to understand tonight that, beginning tomorrow morning early, there are going to be much tougher security considerations all across the country, and however exhausted we may be by that, we're going to have to learn to live with them, and get along and go forward, and not let them bring us to our knees. You'll remember last summer, how unhappy we were with the security at the Democratic and Republic conventions. Now I don't think we can raise those complaints after what happened in Boston."

Last night on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show, an FBI agent discussed the fact that the US government has the right to arrest terrorism suspects and not provide them with Miranda warnings before questioning them. After seeing numerous people express surprise at this claim on Twitter, I pointed out that this happened when the Obama administration exploited the attempted underwear bombing over Detroit to radically reduce Miranda rights over what they had been for decades. That's what the US government (aided by the sham "terrorism expert" industry) does in every single one of these cases: exploits the resulting fear to increase its own power and decrease everyone else's rights, including privacy.

At the Atlantic, security expert Bruce Schneier has a short but compelling article on how urgent it is that we not react to this Boston attack irrationally or with exaggerated fear, and that we particularly remain vigilant against government attempts to exploit fear to impose all new rights-reducing measures. He notes in particular how the more unusual an event is (such as this sort of attack on US soil), the more our brains naturally exaggerate its significance and frequency (John Cole makes a similar point).

In sum, even if the perpetrators of Monday's attack in Boston turn out to be politically motivated and subscribers to an anti-US ideology, it will still be a very rare event, one that poses far less danger to Americans than literally countless other threats. The most important lesson of the excesses arising from the 9/11 attacks should be this one: that the dangers of overreacting and succumbing to irrational fear are far, far greater than any other dangers posed by these type of events.

In the New Yorker, Amy Davidson has a superb and chilling analysis of how a 20-year-old Saudi victim of the bombing was instantly, and baselessly, converted by the US media and government into a "suspect".

• Boston Marathon bombing
• US constitution and civil liberties

One of the most powerful Op-eds ever published in the NYT, by a Yemeni detainee, underscores the president's role in this travesty

(updated below)

The New York Times this morning deserves credit for publishing one of the most powerful Op-Eds you will ever read. I urge you to read it in its entirety: it's by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a Yemeni national who has been imprisoned at Guantánamo without charges of any kind for more than 11 years. He's one of the detainees participating in the escalating hunger strike to protest both horrible conditions and, particularly, the supreme injustice of being locked in a cage indefinitely without any evidence of wrongdoing presented or any opportunity to contest the accusations that have been made. The hunger strike escalated over the weekend when guards shot rubber bullets at some of the detainees and forced them into single cells. Moqbel "wrote" the Op-ed through an interpreter and a telephone conversation with his lawyers at the human rights group Repreive:

"I've been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

"I've been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

"I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a 'guard' for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don't even seem to believe it anymore. But they don't seem to care how long I sit here, either. . . .

"The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.

"I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen's president do something, that is what I risk every day.

"Where is my government? I will submit to any 'security measures' they want in order to go home, even though they are totally unnecessary.

"I will agree to whatever it takes in order to be free. I am now 35. All I want is to see my family again and to start a family of my own.

"The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply. At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.

"And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.

"I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late."

Read the entire Op-ed, as he also details the brutality to which he is subjected every day when he is force-fed by camp guards.

The instant Guantánamo is mentioned, the people in the faction who spent years denouncing it as a Great Evil now instead rush to exonerate President Obama for any responsibility or blame. They insist that the fault rests with Congress for preventing Obama from fulfilling his pledge to close the camp.

I've written many times before why this claim, though grounded in some truth, is misleading in the extreme. I won't repeat all of that here; click the links and read the documentation proving its truth. In sum, Obama sought not to close Guantánamo but simply to re-locate it to Illinois, and in doing so, to preserve what makes it such a travesty of justice: its system of indefinite detention. The detainees there are not protesting in desperation because of their geographical location: we want to be in Illinois rather than a Cuban island. They are sacrificing their health and their lives in response to being locked in a cage for more than a decade without charges: a system Obama, independent of what Congress did, intended to preserve. Obama's task force in early 2010 decreed that "48 detainees were determined to be too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution" and will thus "remain in detention": i.e. indefinitely imprisoned with no charges. Given these facts, one cannot denounce the disgrace of Guantánamo's indefinite detention system while pretending that Obama sought to end it, at least not cogently or honestly.

But Obama's responsibility for the Guantánamo disgrace extends beyond that. Moqbel, the author of this Op-Ed, is Yemeni. More than half of the remaining 166 detainees at the camp are Yemeni. Dozens of those Yemenis (along with dozens of other detainees) have long ago been cleared for release by the US government on the ground that there is no evidence to believe they are a threat to anyone. A total of 87 of the remaining detainees - roughly half - have been cleared for release, of which 58 are Yemeni. Not even the US government at this point claims they are guilty or pose a threat to anyone.

The Yemeni government not only is willing to take them, but is now demanding their release, using language notably harsh for a US puppet regime:

"Even Yemen's president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who generally enjoys close relations with the United States, has directed rare criticism at the Obama administration.

"'We believe that keeping someone in prison for over 10 years without due process is clear-cut tyranny,' Hadi said in a recent interview broadcast over the Arabic language channel of Russia Today. 'The United States is fond of talking democracy and human rights. But when we were discussing the prisoner issue with the American attorney general, he had nothing to say.'"

"Clear-cut tyranny", says Yemen's president. But in January, 2010, Obama - not Congress, but Obama - announced a moratorium on the release of any Yemeni detainees, even ones cleared for release. As Amnesty International put it at the beginning of this year:

"But President Obama adopted the USA's unilateral and flawed 'global war' paradigm and accepted indefinite detentions under this framework.

"Then, in 2010, his administration announced that it had decided that four dozen of the Guantánamo detainees could neither be prosecuted nor released, but should remain in indefinite military detention without charge or criminal trial. The administration also imposed a moratorium on repatriation of Yemeni detainees. and said that 30 such detainees would be held in 'conditional' detention based on 'current security conditions in Yemen'. This moratorium is still in place."

Earlier this month, as news of the hunger strike at the camp emerged, the Boston Globe's editorial page explained precisely what responsibility Obama bears for what is happening and what he could and should do to end it:

"Obama himself has made transfers more difficult. After one terrorist plot, he issued a blanket moratorium on sending detainees to Yemen, where more than half of the detainees are from . . . .

"That sweeping language [enacted by Congress to restrict detainee release] has had a chilling effect. No one can give an absolute guarantee that detainees won't go back to fighting, just as no one can ensure that criminals released from US prisons won't go back to crime. As Charles Stimson, who headed detainee affairs under George W. Bush, points out: 'You have to tolerate some kind of risk.'

"That's why Obama ultimately deserves the blame for the failure to make more progress at closing Guantánamo. He seems unwilling to tolerate any risk at all. Even Shaker Aamer, a British resident cleared for release years ago, remains at Guantánamo, despite the British government's public and repeated requests that he be sent home.

"Obama should muster the political courage to stand up to Congress on Guantánamo. If his secretary of defense is unable to certify a transfer under the tough provisions, Obama retains the ability to transfer prisoners with a 'national security waiver' — a power he has never used. . . .

"About a third of the 88 men from Yemen have already been cleared for release. Keeping them at Guantánamo just because of their nationality flies in the face of justice. . . .

"Instead, Obama appears to have thrown in the towel on Guantánamo. In January, he closed the office of the envoy who led the effort to close the facility. Now, the US military is investing in a fiber optic cable to the base and planning for specialized medical care for 'aging detainees.' That suggests that some will be held there for the rest of their natural lives.

The last detainee to die at the camp, Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, who allegedly killed himself in September, was a Yemeni who had never been charged with a crime and had been cleared for release, but, when it was apparent he was going nowhere, "had regularly gone on hunger strikes and been sedated or placed on suicide watch". Independently, the worsening conditions at the camp that the detainees are protesting are under the exclusive province of Obama as Commander-in-chief.

The question of blame and responsibility is not about whose legacy will be stained by this. That's an abstract question of less urgency, which will be resolved in the future. The issue is who is empowered to end, or at least mitigate, the enduring national disgrace that is taking place at this camp. There is no doubt that Congress - both parties - played a significant role in the ongoing travesty by limiting Obama's options, and it deserves much of the blame. But for the reasons documented here, Obama deserves his own share of the blame, and it is substantial. He can take several steps to alleviate this injustice, as outlined by the Boston Globe, but simply refuses to do so. Having Democratic partisans reflexively claim every time Guantánamo is mentioned that it is all the fault of Congress is not only deceitful, but much worse, prevents pressure points being applied where they can be effective and closes off the most promising avenue for some positive reform.

When Obama, in early 2010, issued an Executive Order to preserve Guantánamo' system of indefinite detention, GOP Rep. Peter King lavished Obama with praise: "I commend the Obama Administration for issuing this Executive Order. The bottom line is that it affirms the Bush Administration policy that our government has the right to detain dangerous terrorists until the cessation of hostilities." Peter King, widely regarded as a national security extremist and anti-Muslim bigot, has continuously praised Obama's policies in the "War on Terror" generally. At some point, it may be worth thinking about what this convergence tells us.

The Guardian's Matt Williams this weekend reported on Shaker Aamer, the last UK detainee at the camp who has also never been charged with a crime and has been long ago cleared for release. Aamer, who has been kept in a cage for 11 years, is participating in the hunger strike. He describes "the deteriorating conditions of inmates" and "fears that he and others will soon die as a result of what he described as 'systematic torture'".

• Guantánamo Bay

A bill introduced by the California Democrat would uniquely exempt Israel from long-standing requirements imposed on all other nations

(updated below - Update II)

In order for the US to permit citizens of a foreign country to enter the US without a visa, that country must agree to certain conditions. Chief among them is reciprocity: that country must allow Americans to enter without a visa as well. There are 37 countries which have been permitted entrance into America's "visa waiver" program, and all of them - all 37 - reciprocate by allowing American citizens to enter their country without a visa.

The American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) is now pushing legislation that would allow Israel to enter this program, so that Israelis can enter the US without a visa. But as JTA's Ron Kampeas reports, there is one serious impediment: Israel has a practice of routinely refusing to allow Americans of Arab ethnicity or Muslim backgrounds to enter their country or the occupied territories it controls; it also bars those who are critical of Israeli actions or supportive of Palestinian rights. Israel refuses to relinquish this discriminatory practice of exclusion toward Americans, even as it seeks to enter the US's visa-free program for the benefit of Israeli citizens.

As a result, at the behest of Aipac, Democrat Barbara Boxer, joined by Republican Roy Blunt, has introduced a bill that would provide for Israel's membership in the program while vesting it with a right that no other country in this program has: namely, the right to exclude selected Americans from this visa-free right of entrance. In other words, the bill sponsored by these American senators would exempt Israel from a requirement that applies to every other nation on the planet, for no reason other than to allow the Israeli government to engage in racial, ethnic and religious discrimination against US citizens. As Lara Friedman explained when the Senate bill was first introduced, it "takes the extraordinary step of seeking to change the current US law to create a special and unique exception for Israel in US immigration law." In sum, it is as pure and blatant an example of prioritizing the interests of the Israeli government over the rights of US citizens as one can imagine, and it's being pushed by Aipac and a cast of bipartisan senators.

Israel's religious- and ethnicity-based entrance exclusions of American citizens are so well-documented and pervasive that even the US State Department provides an official warning about it in its official travel advisory for Israel, noting:

Some US citizens holding Israeli nationality, possessing a Palestinian identity card, or of Arab or Muslim origin have experienced significant difficulties in entering or exiting Israel or the West Bank."

Friedman notes that the bill is specifically designed to protect "Israel's regular and arbitrary denial of entry to US citizens . . . in particular US citizens of Arab descent or US citizens viewed as sympathetic to the Palestinians". As the former Director of the US Office of B'Tselem, Mitchell Plitnick, explained this week, concern over Israel's discriminatory exclusions was heightened by Israel's refusal this January to allow an American teacher of Palestinian descent, Nour Joudah, to enter Israel to teach English in the West Bank despite her holding a valid visa. As Plitnick noted, "Israel, undoubtedly, is concerned that a reciprocal agreement would compromise its ability to bar not only Palestinian-Americans, but also pro-Palestinian activists, from entering the country."

To accommodate this desire to discriminate, Boxer, Blunt and Aipac are now attempting to create a special exemption for Israel from the requirement to which all other countries are bound, and by which the US will be bound vis-a-vis Israelis. More amazingly, the only purpose of this exemption from these US senators would be to allow Israel to discriminate against the citizens of the country these senators are supposed to represent. As Mike Coogan of the US Campaign to End Israeli Occupation wrote in the Hill this week, "given that Israel views the mere existence of Palestinians as a threat, the [Boxer/Aipac bill] would essentially codify Israel's discrimination against Palestinian-, Muslim-, and Arab-Americans into US law." Indeed, Aipac is not even attempting to pretend this exemption has a non-discriminatory purpose. He further explained:

According to off the record accounts, AIPAC officials told members of Congress that there would need to be flexibility on this legal requirement to accommodate Israel's ongoing discrimination against Arab- and Muslim-Americans who attempt to travel to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories."

So brazen is this bill in the special favors it showers on Israel at the expense of American citizens that even normally loyal factions in Congress are balking. As Kampeas reported:

'It's stunning that you would give a green light to another country to violate the civil liberties of Americans traveling abroad,' said a staffer for one leading pro-Israel lawmaker in the US House of Representatives.

Stunning indeed, but unfortunately far from surprising. Coogan similarly reported:

"Numerous public reports and off-the-record accounts from legislators and staff signaled that the brazenness and late release of the Israel lobby's legislative demands blindsided both individual members and various committees. Provisions appeared tone deaf and legally problematic, even among Israel's strongest supporters. . . .

"Behind closed doors, members of Congress and legal counsel alike balked at the idea that Israel be allowed in the program but remain exempt from the reciprocity requirement. Attorneys for both individual members and committees privately advised that complying with the request would be a flagrant violation of certain US laws barring discrimination, and would undermine the US government's call for the equal protection of all its citizens traveling abroad."

Apparently, none of that is a concern for Barbara Boxer, Roy Blunt or Aipac. Protecting the equal rights of their own country's citizens quite obviously has little significance when weighed against the supreme mandate to serve the interests of the Israeli government. That's not hyperbole: how else can this bill be fairly described?

The bill, formally named the United States-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2013, now has a total of 18 co-sponsors. That includes 9 Democrats and 9 Republicans, perfectly symbolizing how bipartisan is loyalty to Aipac on Capitol Hill. Besides Boxer, the bill's chief sponsor, that list of co-sponsors includes such progressive favorites as Ron Wyden, Amy Klobuchar, Richard Blumenthal, and Benjamin Cardin, as well as reflexive right-wing GOP Israel supporters such as John Cornyn and Saxby Chambliss. Perhaps most disgracefully, one of the co-sponsors is Democrat Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, whose state boasts a large Arab-American and Muslim-American population: exactly the people who would be targeted by this discrimination from a foreign government which she is seeking to legalize.

Coogan notes that, even with 18 co-sponsors in the Senate, the bill has attracted an unusually low level of support for an Aipac bill, which typically passes quickly and without much resistance. Plitnick says that "it certainly seems like AIPAC reached a little too far with this bill" and notes that Coogan's reporting suggests "this is a sign that AIPAC's grip on Congress might be weakening". This all follows an article in the Forward suggesting that Aipac's possible attempts to have Israeli aid uniquely protected from the budget cuts mandated by "sequestration" could "deprive aid to Israel of its broader support in the foreign aid community" by creating resentment in Congress and in the country generally.

Indeed, as AIPAC itself notes in touting Boxer's Senate bill, it includes numerous other provisions to further bolster Israel's special status vis-a-vis US policy. The bill begins by reciting the standard narrative favored by the Israeli government: "the Government of Iran continues to pose a grave threat to the region and the world at large with its reckless uranium enrichment program and defiance of multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions." At a time when American citizens are facing severe budget cuts, the bill vows "to continue to provide Israel with robust security assistance". The bill accomplishes its pro-discrimination goal by mandating Israel's entrance into the visa-free program provided that Israel "has made every reasonable effort, without jeopardizing the security of the State of Israel, to ensure that reciprocal travel privileges are extended to all United States citizens'". That is the special exemption that no other country in the program is permitted: Israel, alone in the world, is not required to reciprocate for US citizens but merely will make "every reasonable effort, without jeopardizing the security of the State of Israel, to ensure that reciprocal travel privileges are extended to all United States citizens."

Despite the unusually tepid reaction in Congress, this fight is far from over. Aipac rarely if ever loses when it comes to bills they want Congress to enact. As Coogan notes, "even without a large number of co-sponsors, it could pass under unanimous consent or other rules used by members of Congress to stymie debate or give the impression that legislation has more support than is really the case."

Aipac and its supporters have long expressed righteous outrage at suggestions that they prioritize Israeli interests over US interests and those of American citizens. Yet it is hard to imagine a clearer or purer example of exactly that behavior than this pernicious bill. If you're a US politician finding yourself working to allow a foreign government to discriminate against your own fellow citizens - by vesting that foreign country with a right that no other country (including your own) has - then you're essentially broadcasting to the world that the interests of that foreign government take precedence over your own and over the equal rights of your own fellow citizens.

Somewhat ironically, as Kampeas notes, what long kept Israel out of the US's visa-free program were "concerns in Congress' Homeland Security and Intelligence Committees that granting visa-free access to Israel's Arab minority could pose a security risk to the United States." So what had previously prevented this deal was that the US was long driven by the same discriminatory mindset that is now driving Israel: we want to keep Arabs out of our country! Notably, the Boxer/Aipac bill accommodates only the Israeli concern about Arabs in their country, but not the identical US concern, as they provide this discriminatory exemption right only to Israel but not to their own country.

To illustrate how central the concept of reciprocity is in foreign relations (and to seize the opportunity to highlight a story I love so very much): on Friday, the US announced it was banning 18 Russian officials from entering the US due to human rights violations; today, Russia, in response, announced a list of 18 US officials banned from entering Russia due to their participation in the US torture regime, including David Addington, John Yoo, and two former commanding generals at Guantanamo. The Russians did not hide the fact that they were driven by one consideration only: the principle of reciprocity.

In 2004, the US began photographing and fingerprinting upon entry to the country the citizens of various countries, including Brazil; in response, a Brazilian court ordered the Brazilian government to begin photographing and fingerprinting US citizens entering Brazil. I recall quite well that a separate line was then created at all Brazilian airports under a huge sign that read: "for US citizens", where all arriving Americans waited in a long line. It's likely that the Brazilian government - which had no real interest in fingerprinting people - threw the fingerprints and photographs away. They did it for one reason: reciprocity.

This is the crucial, central principle which Barbara Boxer, Aipac and friends are discarding in order to benefit Israel. And what's most amazing is that they are discarding it not to the benefit of their own country and its citizens, but rather to their disadvantage, in order to benefit a foreign country. What they are saying, in effect, is that they want to waive reciprocity so that Israeli citizens can be treated better than US citizens in relations between the two countries. It is hard to overstate just how extraordinary that is.

• Israel

The axiom that political officials abuse their power and lie to the public when operating in the dark is proven yet again

For years, senior Obama officials, including the president himself, have been making public claims about their drone program that have just been proven to be categorically false. The evidence of this falsity is so conclusive that even establishment sources are using unusually harsh language - including "lies" - to describe Obama's statements. McClatchy's national security reporter, Jonathan Landay, obtained top-secret intelligence documents showing that "contrary to assurances it has deployed US drones only against known senior leaders of al-Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified 'other' militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area." That article quotes drone expert Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations as saying that "McClatchy's findings indicate that the administration is 'misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.'"

In his own must-read article at Foreign Policy about these disclosures, Zenko writes - under the headline: "Finally, proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars" - that "it turns out that the Obama administration has not been honest about who the CIA has been targeting with drones in Pakistan" and that the McClatchy article "plainly demonstrates that the claim repeatedly made by President Obama and his senior aides - that targeted killings are limited only to officials, members, and affiliates of al-Qaida who pose an imminent threat of attack on the US homeland - is false." Beyond the obvious harms of having the president and his administration continuously lie to the public about such a crucial matter, Zenko explains that these now-disproven claims may very well make the drone strikes illegal since assertions about who is being targeted were "essential to the legal foundations on which the strikes are ultimately based: the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force and the UN Charter's right to self-defense." Marcy Wheeler uses the documents to show how claims about drones from other key officials, including Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, are also unquestionably false.

Both Landay's article and Zenko's analysis should be read for the details, but I want to highlight the three key points from this:

(1) The Obama administration often has no idea who they are killing.

This has long been the most amazing aspect of the drone debate to me. Not even the CIA, let alone ordinary citizens, has any idea of the identity of many of the people they are targeting for death. Despite this central ignorance, huge numbers of people walk around in some sort of zombie-like state repeatedly spouting the mantra that "Drones are Good because We are Killing the Terrorists" - even though the CIA itself, let alone citizens defending its killings, have no clue who is even being targeted. It has long been known that Obama (like Bush before him) approved the use of so-called "signature strikes", where the identity of the target is not known but they are targeted for death anyway "based on a 'pattern of life' analysis – intelligence on their behavior suggesting that an individual is a militant" (the New York Times reported that "the joke [at the State Department] was that when the CIA sees 'three guys doing jumping jacks', the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp" and that "men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers - but they might also be farmers").

But these McClatchy documents make clear just how extreme this ignorance often is, even after the fact:

The documents also show that drone operators weren't always certain who they were killing despite the administration's guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA's targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been 'exceedingly rare.'"

Zenko adds: "even the US intelligence community does not necessarily know who it has killed; it is forced to use fuzzy categories like 'other militants' and 'foreign fighters'." Targeting people without knowing their identity is as dubious morally as it is legally, which is why, Zenko explains, "No US government official has ever openly acknowledged the practice of such 'signature strikes' because it is so clearly at odds with the bedrock principle of distinction required for using force within the laws of armed conflict." How can any minimally rational person continue to walk around defending Obama's drone kills on the ground that they are killing The Terrorists or that civilian deaths are rare when even the government, let alone these defenders, often have no clue who is being targeted and then killed?

(2) Whisteblowers are vital for transparency and accountability, which is precisely why the Obama administration is waging a war on them.

Here is yet another example where we obtained proof of the falsity of the government's claims, and possibly illegal actions, for only one reason: a whistleblower leaked top secret documents to a journalist, who then published them. When you combine an impotent Congress, a supine media, and a subservient federal judiciary - the institutions ostensibly designed to check excessive executive branch secrecy - government leakers have really have become the only reliable means for learning about the lies and bad acts of political officials. And that's precisely why the Obama administration is waging an unprecedented war against them. Yesterday on Democracy Now, New York Times national security reporter Mark Mazzetti explained to Amy Goodman how this whistleblower war - by design - is impeding basic investigative journalism:

"AMY GOODMAN: And you, as a reporter, Mark - we see the greatest crackdown on whistleblowers that we have ever seen under any president: President Obama's administration is going after more whistleblowers than all presidential administrations combined in the past. And the role of journalists, how do you feel, as you try to cover these issues? Do you feel the crackdown?

"MARK MAZZETTI: It's harder. There's no question. It's harder and harder. People are - this crackdown has perhaps had its intended effect, which was maybe not to go prosecute the cases that have been brought, but also to scare others into not talking. And so, I find that in the last couple years covering national security issues, you just find people who were perhaps once more eager to talk or willing to talk, for reasons that- not just because they were whistleblowers, but because they thought it was important for reporters to have context and information about some of these operations -those people are increasingly less likely to talk.

"AMY GOODMAN: And you, yourself, being prosecuted or put under a kind of spotlight from the administration?

"MARK MAZZETTI: I mean, it's certainly worrisome for us and is worrisome that, you know, they go after - they go after sources, and it brings the reporters into it, as well. I think we're at a critical time here to - you know, hopefully this ends. But, you know, once there is a momentum in some of these cases, the Justice Department works in its own ways, and so people, once they make cases, they tend to try to make other cases. And so, that's what some -that's what's concerning for us."

There is no doubt that this is not only the primary effect, but also the primary purpose, of Obama's vindictive though highly selective attacks on leakers: to create a climate of fear to deter whistleblowers and journalists who think about exposing the bad acts and lies of the government (leaking to glorify the President remains permissible and encouraged). As Mazzetti suggests, the traditional sources for national security investigative reporters have dried up and the journalists themselves are frightened about reporting on these matters. All of this from a President who vowed to have the Most Transparent Administration Ever and from a political movement that once professed such horror at the secrecy abuses of Nixon and Bush.

(3) Secrecy ensures both government lies and abuses of power.

That the Obama administrations' claims about its drone program have proven to be false should be viewed as anything but surprising. Aside from the potent impulse for governments to lie to their citizenry about what they do, secrecy in particular renders inevitable - not possible, not probable, but inevitable - both abuses of power and systematic lying. And secrecy has been the hallmark of the Obama administration generally and its drone killings in particular. A recent Washington Post article - headlined: "Drone use remains cloaked despite Obama's pledge for more transparency" - discussed Obama's repeatedly unfulfilled promises for more openness and explained:

"But there is no indication that moves have been made in that direction, and the White House has not taken a public position on any legislative initiatives [for greater transparency]. The administration has continued to contest legal challenges to the program's secrecy. It has argued that national security concerns and the sensitivity of foreign partners who allow strikes on their territory preclude public explanations of how targets are selected and follow-up reports on who is killed."

So extreme is this secrecy and the abuses that it is spawning that even former Obama officials, such as former Clinton State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter, are vehemently objecting. Slaughter told the Post:

"The idea that this president would leave office having dramatically expanded the use of drones - including [against] American citizens - without any public standards and no checks and balances . . . that there are no checks, and there is no international agreement; I would find that to be both terrible and ultimately will undermine a great deal of what this president will have done for good . . . .I cannot believe this is what he wants to be his legacy."

Just to get a sense for how inevitable government lies are when political officials can operate in secret, consider the McClatchy revelation that "the [secret CIA] reports estimated there was a single civilian casualty, an individual killed in an April 22, 2011, strike in North Waziristan". Aside from the fact that, as Zenko noted, this proves Brennan's public claim of no civilian casualties during this period to be a lie, and independently is a claim that can be made only by virtue of Obama's warped re-definition of "militant" to mean any military-age male in a strike zone, the demonstrated truth is that this exact drone strike killed "five women and four children". So here you have Brennan lying to the public about civilian deaths, and the CIA lying in its own documents - all enabled by the radical wall of secrecy behind which this all functions.

That secrecy is the linchpin of abuses of government power is as central a political principle as exists. This week, WikiLeaks released a serachable catalog of millions of once-secret but now-declassified documents and highlighted an incredibly revealing transcript of a 1975 meeting between then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Turkish officials. The US Congress had just enacted an arms embargo on Turkey in response to its aggressive actions in Cyprus, and Kissinger, at this meeting, made clear that the Ford administration opposed the embargo and was committed to finding a way to get arms and other aid to Turkey. When a Turkish official suggested that Kissinger enter into a secret agreement for European countries to provide the arms, this is what was said:

People who exercise power inevitably abuse it when they can wield it in secret. They inevitably lie about what they do when they can act in the dark. This is just basic human nature, and applies even to the most kind-hearted leaders, even ones who are charming and wonderful family men. This is what makes pervasive secrecy and a lack of oversight and accountability so dangerous. It's what makes it particularly dangerous when the powers in question are ones highly susceptible to abuse, such as the power to target people for execution.

For that reason, it's entirely unsurprising that the Obama administration got caught making plainly false statements about its killing program. But for the same reason, it's very significant that it has been caught. In light of this evidence, any journalists that continue to rely on US government statements about its killing program are revealing themselves to be eager propagandists, willing to be lied to and help amplify those lies (the same was true of journalists who continued to rely on government statements about "militants" being killed even after they knew how Obama officials had broadened that term to the point of meaninglessness). How many times do we have to learn these same lessons before recognizing their universality?

• Drones

Two former officials of the US National Security State become the most vocal critics of US policy toward Tehran

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett are two of the nation's preeminent experts on all matters relating to Iran. They have also become the nation's most unlikely yet compelling critics of US policy toward Tehran and particularly the misconceptions shaping political and media discourse in the west. What's most amazing is that they come directly from the belly of the National Security State beast: they both were Middle East officials in the National Security Council and State Department during the Bush years, while he also worked as a CIA analyst and she for the US mission to the UN and as one of the few diplomats to directly negotiate with Tehran in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. With their top secret security clearances, they both had front-row seats to the run-up to the Iraq war from inside the US government.

They have now published an extraordinary new book entitled Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran. No matter your views, it's impossible to meaningfully participate in debates over these issues without understanding the facts they have assembled and perspectives they advocate. Exactly as happened with Iraq, there is a whole slew of highly dubious assumptions and narratives about Iran and the US's relationship to it that are rarely challenged in any meaningful way in standard media circles. The Leveretts and "Going to Tehran" are vital to thinking critically about these claims.

I spoke with them for 30 minutes about Iran, their new book, and the criticisms to which they have been subjected, and that discussion can be heard below. They identify the most significant misconceptions about Iran that prevail in the west, analyze the inflammatory policies toward Iran from the Obama administration (and its true motives in the region), and discuss the lessons they learned from the Iraq war and how they apply to Iran. Hillary also recounts the key role played by Bill Clinton in bolstering the resolve of her then-boss, Condoleezza Rice, to wage war on Iraq. Just as happened in the run-up to the Iraq war - when even the most informed experts on that country were marginalized if they opposed the prevailing Beltway assumptions - the Leveretts, as they detail here, are now experiencing a similar marginalization process (I erroneously said in the introduction that Flynt is with the New American Foundation: he no longer is, but is instead now a professor at Pennsylvania State University's School of International Affairs).

Both because of their expertise and their long immersion in these issues, they (and their data-filled book) deserve a prominent voice in all serious debates about Iran. They are very worth listening to. The 30-minute podcast can be heard on the player below (or at this link):

• Iran

The dictate that one 'not speak ill of the dead' is (at best) appropriate for private individuals, not influential public figures

News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." Following in the footsteps of Santa Claus, Steve Hynd quickly compiled a list of all the naughty boys and girls "on the left" who dared to express criticisms of the dearly departed Prime Minister, warning that he "will continue to add to this list throughout the day". Former Tory MP Louise Mensch, with no apparent sense of irony, invoked precepts of propriety to announce: "Pygmies of the left so predictably embarrassing yourselves, know this: not a one of your leaders will ever be globally mourned like her."

This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. "Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts. I made this argument at length last year when Christopher Hitchens died and a speak-no-ill rule about him was instantly imposed (a rule he, more than anyone, viciously violated), and I won't repeat that argument today; those interested can read my reasoning here.

But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms.

Whatever else may be true of her, Thatcher engaged in incredibly consequential acts that affected millions of people around the world. She played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq. She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as "terrorists", something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends"). And as my Guardian colleague Seumas Milne detailed last year, "across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted – and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown."

To demand that all of that be ignored in the face of one-sided requiems to her nobility and greatness is a bit bullying and tyrannical, not to mention warped. As David Wearing put it this morning in satirizing these speak-no-ill-of-the-deceased moralists: "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims. Tasteless." Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. Here, for instance, was what the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez:

To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance."

Nobody, at least that I know of, objected to that observation on the ground that it was disrespectful to the ability of the Chavez family to mourn in peace. Any such objections would have been invalid. It was perfectly justified to note that, particularly as the Guardian also explained that "to the millions who revered him – a third of the country, according to some polls – a messiah has fallen, and their grief will be visceral." Chavez was indeed a divisive and controversial figure, and it would have been reckless to conceal that fact out of some misplaced deference to the grief of his family and supporters. He was a political and historical figure and the need to accurately portray his legacy and prevent misleading hagiography easily outweighed precepts of death etiquette that prevail when a private person dies.

Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. There's something distinctively creepy - in a Roman sort of way - about this mandated ritual that our political leaders must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death. This is accomplished by this baseless moral precept that it is gauche or worse to balance the gushing praise for them upon death with valid criticisms. There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn't change simply because they die. If anything, it becomes more compelling to commemorate those bad acts upon death as the only antidote against a society erecting a false and jingoistically self-serving history.

• Margaret Thatcher

Beijing considers but rejects drone-killing an elusive foreign killer hiding in the jungle claiming sovereignty issues and the need for a trial

A heinous act of wanton slaughter, committed on 5 October 2011, dominated Chinese news for months. Two Chinese cargo ships were found adrift on the Mekong River, a major trade route for China, near the Thai-Burmese border, with 13 Chinese crew members brutally killed, summarily stabbed or shot with their hands bound behind their backs and their mutilated bodies dumped in the water. The Chinese government suspended passenger and cargo traffic on the river, while the Chinese public was furious at the government's failure to protect against violence on the Mekong and "increasingly critical of government agencies not perceived as taking a strong enough stand to defend the country".

The suspected mastermind of the massacre was quickly named by the Chinese: Naw Kham, the Burmese leader of the largest drug trafficking gang in the so-called Golden Triangle, where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand converge. A major manhunt for Naw Kham ensued under the direction of Liu Yuejin, head of China's antinarcotics bureau in its Ministry of Public Security. But it proved exceedingly difficult to find him because he was hiding in the vast mountainous jungles of Laos, which he knew well and which had a network of loyalists to protect him that included, according the experts in the region, operatives within the Burmese and Thai armies and the Laotian security forces.

Moreover, the Chinese were limited by both political constraints and technological capabilities in what they could do in that region. The Global Times noted that "some analysts had even said the hunt for Naw Kham could be as difficult as the hunt for Bin Laden," while Chinese newspapers quoted others as saying that "the overseas manhunt was more difficult than that of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, in that the only preliminary clue [about Naw Kham] was a suspect portrait taken 20 years ago." On at least three occasions when the Chinese were convinced they had located him, they were unable to secure the cooperation of government and local police officials quickly enough or overcome the protection of local villagers, who engaged in firefights with police forces trying to apprehend him. That enabled Naw Kham to disappear across the border into the jungle of Myanmar.

As a result of these obstacles, the Global Times reported back in February, China seriously considered using a drone strike in Myanmar to kill him: "an unmanned aircraft to carry 20 kilograms of TNT to bomb the area". That option was rejected because, the report said, the Chinese were intent on capturing him alive and trying him in court. This morning, the New York Times provides more details on this decision-making process:

"The Chinese were so intent on catching up with Mr. Naw Kham that security forces considered using a drone to kill him.

"The drone idea was eventually abandoned even as Mr. Naw Kham outfoxed his pursuers in Myanmar's mountainous jungles, said Mr. Liu, a precise man with a photograph of himself at a Mao heritage site on his office wall.

"The Chinese news media reported that Mr. Liu's superiors had ordered that Mr. Naw Kham be captured alive. Mr. Liu, whose antinarcotics bureau runs a fleet of unarmed drones for surveillance in China's border areas, insisted that the idea was shelved because of legal restraints.

"'China using unmanned aircraft would have met with problems,' he said. 'My initial reaction was that this was not realistic because this relates to international and sovereignty issues."

What kind of weak, soft, overly legalistic government worries about trivial concerns like international law and "sovereignty issues" when it comes to drone-killing heinous murderers for whom capture is difficult? Why not just shoot Hellfire missiles wherever you think he might be hiding in weaker countries and kill him and anyone who happens to be near him? Or if you are able to find him, at least just riddle his skull with bullets, dump his corpse into the ocean, and then chant nationalistic slogans in the street and at your political conventions. Who would ever want to give a trial to such a heinous and savage foreign killer of your citizens, particularly if it means risking the lives of your soldiers to apprehend him?

What China did instead was conduct what the NYT this morning calls a "methodical and unyielding" law enforcement investigation over the course of six months. Using informants and following up on leads, they learned of Naw Kham's plans to escape to Laos. In April of last year, the Laotian police, acting in concert with the Chinese, apprehended him as he attempted to flee. He was quickly flown back to China and put on trial, which was nationally televised. In September, he pleaded guilty to the killings and was sentenced to death; after he withdrew his plea, his final appeal was rejected in December; and he was executed by lethal injection last month.

In contrast to the strong and just US - which not only boldly drone-kills whomever and wherever it wants without regard to irritating trivialities like sovereignty but even tried (unsuccessfully) to pressure the Afghan government to execute its accused "drug lords" with no trials - the weak and soft Chinese are actually celebrating their own impotence. As the New York Times put it in February: "'We didn't use China's military, and we didn't harm a single foreign citizen,' Mr. Liu bragged after the arrest in April 2012." Note the word "brag": the Times has to infuse something negative into the success of the Chinese in avoiding killing foreign civilians and relying on law enforcement processes rather than military strikes to apprehend an elusive killer.

Indeed, in reporting on this episode, the New York Times twice tried to depict it as proof of the growing Chinese menace. In February, it said that the mere possibility that China would use a drone strike "highlights China's increasing advances in unmanned aerial warfare, a technology dominated by the United States and used widely by the Obama administration for the targeted killing of terrorists" (by "terrorists", the Times means: people accused of being terrorists by the US government with no due process). Then this morning, the Times claims that China's apprehension of Naw Kham in cooperation with other governments shows, as the headline put it, that "Beijing Flaunts Cross-Border Clout in Search for Drug Lord" and that "the capture shows how China's law enforcement tentacles reach far beyond its borders into a region now drawn by investment and trade into China's orbit, and where the United States' influence is being challenged."

So even when China refuses to use weapons the US routinely uses, by citing precepts of international law, respect for the sovereignty of neighboring countries and at least the pretense of due process, this shows that China is a growing threat to US interests in the region. At some point, either China or Russia or someone else is going to start drone-killing people in other countries, and the only thing certain to happen is that US political and media circles will erupt with condemnation without the slightest sense of irony or shame (provided that it's done by a government that is not a US client). The fact that China's restraint is depicted in US media circles as evidence of the growing threat it poses highlights the mindset that drives this.

There are, of course, ample reasons to treat Chinese claims with great suspicion. One expert quoted in the Times speculated that China's restraint may have been due to its lack of confidence in its drone technology (that sounds unconvincing: if they wanted to just kill him and didn't trust their drones, they could have used a fighter jet). Either way, he noted that if they don't already have full drone-killing capability they will shortly. When that happens, he said, "they surely will have America's armed drone practice as a convenient cover for legitimating their own practice". But at least for now, America stands alone as the only country to embrace this model.

• China
• Drones

A long overdue debate breaks out about whether rational atheism is being used as a cover for Islamophobia and US militarism

(updated below - Update II - Update III [Thurs.])

Two columns have been published in the past week harshly criticizing the so-called "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens: this one by Nathan Lean in Salon, and this one by Murtaza Hussain in Al Jazeera. The crux of those columns is that these advocates have increasingly embraced a toxic form of anti-Muslim bigotry masquerading as rational atheism. Yesterday, I posted a tweet to Hussain's article without comment except to highlight what I called a "very revealing quote" flagged by Hussain, one in which Harris opined that "the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists."

Shortly after posting the tweet, I received an angry email from Harris, who claimed that Hussain's column was "garbage", and he eventually said the same thing about Lean's column in Salon. That then led to a somewhat lengthy email exchange with Harris in which I did not attempt to defend every claim in those columns from his attacks because I didn't make those claims: the authors of those columns can defend themselves perfectly well. If Harris had problems with what those columns claim, he should go take it up with them.

I do, however, absolutely agree with the general argument made in both columns that the New Atheists have flirted with and at times vigorously embraced irrational anti-Muslim animus. I repeatedly offered to post Harris' email to me and then tweet it so that anyone inclined to do so could read his response to those columns and make up their own minds. Once he requested that I do so, I posted our exchange here.

Harris himself then wrote about and posted our exchange on his blog, causing a couple dozen of his followers to send me emails. I also engaged in a discussion with a few Harris defenders on Facebook. What seemed to bother them most was the accusation in Hussain's column that there is "racism" in Harris' anti-Muslim advocacy. A few of Harris' defenders were rage-filled and incoherent, but the bulk of them were cogent and reasoned, so I concluded that a more developed substantive response to Harris was warranted.

Given that I had never written about Sam Harris, I found it odd that I had become the symbol of Harris-bashing for some of his faithful followers. Tweeting a link to an Al Jazeera column about Harris and saying I find one of his quotes revealing does not make me responsible for every claim in that column. I tweet literally thousands of columns and articles for people to read. I'm responsible for what I say, not for every sentence in every article to which I link on Twitter. The space constraints of Twitter have made this precept a basic convention of the medium: tweeting a link to a column or article or re-tweeting it does not mean you endorse all of it (or even any of it).

That said, what I did say in my emails with Harris - and what I unequivocally affirm again now - is not that Harris is a "racist", but rather that he and others like him spout and promote Islamophobia under the guise of rational atheism. I've long believed this to be true and am glad it is finally being dragged out into open debate. These specific atheism advocates have come to acquire significant influence, often for the good. But it is past time that the darker aspects of their worldview receive attention.

Whether Islamophobia is a form of "racism" is a semantic issue in which I'm not interested for purposes of this discussion. The vast majority of Muslims are non-white; as a result, when a white westerner becomes fixated on attacking their religion and advocating violence and aggression against them, as Harris has done, I understand why some people (such as Hussain) see racism at play: that, for reasons I recently articulated, is a rational view to me. But "racism" is not my claim here about Harris. Irrational anti-Muslim animus is.

Contrary to the assumptions under which some Harris defenders are laboring, the fact that someone is a scientist, an intellectual, and a convincing and valuable exponent of atheism by no means precludes irrational bigotry as a driving force in their worldview. In this case, Harris' own words, as demonstrated below, are his indictment.

Let's first quickly dispense with some obvious strawmen. Of course one can legitimately criticize Islam without being bigoted or racist. That's self-evident, and nobody is contesting it. And of course there are some Muslim individuals who do heinous things in the name of their religion - just like there are extremists in all religions who do awful and violent things in the name of that religion, yet receive far less attention than the bad acts of Muslims (here are some very recent examples). Yes, "honor killings" and the suppression of women by some Muslims are heinous, just as the collaboration of US and Ugandan Christians to enact laws to execute homosexuals is heinous, and just as the religious-driven, violent occupation of Palestine, attacks on gays, and suppression of women by some Israeli Jews in the name of Judaism is heinous. That some Muslims commit atrocities in the name of their religion (like some people of every religion do) is also too self-evident to merit debate, but it has nothing to do with the criticisms of Harris.

Nonetheless, Harris defenders such as the neoconservative David Frum want to pretend that criticisms of Harris consist of nothing more than the claim that, as Frum put it this week, "it's OK to be an atheist, so long as you omit Islam from your list of the religions to which you object." That's a wildly dishonest summary of the criticisms of Harris as well as people like Dawkins and Hitchens; absolutely nobody is arguing anything like that. Any atheist is going to be critical of the world's major religions, including Islam, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

The key point is that Harris does far, far more than voice criticisms of Islam as part of a general critique of religion. He has repeatedly made clear that he thinks Islam is uniquely threatening: "While the other major world religions have been fertile sources of intolerance, it is clear that the doctrine of Islam poses unique problems for the emergence of a global civilization." He has insisted that there are unique dangers from Muslims possessing nuclear weapons, as opposed to nice western Christians (the only ones to ever use them) or those kind Israeli Jews: "It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of devout Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence." In his 2005 "End of Faith", he claimed that "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death."

This is not a critique of religion generally; it is a relentless effort to depict Islam as the supreme threat. Based on that view, Harris, while depicting the Iraq war as a humanitarian endeavor, has proclaimed that "we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam." He has also decreed that "this is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with millions more than have any direct affiliation with Al Qaeda." "We" - the civilized peoples of the west - are at war with "millions" of Muslims, he says. Indeed, he repeatedly posits a dichotomy between "civilized" people and Muslims: "All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth."

This isn't "quote-mining", the term evidently favored by Harris and his defenders to dismiss the use of his own words to make this case. To the contrary, I've long ago read the full context of what he has written and did so again yesterday. All the links are provided here - as they were in Hussain and Lean's columns - so everyone can see it for themselves. Yes, he criticizes Christianity, but he reserves the most intense attacks and superlative condemnations for Islam, as well as unique policy prescriptions of aggression, violence and rights abridgments aimed only at Muslims. As the atheist scholar John L Perkins wrote about Harris' 2005 anti-religion book: "Harris is particularly scathing about Islam."

When criticism of religion morphs into an undue focus on Islam - particularly at the same time the western world has been engaged in a decade-long splurge of violence, aggression and human rights abuses against Muslims, justified by a sustained demonization campaign - then I find these objections to the New Atheists completely warranted. That's true of Dawkins' proclamation that "[I] often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today." It's true of Hitchens' various grotesque invocations of Islam to justify violence, including advocating cluster bombs because "if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too". And it's true of Harris' years-long argument that Islam poses unique threats beyond what Christianity, Judaism, and the other religions of the world pose.

Most important of all - to me - is the fact that Harris has used his views about Islam to justify a wide range of vile policies aimed primarily if not exclusively at Muslims, from torture ("there are extreme circumstances in which I believe that practices like 'water-boarding' may not only be ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary"); to steadfast support for Israel, which he considers morally superior to its Muslim adversaries ("In their analyses of US and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. . . . there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah"); to anti-Muslim profiling ("We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it"); to state violence ("On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right. This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that 'liberals are soft on terrorism.' It is, and they are").

Revealingly, Harris sided with the worst Muslim-hating elements in American society by opposing the building of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero, milking the Us v. Them militaristic framework to justify his position:

"The erection of a mosque upon the ashes of this atrocity will also be viewed by many millions of Muslims as a victory — and as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice."

Harris made the case against that innocuous community center by claiming - yet again - that Islam is a unique threat: "At this point in human history, Islam simply is different from other faiths."

In sum, he sprinkles intellectual atheism on top of the standard neocon, right-wing worldview of Muslims. As this superb review of Harris' writings on Israel, the Middle East and US militarism put it, "any review of Sam Harris and his work is a review essentially of politics": because his atheism invariably serves - explicitly so - as the justifying ground for a wide array of policies that attack, kill and otherwise suppress Muslims. That's why his praise for European fascists as being the only ones saying "sensible" things about Islam is significant: not because it means he's a European fascist, but because it's unsurprising that the bile spewed at Muslims from that faction would be appealing to Harris because he shares those sentiments both in his rhetoric and his advocated policies, albeit with a more intellectualized expression.

Beyond all that, I find extremely suspect the behavior of westerners like Harris (and Hitchens and Dawkins) who spend the bulk of their time condemning the sins of other, distant peoples rather than the bulk of their time working against the sins of their own country. That's particularly true of Americans, whose government has brought more violence, aggression, suffering, misery, and degradation to the world over the last decade than any other. Even if that weren't true - and it is - spending one's time as an American fixated on the sins of others is a morally dubious act, to put that generously, for reasons Noam Chomsky explained so perfectly:

"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it.

"So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."

I, too, have written before about the hordes of American commentators whose favorite past-time is to lounge around pointing fingers at other nations, other governments, other populations, other religions, while spending relatively little time on their own. The reason this is particularly suspect and shoddy behavior from American commentators is that there are enormous amounts of violence and extremism and suffering which their government has unleashed and continues to unleash on the world. Indeed, much of that US violence is grounded in if not expressly justified by religion, including the aggressive attack on Iraq and steadfast support for Israeli aggression (to say nothing of the role Judaism plays in the decades-long oppression by the Israelis of Palestinians and all sorts of attacks on neighboring Arab and Muslim countries). Given the legion human rights violations from their own government, I find that Americans and westerners who spend the bulk of their energy on the crimes of others are usually cynically exploiting human rights concerns in service of a much different agenda.

Tellingly, Harris wrote in 2004 that "we are now mired in a religious war in Iraq and elsewhere." But by this, he did not mean that the US and the west have waged an aggressive attack based at least in part on religious convictions. He meant that only Them - those Muslims over there, whose country we invaded and destroyed - were engaged in a vicious and primitive religious war. As usual, so obsessed is he with the supposed sins of Muslims that he is blinded to the far worse sins from his own government and himself: the attack on Iraq and its accompanying expressions of torture, slaughter, and the most horrific abuses imaginable.

Worse, even in its early stages, Harris casually dismissed the US attack on Iraq as a "red herring"; that war, he said, was simply one in which "civilized human beings [westerners] are now attempting, at considerable cost to themselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people." Western violence and aggression is noble, civilized, and elevated; Muslim violence (even when undertaken to defend against an invasion by the west) is primitive, vicious, brutal and savage. That is the blatant double standard of one who seeks not to uphold human rights but to exploit those concepts to demonize a targeted group.

Indeed, continually depicting Muslims as the supreme evil - even when compared to the west's worst monsters - is par for Harris' course, as when he inveighed:

Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies."

Just ponder that. To Harris, there are "tens of millions" of Muslims "far scarier" then the US political leader who aggressively invaded and destroyed a nation of 26 million people, constructed a worldwide regime of torture, oversaw a network of secret prisons beyond the reach of human rights groups, and generally imposed on the world his "Dark Side". That is the Harris worldview: obsessed with bad acts of foreign Muslims, almost entirely blind to - if not supportive of - the far worse acts of westerners like himself.

Or consider this disgusting passage:

"The outrage that Muslims feel over US and British foreign policy is primarily the product of theological concerns. Devout Muslims consider it a sacrilege for infidels to depose a Muslim tyrant and occupy Muslim lands — no matter how well intentioned the infidels or malevolent the tyrant. Because of what they believe about God and the afterlife and the divine provenance of the Koran, devout Muslims tend to reflexively side with other Muslims, no matter how sociopathic their behavior."

Right: can you believe those primitive, irrational Muslims get angry when their countries are invaded, bombed and occupied and have dictators imposed on them rather than exuding gratitude toward the superior civilized people who do all that - all because of their weird, inscrutable religion that makes them dislike things such as foreign invasions, bombing campaigns and externally-imposed tyrants? And did you know that only Muslims - but not rational westerners like Harris - "reflexively side" with their own kind? This, from the same person who hails the Iraq war as something that should produce gratitude from the invaded population toward the "civilized human beings" - people like him - who invaded and destroyed their country. Theodore Sayeed noted the glaring irony pervading the bulk of Harris's political writing:

"For a man who likes to badger Muslims about their 'reflexive solidarity' with Arab suffering, Harris seems keen to display his own tribal affections for the Jewish state. The virtue of Israel and the wickedness of her enemies are recurring themes in his work."

Indeed. And the same is true of the US and the West generally. Harris' self-loving mentality amounts to this: those primitive Muslims are so tribal for reflexively siding with their own kind, while I constantly tout the superiority of my own side and justify what We do against Them. How anyone can read any of these passages and object to claims that Harris' worldview is grounded in deep anti-Muslim animus is staggering. He is at least as tribal, jingoistic, and provincial as those he condemns for those human failings, as he constantly hails the nobility of his side while demeaning those Others.

Perhaps the most repellent claim Harris made to me was that Islamophobia is fictitious and non-existent, "a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia". How anyone can observe post-9/11 political discourse in the west and believe this is truly mystifying. The meaning of "Islamophobia" is every bit as clear as "anti-semitism" or "racism" or "sexism" and all sorts of familiar, related concepts. It signifies (1) irrational condemnations of all members of a group or the group itself based on the bad acts of specific individuals in that group; (2) a disproportionate fixation on that group for sins committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups, especially one's own; and/or (3) sweeping claims about the members of that group unjustified by their actual individual acts and beliefs. I believe all of those definitions fit Harris quite well, as evinced by this absurd and noxious overgeneralization from Harris:

The only future devout Muslims can envisage — as Muslims — is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, politically subjugated, or killed."

That is utter garbage: and dangerous garbage at that. It is no more justifiable than saying that the only future which religious Jews - as Jews - can envision is one in which non-Jews live in complete slavery and subjugation: a claim often made by anti-semites based on highly selective passages from the Talmud. It is the same tactic that says Christians - as Christians - can only envisage the extreme subjugation of women and violence against non-believers based not only on the conduct of some Christians but on selective passages from the Bible. Few would have difficultly understanding why such claims about Jews and Christians are intellectually bankrupt and menacing.

Worse still, these claims from Harris about how Muslims think are simply factually false. An AFP report on a massive 2008 Gallup survey of the Muslim world simply destroyed most of Harris' ugly generalizations about the beliefs of Muslims:

"A huge survey of the world's Muslims released Tuesday challenges Western notions that equate Islam with radicalism and violence. . . . It shows that the overwhelming majority of Muslims condemned the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001 and other subsequent terrorist attacks, the authors of the study said in Washington. . . .

"About 93 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews. . . .

"Meanwhile, radical Muslims gave political, not religious, reasons for condoning the attacks, the poll showed. . . .

"But the poll, which gives ordinary Muslims a voice in the global debate that they have been drawn into by 9/11, showed that most Muslims -- including radicals -- admire the West for its democracy, freedoms and technological prowess.

"What they do not want is to have Western ways forced on them, it said."

Indeed, even a Pentagon-commissioned study back in 2004 - hardly a bastion of PC liberalism - obliterated Harris' self-justifying stereotype that anti-American sentiment among Muslims is religious and tribal rather than political and rational. That study concluded that "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies": specifically "American direct intervention in the Muslim world" — through the US's "one sided support in favor of Israel"; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, "the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan".

As I noted before, a long-time British journalist friend of mine wrote to me shortly before I began writing at the Guardian to warn me of a particular strain plaguing the British liberal intellectual class; he wrote: "nothing delights British former lefties more than an opportunity to defend power while pretending it is a brave stance in defence of a left liberal principle." That - "defending power while pretending it is a brave stance in defence of a left liberal principle" - is precisely what describes the political work of Harris and friends. It fuels the sustained anti-Muslim demonization campaign of the west and justifies (often explicitly) the policies of violence, militarism, and suppression aimed at them. It's not as vulgar as the rantings of Pam Geller or as crude as the bloodthirsty theories of Alan Dershowitz, but it's coming from a similar place and advancing the same cause.

I welcome, and value, aggressive critiques of faith and religion, including from Sam Harris and some of these others New Atheists whose views I'm criticizing here. But many terms can be used to accurately describe the practice of depicting Islam and Muslims as the supreme threat to all that is good in the world. "Rational", "intellectual" and "well-intentioned" are most definitely not among them.

Sam Harris in 2005: "I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror."

Sam Harris in 2012: "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it."

Sam Harris in 2005: "In our dealings with the Muslim world, we must acknowledge that Muslims have not found anything of substance to say against the actions of the September 11 hijackers, apart from the ubiquitous canard that they were really Jews." (Harris' own ugly canard would come as news to CAIR, the leading Muslim advocacy group, as well as most of the world's Muslims).

By themselves, those statements - fully in context - negate 90% of the comments from Harris defenders. If you're going to defend him, do remember to defend these.

One last point: I absolutely do not believe that Harris - or, for that matter, Hitchens - is representative of all or even most atheists in this regard. The vast majority of atheists I know find such sentiments repellent. They are representative only of themselves and those who share these views, not atheists generally.

Several commenters and emailers object to the inclusion of Dawkins with Hitchens and (especially) Harris on this issue. Both the above-cited Salon and Al Jazeera columns (particularly the former) contain several quotes with links from Dawkins, including his recent decree that he "often" says that Islam is the "greatest force for evil today". Those statements seem clear and incriminating. Nonetheless, my focus here is on Harris, and I haven't conducted the type of comprehensive examination of Dawkins' writing as I have of Harris', so whether Dawkins belongs in this group to the same extent that Harris does is something that is worthy of further debate. One sentence was edited to reflect the debatability of Dawkins' inclusion.

As a follow-up to all of this, here are a few related items. First, here is Noam Chomsky in late 2011 - in the first two minutes of the video - explaining how Harris and Hitchens exploit atheism to justify US militarism and convert it into little more than another religion:

And here is Chomsky in 2008 elaborating further on Harris and company [quote and link fixed]:

"[I]f it is to be even minimally serious, the 'new atheism' should focus its concerns on the virulent secular religions of state worship, so well exemplified by those who laud huge atrocities like the invasion of Iraq, or cannot comprehend why they might have some concern when their own state, with their support, carries out some of its minor peccadilloes, like killing probably tens of thousands of poor Africans by destroying their main source of pharmaceutical supplies on a whim -- arguably more morally depraved than intentional killing, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere.

"In brief, to be minimally serious the 'new atheism' should begin by looking in the mirror."

That is the hallmark of this New Atheist movement: exploiting rational atheism to support and glorify US state power and aggression; they have become a prime source for pseudo-intellectual justification of US government conduct.

Here's a 2008 interview with the great war journalist Chris Hedges on what he concluded after reviewing the work of "New Atheists" such as Harris and Hitchens: "I was appalled at how they essentially co-opted secular language to present the same kind of chauvinism, intolerance, and bigotry that we see in the Christian right." He adds:

"They're secular fundamentalists. . . . I find that it's, like the Christian right, a fear based movement. It's a movement that is very much a reaction to 9/11. The kinds of things that they write about Muslims could be lifted from the most rabid sermon by a radical fundamentalist."

Having dealt somewhat extensively with Harris and many of his supporters this week, I can say that I haven't encountered such religious-type fervor and jingoistic and tribalistic self-love (My Side is superior to Theirs!!) in quite a long time.

Meanwhile, even Christopher Hitchens - Harris' comrade in US militarism - denounced Harris' statement that "the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists." Wrote Hitchens in 2006 shortly after Harris wrote that: "When I read Sam Harris's irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: 'Not while I'm alive, they won't.'" I think Harris' "fascists" comment is far from his worst statement - it has the limited significance I outlined - but if Christopher Hitchens, of all people, is telling you that you're being "irresponsible" in your anti-Islam advocacy, that's a pretty strong sign that you've gone way too far.

• Atheism
• Islam

New developments in the Assange case, Saadiq Long finally makes it home, and Barrett Brown's mother is convicted

(1) The government of Ecuador continues its attempts to obtain assurances from either Britain or Sweden that Julian Assange's appearance in Stockholm for questioning on sex crimes allegations will not be used to extradite him to the US. This week, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on several interesting new developments in the case in Sweden, including the fact that the high-profile prosecutor driving the case from the start has now "abruptly" left it. Moreover, both Alexa O'Brien and Ryan Gallagher note that the Obama DOJ continues to say that its Grand Jury investigation of Assange and WikiLeaks is ongoing. Leaked documents from last year reflect that Australian diplomats believe the US is still intent on prosecuting WikiLeaks (a threatened prosecution which former New York Times General Counsel James Goodale recently described as "absolutely frightening" and "the biggest challenge" to press freedoms today).

Those of us who believe there is a valid fear that WikiLeaks will be prosecuted by the US for its journalism have long advocated - along with the Ecuadorians - that Assange immediately go to Stockholm to face the accusations against him in exchange for the Swedish government agreeing that his presence there will not be used as a pretext to turn him over to the US. In response, numerous WikiLeaks critics, led by New Statesman legal blogger David Allen Green, insisted that it would be impossible for the Swedish government to agree to this proposal because, as he put it last year, "any final word on an extradition would (quite properly) be with an independent Swedish court, and not the government giving the purported 'guarantee'." As I've detailed previously on several occasions, that claim is absolutely false: even if Swedish courts rule that extradition is legally proper, the discretion lies with the Swedish government (as it does with most governments in extradition cases) to decide if extradition should occur. The final decison-maker on extradition is the Swedish government.

This week, Stefan Lindskog, a justice of the Supreme Court of Sweden, the highest court in that country, definitively settled that disagreement when he wrote an excellent column on the facts of the Assange case and explained (emphasis added):

If a person whose extradition is requested opposes extradition, it falls to the Supreme Court to examine whether extradition can be legally granted under the conditions laid down by law. The Supreme Court then delivers its opinion to the government for use in its examination of the case.

If the Supreme Court holds that there is any legal impediment to extradition, the government is not allowed to approve the request. The government can, however, refuse extradition even if the Supreme Court has not declared against it.

The evidence that this is true has long been clear. Like most governments, the Swedish government retains the power to refuse extradition even when its courts find that it would be legally valid; that's because extradition entails more than just legalistic questions but also encompasses political considerations and questions of fairness and equity. That's why this always has been and remains the right solution: the Swedish government should agree that it will not use Assange's appearance on its soil as a ruse to turn him over to the US, and Assange should then board the next possible plane to Stockholm to face the accusations against him. That will ensure that the complainants in Sweden get the due process to which they are absolutely entitled for their serious accusations, while protecting Assange's rights against vindictive prosecution by the US for his journalism. Ecuador continues to try to bring about this solution with both Sweden and the UK.

(2) Over the past couple months, I twice wrote about the plight of Saadiq Long, the US Air Force veteran who was first barred from visiting his ailing mother in the US by being placed on the no-fly list, then - once removed from the list and able to fly to the US without incident - was barred from returning home to his job and family in Qatar by being re-placed on that list.

Several weeks ago, Long was finally able to get back home. To do that, he had to take a six-day journey that began with a a bus from Oklahoma City to Laredo, Mexico, followed by a flight to Mexico City, followed by flights to Brazil and then on to Argentina. From Argentina he was able to fly to Istanbul, Turkey and then finally on to Doha, Qatar. As unjust as this plight was for someone never accused of any wrongdoing of any kind, he was ultimately lucky: Mexico and Canada often uncritically honor the US no-fly list. It cost him thousands of dollars, weeks away from his job and family, and untold amounts of stress, but it's good that he was able finally to return home.

(3) Two weeks ago, I wrote about the persecution of journalist and internet freedom activist Barrett Brown and encouraged readers to donate to his legal defense fund so that the government's efforts to imprison him would at least be a fair fight. Readers here generously donated close to $15,000, which will help a great deal in his effort to secure a vigorous defense, but more is needed; those inclined to donate can do so via the link here or by paypal to freebbfund@gmail.com.

To illustrate how vindictive this prosecution is, the US government has continued to target Brown's mother. It was threats to indict her that triggered his angry YouTube video denouncing the FBI which then became the basis for yet another indictment. Last week in a federal court in Dallas, Brown's mother pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of obstructing a search warrant by allowing Barrett to come to her home in order allegedly to try to hide his laptop. US torturers who did things like this and Wall Street tycoons who collapsed the global economy with systemic fraud have faced no legal consequences, but the DOJ has aggressively pursued Barrett Brown's mother (along with the persecution of gay rights activist Dan Choi). That speaks volumes about how the law is exploited by the US government.

(4) The Freedom of the Press Foundation, the organization which I helped found and on whose Board I sit, is currently raising funds for several excellent transparency projects. One particularly compelling one is the "Name the Dead" project of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based on the fact that "fewer than 20% of those killed" by US drone attacks in Pakistan have ever been named; this "project aims to identify as many as possible of the remainder, whether civilian or militant". It is extraordinary to me how many people are willing to assert that it is "the terrorists" or "militants" being killed in these strikes even though they have no idea who is being killed. As I wrote on Sunday, keeping the victims of US violence anonymous and unseen is a key tactic for sustaining support for it. Those wishing to support that project, or the others the Foundation is supporting, can do so here.

(5) Last month, GOP Senator Rob Portman announced he was changing his mind and would now support same-sex marriage, citing his gay son. This week, a hard-core social conservative GOP Congressman from Arizona, Matt Salmon, a devout Mormon, talked about how he has also discovered that he has a gay son but nonetheless still opposes same-sex marriage. The video of the father describing his obviously pained efforts to reconcile his long-held religious and political dogma with the love of his gay son is interesting. But it's a different video - one that his son (also named Matt) made in 2011 as part of the "It Gets Better" campaign - that I found really poignant, for the pure authenticity, lack of cynicism and impressive empathy he displays. If you have a few minutes, I think it's really worth watching:

(6) Following up on last week's column I wrote about the hunger strike at Guantanamo, the number of detainees participating still continues to grow. Relatedly, this Guardian article from this morning, on British troops recounting the grotesque torture that took place at a US detention facility in Iraq frequently visited by then-US Joint Special Operations Commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is really remarkable.

(7) In Washington state, legislation favored by the ACLU was recently introduced by a GOP state legislator, which attracted the support of numerous Democrats, to regulate the use of domestic drones, including requiring a search warrant before they can be used to surveil individuals. But the aircraft manufacturer giant Boeing sprung into action, opposing the bill and causing the Democratic Speaker of the House to block a vote on the bill. Pratap Chatterjee has a great report on this here. The politics driving the efforts against the abuses of domestic drones are fascinating and will scramble the stale and traditional partisan categories, as these fights will pit the corporate drone lobby, the establishment politicians it owns from both parties, and bipartisan authoritarian apologists for police power against anti-establishment politicians from both parties along with civil libertarian and privacy groups.

(8) For those in New York: I'll be giving the keynote address to the annual event of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in New York, entitled "Upholding the Constitution", on Saturday, April 20; ticket and event information is here. Last month, I spoke at Hampshire College on radical executive power and US political and media culture; that was followed by a conversation on those topics with the writer and philosophy professor Falguni Sheth, as well as a vibrant Q-and-A session with the audience. That event can be viewed here:

I'll have several other speaking events for the week of April 20 for which I will post information as they approach.

• WikiLeaks

As two more Afghan children are liberated (from their lives) by NATO this weekend, a new film examines the effects of endless US aggression

(updated below)

Yesterday I had the privilege to watch Dirty Wars, an upcoming film directed by Richard Rowley that chronicles the investigations of journalist Jeremy Scahill into America's global covert war under President Obama and specifically his ever-growing kill lists. I will write comprehensively about this film closer to the date when it and the book by the same name will be released. For now, it will suffice to say that the film is one of the most important I've seen in years: gripping and emotionally affecting in the extreme, with remarkable, news-breaking revelations even for those of us who have intensely followed these issues. The film won awards at Sundance and rave reviews in unlikely places such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. But for now, I want to focus on just one small aspect of what makes the film so crucial.

The most propagandistic aspect of the US War on Terror has been, and remains, that its victims are rendered invisible and voiceless. They are almost never named by newspapers. They and their surviving family members are virtually never heard from on television. The Bush and Obama DOJs have collaborated with federal judges to ensure that even those who everyone admits are completely innocent have no access to American courts and thus no means of having their stories heard or their rights vindicated. Radical secrecy theories and escalating attacks on whistleblowers push these victims further into the dark.

It is the ultimate tactic of Othering: concealing their humanity, enabling their dehumanization, by simply relegating them to nonexistence. As Ashleigh Banfield put it her 2003 speech denouncing US media coverage of the Iraq war just months before she was demoted and then fired by MSNBC: US media reports systematically exclude both the perspectives of "the other side" and the victims of American violence. Media outlets in predominantly Muslim countries certainly report on their plight, but US media outlets simply do not, which is one major reason for the disparity in worldviews between the two populations. They know what the US does in their part of the world, but Americans are kept deliberately ignorant of it.

What makes Dirty Wars so important is that it viscerally conveys the effects of US militarism on these invisible victims: by letting them speak for themselves. Scahill and his crew travel to the places most US journalists are unwilling or unable to go: to remote and dangerous provinces in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, all to give voice to the victims of US aggression. We hear from the Afghans whose family members (including two pregnant women) were slaughtered by US Special Forces in 2010 in the Paktia Province, despite being part of the Afghan Police, only for NATO to outright lie and claim the women were already dead from "honor killings" by the time they arrived (lies uncritically repeated, of course, by leading US media outlets).

Scahill interviews the still-traumatized survivors of the US cruise missile and cluster bomb attack in Southern Yemen that killed 35 women and children just weeks after Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. We see the widespread anger in Yemen over the fact that the Yemeni journalist who first exposed US responsibility for that attack, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, was not only arrested by the US puppet regime but, as Scahill first reported, has been kept imprisoned to this very day at the direct insistence of President Obama. We hear from the grandfather of 16-year-old American teenager Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (he is also the father of US cleric Anwar al-Awlaki) - both before and after a CIA drone killed his son and then (two weeks later) his teenaged grandson who everyone acknowledges had nothing to do with terrorism. We hear boastful tales of summary executions from US-funded-and-directed Somali warlords.

There is an unmistakable and singular message sent by these disparate groups and events. It's one particularly worth thinking about with news reports this morning that two more Afghan children have been killed by a NATO air attack.

The message is that the US is viewed as the greatest threat and that it is US aggression and violence far more than any other cause that motivates support for al-Qaida and anti-American sentiment. The son of the slain Afghan police commander (who is the husband of one of the killed pregnant woman and brother of the other) says that villagers refer to US Special Forces as the "American Taliban" and that he refrained from putting on a suicide belt and attacking US soldiers with it only because of the pleas of his grieving siblings. An influential Southern Yemeni cleric explains that he never heard of al-Qaida sympathizers in his country until that 2009 cruise missile attack and subsequent drone killings, including the one that ended the life of Abdulrahman (a claim supported by all sorts of data). The brutal Somali warlord explains that the Americans are the "masters of war" who taught him everything he knows and who fuel ongoing conflict. Anwar Awlaki's transformation from moderate and peace-preaching American cleric to angry critic of the US is shown to have begun with the US attack on Iraq and then rapidly intensifying with Obama's drone attacks and kill lists. Meanwhile, US military officials and officers interviewed by Scahill exhibit a sociopathic indifference to their victims, while Awlaki's increasingly angry sermons in defense of jihad are juxtaposed with the very similar-sounding justifications of endless war from Obama.

The evidence has long been compelling that the primary fuel of what the US calls terrorism are the very policies of aggression justified in the name of stopping terrorism. The vast bulk of those who have been caught in recent years attempting attacks on the US have emphatically cited US militarism and drone killings in their part of the world as their motive. Evidence is overwhelming that what has radicalized huge numbers of previously peaceful and moderate Muslims is growing rage at seeing a continuous stream of innocent victims, including children, at the hands of the seemingly endless US commitment to violence.

The only way this clear truth is concealed is by preventing Americans from knowing about, let alone hearing from, the victims of US aggression. That concealment is what caused huge numbers of Americans to wander around in a daze after 9/11 innocently and bewilderingly wondering "why do they hate us"? - despite decades of continuous US interference, aggression, and violence-enabling in that part of the world. And it's this concealment of these victims that causes Americans now to react to endless stories of the killing of innocent Muslims with the excuse that "we have to do something about the Terrorists" or "it's better than a ground invasion" - without realizing that they're affirming what Chris Hayes aptly describes as a false choice, and worse, without realizing that the very policies they're cheering are not stopping the Terrorists at all but doing the opposite: helping the existing Terrorists and creating new ones.

To be fair, it's not difficult to induce a population to avert its eyes from the victims of the violence they support: we all like to believe that we're Good and peaceful people, and we particularly like to believe this about the leaders we elect, cheer and admire. Moreover, what the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole recently described as "the empathy gap" - the failure to imagine how others will react to situations that would cause us (and have caused us) to be driven by rage and violence - means that the US government need not work all that hard to silence its victims: there is a pervasive desire to keep them out of sight.

Nonetheless, if Americans are going to support or even tolerate endless militarism, as they have been doing, then they should at least have to be confronted with their victims - if not on moral grounds then on pragmatic ones, to understand the effects of these policies. Based on the out-of-sight-out-of-mind reality, the US government and media have been incredibly successful in rendering those victims silent and invisible. Dirty Wars is a truly crucial tonic to that propaganda. At the very least, nobody who sees it and hears from the victims of US aggression will ever again wonder why there are so many people in the world who believe in the justifiability or even necessity of violence against the US.

For those in London: there will be a special screening of Dirty Wars at the Frontline Club on April 12, followed by a Q-and-A session with Scahill (via Skype) and producer Anthony Arnove. Ticket and event information are here. The ACLU of Massachusetts is hosting a special screening in Boston on April 27. I'll post event information for that and other screening dates as they become available.

• Global terrorism
• Terrorism policy
• Yemen
• Afghanistan
• Somalia