Time for Some Clarification?
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Ever since the U.S. government invaded Panama and whisked that sovereign country’s president off to a Florida jail cell, I have had a nagging sense of bewilderment at what seems to be a certain growing disconnect in matters of international affairs.
Examining the evidence, it seems as though the world has rolled over for the U.S. Empire and is now capitulating to pretty much every demand out of Washington, no matter how egregious.
Per the case of Panama’s Noriega, how would we here in the U.S. react should a platoon of crack Iraqi paratroopers storm the Texas compound of George Bush Jr. and take him into custody for destroying their country – an act that is demonstrably far worse than any real or imagined crime committed by Noriega against the U.S. prior to his incarceration?
The repertoire of U.S. actions, which in recent years has included launching full-scale “preemptive” strikes, as was the case in Iraq, and drone attacks in other countries, begs the question of what role it is that the U.S. is now playing on the global stage? Are we now the de facto global government, able to act at will whenever and wherever we choose? Are the laws that limit the actions of other countries not applicable here?
Some recent actions that have caught my attention.
Drug terrorists in Ghana. It was reported last week that three men from the African nation of Mali were busted in Ghana for conspiring to sell drugs in Europe. But it turns out that the arrests were made in a sting operation run by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and that the men were then stuck on a plane and shipped to New York for trial. Apparently, the DEA decided that the men might have an affiliation with Al Qaeda, and that – along with a threat and/or payoff to the right people in Ghana – it was necessary to extradite the men to the U.S. for trial. Read the article from the LA Times and see if you can find any credible rationale for us sticking our noses into Ghana to arrest men from Mali for planning on selling drugs in Europe, with zero U.S. connection that I can discern.
Open up, Mr. Karzai, it’s the FBI. A story that caught my attention over the weekend involves an old blood feud between relatives of Afghan President Harmid Karzai, a feud that resulted in the recent shooting death of Waheed Karzai, an 18-year-old nephew. The press reports discuss casually that the FBI is on the case, as if it is entirely normal and to be expected. Have you noticed how the FBI has been involved in a lot of this sort of thing around the world? In fact, there’s hardly a serious international incident these days that doesn’t cause the FBI to grab for their suitcase handles. Including, apparently, a murder in Afghanistan. Why? It must be noted that murderers in Baltimore or Chicago enjoy no such attention from the G-Men. So, what are we doing? What is the precedent? Again, I’m just asking, because I really don’t understand what our government is doing. Here’s the story.
The $536 million Credit Suisse fine. I also thought it was interesting that the U.S. government found that Credit Suisse violated international sanctions against doing business with Iran, and unilaterally used its muscle to wrest a $536 million fine out of the bank. And that, further, about half of the monster fine is to go to the U.S. federal government, with the balance split between New York City and New York State. Maybe you understand why the U.S. alone gets the fine, and why half is dedicated to New York, because I can make no sense of it. (And, by the way, the prosecutors are so satisfied with the result that they are now apparently limbering up to apply the same treatment to a whole slate of other international financial institutions.) Meanwhile, there’s no noticeable protest from the Swiss government about the hard treatment one of its leading banks is getting. Here’s the story.
Geneva Convention? I seem to recollect that when Country A invades Country B, and the soldiers of Country B fight back and are captured, they are covered by certain international laws, most famously the Geneva Convention. Yet, such niceties seem to have been thrown out the window by the Bush administration. Oddly, Team Obama has continued to advocate much the same policies. While there are many examples one could point to quizzically, the case of Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan teenager who was captured and charged with tossing a grenade at a U.S. jeep during the war, will make the point. On being captured, he was tortured, wrapped up, and sent off to Guantanamo, where he has been cooling his heels since 2002.
Do as we say, or else. The U.S. Congress recently passed HR 4213, a bill that includes the following provision:
“Reporting on certain foreign accounts: Requires foreign financial institutions, foreign trusts, and foreign corporations to obtain and provide information from each of their account holders to determine if any account is American-owned. Foreign financial institutions would also be required to comply with verification procedures and to report any U.S. accounts maintained by the institution on an annual basis.
“Any foreign financial institution that did comply with the new verification and reporting standards would be subject to a 30 percent tax on income from U.S. financial assets held by the foreign institution.“
In other words, just because it can, the U.S. passed legislation demanding that every financial institution in the world spend time and money trying to ascertain if their account holders are from the U.S. and if so, they must break whatever their own national or corporate privacy regulations dictate by turning said account holders over to the U.S.
Taken in small doses, these and dozens of similar incidents represent interesting geopolitical oddities and, in the case of the Afghanis, an artifact from the nation’s strong reaction to 9/11. But viewed in the totality, these “our way or the highway” actions paint the picture of a changed role for the American Empire that, I believe, warrants some internal debate and clarification on just who we as a nation want to be.
It seems that the late-stage U.S. Empire is assuming all manner of new and far-reaching powers unto itself. When we can so casually toss the Geneva Convention aside and get away with it, or have prosecutors from individual states levying crushing fines on foreign corporations for defying international sanctions – why, just about anything and everything is fair game. And given the dire financial straits of the empire, there is the very real risk that it could get much worse.
In time, however, this sort of thing is likely to beget a blowback – and when that happens, it will constitute more than just the refusal of foreign banks to have anything to do with U.S. individuals. Foreigners will stop wanting to do business with American corporations, stop cooperating on security issues, and maybe even feed us back our trillions of dollars they now hold. |
