As the United States  continues what it calls its  “war against terrorism,” one can’t help but wonder if such a war is misguided.  After all, if the United States is truly looking to eradicate terrorism, perhaps it should direct its attention to within its borders, or more specifically, within the confines of its government.          
  
In 1986, the United States was found guilty by the World Court of “unlawful use of violence” (international terrorism) for its actions in Nicaragua. The United States then promptly vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to adhere to international law.

http://www.causes-of-terrorism.net/usviolence.htm

Amid growing fears in Washington that European powers may withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, just as the US escalates the war there, Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered a speech blasting Europe for insufficient militarization and warning of a deepening crisis in the NATO alliance.

Gates gave the speech February 23 at Washington’s National Defense University, a training center for mid-level and senior US officers. His audience was a forum on the reworking of the “strategic concept”—essentially the mission statement—of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/gate-f26.shtml

32% of those individuals obliterated in northwestern Pakistan by U.S. drones over the past 6 years have been civilians, according to a recent report by the New America Foundation which compiled and analyzed the results of 114 drone strikes that killed over 1,000 people.

Drone strikes: an unpopular but necessary evil
Contemplating the mind-numbing percentage of civilian casualties, it comes as no shock that these unmanned flying death squads are somewhat unpopular among the Pakistani public, with only 9% approving of the Predator strikes, according to a August 2009 Gallup poll. It is also not surprising that, in the same poll, 59% of participants said they believed the U.S. was the greatest threat to Pakistan’s national security. India placed second with 18% of the vote while the Pakistani Taliban came in third with an 11% tally.

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-30980-Afghanistan-Headlines-Examiner~y2010m2d27-1-out-of-every-3-killed-by-US-drone-in-Pakistan-is-a-civilian

Key US lawmakers passed legislation Thursday extending three key provisions of the PATRIOT Act, the sweeping intelligence bill enacted after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Backing a White House request, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the measure 11 votes to 8 to extend until 2013 three clauses that would have expired by 31 December. The bill now heads to the full Senate for a vote.

http://rawstory.com/2009/2009/10/dem-controlled-senate-judiciary-committee-extends-patriot-act-provisions/

Explain something to me.

In recent months, unless you were insensate, you couldn’t help running across someone talking, writing, speaking, or pontificating about how busted government is in the United States.  State governments are increasingly broke and getting broker.  The federal government, while running up the red ink, is, as just about everyone declares, “paralyzed” and so incapable of acting intelligently on just about anything.

Only the other day, no less a personage than Vice President Biden assured the co-anchor of the CBS Early Show, “Washington, right now, is broken." Indiana Senator Evan Bayh used the very same word, broken, when he announced recently that he would not run for reelection and, in response to his decision, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz typically commented, “The system has been largely dysfunctional for nearly two decades, and everybody knows it.” Voters seem to agree.  Two words, “polarization” and “gridlock” — or hyperbolic cousins like “paralyzing hyperpartisanship” — dominate the news when the media describes that dysfunctionalism.  Foreign observers have been similarly struck, hence a spate of pieces like the one in the British magazine the Economist headlined, “America’s Democracy, A Study in Paralysis.”

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175209/

in a report that was "softened" by a senior Justice Department official.

While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) …

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2010/01/john-yoo-and-jay-bybee-are-cleared-of.html

The Dutch Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, says his coalition government has collapsed after members failed to agree on a NATO request to extend the Netherlands' military mission in Afghanistan.

"Later today, I will offer to her majesty the Queen the resignations of the ministers and deputy ministers of the PvdA [Labour Party]," he told journalists in the early hours of Saturday (local time).

Mr Balkenende made the announcement after the cabinet held more than 16 hours of talks in The Hague to try to settle the dispute.

The PvdA is one of three parties in the coalition government, with Balkenende's Christian Democratic Appeal the senior partner.

Vice-premier Wouter Bos invoked the ire of his cabinet colleagues by stating this week that his PvdA would not support extending the Dutch deployment in Afghanistan beyond 2010.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/20/2825563.htm?section=justin

The Washington Post's Dana Priest today reports that "U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people."  That's no surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional authorization.  The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/27/yemen/index.html?

Last year, President Obama and his administration ruled out sending U.S. ground forces into Pakistan. Instead, the White House said, America’s clandestine operations there would be waged solely by remote-control — with Predator and Reaper drones. “There is a red line,” said special envoy Richard Holbrooke. “And the red line is unambiguous and stated publicly by the Pakistani government over and over again: No foreign troops on our soil.”

Yet today, three U.S. soldiers were killed and two more were wounded by an improvised bomb in Pakistan. The area was known “as a Taliban stronghold,” the New York Times notes. But the “Pakistani military had declared cleared of the militants.”

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/3-gis-killed-in-pakistan-when-do-we-start-treating-this-like-a-real-war/