U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT - Dissent in the Ranks

"State Department officials push for military intervention in Syria" PBS NewsHour 6/17/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The question of how to end the devastating five-year Syrian Civil War has split the United States foreign service.  Recently, a group of State Department officials signed an internal memo protesting U.S. policy in Syria and calling for military intervention to destroy the Islamic State and force the Assad regime into peace negotiations.  Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner reports.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  How do you end the war in Syria?  It is a question that has plagued world leaders since the start of the devastating civil conflict there.

Today, we learned more about the extent of disagreement inside the U.S. State Department about the course set by President Obama.

Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner reports.

MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour):  For five years, the savage Syria conflict has killed some 400,000 and put millions more to flight.

Now 51 mid-level diplomatic officials have gone on record advocating a dramatic shift in U.S. strategy.  They have signed an internal so-called dissent letter, calling for targeted military strikes against President Bashar al-Assad's government.

The dissenters argue it would help bring Assad to the negotiating table and deal a major blow to ISIS.  The document remains secret, but Andrew Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is familiar with the document's contents.

ANDREW TABLER, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy:  If the Assad regime violates the cessation of hostilities and uses it to further its position on the battlefield, in such cases, military force could be used.  Second, if humanitarian assistance is not provided or is impeded in some way, military force could be used.

MARGARET WARNER:  In Copenhagen today, Secretary of State John Kerry said he had not yet seen the memo, but welcomed it.

JOHN KERRY, Secretary of State:  I think it's an important statement, and I respect the process very, very much, and I will probably meet with people or have a chance to talk with them when we get back.

MARGARET WARNER:  The memo came through a channel created for State Department employees to register policy disagreements without retaliation.  When conflict first broke out in 2011, President Obama called for ousting Assad.  And in 2012, he threatened military action.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:  A red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.  That would change my calculus.

MARGARET WARNER:  But after a regime chemical attack killed more than 1,000 Syrians in August 2013, the President didn't launch military strikes, nor step up arming the Syrian rebels.

More recently, he's launched U.S. airstrikes in Syria, but only against ISIS.  Instead, Russia intervened last fall on Assad's behalf, bolstering him.  Today, Russian air attacks hit anti-Assad rebels battling is in Southern Syria.

A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin warned today any U.S. move targeting Assad's forces would plunge the region into total chaos.

Andrew Tabler's response?

ANDREW TABLER:  If you look at this, over time, whether it's the United States and the threat of use of military force in 2013 or Israel's continued use of strikes inside of Syria, this is something that the Assad regime is known to respond to.

MARGARET WARNER:  All of this comes as a February cease-fire has largely dissolved.  It did let humanitarian aid reach some Syrian communities, but others remain cut off by Assad loyalists.  And peace talks backed by Secretary of State Kerry and the Russians have shown no progress.

An August 1 deadline for a political transition won't be met.  Plans now are only to resume talks then.

WAR ON TERROR - Shadow Internets for Arab Dissidents

"U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors" by JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF, New York Times 6/12/2011

Excerpt

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

POLITICS - Silencing Dissent

The silencing of any dissent by the government, at all levels, is growing and few are saying anything about loosing this basic Constitutional freedom.

The article "Politicians are stifling dissent, critics say" by Steven Thomma, Knight Ridder Newspapers, has examples of our plight.

Here are some of the examples:

1. The ejection of two women from the U.S. Capitol for wearing message T-shirts during President Bush's State of the Union speech this week was the latest incident in a growing trend of stifling dissent in politics. Capitol Police later apologized for ejecting the women from the House of Representatives gallery - after one of them, the wife of a congressman, complained bitterly, as did her husband. The police acknowledged that they'd acted over zealously.



2. In Denver last year, three people were thrown out of a Bush town-hall meeting on Social Security after they arrived in a car sporting a bumper sticker that proclaimed: "No more blood for oil" and wore T-shirts under their other clothes that said "Stop the Lies. Evicting people who oppose the president, even if they don't say a word, was a carryover from Bush's 2004 presidential campaign.



3. In 2004, protesters at both national party conventions were herded into areas far away from delegates, officials and the news media. At the Democratic National Convention in Boston, protesters were kept in enclosed areas surrounded by fences topped with razor wire and watched by armed police.

These are just examples, there are more.

Local, State, and Federal officials are acting as if they don't believe in the Constitution or Freedom of Speech. They act as if dissent is a crime.

We have to teach and reiterate to all Law Enforcement Officials (local, state, federal) that in the USA dissent is not a crime and stop treating people as if they don't have a right to publicly dissent. Especially in "public" speeches given by government officials, "public" includes dissenters.

If we loose the right to protest or dissent protected by the Constitution it will be because we gave it away.