{"id":108910,"date":"2014-03-03T13:55:10","date_gmt":"2014-03-03T13:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=108910"},"modified":"2014-03-03T13:55:10","modified_gmt":"2014-03-03T13:55:10","slug":"heard-one-obama-denouncing-breach-international-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/heard-one-obama-denouncing-breach-international-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Heard the One About Obama Denouncing a Breach of International Law?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Norman Solomon\u00a0<\/strong>
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

International law is suddenly very popular in Washington. President Obama responded to Russian military intervention in the Crimea by accusing Russia of a \u201cbreach of international law.\u201d Secretary of State John Kerry followed up by declaring that Russia is \u201cin direct, overt violation of international law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, during the last five years, no world leader has done more to undermine international law than Barack Obama. He treats it with rhetorical adulation and behavioral contempt, helping to further normalize a might-makes-right approach to global affairs that is the antithesis of international law.<\/p>\n

Fifty years ago, another former law professor, Senator Wayne Morse, condemned such arrogance of power. \u201cI don\u2019t know why we think, just because we\u2019re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right,\u201d Morse said on national TV in 1964. \u201cAnd that\u2019s the American policy in Southeast Asia\u2013just as unsound when we do it as when Russia does it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, Uncle Sam continues to preen as the globe\u2019s big sheriff on the side of international law even while functioning as the world\u2019s biggest outlaw.<\/p>\n

Rather than striving for an evenhanded assessment of how \u201cinternational law\u201d has become so much coin of the hypocrisy realm, mainline U.S. media are now transfixed with Kremlin villainy.<\/p>\n

On Sunday\u00a0night, the top of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0home page reported: \u201cRussian President Vladimir V. Putin has pursued his strategy with subterfuge, propaganda and brazen military threat, taking aim as much at the United States and Europe as Ukraine itself.\u201d That was\u00a0news<\/em>coverage.<\/p>\n

Following close behind, a\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0editorial<\/a>\u00a0appeared in print\u00a0Monday\u00a0morning, headlined \u201cRussia\u2019s Aggression,\u201d condemning \u201cPutin\u2019s cynical and outrageous exploitation of the Ukrainian crisis to seize control of Crimea.\u201d The liberal newspaper\u2019s editorial board said that the United States and the European Union \u201cmust make clear to him that he has stepped far outside the bounds of civilized behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such demands are righteous\u2013but lack integrity and credibility when the same standards are not applied to President Obama, whose continuation of the Bush \u201cwar on terror\u201d under revamped rhetoric has bypassed international law as well as \u201ccivilized behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

In these circumstances, major U.S. media coverage rarely extends to delving into deviational irony or spotlighting White House hypocrisy. Yet it\u2019s not as if large media outlets have entirely excluded key information and tough criticism.<\/p>\n

For instance, last October the McClatchy news service\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cthe Obama administration violated international law with top-secret targeted-killing operations that claimed dozens of civilian lives in Yemen and Pakistan,\u201d according to reports released by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.<\/p>\n

Last week, just before Obama leapt to high dudgeon with condemnation of Putin for his \u201cbreach of international law,\u201d the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em>\u00a0published an op-ed\u00a0piece<\/a>\u00a0that provided illuminating context for such presidential righteousness.<\/p>\n

\u201cDespite the president’s insistence on placing limits on war, and on the defense budget, his brand of warfare has helped lay the basis for a permanent state of global warfare via \u2018low footprint\u2019 drone campaigns and special forces operations aimed at an ever-morphing enemy usually identified as some form of Al Qaeda,\u201d wrote Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University\u2019s law school.<\/p>\n

Greenberg went on to indicate the scope of the U.S. government\u2019s ongoing contempt for international law: \u201cAccording to Senator\u00a0Lindsey Graham(R-S.C.), the Obama administration has killed 4,700 individuals in numerous countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Obama has successfully embedded the process of drone killings into the executive branch in such a way that any future president will inherit it, along with the White House \u2018kill list\u2019 and its \u2018terror\u00a0Tuesday\u2019 meetings. Unbounded global war is now part of what it means to be president.\u201d<\/p>\n

But especially in times of crisis, as with the current Ukraine situation, such inconvenient contradictions go out the mass-media window. What remains is an Orwellian baseline, melding conformist ideology and nationalism into red-white-and-blue doublethink.<\/p>\n

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.<\/div>\n

Norman Solomon is\u00a0co-founder of\u00a0RootsAction.org<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0founding director of the\u00a0Institute for Public Accuracy<\/a>. His books include\u00a0\u201cWar Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death<\/a>\u201d and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State<\/a>“.<\/em><\/p>\n

Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Norman Solomon\u00a0 RINF Alternative News International law is suddenly very popular in Washington. President Obama responded to Russian military intervention in the Crimea by accusing Russia of a \u201cbreach of international law.\u201d Secretary of State John Kerry followed up by declaring that Russia is \u201cin direct, overt violation of international law.\u201d Unfortunately, during the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":108911,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-108910","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}