Bradley Manning, the army private whose leaks of classified information and subsequent prosecution have been the subject of fierce international debate for over three years, was sentenced to 35 years in military prison Wednesday, but his legal team and supporters say they will fight the sentence.

Bradley Manning. Credit: public domain

“It’s tragic,” Nathan Fuller of the Bradley Manning Support Network told IPS minutes after the sentence was read. “It sends a terrible message for holding government accountable.”

Colonel Denise Lind, the sole judge in the case, read Manning’s sentence at the courthouse in Fort Meade, Maryland, near the location where he was being held during trial. She took one day to reach her decision after adjourning a three-week sentencing hearing on Tuesday morning.

In early 2010, Manning handed over a trove of classified data from U.S. Army computers to WikiLeaks, the radical pro-transparency group. The latter made the data public, causing scandals for the U.S. and some of its allies.

Manning’s supporters argue that he released the information believing he would better society, and they protest that he was unfairly held for an extended time prior to being tried.

Manning was arrested in May 2010 and has been detained since. Lind announced that this time will be subtracted from his sentence, effectively reducing it by nearly 1,300 days.

The judge convicted him on Jul. 30 of six violations of the federal Espionage Act, as well as 14 other charges of theft and fraud. The maximum sentence Manning faced would have been 90 years.

Kevin Gosztola, a blogger for firedoglake.com who supports Manning and covered his trial, told IPS that the possibility remains open that the 25-year-old soldier could be freed before he turns 40. By regulation, he is eligible for parole after serving 10 years of his sentence, minus the discounted pre-trial confinement days.

“I think this shows that the judge was responsive to the defence’s plea to allow [Manning] a life after prison,” Gosztola says.

Manning’s attorney, David Coomb, questions the severity of the sentence. Speaking with reporters after the sentence was handed down, he noted that he has seen lighter punishments for military clients he has defended who have murdered people or molested children.

Fuller says the next step for those who oppose Manning’s imprisonment will be to lobby Major General Jeffrey Buchanan, the military commander in charge of the district, to reduce the sentence. According to Fuller, Buchanan has “full latitude” in his ability to soften the sentence, if he chooses.

If the effort to sway Buchanan fails, Manning’s legal team will pursue the military appeals process and take advantage of available yearly sentencing reviews by a military parole and clemency board.

His support network will also try to convince U.S. President Barack Obama to commute the sentence.

A demonstration outside the White House is planned for Wednesday evening.

“There are several battles left to fight,” Fuller told IPS. “People will be angry.”

Leaks

The data Manning leaked included 470,000 battlefield reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables.

Perhaps most notorious of the data released was a video titled “Collateral Murder”, which contained footage taken by a U.S. Army helicopter crew as it gunned down a group of Iraqis standing on a Baghdad street and continued firing as passers-by attempted to rescue them. In the video, U.S. soldiers engaged in the killing can be heard laughing.

Manning’s actions divided popular opinion in the U.S., as some praised him as a hero and others excoriated him as a traitor.

“He was really hoping to change the world for the better,” Deborah Van Poolen, an artist who attended Manning’s trial and claims to have been “inspired” by his actions, told IPS.

Others disagree.

“He is not a whistleblower or a hero. [His leaks] tarnished the image of the U.S. at a sensitive time,” Steven Bucci, director of the Foreign Policy Center at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank here, told IPS, adding that Manning should be considered the “biggest spy [the U.S. has] ever had”.

Sympathy for Manning was more widespread outside the U.S., coming especially from those critical of U.S. policy, and over the past three years movements around the world have advocated for his release.

A campaign has even been started promoting Manning as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, and last week a U.S. human rights group delivered a petition with 100,000 signatures to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which decides the winner.

Defence attorneys for Manning did not attempt to argue that their client acted as a hero, however, portraying him instead as naïve and telling the court that he was a “young man capable of being redeemed”.

“Perhaps his biggest crime was that he cared about the loss of life that he was seeing and couldn’t ignore it,” defence attorney David Coombs, who will remain as Manning’s attorney, told the judge during the sentencing hearing.

In his own testimony, Manning said he regretted his actions.

“I’m sorry that my actions hurt people,” he told the judge. “I’m sorry that they hurt the United States.”

“In retrospect I should have worked more aggressively inside the system, as we discussed during the … statement, I had options and I should have used these options.”

The prosecution argued that Manning’s leaks strengthened enemies of the United States and put at risk the lives of U.S. soldiers and diplomats living abroad.

“There may not be a soldier in the history of the army who displayed such an extreme disregard [for his duty],” prosecutor Capt. Joe Morrow argued.

Before the conviction was handed down, the prosecution had argued that Manning was guilty of “aiding the enemy”, a crime which could have resulted in a life sentence for the young soldier, and, many feared, an extreme precedent for punishing information leaks.

The judge did not convict Manning of “aiding the enemy”, but still some believe Manning’s case is intended to serve as a warning to future whistleblowers.

“Manning’s treatment has been intended to send a signal to people of conscience in the U.S. government who might seek to bring wrongdoing to light,” Julian Assange, a founder of WikiLeaks, said in a statement.

“[T]he Obama administration is demonstrating that there is no place in its system for people of conscience and principle.”

Boats washed up along the riverfront in Croton-on-Hudson, about thirty miles north of Manhattan, after Hurricane Sandy. Credit: Katherine Stapp/IPS

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Aug 20 2013 (IPS)

The United States government is recommending new preparations aimed at protecting vulnerable communities from climate change-related disasters, a year after a major hurricane devastated swaths of the country’s East Coast.

On Monday, a presidential task force released a report that details a strategy it says will both rebuild the region devastated in October by Hurricane Sandy and guard the nation from future climate change-related extreme weather."When we look at the costs of national disasters... it starts to become clear that those costs outweigh the costs of cutting down on the use of fossil fuels." -- Janet Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute

The Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force Strategy Report includes 69 policy recommendations, some of which are already in practice. The authors says they are designed to “help homeowners stay in and repair their homes, strengthen small businesses and revitalize local economies and ensure entire communities are better able to withstand and recover from future storms.”

The government’s signal that it will directly confront challenges related to climate change is viewed positively by some environmental experts.

“It is absolutely critical that the U.S. takes climate change into consideration as it decides how to invest money into repairing and rebuilding infrastructure,” Janet Larsen, research director at the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington think tank, told IPS.

Larsen believes the United States learned the hard way that its communities are vulnerable to climate change.

“Ten or 15 years ago, if you asked where there were likely to be ‘climate refugees’, it was commonly thought they would just be from small island nations,” she notes. “But after Hurricane Katrina” – which hit the U.S. in 2005 – “there were a quarter of a million people who had to leave their homes, and many have yet to return.”

Twenty-three federal agencies participated in drafting the Strategy Report, headed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The report says its recommendations are aimed at “cutting red tape”, but advocates of more localised solutions note the continuing multitude of agencies involved. Such bureaucracy, they say, undermines claims that a massive federal effort would make responses to disaster more efficient.

“They talk about better coordination,” Ted DeHaven, a budget analyst for the Cato Institute, a think tank here that promotes small government, told IPS. “But the reality is that there are too many federal cooks in the kitchen.”

Nonetheless, the report presents guidelines for using the 50 billion dollars authorised by Congress and approved by U.S. President Barack Obama in January to rebuild the northeastern region.

According to HUD, the strategy outlined in the report is also intended “to serve as a model for communities across the nation facing greater risks from extreme weather and to continue helping the Sandy-affected region rebuild.”

The agency emphasises two of its recommendations as being of particular consequence, and both revolve around the potential for increased extreme weather in the future. One is to initiate “a process to prioritize all large-scale infrastructure projects and map the connections and interdependencies between them, as well as guidelines to ensure all of those projects are built to withstand the impacts of climate change.”

Another is to “harden energy infrastructure to minimize power outages and fuel shortages – and ensure continuation of cellular service – in the event of future storms.”

The report also urges the creation of a publicly available “Sea Rise Projection Tool” in order to keep vulnerable communities aware of how water levels may change.

Such measures, the authors suggest, “will improve our ability to withstand and recover effectively from future flood-related disasters across the country.”

Resilience and hard truths

In line with a growing trend across the globe, the stated goal of these new official recommendations is to achieve “resilient” communities – those with the ability “to respond effectively to a major storm, recover quickly from it, and adapt to changing conditions, while also taking measures to reduce the risk of significant damage in a future storm.”

Yet EPI’s Larsen suggests that some of this emphasis may be misplaced. She notes that while the concept of “resilience” is mentioned in the report over 300 times, root causes of climate change, such as fossil fuel emissions, are hardly addressed.

While she applauds the report for acknowledging the challenge of climate change, she regrets the lack of attention to these causes.

Larsen suggests that positive concepts such as rebuilding are politically popular and therefore easier to propose to the public, while “hard truths” that put the country on the defensive don’t resonate well with the United States’ “dominant” self-image.

Cato’s DeHaven agrees that politics are at play in the federally focused strategy. He says that state and local politicians, without considering long-term costs, are often all too quick to accept federal dollars.

Yet the long-term costs, according to DeHaven, are state and local governments that are dependent on federal cheques and therefore less in control of their own destinies.

“Once the federal government intervenes and accrues power, even after the original problem subsides, it tends not to relinquish that power,” he says.

DeHaven also notes that the federal policies have increased vulnerability by subsidising below-market insurance rates that encourage building in risky areas.

For EPI’s Larsen, a better national plan would include a more rapid timetable for cutting emissions and acceptance of the fact that “there may have to be some areas where we don’t build at all.”

“The main idea,” she says “should be that when we look at the costs of national disasters and understand that climate change contributes to them, it starts to become clear that those costs outweigh the costs of cutting down on the use of fossil fuels.” 

One day after the killing by the Egyptian army and security forces of hundreds of civilian protestors, U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday announced the cancellation of joint U.S.-Egyptian military exercises scheduled for September.

Cancellation of the biannual Operation Bright Star marked the first concrete step taken by Obama to distance Washington from the Egyptian military since the latter ousted President Mohamed Morsi Jul. 3 and installed an interim government which it increasingly appears to dominate.“There is no question this has highlighted the reduced significance and leverage the U.S. has with regard to Egypt.” -- Samer Shehata

The move came, however, amidst growing calls from lawmakers and others to go much farther by immediately suspending 1.3 billion dollars Washington provides in military aid to Egypt each year, a step that the administration is considered by most experts unlikely to take unless Wednesday’s bloody crackdown continues in the coming days.

“(W)hile we want to sustain our relationship with Egypt, our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” Obama declared in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where he is currently vacationing with his family.

“As a result, this morning we notified the Egyptian government that we are canceling our biannual joint military exercise which was scheduled for next month,” he added.

“Going forward I’ve asked my national security team to assess the implications of the actions taken by the interim government and further steps that we may take as necessary with respect to the U.S.-Egyptian relationship.”

With the official death toll from Wednesday’s violence climbing overnight to well over 600 and another 4,000 people injured, prospects for restoring stability to the country appear very uncertain.

The Muslim Brotherhood, whose partisans were the principal victims of the bloodshed and whose leaders are reportedly being rounded up throughout the country, has vowed to continue demonstrating until Morsi is re-instated.

Virtually all analysts here agree that Washington’s influence over events and the key protagonists in Egypt appears extremely limited at the moment.

Efforts by top U.S. officials, including, notably, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel, to persuade his Egyptian counterpart, Gen. Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, not to evict pro-Morsi protestors and two Cairo encampments with lethal force were clearly unavailing. Similar efforts to convince top Brotherhood leaders to drop their demand that Morsi be re-instated also came to naught.

“There is no question this has highlighted the reduced significance and leverage the U.S. has with regard to Egypt,” Samer Shehata, an Egypt expert at the University of Oklahoma, told IPS.

The suspension of military aid, he added, “seems to be the most extreme action the administration would take. If the levels of violence continue, it will be seriously considered, but if they diminish, I don’t think it will.”

Nonetheless, a number of influential lawmakers are calling for precisely such action.

“While suspending joint military exercises as the president has done is an important step, our law is clear: aid to the military should cease unless they restore democracy,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the key Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Thursday.

He was joined by Republican Sen. John McCain, who last week personally warned officials in Cairo that aid would be cut if the military carried through with its threat to use force in clearing two squares in Cairo that had been occupied by tens of thousands of pro-Morsi demonstrators since the coup.

Only two weeks ago, McCain had spoken in opposition to legislation mandating a cut-off of all aid to Egypt, arguing that it would reduce U.S. influence with the generals.

They were backed by the editorial boards of both the Washington Post and the New York Times which Thursday argued that until “the generals change their ways, …the United States should slam the door on an aid program that has provided the Egyptian military with a munificent 1.3 billion dollars a year for decades.”

The cancellation of Bright Star “falls short of what the circumstances on the ground merit, given the bloodshed and how many civilians have been killed,” Mona Yacoubian, an Egypt expert at the Stimson Centre, told IPS.

The administration, she added “should very strongly consider a suspension of aid until the situation improves.”

But a number of analysts believe the Egyptian military may be willing to forgo the aid in what it may believe is an existential struggle against the Brotherhood.

“[T]he military there are not concerned about American opinion,” wrote Col. Pat Lang (ret.), a former top Middle East analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) on his blog, “Sic Semper Tyrannis” Thursday.

“They don’t think the money will be cut off for long. They have other sources of money. They are basically an internal security force and do not need the fancy gear that we have provided them. Abrams tanks, F-16s, etc. are too sophisticated for them to use effectively in actual combat.”

Those other sources of money include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait which together have pledged 12 billion dollars for Egypt since the coup – almost 10 times the total amount of U.S. military aid, most of which ends up, in any event, in the coffers of U.S. arms manufacturers which, along with the Gulf states and Israel, can be expected to lobby hard against any aid cut-off.

“The calculation of the Egyptian generals is right,” noted Joshua Stacher, an Egypt expert at KentStateUniversity in Ohio. “As the administration, what’s your ultimate play? You’re [not] going to break 35 years of a policy …whose essence is reliance on the Egyptian military.

“The Israelis, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Emiratis are saying, ‘Don’t cut those relations.’ Not only are they allies and friends, but they also buy an enormous amount of military hardware [from U.S. manufacturers],” he told IPS.

According to Shehata, “What the U.S. is concerned about, first and foremost, is the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. That is the lens through which the U.S. sees Egypt.

“Secondary to that is military co-operation: expedited passage of naval vessels through the Suez Canal, overflight through Egyptian airspace, intelligence sharing in the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Of course, human rights concerns are there someplace, but, unfortunately, they are below these other concerns on the list of priorities.”

Indeed, in an op-ed published Thursday in the New York Daily News, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) noted precisely such considerations in arguing not only against cutting off aid but also against the administration’s appeals for a post-coup transition that would include, rather than repress, the Brotherhood.

“What Washington needs to do is clear. U.S. policy should be to support only Egyptian leaders unambiguously committed to Camp David [the Israeli-Egyptian treaty]…And we must assist those who place highest priority on repairing Egypt’s badly weakened economy and securing its international economic obligations, particularly safe transit through the Suez Canal.”

Even an aid cut-off which, according to Stacher, has become a real possibility, is unlikely to have the desired effect for the reasons cited by Lang.

“If you really want to get to the heart of the relationship, you have to attack the military-to-military exchanges – the training visits to the U.S., and the informal officer-to-officer relationships that take place outside the formal chain of command.

“As long as these informal officer-to-officer relationships exist, the generals won’t believe threats coming out of Washington as credible,” he said.

“Until these relationships are severed and the military-to-military relationship is formalised, any U.S. administration has wiggle room to look like it’s changing its policies without actually changing the essence of the relationship, which is U.S. reliance on the Egyptian military.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has denounced in unusually harsh terms Wednesday’s bloody military crackdown against supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

But, despite a growing chorus of calls by prominent lawmakers, commentators and Egypt experts here to suspend all U.S. aid to the interim government in Cairo that was installed early last month in a military coup d’etat against President Mohammed Morsi, the administration suggested only that it will review “the implications for our broader relationship which includes aid”.“You can’t sit idly by. There has to be an escalatory roadmap that at least has some teeth." -- Michael Wahid Hanna of the Century Fund

“The United States strongly condemns the use of violence against protestors in Egypt,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where Obama and his family are currently vacationing.

“The violence will only make it more difficult to move Egypt forward on a path to lasting stability and democracy, and runs directly counter to the pledges by the interim government to pursue reconciliation,” he noted.

Earnest added that Washington was also “strongly oppose[d]” to a return to a State of Emergency law which the military announced as the crackdown got underway earlier Wednesday morning.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who, in a widely criticised statement, praised the Egyptian military for “restoring democracy” by ousting Morsi earlier this month during a press conference in Pakistan, echoed Earnest in an unusual appearance during the daily State Department press briefing later in the afternoon.

“Today’s events are deplorable, and they run counter to Egyptian aspirations for peace, inclusion, and democracy. Egyptians inside and outside of the government need to take a step. They need to calm the situation and avoid further loss of life,” he added.

“The only sustainable path for either side is one toward a political solution. I am convinced from my conversations today with a number of foreign ministers, including the foreign minister of Egypt …that that path is, in fact, still open… though it has been made much, much harder, much more complicated, by the events of today.”

The statements were issued amidst horrific reports of the violence that began with a full-scale military and police effort to clear tens of thousands of pro-Morsi protestors from camps at two major Cairo squares that sprang up in the immediate aftermath of the Jul. 3 coup. Violent clashes between pro-military activists and Brotherhood demonstrators were also reported in Cairo and other cities.

Nearly 300 people were killed in Cairo and elsewhere around the country, according to an evening report by the government health ministry, although Brotherhood officials, which called the killings a “massacre”, said the death toll was many times that number in what was the worst day of violence in Egypt in living memory.

It was precisely the kind of crackdown that U.S. officials – both from the Pentagon and the State Department – had been trying to persuade their Egyptian counterparts to forgo over the past several weeks in hopes that the Brotherhood and its supporters would give up their demand that Morsi be re-instated and that some kind of reconciliation process could get underway.

The administration even appeared to approve a special trip to Cairo last week by two of its fiercest Congressional critics – Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham – for the purpose of conveying to the military, in particular, that any violent crackdown would result in a cut-off of the roughly 1.6 billion dollars, including 1.3 billion dollars in sophisticated weaponry, Washington provides Egypt in aid every year.

“As we predicted and feared, chaos in #Cairo,” tweeted McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, early Wednesday. “Sec Kerry praising the military takeover didn’t help,” he added in a jab at Kerry’s statement in Pakistan.

The administration clearly fears that Wednesday’s violence will greatly diminish, if not eliminate, the possibility of any reconciliation between the Brotherhood and other Islamist parties, such as the more fundamentalist Al-Nour party (which until now has taken a more-neutral role in the ongoing crisis), and the secular forces which backed the coup.

Indeed, the risk of even greater polarisation and escalating civil conflict in the Arab world’s most populous and influential country, whose stability has long been considered critical to U.S. strategic interests in the region, has risen sharply as a result of Wednesday’s bloodshed, according to independent analysts.

“The events in Egypt will provide a substantial boost to extremism, and specifically violent Islamist extremism,” Paul Pillar, a retired top CIA Middle East analyst who now teaches at Georgetown University, told IPS in an email.

“It was bad enough that moderate Islamists are being so clearly and completely excluded from a peaceful, democratic political process. Now the inevitable anger in response to large-scale bloodshed is being added to the mix.”

That observation was echoed by the interim government’s own vice president and a Washington favourite, Mohammed El-Baradei, who resigned in the face of Wednesday’s violence.

“Violence begets violence, and mark my words, the only beneficiaries from what happened today are extremist groups,” he said in his resignation letter.

What precisely Washington will do now remains to be seen. Despite increasing signs over the past month that the military was extending its control over the government – the latest coming Tuesday when the government appointed generals to 19 of the country’s 25 provincial governorships – it has refused to label Morsi’s ouster as a “coup d’etat”, a move that would force it to cut off all U.S. aid.

Cutting off aid, according to officials, risked reducing, if not eliminating, whatever influence Washington retained with the military.

But that position appears increasingly untenable in the wake of Wednesday’s violence. Indeed, the Washington Post editorialised Wednesday Obama’s decision not to cut aid made his administration “complicit in the new and horrifyingly bloody crackdown…”

“The bloody assault on the protester camps – after repeated American opposition to such a move – leaves President Obama little choice but to step away from the Egyptian regime,” wrote Marc Lynch, an influential Middle East analyst who has generally supported the administration’s “quiet diplomacy” with the generals, on his foreignpolicy.com blog Wednesday.

“Washington should, and probably will, call for a return to an elected civilian government, a rapid end to the state of emergency, and restraint in the use of force. When that doesn’t happen, it needs to suspend aid and relations until Cairo begins to take it seriously,” he wrote.

“Particularly after today, the country is much further away from a potential resolution and stability; compared to 24 hours ago, things are much worse,” Michael Wahid Hanna, an Egypt expert at the New York-based Century Fund, told IPS in a telephone interview from Cairo.

He said he favoured “an escalatory step-by-step process in terms of coercive measures or signals of displeasure (by the U.S.), as opposed to an all-or-nothing formulation.

“You can’t sit idly by. There has to be an escalatory roadmap that at least has some teeth,” possibly beginning with the cancellation of the bi-annual Bright Star joint U.S.-Egyptian military exercises which normally takes place during the fall.

“In the end, if we’re unsuccessful in changing behaviour, then we have a much more fundamental question about the sustainability of the bilateral relationship despite the strategic importance historically accorded it [by the U.S.],” he added.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Zanmi Agrikol farm/Friends of Agriculture, in Haiti's Bas-Plateau Central. Credit: Wadner Pierre/IPS

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Aug 14 2013 (IPS)

Work by the Group of 4 (G4) union of Haitian peasant organisations, along with assistance from the Dessalines Brigade –  South American peasant leaders and agroecology experts supported by La Via Campesina – has been singled out for promoting “good farming practices and advocat[ing] for peasant farmers” in Haiti.

The two network organisations, it was announced Tuesday, will be awarded the 2013 Food Sovereignty Prize, an annual award given to groups that promote a more democratic, community-based food system.

The G4 alliance represents over a quarter-million Haitians. Its relationship with the South American peasant leadership is intended “to rebuild Haiti’s environment, promote wealth and end poverty” in that country, which continues to feel the devastating effects of the major earthquake that struck the island in 2010.

“We wanted to honour that relationship,” Charity Hicks, of the Detroit Food Justice Task Force, one of the groups behind the Food Sovereignty Prize, told IPS, referring to the partnership between G4 and Via Campesina.

Hicks’ organisation is just one member of the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA), the group offering the award. USFSA aims to “end poverty, rebuild local food economies, and assert democratic control over the food system”, as well as to connect “local and national struggles to the international movement for food sovereignty”.

Hicks lauds the partnership between the Haitian peasant union and the South American groups as an example of food sovereignty organisations from different regions “sharing knowledge and skills, respecting ecologies and creating food democracy”.

Food democracy, she explains, refers to “bottom-up, communal and cultural approaches to deal with hunger and poverty.”

In addition, the G4 union stood out for a decision made in 2010 by one of its member groups, the Peasant Movement of Papaye, to reject a substantial donation of hybrid seeds by U.S. mega-producer Monsanto following the earthquake.

“Denying the [Monsanto] seeds represented significant opposition to what the corporate food system is doing by trying to control our food,” Lisa Griffith, of the National Family Farm Coalition, another member group of the USFSA, told IPS.

The opposition to Monsanto was especially important in the decision to award G4, Griffith says, because the Food Sovereignty Prize acts as an alternative to the World Food Prize. That annual award was given this year to, among others, Robert Fraley, a high-ranking Monsanto executive.

The World Food Prize, according to its website, is the foremost international food award, intended to reward “the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.”

According to Hicks, however, there is reason to question the merits of the prize.

“The World Food Prize represents a way for corporations to give themselves awards for the notion of using technology in order to feed the world,” she says.

Indeed, one of the many corporate sponsors behind the prize is Monsanto itself.

On the other hand, food sovereignty groups, according to Griffith, offer an important alternative to the corporate producers because they have “a much stronger understanding of what their communities want to produce and want to eat.

“These communities don’t need to be taken over by corporations who profess to know better about what [the communities] want,” Griffith says.

Hicks adds that, counter to the values of the corporate food system, food sovereignty “affirms peoples’ democratic right to food, restores their traditional relationship with food and the environment and rejects the commodification of nature.”

Constitutional aim

Along with the announcement of the G4 as the winner of this year’s award, the prize also lauded the work of three additional nominees for their work in promoting the values of food sovereignty.

The Basque Country Peasants’ Solidarity (EHNE), which was one of the groups responsible for the founding of Via Campesina, represents 6,000 members in the Basque region. It received mention for, among other things, its work with young farmers.

The National Coordination of Peasant Organisations of Mali, with around 2.5 million members, was also recognised for its advocacy work in support of democratic agricultural policies. In part due to its efforts, Hicks says Mali is now one of the first countries to have enshrined food sovereignty in its national constitution.

Finally, the Tamil Nadu Women’s Collective (TNWC) stood out for its work empowering women in the South Indian state.

“Through the [TNWC], 100,000 marginalised women are organised, many in unofficial worker unions or small collective farms, to strengthen their food sovereignty and thus their broader power,” the USFSA noted in a statement.

Following on Tuesday’s announcements, a formal awarding ceremony for the Food Sovereignty Prize will be held on October 15 at the Smithsonian Institute’s Museum of the American Indian, in New York City. Representatives of each of the four groups will be flown in and will accept modest monetary gifts on behalf of their organisations.

The venue, Hicks says, was chosen for symbolic reasons, in order to “honour indigenous communities worldwide”.

Civil liberties advocates are expressing doubt that promised reforms to a vast and controversial U.S. surveillance programme will allay concerns that the spying infringes on certain rights.

On Friday, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he would oversee reforms to his administration’s surveillance programme. Evidence of this programme, which was initially leaked in May, showed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had gained access to the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens, sparking public outrage.“Intelligence agencies, by their nature, will always want to collect as much information as possible, and today there are very few technological limits left on what they can collect." -- Prof. David C. Unger

“It’s good that President Obama has gotten the message that Americans are troubled to learn of the National Security Agency’s overreaching surveillance of their private communications,” David C. Unger, a professor of U.S. foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), told IPS.

“But more transparency alone won’t be enough, especially if the president intends to keep his proposed review process within the executive branch itself.”

Rather, Unger says what is needed is a “reinvigorated system of checks and balances, with much more vigorous legislative and judicial oversight than we have today.”

In his remarks, Obama listed four reforms his administration was ready to make. The steps include working with Congress to reform the laws governing surveillance, pursuing measures to increase transparency, and establishing “a high-level group of outside experts” to assess how U.S. intelligence agencies utilise communications technology.

The reforms, he said, are intended to “strike the right balance between protecting our security and preserving our freedoms,” as well as “to give the American people additional confidence that there are additional safeguards against abuse.”

In a sign of sincerity about the reforms, on Monday the president sent a memorandum to the director of national intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, ordering him to establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies.

The Review Group’s primary assignment is to “assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.”

The committee will now have two months to carry out the review, after which it will present its findings to Obama through the DNI.

Right to ask questions

Speaking with reporters at the White House, Obama reminded U.S. citizens about the threat of terrorism the country continues to face. He also lamented the effects that high-profile leaks made by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden have had on the country’s discourse about the power of its spy agencies.

“Unfortunately, rather than an orderly and lawful process to debate these issues and come up with appropriate reforms, repeated leaks of classified information have initiated the debate in a very passionate, but not always fully informed, way,” the president said.

Yet that opinion clashes with the widespread views of critics of the surveillance programme, who are encouraged that an impassioned public outcry has reached presidential ears.

“While we’re glad Obama is responding to the public’s concerns, we take [his] promises today with a healthy dose of scepticism,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group which advocates for less government surveillance, said in a statement.

“He may be paying lip service to accountability and transparency, but the devil will be in the details when it comes to whether his proposals will be effective.”

The EFF also remarked that it is “glad” the Obama administration “has been forced to address the matter publicly as a result of the sustained public pressure from concerned voters as well as the ongoing press coverage of this issue.”

In his remarks on the subject, Obama did note that he had been influenced by a meeting held with civil liberties advocates at the beginning of this month. He also said he understood the concerns being expressed by those who oppose the more invasive spying techniques that his administration has reportedly used.

“[G]iven the history of abuse by governments, it’s right to ask questions about surveillance,” the president said, “particularly as technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives.”

Critics of the extensive spying programme agree the advancement of communication technology has played a part in enabling governments to gather vast amounts of information on private citizens.

“Intelligence agencies, by their nature, will always want to collect as much information as possible, and today there are very few technological limits left on what they can collect,” says SAIS’s Unger, author of “The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs.”

Maintaining principles

In his remarks, President Obama also made noteworthy comments on the importance of openness and adherence to the law, even when engaging in controversial surveillance activity. He suggested this was one way in which the United States distinguishes itself from other powers.

“[W]e show a restraint that many governments around the world don’t even think to do, refuse to show – and that includes, by the way, some of America’s most vocal critics,” the president stated.

U.S. leadership, Obama suggested, depends upon “the example of American democracy and American openness – because what makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation, it’s the way we do it.”

While those leery of extensive spying are aware that U.S. practices are often less abusive than some states that have criticised it, many continue to warn against using that fact as justification for the U.S. abandoning its ethical principles.

“Without a doubt there are worse actors in the world of espionage than the United States, including some of America’s critics,” SAIS’s Unger told IPS.

“[However,] none of that should or does absolve the United States from adhering to the principled standards it has historically set for itself and that are in its own long-term best interests.”

Map depicting United States groundwater aquifers that intersect known shale gas extraction areas (as of May 2011). Credit: Brylie Oxley/cc by 3.0

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 2013 (IPS)

New signs have emerged in recent days which indicate that extreme measures are being taken in order to suppress evidence of the pernicious effects of the energy extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”.

At the beginning of this month, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette revealed that, in 2011, a Pennsylvania family reached an unprecedented settlement with an energy company fracking near their property. It included gag orders on the family’s two children, ages seven and 10 at the time of the settlement, which prohibit them from, at any point in their lives, discussing their experiences living near a fracking site.“Advertising and lobbying are deployed by the energy companies to confuse the public, and meanwhile anyone who has suffered from their practices gets a muzzle.” -- Steve Horn of DeSmog Blog

This revelation came only days after the Los Angeles Times reported that it had obtained a set of government-censored Powerpoint slides related to a study by the Environmental Protection Agency. The slides conclude that fracking was indeed polluting the aquifer in question.

Critics of the controversial extraction method note that these examples are part of an overall cover-up strategy being employed by the oil and gas industry.

“The industry uses its influence in DC to shut down studies by the EPA, while simultaneously using the legal system as a weapon to silence its victims,” Brendan Demelle, executive director of DeSmog Blog, the organisation which obtained the Powerpoint slides and made them public, told IPS.

The concluding slide states that “[m]ethane is is at significantly higher concentrations in the aquifers after gas drilling.” Further, it asserts this methane, along with other gases released during extraction “apparently cause[s] significant damage to the water quality” of surrounding aquifers.

Dispersed methane is the most notorious pollutant associated with fracking. It is a colourless and odourless gas which, when concentrated highly enough, can spoil water sources, and in some cases make them flammable.

Sowing confusion

According to critics, the pernicious effects of fracking are being obfuscated by powerful companies who profit from popular ignorance.

“Advertising and lobbying are deployed by the energy companies to confuse the public, and meanwhile anyone who has suffered from their practices gets a muzzle,” Steve Horn, a research fellow at DeSmog Blog, told IPS.

“They use every avenue of our broken democracy to their advantage,” Horn added, referring to the energy companies.

The DeSmog Blog activists agree that power and wealth allow the fossil fuel industry to “call the shots” when it comes to fracking.

They note that because of this advantage companies can afford “endless legal fees”, a luxury which is out of reach for ordinary citizens who may want to challenge them in court.

“It is rare for cases to reach the stage of a full-blown trial. Normally families and individuals wind up settling for less than what they want, because the alternative would be much worse for them,” says DeMelle.

In the case of the Hallowich family, whose children are prohibited for the rest of their lives from uttering certain “illegal words” related to fracking, the sum of the settlement was 750,000 dollars.

Psychological warfare

For anti-fracking activists, the Hallowich case is only “the tip of the iceberg”.

“The muzzling of a seven-year-old is just an egregious example of the systematic corruption which the oil industry has spent years orchestrating,” Horn told IPS.

Fossil fuel companies, according to DeSmog Blog, have gone as far as to hire military specialists with expertise in psychological warfare to deal with residents who try to resist nearby fracking.

Horn says he attended a conference in Texas where one energy company spokesperson admitted to this, saying “we are dealing with an insurgency” and recommending industry members read the U.S. Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency.

“Rather than taking responsible steps to address community concerns about the inherent risks of fracking,” says DeMelle, “the industry is taking an adversarial approach, treating concerned citizens as an ‘insurgency’ and using military warfare tactics and personnel to intimidate U.S. citizens in their own backyards.

“It’s unethical, despicable behaviour, and Congress should investigate whether the oil industry is in violation of federal law,” he added in a statement given to IPS.

Other cases of the industry suppressing government studies of fracking effects include one which took place in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas. There, an emergency order was issued by the EPA after a man complained of his water supply bubbling, only to be rescinded a year later after the oil company involved threatened the agency.

In the end, no government action was taken, and the man who complained was left to pay a thousand dollars per month to have access to clean water.

Another EPA study conducted in Wyoming connected fracking to water contamination, but again industry manipulation led to no further action being taken, despite some of the contamination being carcinogenic.

The EPA was originally slated to release a comprehensive study on the effects of hydraulic fracturing in 2014. The deadline for that report, however, has been pushed back to 2016.

U.S. authorities claim the month of August may be a dangerous one for U.S. citizens residing abroad, and they are apparently going to great lengths to reduce the risk.

Over the past two days, the U.S. Department of State, expressing a concern that Al-Qaeda affiliates may be planning a terror attack for this month, has taken a pair of drastic steps to reduce its citizens’ vulnerability to violence abroad.

A day after announcing the closure of several U.S. embassies and consulates, the department Friday issued a worldwide travel alert for all U.S. citizens. It specifically mentions the possibility of a terror attack this month.

“The Department of State alerts U.S. citizens to the continued potential for terrorist attacks, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, and possibly occurring in or emanating from the Arabian Peninsula.

“Current information suggests that al-Qa’ida and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks both in the region and beyond, and that they may focus efforts to conduct attacks in the period between now and the end of August,” the statement reads.

“This alert expires on August 31, 2013,” it states.

This warning comes only a day after State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters at a press briefing that the U.S., beginning Sunday, Aug. 4, would be closing down many of its diplomatic facilities in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa.

“[T]he Department of State has instructed certain U.S. embassies and consulates to remain closed or to suspend operations on Sunday, August 4th. The Department has been apprised of information that, out of an abundance of caution and care for our employees and others who may be visiting our installations, indicates we should institute these precautionary steps,” Harf said.

Although it is typical in many countries for official facilities to be closed on Sundays, for the countries in question it is a business day and would normally see embassy buildings open.

At least 18 facilities are expected to be subject to closure. They include embassies and consulates in Libya, Egypt, Algeria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Kuwait, Turkey, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Mauritania, Bahrain, and Israel.

It is unclear how long the shutdown will last or whether it will be extended to embassies outside of these regions. The issuance of the worldwide travel alert Friday is evidence that the U.S. is concerned about threats to its citizens which are irrespective of region.

Lessons learned?

The memory of the attacks on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, which occurred last year, may factor into the precautions being taken this month.

On Sep. 11, 2012, U.S. government buildings were attacked in the Eastern Libyan city and multiple U.S. citizens were killed, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. The attack caused a scandal in the U.S., and many opponents of the administration of President Barack Obama have accused it of doing too little to prevent the tragedy.

The extreme steps to prevent Al-Qaeda-linked terrorism, however, seem to damage claims the U.S. government has made on numerous recent occasions – namely, that the group responsible for the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 has been greatly weakened by the efforts of the U.S. war on terror.

Nevertheless, speaking at the same press conference in which she announced the shutdowns, Harf defended the U.S. tactic of using drone strikes against militants in Pakistan, claiming that the core groups there had been reduced to “a shadow of what they once were”.

“I think that it’s just a fact that we have eliminated a great deal of the threat coming from core Al-Qaeda,” the spokeswoman said Thursday, just after announcing the closures. She qualified that statement by saying some level of threat did remain, however.

The Obama administration has regularly justified its use of drone strikes in Pakistan by claiming their effectiveness in reducing the terror threat combined with the limited civilian casualties they allegedly involve.

After a secret document was uncovered last month, however, the claim that strikes involve an insubstantial number of civilian casualties no longer holds much water. The document, part of an internal assessment by the Pakistani government, recorded 147 civilian deaths out of a total of 746 which it listed as being killed by drone strikes.

Ninety-four of the civilians were children.

The drone strikes are now Pakistan’s “main bone of contention” with Washington, Bruce Riedel, who has worked as a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East for the last four U.S. presidents, told IPS.

With the claim of low civilian casualties decimated, the remaining justification for drones as an effective tool against terror becomes ever more important. But some analysts argue that the strikes actually breed more anti-U.S. militants than they eliminate.

“There is strong evidence,” said one landmark study, “to suggest that U.S. drone strikes have facilitated recruitment to violent non-state armed groups, and motivate attacks against both U.S. military and civilian targets.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, on an official trip to Pakistan, announced Thursday that high-level policy discussions will begin anew between Washington and Islamabad.

“Today, very quickly, we were able to agree to a resumption of the strategic dialogue to foster a deeper, broader and more comprehensive partnership between our countries,” Kerry said, speaking to the press in Islamabad.“The continuation of drone operations, now that the Pakistani government has made it clear in every possible way that it wants them to stop, is a very serious irritant to U.S.-Pakistani relations.” -- South Asia expert Bruce Riedel

Such dialogue between Washington and Islamabad had been suspended for almost two years following a series of U.S. actions in 2011 which killed people inside Pakistan and infuriated the public there.

“This is a modest but important step in taking this important relationship to a healthier place than where it has been in the last several years,” Bruce Riedel, who has worked as a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East for the last four U.S. presidents, told IPS.

October 2011 was the last time a visit was made by a U.S. secretary of state to the strategically important nation, which is possessed of a growing stockpile of nuclear weaponry and which neighbours a land where the U.S. is still leading a war.

The major actions which irked Islamabad in 2011 included the killing of two Pakistani men by CIA asset Raymond Davis in Lahore, the assassination of Osama Bin Laden by U.S. soldiers in Abbottabad, and the strafing to death of 24 Pakistani soldiers by U.S. planes along the country’s border with Afghanistan.

Two years later, however, the situation has evolved, Touqir Hussain, a member of the South Asian Studies faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told IPS.

“Something like this had to happen,” says Hussain. “The relationship had been going too far into negative territory.”

Husssain, who calls the resumption of U.S.-Pakistani discussions a “reset” in the relationship between the two countries, stresses the importance of the U.S. war for the sudden resumption of dialogue. He says that the U.S. recognises the importance of a successful withdrawal from Afghanistan, and that it will be better off in that task if working with a cooperative Islamabad.

“The U.S. realises the important role that a stable Pakistan can play for them, especially in Afghanistan,” he told IPS.

The drone issue

The biggest bone of contention for Pakistan in its relationship with the U.S. is the latter’s continued policy of carrying out drone strikes in its tribal regions.

“The continuation of drone operations, now that the Pakistani government has made it clear in every possible way that it wants them to stop, is a very serious irritant to U.S.-Pakistani relations, and there’s no getting around that,” says Riedel, who is currently a senior fellow at Brookings, a think tank here.

The attacks are designed to eliminate those suspected as militants, but reports say they also cause many civilian deaths.

Speaking on Pakistani television, Kerry made a statement seemingly intended to assuage concern over this issue.

“I think the programme will end, as we have eliminated most of the threat and continue to eliminate it,” he told the cameras, adding that he hoped the end would come “very soon”.

In a State Department press conference which followed that speech, however, spokeswoman Marie Harf qualified that statement, saying there was no exact timeline, and that it would depend on “the situation on the ground”.

Sharif, who assumed leadership in June, has supported more lenient counter-terrorism policies, including dialogue with the groups responsible for acts of violence against the Pakistani state. His government has made it clear that it wants a halt to all drone strikes.

Hussain, for one, doubts the lengths Islamabad is willing to go to see that desire realised.

“The U.S. and Pakistan will continue to have a conflict of view on this issue, but they are not going to let everything else come to a standstill because of it,” Hussain told IPS.

“Pakistan will continue to make noises and the U.S. will continue to carry out drone attacks,” he added, referring to the complaints made by Pakistani officials about the U.S. strikes.

While Kerry praised the unprecedented success of the election of Sharif, calling it an “historic transition”, he also took the opportunity while speaking in Islamabad to warn of the dangers of not combating extremism.

“The choice for Pakistan is clear: Will the forces of violent extremism be allowed to grow more dominant, eventually overpowering the moderate majority?” Kerry asked.

While the U.S. is once again on speaking terms with Pakistan at the highest level, it has a long way to go to regain the sympathy of the Pakistani public opinion.

Research indicates that over 70 percent of Pakistanis hold an unfavourable opinion of the U.S.

“Pakistani public opinion remains harshly anti-American and harshly anti-drones, and I don’t think anything Secretary Kerry has said is going to change that,” Riedel tells IPS.

Further, there is a “fundamental divide”, the Brookings scholar says, between the interests of Washington and those of Islamabad.

“The U.S. is at war with the Afghan Taliban, while Pakistan is supporting it,” he notes.

He further points out that, even when talks were under way before the problems in 2011, they never really produced much. Therefore he is sceptical about how much will come out of this rejuvenated relationship.

“While it is a modest step in the right direction, I don’t think people should have exaggerated expectations.”

Private Bradley Manning. Credit: U.S. Army/public domain

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jul 30 2013 (IPS)

A U.S. military judge ruled Tuesday that Private Bradley Manning, the young soldier who shared a mountain of classified data with the rogue pro-transparency group WikiLeaks, is not guilty of “aiding the enemy”.

He was found guilty, however, of a host of other charges which together could carry a punishment of up to 136 years in prison.

The verdict was read at 18:00 GMT by Colonel Denise Lind, the judge who presided over the trial held in a military court in Fort Meade, Maryland. It was met by ambivalence on the part of those who support Manning.

“I’m greatly relieved that Bradley was found not guilty of aiding the enemy…but I am completely outraged that he may be condemned to what could be tantamount to a life sentence for making government abuses known,” Nathan Fuller, who works with the Bradley Manning Support Network, told IPS.

The crimes Manning was found guilty of include five espionage charges and five theft charges.

Manning’s convictions stem from his decision to download a trove of classified data from U.S. Army computers and share it with WikiLeaks. The latter made the data public, causing a scandal which reflected poorly on U.S. military and diplomatic apparatuses.

“[Manning] is not a whistleblower or a hero. [His leaks] tarnished the image of the U.S. at a sensitive time,” Steven Bucci, director of the Foreign Policy Center at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank here, told IPS.

Bucci said that Manning acted illegally in releasing the data and this negates his claim to be a whistleblower.

Most notorious of the data released was the video file titled “Collateral Murder”,  which contained footage taken by a U.S. Army helicopter crew as it gunned down a group of Iraqis standing on a Baghdad street and continued firing as people nearby attempted to rescue them with a van.

Two of the initial targets turned out to be journalists working for Reuters. The van used for the rescue attempt also held two children, who suffered injuries.

Narration by soldiers engaged in the attack makes it sound as if they are enjoying the killing.

“On the video you can hear soldiers laughing about children being brought into battle,” says Fuller.

Fuller says that Manning released the unclassified video after learning that Reuters’ attempts to access it had been blocked.

Whistleblower or traitor?

In addition to the video, the data leaked by Manning included 470,000 battlefield reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables.

Prosecutors argued that in illegally offering up the data, Manning acted as a “traitor” and knew he would be making crucial information available to enemies of the U.S.

Of the 22 crimes he was charged with, Manning pleaded “guilty” to 10 of the lesser ones but “not guilty” to the most substantial charge of aiding the enemy.  This most serious charge can be a capital offence, but prosecutors declined to seek the death penalty in Manning’s case, settling instead to pursue a life sentence.

There was never much chance that Manning would get off scot-free. The charges to which he pleaded guilty alone carried penalties of up to 20 years prison time.

His defence presented him as a naïve whistle-blower who broke the law in order to serve what he believed to be the greater good. It denied the prosecution’s assertion that he acted as a traitor out to undermine U.S. war efforts.

A message sent by Manning was cited as evidence of his noble intent.

“If you had free reign over classified networks over a long period of time,” Manning wrote in an internet chat with the man who would eventually turn him in, “if you saw incredible things, awful things, things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C., what would you do?”

At the pre-trial hearing where he made his pleas, however, he was asked by the judge if he knew what he had done was wrong.

“Yes, your honour,” he replied.

Hoping to change the world

Despite the illegality of Manning’s actions, many in the U.S. protested for his release. Some activists advocating on his behalf believe the overall effect of his leaks was positive.

Outside the U.S., as well, demonstrators in scores of cities voiced their support of Manning.

“The people who have come out in support know he did something brave and selfless to inform them about corrupt U.S. policies. It had an effect on the entire world,” says Fuller.

One of those supporters, Deb Van Poolen, an artist who attended the trial and sketched Manning, says she is “inspired” by him.

“He was really hoping to change the world for the better,” Van Poolen told IPS.

The artist was dismayed by the fact that Manning had been held for three years prior to his trial, saying it violated his right to a speedy trial and calling it “completely ridiculous”.

Sentencing for Manning will take place during the month of August and is expected to take at least two weeks. The range of prison time Manning could receive is vast, and the possibility remains open that he will escape with little prison time.

After his sentencing the case will remain open to appeals.

Heritage’s Bucci, who believes Manning to be the “biggest spy [the U.S. has] ever had”, believes that a harsh sentence will do much to dissuade people with inside access from making similar illegal leaks.

“People have to understand,” Bucci explained to IPS, “that if you accept a top-secret clearance you have to abide by the rules, and, if you don’t, there is going to be a price that has to be paid.”

But the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange in the U.S., said in a a statement Tuesday, “Manning’s treatment, prosecution, and sentencing have one purpose: to silence potential whistleblowers and the media as well.

“While the ‘aiding the enemy’ charges (on which Manning was rightly acquitted) received the most attention from the mainstream media, the Espionage Act itself is a discredited relic of the WWI era, created as a tool to suppress political dissent and antiwar activism, and it is outrageous that the government chose to invoke it in the first place against Manning.”

Party allegiances apparently mean little in the U.S. when it comes to the debate over domestic government surveillance.

A study released this morning by the Pew Research Center, a major U.S. polling agency, revealed that 57 percent of Democrats approve of government spying, along with 44 percent of Republicans.“There is a rising tide of public concern about the balance that’s being struck between national security and civil liberties." -- William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution

“There is a real division within each party on this issue,” Norman J. Ornstein, a renowned expert on U.S. politics, told IPS.

This was evident in the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, when a vote to curtail domestic spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) sundered the Democratic and Republican parties alike.

The vote was the first of its kind to take place since the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden which, when published by The Guardian newspaper, exposed a degree of domestic surveillance far greater in scale and scope than was previously understood by the public.

The 217-205 decision to reject an amendment blocking spending on NSA domestic spying was so close that one political commentator called it a “nail biter”. Of the 205 votes in favour, 111 were from Democrats and 94 from Republicans, and of the 217 votes opposed, 83 were from Democrats votes and 134 from Republicans.

“You’re not going to see many votes like this,” says Ornstein, who is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington-based neoconservative think tank.

William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, another think tank here, agrees that the outcome was unusual.

“It did not conform to standard party lines but instead saw an unusual coalition of the libertarian right and the liberal left voting against the centres of both parties,” Galston told IPS.

Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute, a research organisation which advocates individual liberties and limited government, told IPS that there are historical reasons for civil liberties being a major issue for members of both parties.

“The libertarian strain is a natural dimension of Republican ideology which was diminished by the immediate reaction to [the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001], and now it is sort of naturally reasserting itself,” says Sanchez.

“[On the other hand,] progressive activists have frequently been the targets of abusive intelligence powers,” he added, citing historical examples of government crackdowns on unions, civil rights groups and other leftist organisations as lessons that help explain Democratic opposition to spying.

Rising Tide

Both Ornstein and Galston told IPS that the narrow decision in congress was reflective of public opinion.

“There is a rising tide of public concern about the balance that’s being struck between national security and civil liberties,” says Galston.

U.S. citizens, Ornstein told IPS, are “strongly divided as a whole”.

Indeed, the Pew poll indicates more U.S. citizens favour being surveilled by their own government, but only by a slim margin.

Of the 1480 adults surveyed, 50 percent overall said they approved of the domestic surveillance programme, while 44 percent actually said they disapproved.

In a separate question, 56 percent agreed that federal courts have failed to impose adequate limits on intelligence gathering.

Based on the Pew findings, age and gender seem to be factors in where citizens stand on the issue.

By a ratio of about two-to-one, 60 to 29 percent, young respondents said they were more concerned about the government doing too much to weaken civil liberties than they were about it doing too little to defend the nation from terror. In terms of gender, 51 percent of men agreed with this statement, as opposed to only 29 percent of women.

In the report, Pew concludes that the views of U.S. citizens on this issue are “complex”, a conclusion based in part on the relative lack of correlation with party leanings.

Spill Over

Ornstein believes that the cross-cutting divide splitting both major parties is “issue-specific” and unlikely to spill over into other major controversies, for example on social issues such as spending on health care.

To an extent, Galston agrees.

“The liberal left has strict views on economic questions that are poles apart from the views of the libertarians,” Galston says, “and it would be very hard for them to find common ground.”

Liberal Democrats, Galston explains, would have difficulty accepting the small-government solutions often championed by libertarian Republicans.

He notes, however, that more legislation on government spying will take place in the foreseeable future, and that the closeness of Wednesday’s vote was indicative of a strengthening bipartisan opposition to intrusive government tactics.

Cato’s Sanchez believes this like-mindedness could spill over into over issues, namely those related to civil liberties.

“There are civil libertarian wings of both parties, so I expect we could see cooperation on other things, such as free speech issues,” Sanchez says.

It is widely speculated that the de facto leader of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, Senator Rand Paul, will make a run for the presidency in 2016. One early poll has placed him as the current top contender for the Republican nomination.

Galston told IPS that this issue has opened the way for “conversation” between Paul’s faction of the right and the liberal left.

“Now that they’ve discovered each other, there is likely to be more conversation across party lines,” says Galston.  “This is probably a beginning rather than an end.”

Momentum appears to be building in the push to close down the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, where 166 inmates, 86 of whom have been cleared for release, remain held without charges.

On Wednesday, a U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing focused specifically on the merits of shuttering the prison. It was the first such meeting in four years, and comes just a few months after U.S. President Barack Obama renewed a pledge he first made in 2008 to close down the detention centre.

U.S. groups advocating for the closure of the facility believe Wednesday’s hearing is another sign that change may be imminent.

“It feels like we are getting to a tipping point on this issue,” Elisa Massimino, president of the Washington-based watchdog group Human Rights First and one of the witnesses at the hearing, told IPS shortly after she gave testimony.

Massimino notes that, in addition to Obama’s recently renewed pledge, the hearing also comes on the heels of new controversies that have put the issue of closing down the prison “back on the radar screen”. She cites revelations of operating costs that are higher than previously understood and the ongoing force-feeding of hunger-striking inmates.

She also points to recent statements by prominent lawmakers, such as Senator John McCain, in favour of shuttering the facility.

The witnesses who spoke Wednesday came from varying backgrounds and expressed vastly different viewpoints. While most were in support of seeing the prison shut down, some continued to highlight its importance as a tool in the ongoing U.S. “war on terror”.

“If Guantanamo is closed, it raises the question of where these terrorists will be sent,” Senator Ted Cruz said at the hearing, referring to inmates being held without charge.

“Radical terrorism remains a live threat,” he added, noting recent attacks on U.S. targets in Boston, Benghazi and Fort Hood, Texas.

Frank Gaffney, a commentator who writes for the Washington Times and whose Centre for Security Policy is viewed by many as a lead proponent of Islamophobic views, accused those advocating for the closure of the prison of forgetting why it was established in the first place.

“We are at war because others attacked us,” Gaffney asserted at the hearing.

He testified that the Guantanamo detention centre exists because there is “no better option”, stating that the prospects of sending some prisoners to other countries and bringing others to the United States are too dangerous to be adopted.

Releasing inmates abroad, Gaffney said, brings about the possibility that they could “return to the battlefield”. Meanwhile, bringing them into the U.S. prison system, he continued, offers the possibility that they could proselytise within U.S. prisons, that “sympathetic judges” could eventually authorise their release, or that a large-scale escape could take place.

Gaffney also warned that shutting down Guantanamo would signal weakness on the part of the United States, potentially encouraging more aggressive behaviour by anti-U.S. forces.

Proponents of closing the facility down cast doubt on many of these claims, however.

“Protecting ourselves can still be accomplished by holding [detainees] in the U.S.,” said Adam Smith, a member of the House of Representatives.

Smith pointed out that, along with a great number of murderers and paedophiles, hundreds of criminals convicted of charges related to terrorism are already being held in high-security U.S. prisons.

“The idea that, instead of having 400 terrorist inmates, we have maybe 484 in the U.S., [and that this] is somehow going to massively increase the threat is just ridiculous on its face,” said Smith.

“Terror-creating institution”

Those in favour of closure also argued Wednesday that, while some detainees would likely engage in anti-U.S. activities if released abroad, the prison’s continued existence actually makes the country less safe.

Paul Eaton, a retired major-general in the U.S. Army, testified that Guantanamo harms the international reputation of the U.S., a sentiment supported by a letter sent yesterday by 26 other generals which stated that “Guantanamo is a symbol of torture and injustice not befitting a nation that is a beacon of liberty to the world.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, corroborated these assertions by saying that practices at Guantanamo “make a myth” of the U.S. legal system.

Eaton also claimed the facility works as a recruiting tool for jihadist groups and creates more motivation for terrorism than it suppresses. He referred to it as a “terror-creating institution”.

“[The prison] facilitates the filling of the ranks of Al-Qaeda and other organisations that would attack the U.S.,” Eaton stated.

Multiple speakers at Wednesday’s hearing denounced the financial costs of the prison, noting that for every inmate there, the U.S. government, which is currently cutting budgets elsewhere, spends around 2.7 million dollars a year. This is far greater than the roughly 78,000 dollars it spends annually on inmates being held at the U.S. system’s highest-security prison, Florence ADX in Colorado.

The Florence prison currently holds the only participant in the Sep. 11, 2001, attacks to be tried in civilian court, Zacarias Moussaoui. It also holds Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and the vigilante known as the “Unabomber”, Ted Kaczynski.

While Massimino of Human Rights First expressed gratitude for Wednesday’s hearing, she told IPS that she lamented the absence of any representative of the Obama administration.

She notes that while there is currently a great deal of popular interest in seeing the prison shut down – indeed, Wednesday’s hearing had to be moved to a larger room due to high public turnout – there remains a lack of adequate political incentive to tackle the issue.

“I give a lot of credit to Senator [Richard] Durbin,” says Massimino, referring to the head of the committee that held the hearing. “This issue does not generate a lot of campaign contributions or press coverage, but he has done a great job in trying to keep it on the radar screen.”

Following the amendment of a long-standing U.S. law, people in this country will now be exposed to news which is produced by the U.S. government.

On Jul. 2, a change to the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act, also known as the Smith-Mundt Act, came into effect, reversing a ban on the State Department and U.S. international broadcasting agencies which had prevented them from disseminating their programme materials within U.S. borders."The nature of news is that it influences public opinion, so how do you prove or prevent news that seeks to do that?" -- Lisa Graves of the Center for Media and Democracy

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the U.S. federal government agency which oversees all U.S. government-supported media internationally, notes that individuals residing in the U.S. will now have access to vast amounts of new information.

“This is quality, award-winning journalism,” Lynne Weil, a spokeswoman for BBG, told IPS, “so why shouldn’t Americans be able to see and hear it in broadcast quality?”

The BBG will now be able to respond positively to requests for content from “U.S.-based media, universities, non-governmental organizations, and individuals.” This means that local and national news providers in the U.S. can relay material produced by BBG sources if they so desire.

Opponents complain government-sponsored news being delivered domestically is akin to propaganda, but the BBG argues that it actually represents an advance for U.S. transparency, as citizens now will have a better understanding of what kind of information its government propagates abroad.

It deserves noting, however, that U.S. citizens have always had access to BBG material through the internet.

BBG agencies include the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa), Radio Free Asia, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and TV Marti).

Weil points out that even prior to the change, U.S. independent media could cite reports from these organisations and even rebroadcast them if they were pulled from the internet or by other means.  The difference is that now these media can request and receive entire government-sponsored reports in broadcast quality, which they can then relay to U.S. audiences.

Propaganda?

In its mission statement, the BBG says it seeks to “engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”

Unlike traditional, independent news sources, the BBG has on its board representatives from the State Department and is funded entirely with tax dollars designated for “public diplomacy”.

“[P]ublic diplomacy,” according to the University of Southern California (USC) Center on Public Diplomacy, “was developed partly to distance overseas governmental information activities from the term ‘propaganda’, which had acquired pejorative connotations.”

The Smith-Mundt Act was established in 1948, at the outset of the Cold War, to authorize the government to conduct public diplomacy abroad, and it has faced significant opposition ever since.

In the 1970s, toward the end of the Vietnam War, U.S. Senator William Fulbright led the move to block U.S.-sponsored news agencies from having access to domestic consumers. He wrote a book in which he denounced government news as propaganda and said the agencies “should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.”

Weil rejects outright accusations that BBG organisations engage in propaganda.

“Propaganda is a pejorative term and should not be applied to what our journalists do. They report the truth and apply proper journalistic standards to the work they do,” Weil told IPS.

She asserts that the term “propaganda” is limited to information which is untrue or inaccurate, but media watchdog groups note that not all propaganda is made up of falsehoods.

“There can be subtle propaganda, as well as less subtle propaganda which actually ‘spins’ the facts,” Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, a non-profit investigative reporting group, told IPS.

Dictionary definitions seem to support Graves’ position. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, for example, includes a definition of “propaganda” as “ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause.”

Semantics aside, the agencies under BBG do have a mandate to present accurate news and are prohibited from acting as mouthpiece for the government.

“VOA reporters and broadcasters must strive for accuracy and objectivity in all their work. They do not speak for the U.S. government. They accept no treatment or assistance from U.S. government officials or agencies that is more favorable or less favorable than that granted to staff of private-sector news agencies,” the VOA code states, for example.

The BBG agencies are also prohibited from producing material in order to influence U.S. public opinion.

Graves says she “appreciates” these guidelines but is not confident they will be enforced.

“The nature of news is that it influences public opinion,” Graves says, “so how do you prove or prevent news that seeks to do that?”

According to Weil, the BBG agencies are “tasked with presenting accurate information in places where this is otherwise difficult or impossible.” She notes that BBG journalists have died or gone missing because of their work.

Graves says she also appreciates the importance of public diplomacy in areas where access to information is limited, but she is sceptical that the U.S., with its vast array of media sources, qualifies.

Also, she is concerned that many citizens do not pay close attention to the ultimate source of the news they receive.

“Some people are very specific about how they get their news, but others won’t necessarily realise where the information is coming from,” she told IPS.

“I don’t know that many people will recognise or even know what Voice of America is.”

Since the change went into effect, Weil says the BBG has received a multitude of requests for content, including some from major media outlets.

Intellectual property provisions proposed by the United States would extend monopoly powers derived from patents to pharmaceutical companies that sell their medicines abroad. Credit: Bigstock

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jul 16 2013 (IPS)

As a new round of talks behind a major proposed free trade area, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), get underway this week, the United States is pushing several developing countries to accept provisions that critics say would make it more difficult for their citizens to access medicine.

“The concern about access to medicine, and that the TPP deal will lead to high health-care costs, is huge,” Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of Citizens Trade Campaign, a fair trade advocacy group based here, told IPS.“TPP is certainly not being written in the interest of small business owners or working people.” -- Arthur Stamoulis of the Citizens Trade Campaign

On Monday, as negotiations for the TPP enter their 18th round, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), a humanitarian organisation, reflected this concern, urged negotiating countries “to remove terms that could block people from accessing affordable medicines, choke off production of generic medicines, and constrain the ability of governments to pass laws in the interest of public health.”

Negotiations for the TPP, which officially started in 2010, are currently being held in Malaysia, and the countries participating include the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Canada and Mexico.

Japan is expected to join at the end of this round, while others have expressed interest in signing on, as well.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative has explained that the purpose of the deal is to “enhance trade and investment among the TPP partner countries, promote innovation, economic growth and development, and support the creation and retention of jobs.”

Yet critics have long warned that the United States appeared to be setting onerous conditions for any agreement, while complaining that the talks have been held in near secrecy, lacking oversight even from the U.S. Congress.

While intellectual property provisions proposed by the United States may be intended to promote innovation, MSF notes that they would extend monopoly powers derived from patents to pharmaceutical companies that sell their medicines abroad.

This means that it would take longer for cheaper generic drugs to come to market in low-income countries, where citizens often struggle to afford basic necessities.

Further, by hamstringing Asian suppliers of generic drugs, the effect of TTP’s restrictive intellectual property provisions could ultimately reverberate beyond the countries involved in the agreement.

“The critically important role that many Asian countries have in supplying both generic medicines and the active pharmaceutical ingredients needed to produce drugs is in jeopardy because of new restrictions proposed in the TPP,” says Judit Rius Sanjuan, U.S. manager of MSF’s Access Campaign.

“The TPP threatens to put a stranglehold on the world’s supply of affordable treatments, with dire consequences for patients, treatment providers, and pharmaceutical producers in developing countries.”

The proposed agreement could facilitate “evergreening” by patent-holding pharmaceutical companies, a term that refers to legal manoeuvres that, when successful, lead to monopoly powers being maintained longer than the 20 years typically allotted by patents.

Imposing these types of new restrictions would run counter to previous international agreements and national legislation under which Washington has pledged to expand access to generic medicines.

Any restriction in access to such medicines would also affect the United States’ own global health goals. Generics are said to make up some 98 percent of the medicines used by PEPFAR, the United States’ flagship anti-HIV/AIDS programme and the world’s largest.

MSF calls the practice of evergreening “abusive”. Further, under a free trade agreement all adhering countries would conform their laws, and the standard promoted by the United States would, the group is warning, do so in a way that would make evergreening more feasible abroad.

Sense of urgency

For the administration of President Barack Obama, there has been a sense of urgency to finish the TPP negotiations by the fall. Some observers have suggested that this could lead countries that would otherwise reject the clauses affecting access to medicine to allow them to remain.

“We are hearing from other negotiating teams that the pressure to finalise this agreement by October is rising,” Sanjuan told IPS during a previous round of negotiations, “and they fear that if there is not more time for substantive discussion, this chapter could stand.”

She also notes that negotiations are being carried out in secret and without input from civil society. Her office became aware of the clauses related to intellectual property and access to medicine only after text of a chapter was leaked to them.

In fact, concerned groups and the media have had extremely limited opportunities to speak with negotiators. Much of the communication has occurred at so-called “stakeholder meetings”, wherein groups are allowed to make brief presentations to certain negotiators and given controlled access to speak face-to-face with them.

IPS recently attended a stakeholder meeting related to another major proposed U.S.-led free trade agreement and was told by multiple delegates that the information they could divulge was very limited.

That lack of transparency is being interpreted by some as a clear indication that the TPP agreement is not being negotiated in the interest of the general public. Indeed, the vast majority of those who have had access to the TPP talks have been representatives of major corporations.

“TPP is certainly not being written in the interest of small business owners or working people,” the Citizens Trade Campaign’s Stamoulis says. Instead, he suggests it will serve the interest of “a small handful of very powerful corporations”.

Stamoulis, too, notes mounting pressure on negotiators to finish the deal by the end of the year.

“They’re definitely going full steam ahead to get this thing done as fast as possible, there’s no doubt about that,” he says.

For her part, Sanjuan recommends that the urgency of those looking to push the agreement through be met by urgency on the part of those who want to avoid restricting medicinal access to poor people.

“The time for negotiators to fix the TPP is now, in this round of talks, before political pressure escalates and a deal that is bad for public health is sealed in the interest of time.”

“Bleeding”, “vomiting”, “a quarter or even a third” of bodyweight lost, “torture”. These are characteristic descriptions from testimony by hunger strikers at the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay of their experience being force-fed at the hands of U.S. officials, published in a report released Thursday.

The report, produced by Reprieve, a U.K.-based legal assistance and advocacy group that is representing more than a dozen of the Guantanamo prisoners, collates testimonies from the prisoners’ unclassified letters, calls and discussions with attorneys.“It diminishes the standing of the U.S. in the world that we don’t follow the established ethics of the medical profession." -- Dr. Scott Allen of Physicians for Human Rights

The views “from the inside” presented in these descriptions are extremely disturbing, and advocates say they raise serious questions concerning the United States’ commitment to human rights.

“From a medical standpoint, the force-feeding of a competent hunger striker is a serious violation of ethics,” Dr. Scott Allen, a medical advisor to the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights, told IPS.

Allen spent seven years as a physician working within the U.S. prison system, during which time he dealt with hunger strikers. He points out that force-feeding is counter to the standards of the World Medical Association. Further, those standards have been accepted by the American Medical Association, which has expressed opposition to the practices at Guantanamo Bay.

There are currently some 140 U.S medical personnel tasked with carrying out the force-feedings that are being done to 45 hunger strikers at the detention centre. More than 100 detainees are currently on a hunger strike that has gone on since February, in protest of what they view as their indefinite detention.

The accounts from inmates in the Reprieve report indicate that U.S. practices go even beyond the concerns expressed by Allen and the associations he mentions.

Some of the accounts describe forcible cell extractions (FCEs), as the procedure of physically removing prisoners from their cells and subjecting them to force-feeding is officially known.

The U.S. military has claimed that strikers “present themselves daily, calmly, in a totally cooperative way, to be fed through a tube”. Prisoner accounts of FCEs contradict that claim, however.

“They wanted me to undergo tests and, when I refused, they called in the anti-riot [FCE] squad, who stormed into my hospital room,” Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian detainee who was cleared for release in 2007, is cited in the report as saying. “They shackled my hands and feet to the bed and then force fed me intravenously for twenty-four hours.”

Of the 166 detainees in Guantanamo, 86 have been cleared to be let free, but they remain held in the prison because of complications that have arisen in facilitating their releases.  

Another prisoner quoted by the report, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian national who was cleared for release in 2009, explains in graphic detail the pain he has experienced as a result of being force-fed.

“I vomited blood for three days. I had a very strong cough and felt that my throat was injured,” Dhiab recounts. “[A] while ago they broke a rib in my chest. After it healed, the FCE again broke the same rib. It happened over and over again and the injury gets worse.”

Adversarial approach

In a manual outlining standard operating procedure for 2013, which was leaked to the press, Guantanamo officials express their approach to hunger-striking patients using terminology reminiscent of war.

“Just as battlefield tactics must change throughout the course of a conflict, the medical responses to Guantanamo detainees who hunger strike has evolved with time,” the manual states.

As Dr. Allen notes, this adversarial approach would constitute a highly atypical stance for medical professionals to take toward their patients. Moreover, he says, it is not one which is likely to solve the issue.

“Handling the strike this way will lead the doctors to lose the trust of their patients,” he says. “And having no trust means there will be little chance of properly resolving the strike.”

The debate over force-feeding has rekindled talk of Guantanamo officials being engaged in torture, a public debate that seemingly ended after President Barack Obama banned the practice of water-boarding (a form of interrogation that simulates drowning) there in 2009.

Indeed, there are accounts in the Reprieve report which explicitly call force-feeding torture.

“The force-feeding itself is simple torture,” explains Shaker Aamer, a Saudi prisoner cleared for released in 2007 and again in 2009. “Now they are using the metal-tipped tubes, forcing them in and pulling them out twice a day, leaving people vomiting on themselves in the restraint chair, and so forth.”

Just as the controversy surrounding water-boarding was viewed by many as damaging to the United States’ international image, so the continuing subjection of inmates to force-feeding may degrade the country in the minds of citizens and governments around the globe, Dr. Allen explained to IPS.

“It diminishes the standing of the U.S. in the world that we don’t follow the established ethics of the medical profession,” he says.

There is currently political pressure building on the administration of President Obama to end the use of force-feeding.

Influential Senators Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin sent a letter to the administration on Wednesday imploring it to end the force-feeding and ultimately close the prison.

“The growing problem of hunger strikes is due to the fact that many detainees have remained in legal limbo for more than a decade and have given up hope,” the letter states. “This should be alarming to all of us, and it is imperative that the Administration outline a formal process to permanently close the Guantanamo facility as soon as possible.” 

An Afghan soldier protects the palace of King Amanullah (1919-1929) that was partly destroyed in the 1992-1996 civil war. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jul 9 2013 (IPS)

The prospects for a peace settlement and power-sharing in Afghanistan following the scheduled U.S.-led troop withdrawal in 2014 are grim, according to a report presented here Monday.

Washington is currently debating how it will structure this withdrawal, including an option to remove all its soldiers sooner than expected.“We can stay until 2014 or we can stay until 2024. Unless we’ve negotiated a political settlement, it won’t matter.” -- Bill Goodfellow of the Center for International Policy

In this context, a study group from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), a think tank here, has concluded that faulty diplomat efforts by the United States have failed to create the necessary circumstances for achieving a smooth political transition to an independent Afghan state.

The report details the findings of an extensive study on U.S. attempts to facilitate negotiations between the Taliban the Afghan national government. The ICSR analysts found that, thus far, those attempts have amounted to a “failure”; further, they express doubt that this failure can be reversed.

“Given the short time remaining before the end of the International Security Assistance Force combat mission in December 2014,” the report states, “there are few grounds for optimism that further talks might lead to a major political breakthrough.”

The difficulties involved in carrying out negotiations are many, both proponents and critics agree, and no talks are currently scheduled to take place.

The latest attempt to induce Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government to talk to the Taliban failed last month because of objections Karzai had over a sign placed by the Taliban outside of the headquarters it has established in Doha, Qatar.

Nevertheless, the report accuses Washington of making a number of strategic errors that have compounded problems facing negotiations.

For instance, it attributes “bad timing” to U.S. efforts to conduct the talks, saying that they came too late, leaving the process too little time to bear fruit.

“The timing for talks could not have been worse,” Ryan Evans, one of the ICSR authors, said at Monday’s presentation of the report. “[The U.S. is] not negotiating from a position of strength but rather a position of weakness, because we announced we were withdrawing troops before we announced talks were a matter of U.S. policy.”

He added: “Doing so, we took away the biggest stick, the biggest leverage we had as far as the Taliban was concerned: our troop presence in Afghanistan.”

Frederic Grare, director of the South Asia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank here, also doubts that there will be substantial negotiations involving Karzai’s government and the Taliban prior to the U.S. withdrawal, noting similar problems with timing.

“The Taliban do not want to deal with Karzai because they view him as a U.S. puppet,” Grare told IPS. “And the closer you get to the date of withdrawal, the less of a chance there is you’ll get the Taliban to do what they don’t want to do.”

Too many voices

Meanwhile, the report accuses the United States of lacking one coherent voice when speaking to Afghans, and providing mixed and often contradictory indications of its intentions.

It notes that members of a wide range of U.S. government agencies, such as the Defence Department, State Department and the National Security Council, are pursuing varied agendas.

“[T]here have been too many actors involved in this process and so many different lines of communication with the Taliban that the cumulative effect has been chaos,” the report states. “Multiple channels have been operating in parallel, creating confusion, disjointed expectations from all parties, and contradictory messages.”

Meanwhile, the Taliban is also not as unified as would be ideal for conducting effective talks. But the United States has done itself a disservice by failing to operate with this in mind, the report states.

“We’ve approached the Taliban as if it were this strictly controlled hierarchical movement, and that we can negotiate with some people at the top and the rest of the group will fall into line,” Evans said, noting that this is not the case.

“People there fight for very local reasons and are often only casually connected to the leadership of the Taliban.”

Evans cites his own experiences in the country, as well as examples from recent history in which deals struck with Taliban leadership not been held up by lower-ranking members.

The ICSR warns that in addition to having a disparate structure, the Taliban is prone to using negotiations as a tactical move in a grander strategy.

“There may indeed be pragmatic Taliban who favour negotiation toward some sort of power-sharing deal,” the report states, “but there are also those who view negotiations as a means to an end or as ‘a way to reduce military pressure enabling them to conserve their strength and consolidate their authority in the areas of Afghanistan they currently control’.”

This last is a quote from a 2012 report in Foreign Policy magazine.

Meanwhile, Grare laments that other important voices have been left out of the talks. He believes that by pushing away other non-Taliban groups, Karzai left himself “isolated”.

This failure to involve other actors is one of the reasons, Grare believes, that talks “will lead nowhere.”

Work from one script

Still, other experts assert that the U.S. has no good option other than to push for substantial negotiations ahead of the 2014 planned withdrawal.

“We can stay until 2014 or we can stay until 2024,” Bill Goodfellow, a founder of the Center for International Policy, another think tank here, told IPS. “Unless we’ve negotiated a political settlement, it won’t matter.”

Goodfellow emphasises the importance of including all states and parties concerned, including Iran, a country with which Washington is currently at odds.

The ICSR report does lay out a series of recommendations, however, which it suggests could improve U.S. chances of achieving a peaceful power-sharing agreement via negotiations.

It advises the United States to “speak with one voice”, for instance, by reining in the various U.S. government messengers in Afghanistan. By “working from the same script” U.S. could ensure Afghans understand its position and purpose.

The report also suggests the United States make sure all key stakeholders are involved in the process, and that the needs of the majority of Afghan society are taken into consideration.

“Ignoring those fundamental needs and interests,” the report concludes, “not only increases the risk of civil war, it also destabilises the negotiation process itself.”

Evo Morales at a press conference at U.N. headquarters in New York . Credit: Mathieu Vaas/IPS

By Diana Cariboni and Jared Metzker
MONTEVIDEO/WASHINGTON , Jul 4 2013 (IPS)

The suspicion that Bolivian President Evo Morales’ jet was carrying Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who has become Washington´s public enemy number one, triggered an unprecedented international incident.

Four European countries – France, Italy, Spain and Portugal – denied Morales’ presidential jet permission to fly through their airspace on his way back from Moscow to La Paz.

Snowden, the former technical contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) who released dozens of top secret documents proving that the U.S. government has been tapping global internet and phone systems on a massive scale, is in hiding in the Moscow airport.

Morales’ aircraft was rerouted and forced to land in Austria, where it was stuck on the tarmac for 14 hours. The governments implicated in the incident brandished technical explanations, and after hours of heated negotiations, the presidential jet was allowed to take off again.

While it was grounded, the plane and its passengers were apparently subjected to some kind of inspection, the scope of which is not yet clear. But afterwards, Austria’s foreign minister, Michael Spindelegger, stated that there were only Bolivian citizens in the aircraft.

The incident violates international law, because aircraft carrying national leaders have diplomatic immunity. Bolivian diplomats complained at the United Nations that Morales had been “kidnapped” during the time he was grounded in Austria. And the indignation spread to other South American governments.

An extraordinary meeting of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) has been convened for Thursday in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba to discuss the issue.
Morales, who along with other presidents from the region was in Russia for an oil and gas conference, had expressed sympathy for Snowden’s plight. The whistleblower has been desperately seeking asylum in different countries since his passport was revoked and he was charged with espionage. In the last few days Snowden has applied for asylum in 21 countries. But as of yet he hasn’t received a response from any government.

Washington has not tried to conceal its efforts to block any attempt to offer asylum to the 30-year-old former employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

But U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki largely evaded questions as to whether communications between the U.S. and the European countries which denied the airspace had led to the rerouting of Morales’ presidential jet. “Ask them,” she said.

She was only willing to acknowledge that U.S. officials had been in touch with “a broad range of countries” in recent days with regard to Snowden.

It is clear that some of those contacts bore fruit. After receiving a phone call from U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said that neither he nor officials in Quito had given authorisation for travel documents that the consul in London issued to Snowden.

The consul in question is in the Ecuadorean embassy in Britain, where Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistleblower website, has been living since June 2012. Assange was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012.

“While we still do not know what role the U.S. played (in rerouting the plane), it is hard to believe the U.S. did not exert pressure to ensure Snowden was not on the plane, as they apparently suspected,” Coletta Younger, senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told IPS.

“It was a huge tactical blunder and a breach of diplomatic protocol (by whoever decided to deny the airspace). But it sent a strong message that whoever takes Snowden in will face serious repercussions from the U.S.,” she added.

“I think this could backfire. The Latin Americans are so outraged that it could facilitate the decision to take Snowden in,” Younger said.

Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank, said “It seems either the U.S. had something to do (with the decision to deny the airspace) or it was done out of a sense of solidarity with the U.S.

It is possible they made the decision alone based on a recognition of how serious this issue is to the U.S.”

Shifter said that normally such a drastic step would indicate a state of war. He described it as “An extreme overreaction…Whatever one thinks about Snowden or Morales, it seems like this was disrespectful of international law.”

He also said the incident “looks terrible in political terms.“It was out of proportion. It reflects a patronising, paternalistic mindset that stronger countries can bully weaker ones.”

But he disagreed with Younger that it would facilitate a Latin American refuge for Snowden. “What this ultimately underscores is how seriously the U.S. regards this case,” he said.

“It may be tempting to take Snowden in in order to needle the U.S., but the consequences of that will have to be taken into consideration. The U.S., for all its weaknesses, is still the U.S.,” he said.

Ragia Omran. Credit: Lilian Wagdy/cc by 2.0

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jul 3 2013 (IPS)

A prominent human rights organisation based here announced Tuesday that its annual award for 2013 would go to Ragia Omran, an Egyptian lawyer and women’s rights activist.

“With dedication and courage, Ms. Omran is often the first to arrive on the scene at jails, police stations, court houses, and military and civilian prosecution offices,” said Kerry Kennedy, president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, which has presented the award to outstanding defenders and advocates of human rights for 30 years.“She is doing critical work in a country and a region that is going through a very difficult and important time." -- RFK's Santiago Canton

“Hundreds of peaceful activists have her to thank for successfully securing their release and protecting their rights to freedom of speech and association. [Omran] is a beacon of hope for the women of Egypt and a champion in the global human rights movement.”

The award, according to the centre, is designated for “journalists, authors, and human rights activists who, often at great personal risk and sacrifice, are on the frontlines of the international movement for human rights and social justice.”

Picked by the RFK Center from a list of over 100 nominees, Omran has spent two decades fighting for women’s rights, as well as human rights in general, in Egypt. In 1994, she started and led a successful campaign to stop the practice of female genital mutilation in public hospitals.

Most recently, she played a part in the popular uprisings in Egypt, founding an influential campaign to further human rights there. Her Almasry Alhurr Movement seeks to promote long-term good governance, transparency and public participation.

Other groups that promote human rights have also acknowledged the merit of Omran’s work, especially noting her recent accomplishments.

“She has done really good work, especially since 2011,” Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, told IPS. “In particular, she has been very engaged in defending protestors in military trials.”

As an attorney, Omran has represented hundreds of protestors facing military tribunals, defending their rights to demonstrate publicly against government repression. She is also a part of the Front to Defend Egypt Protesters, a legal network designed to protect activists, and the New Woman Foundation, which advocates reproductive rights and the inclusion of women in politics.

In addition, she’s a member of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, which represents torture victims and others who have suffered mistreatment at the hands of the government, and the No to Military Trials for Civilians Campaign, an effort to halt the subjection of civilians to military trials.

The RFK Center stated in its announcement that “[t]he work of human rights activists remains critical during this time of political unrest [in Egypt].”

Shield of recognition

In an interview with IPS, Santiago Canton, director of the centre’s human rights programme, reiterated the importance of geography in selecting Omran for the award.

“She is doing critical work in a country and a region that is going through a very difficult and important time,” he noted.

Egypt is currently in a state of great social and political unrest, with its military having given President Mohammad Morsi an ultimatum, which ends Wednesday, to gain control of a political situation that has never stabilised following last year’s elections.

What the military will do if the president fails to meet this demand remains unclear, but the ultimatum underscores the lack of democratic stability and degree of military control that still exists in Egypt.

Women’s rights have been a central component of Egypt’s secular, democratic movement. The sexual abuse of women protesting in Egypt has also drawn attention to the issue of gender within the pro-democracy movement there.

The RFK Center has a well-established reputation for maintaining material and political support for its awardees for many years after the honour is received. Omran will receive an undisclosed amount of money as part of the award, but Canton points out that she will benefit from it in other ways.

For instance, the centre will commit to assisting Omran in achieving her goals by advocating on her behalf and providing her with needed resources. In addition, the attention the award draws, Canton believes, will act as a shield against threats from the sources of power that are challenged by her work.

“The award provides recognition that will in turn provide added protection for her as she continues to do this outstanding work at her own risk,” Canton told IPS, citing examples from the history of the award where this has proven to be the case.

He notes, for instance, stories of past awardees, such as Zbigniew Bujak and Adam Michnik, leaders of a Polish underground movement being persecuted by secret police, and Amilcar Mendez Urizar, a Guatemalan activist whose work earned him death threats from powerful people.

The award will be presented to Omran by the widow of former U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, for whom the award is named, during a ceremony here in November.

An electricity pylon in Somaliland being repaired by Edwin Mireri. Somaliland’s first Electricity Energy Act will be launched this year and it will be the country’s first legal and regulatory framework aimed at managing energy production and distribution. Credit: IPS

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jul 2 2013 (IPS)

During an eight-day trip to Africa, President Barack Obama unveiled an ambitious plan to improve access to electricity across the continent, a move the White House says is designed to lift Sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty and help the region develop a stable middle class.

While the initiative may appear to be a generous increase in U.S. government aid to the continent, analysts suggest that it is perhaps more noteworthy as a change in the paradigm of how the United States assists developing nations.

The plan, dubbed Power Africa, will be aimed at doubling access to electricity in the region, where some 85 percent of the rural population continues to lack access to power. The hope is that vastly increasing this infrastructure will in turn strengthen African economies.

“The initiative seeks to address a major, major issue,” John Campbell, a senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank here, told IPS. “The absence of electrical power, among other things, makes it difficult to establish the kind of manufacturing that generates employment.”

Power Africa was announced on the heels of an address given by President Obama at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. The president, who has been criticised for actions that fail to live up to his impressive speeches and for largely ignoring Africa during his first term, called on the United States to “up [its] game when it comes to Africa”.

Obama referenced Nelson Mandela’s experience in captivity as analogous to Africa’s continued suffering with poverty and underdevelopment.

“(J)ust as freedom cannot exist when people are imprisoned for their political views,” he stated, “true opportunity cannot exist when people are imprisoned by sickness, or hunger, or darkness.”

The president also asserted that development assistance to the region would be in the United States’ own interests, saying an enlarged middle class there would translate into “an enormous market for [U.S.] goods”.

Assistance as insurance

Establishing reliable sources of electricity, the Obama administration believes, will be a key part of the effort to bolster that middle class.

An estimate endorsed by the administration states that it would take around 300 billion dollars to grant all Sub-Saharan Africans access to electricity by 2030. With Power Africa, the U.S. ensures the region will receive seven billion dollars over the next five years.

That sum will be split among six countries (Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Tanzania and Nigeria). It will be used to exploit the region’s large, newly discovered reserves of oil and gas, as well as its potential to develop renewable energy from geothermal, hydro, wind and solar sources.

But, as Campbell points out, the way the United States will raise the seven billion dollars represents a shift in how it provides aid to Africa, focusing more on private trade and investment rather than on direct government aid.

“The old model would have been a government aid agency providing U.S. taxpayer money to fund development projects,” he says. “Here we will have the government partnering with private sources of money by guaranteeing against losses.”

Essentially, Campbell explains, the United States will marshal seven billion dollars’ worth of both money and material from private investors, who will then provide much of this by exporting manufactured goods intended to improve African infrastructure. These investors will be protected from losses by guarantees from Washington, which will play a role similar to that of an insurance provider.

Five billion dollars of support will be provided by the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) to U.S. exporters, while another 1.5 billion dollars in financing and insurance will come from government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC).

Only a small portion of the seven billion dollars will come in the form of government aid. One billion dollars will come from the publicly-funded Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC), while the country’s main foreign assistance arm, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), will provide just 285 million dollars.

“At the end of the day, if it all works out well, the U.S. government will actually make money,” Campbell says.

He also notes that the new model will mean insured profits and new jobs for U.S. manufacturers assigned with exporting needed products.

Campbell is concerned, however, that the new plan could fall short of its goals without additional U.S. government funding. But given the budget-conscious attitude prevailing in the U.S. Congress, he suggests this funding could be unobtainable.

China question

Some have speculated that the revamped assistance to Africa comes as a response to Chinese movement into the continent. China has, over recent years, invested massive amounts of its reserve funds into bolstering African infrastructure, and thus making inroads for future commercial and political relations.

Yet Campbell believes this speculation reflects an outmoded Cold War-era mentality and is an incorrect interpretation of what motivates the United States. He points out that Obama on Sunday welcomed investment in Africa by states other than the U.S. – including China.

“Governments and businesses from around the world,” Obama stated, “are sizing up the continent, and they’re making decisions themselves about where to invest [and] that’s a good thing. We want all countries – China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Europe, America – we want everybody paying attention to what’s going on here, because it speaks to your progress.”

The Western Hemisphere’s approach to countering the use and flow of illegal drugs may soon change radically, as recently published reports by the Organization of American States (OAS) signal a region less willing to be dominated by the United States and anxious to act on a more multilateral basis.

On Thursday here in Washington, OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza presented two reports by his organisation on the issue, endorsing alternatives to the U.S.-led status quo.

The two reports include an analytical assessment of the current situation surrounding illegal drugs in the Americas, and one looks towards potential future scenarios for a coordinated response. The two reports, released in May, were a focus of debate at the OAS General Assembly in Antigua, Guatemala, earlier this month.

While the reports did not lead to any concrete policy shifts by the OAS at the general assembly, some observers see the reports as an indication that changes could be afoot.

“A few years ago the issue was a taboo,” Coletta A. Youngers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group, told IPS. “It was seen as purely U.S.-dominated, and if you would have proposed something like these reports, people would have laughed at you.”

The reports favour the view that the overall drugs issue is a public health, rather than a security, matter. Youngers believes such a stance represents a “very useful tool” for starting a serious discussion on hemispheric drug policy.

“With these reports, we now have a basis from which we can carry forward the debate,” she says. “The question now is how we do that.”

At the general assembly in Antigua, representatives of the 35 OAS member states decided that the organisation would hold an extraordinary session to discuss drug policy in 2014. The United States initially opposed such a session, but in the end accepted the plan, merely adding footnotes to the declaration expressing its concerns.

Still, Youngers believes Washington is “very bothered” by the language of the reports – and by the fact that the rest of the OAS appears to be asserting its own interests at the expense of U.S. regional control.

“After decades of the U.S. being able to dictate policy,” she says, “Latin America is now taking ownership and saying this is an issue which needs to be debated at the regional level by all the states concerned.”

Decriminalisation

The United States is particularly troubled by the OAS’s forward-looking report, Youngers suggests. That report is critical of the approach long held by the United States, which tackles the drug issue primarily through law enforcement and views drug users as criminals.

The analytical report, too, contains language that runs counter to the prevailing system.

“Decriminalisation of drug use,” the report states in its conclusion, “needs to be considered as a core element in any public health strategy. An addict is a chronically sick person who should not be punished for his or her dependence, but rather treated appropriately.”

It goes on to weigh in specifically on marijuana, seemingly amenable to the possibility of removing it from the region’s list of illegal drugs.

“(I)t would be worthwhile to assess existing signals and trends that lean toward the decriminalisation or legalisation of the production, sale, and use of marijuana,” the report concludes.

The issues of decriminalisation of drug use and marijuana in general remain highly controversial within the United States. Federal laws here continue to maintain that the use of all illicit drugs, including marijuana, is a crime.

In only two states, Washington and Colorado, is the private production and consumption of marijuana legal, and that was only allowed following public referendums late last year that resulted in surprise decisions to legalise.

In Latin America, meanwhile, there is a wide array of opinions on decriminalisation of illegal drugs.

Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, who hosted the recent OAS general assembly, surprised many when he came out in early 2012 in support of legalising all drugs. Prior to being elected, he had stated his opposition to such an approach, but apparently had a change of heart after becoming leader of a country wracked with violence related to the trafficking of illegal drugs.

Pérez referred to the OAS reports as a “triumph”.

Other Latin American states, too, have made significant moves toward the legalisation of marijuana specifically. In Uruguay, for example, personal use is permitted, and the legislature is currently debating possible ways to legalise and regulate both the production and sale of the drug.

Youngers says the OAS reports will allow more “experimentation” among countries in the region in crafting their own drug policies, a change she says would be welcome.

No consensus

Others have suggested that the implications of the reports could be far broader, affecting a global anti-narcotics system which concerns nations beyond the Western Hemisphere.

“We are potentially on the cusp of the collapse of the existing international counter-narcotics regime,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, another think tank here, told IPS. “And it looks like the Latin Americans could be the ones to pull the plug.”

Felbab-Brown notes that there is as yet “no consensus” within the OAS on anti-drugs policy, and says many countries are wary of any further relaxation. For instance, countries with high consumption levels (Brazil and Argentina, for example) are “lukewarm” toward less intensive interdiction policies or any further decriminalisation of controlled substances.

She is critical of the OAS reports for professing an interest in harmonised policy, however, while at the same time endorsing a country-by-country approach.

“The reports express an OAS desire to have its drug policy cake and eat it too,” she says. “What this would likely lead to is a scenario of different countries adopting different policies, generating spill-over problems and complaints from neighbours.”

Protesters outside the White House in January 2012 demonstrate against torture and indefinite detention on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Bay. Credit: Charles Davis/IPS

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jun 26 2013 (IPS)

Groups promoting human rights here are “cautiously optimistic” that U.S. President Barack Obama’s renewed pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay will be fulfilled.

That optimism is due in part to the language of this year’s proposed U.S. National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA), a massive annual appropriations bill that funds much of the U.S. military and is currently being debated in Congress.

“It feels like there is momentum building toward achieving a bipartisan consensus,” Dixon Osburn, director of the law and security program for Human Rights First, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS. “I’m certainly more optimistic on this than I have been for the last several years.”

In its current form, the 2014 NDAA would give the executive branch, through the secretary of defence, greater authority to remove detainees from the prison, either to transfer them to other facilities or to release them altogether. It would also unblock transfers of detainees to the United States.

The NDAA recently passed through the Senate Armed Service Committee with the provisions related to Guantanamo left intact. These provisions, which would help pave the way for an eventual shutdown of the prison, are expected to be the subject of fierce debate when the Senate votes on the full bill sometime in the coming months.

The current push to close the controversial detention centre is being spearheaded by a renewed pledge made by Obama in late April. At that time, the president spoke in no uncertain terms against the continued existence of the facility, which he had originally pledged to close down at the start of his first term, in 2009."It's not sustainable…the notion that we're going to continue to keep over 100 individuals in a no-man's land in perpetuity."
-- U.S. President Barack Obama

“It’s not sustainable…the notion that we’re going to continue to keep over 100 individuals in a no-man’s land in perpetuity,” Obama stated in April, noting that U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been or are being wound down. “The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried – that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.”

Since that renewed call, powerful members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, have come out forcefully in favour of supporting Obama’s efforts to close down the prison. Earlier this month, Senators John McCain and Dianne Feinstein (the former a Republican and the latter a Democrat) joined White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on a trip to Guantanamo, afterward releasing a statement advocating its termination.

“We continue to believe that it is in our national interest to end detention at Guantanamo, with a safe and orderly transition of the detainees to other locations,” the statement noted. “We intend to work, with a plan by Congress and the administration together, to take the steps necessary to make that happen.”

Cleared for release

There are currently 166 detainees being held indefinitely at the detention centre in Guantanamo, 86 already determined eligible for released. Due to concerns over where to send them, however, they remain stuck in the prison.

Fifty-six of the 86 inmates cleared for release (and nearly 100 of the 166) are originally from Yemen, a country believed to contain a heavy presence of al-Qaeda affiliates. Previously, a moratorium had been in place preventing repatriation to the country, but last month Obama announced he would lift that moratorium.

Many of the inmates waiting for release are currently being force-fed, following a mass hunger strike that began in February to protest their continued detainment.

“Those who have been cleared are sitting there waiting for the political stalemate to end,” says Osburn.

In addition to human rights concerns, Osburn notes the “exorbitant” costs of holding individuals at Guantanamo. He cites expenses as totalling 1.6 million dollars per detainee per year, a sum much larger than the average cost of holding prisoners in high-security facilities in the United States, which is around 50,000 dollars per year.

Obama’s original pledge to close the prison actually came before he was elected president, in 2008, when he promised that the detention centre would be shuttered within a year of his taking office. Largely due to opposition from Congress, however, the president has failed to follow through on this promise, disappointing human rights advocates.

“We took the president at his word the last time around,” Andrea Prasow, a senior counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch, an international watchdog group, told IPS. “I want to believe it is different this time, but I won’t until I see action.”

Nevertheless, Prasow, too, was “quite hopeful” that action of some kind would be taken on the renewed pledge. She noted that Obama likely views the issue as an important part of his legacy.

“[Obama] is a young president, who will live a long time in this country and see the impact of his decisions,” she said. “Leaving office without having changed this situation would be a grave mistake.”

Critics of a potential free trade agreement between the United States and European Union worry that such an agreement could lead to increased exportation of liquified natural gas from the U.S. Credit: Bigstock

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

Controversy is building following the announcement that negotiations will soon begin on a free trade agreement between the United States and European Union, with critics warning that any such agreement could negatively affect a host of regulatory concerns.

On Monday, during the Group of Eight (G8) summit held in Northern Ireland, the United States, European Commission and European Council jointly announced that negotiations will begin on Jul. 8 in Washington for what British Prime Minister David Cameron called “the biggest bilateral trade deal in history”.

Proponents characterise the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), also known as the Trans-Atlantic Free Agreement (TAFTA), as a way to improve the struggling economies of the United States and European Union.

“The whole point,” Cameron stated on Monday, “is to fire up our economies and drive growth and prosperity around the world – to do things that make a real difference to people’s lives. And there is no more powerful way to achieve that than by boosting trade.”

He asserted that the deal could “add as much as a 100 billion pounds to the EU economy, 80 billion pounds to the U.S. economy, and as much as 85 billion pounds to the rest of the world”.

Nevertheless, there is significant opposition to the proposed deal.

“The claims that this deal will somehow be an economic cure-all and generate significant growth are simply not supported by any reliable evidence,” Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen‘s Global Trade Watch, a public interest watchdog group based in Washington, said Tuesday.

“But we do know that the talks are based on the demands of U.S. and EU corporations that have been pushing for decades to eliminate the best consumer, environmental and financial standards on either side of the Atlantic.”"The claims that this deal will somehow be an economic cure-all and generate significant growth are simply not supported by any reliable evidence."
-- Lori Wallach

Tariffs between the U.S. and E.U. are already low, and critics note that that what the deal really seeks to accomplish is the removal of “non tariff barriers” (also referred to as “trade irritants”).

“Non-tariff barriers is a commonly-used euphemism which refers to the array of financial, environmental, health and other policies which the public has put in place to safeguard its own interests,” Ben Beachy, a research director for Public Citizen, told IPS.

Under T-TIP, standards such as those mentioned by Beachy would be “converged”, so that regulations from state to state would be more closely aligned. Supporters of the deal say this uniformity would facilitate trade, but Beachy contended that the greater effect would be to lower regulation levels to a point that “democratic electorates would never stand for.”

“The resulting effect of ‘convergence'”, he said, “will be to limit the ability of democratic policymakers to establish their own preferred levels of regulation.”

Chilling effect

Environment groups are likewise worried that such harmonisation will allow for an increase in certain energy technologies, particularly the sudden prevalence in the United States of natural gas hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”.

Countries of the European Union currently restrict fracking within their own borders due to environmental concerns. But some analysts suggest these countries would be less averse to consuming imported gas fracked in the United States.

“There are concerns that the U.S. would become a major exporter of liquefied natural gas to the E.U.,” Ilana Solomon, of the Sierra Club, an environmental protection group, told IPS.

The United States recently approved private licenses for companies seeking to liquefy gas, indicating that in the future it will export liquefied natural gas, something it does not currently do.

Under free trade agreements in the past, Solomon noted, important regulatory reviews normally undertaken when considering the advantages of exportation have often been replaced by automatic approvals.

There are also health concerns related to the agreement. Some worry that food safety standards in the United States, for example, could be compromised if European exporters –  currently subject to lower standards – could deliver their, say, milk to U.S. stores.

Regardless of where U.S. standards stood, the less-well-regulated (and possibly less expensive) European milk would be available to U.S. consumers.

Another controversial aspect of the agreement would allow European privately owned corporations to challenge U.S. domestic laws that may negatively affect their profits or even expected profits.

In what are known as “investor-state” tribunals, foreign corporations would be eligible to receive compensation from taxpayers if the corporations could demonstrate that they lost money because of laws that inhibit trade.

Being subject to these tribunals could lead to what Public Citizen’s Beachy refers to as a “chilling effect”, meaning policymakers would be less likely to pass regulations because of perceived vulnerability.

Chipping away regulation

Beachy also noted the deal could carry “very real economic costs” if it undermines financial regulations and increases the risk of economic crisis.

According to a European Commission study, regulations that may be subject to “convergence” include financial safeguards such as those included in policies enacted by the United States following the economic crisis that began in 2008.

Last year, the Association of German Banks indicated what it hoped would emerge from any transatlantic deal regarding the aligning of U.S. and European standards.

“We would not like to see U.S. regulators applying standards to our banks that are extraterritorial, duplicative or discriminating … we have a number of such concerns regarding the ongoing implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act,” said the Association, referring to the most significant U.S. regulatory legislation passed in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

According to Beachy, it is doubtful that the free trade agreement could succeed in removing all its targeted “irritants”.

The European Commission study confirmed that this would be “unlikely”, noting that to do so in some cases would require “constitutional changes” and that “political sensitivities” might stand in the way.

Still, opponents worry that by specifically targeting these barriers, the broad agreement could succeed in chipping away at a significant number of them.

“The corporations that favour the agreement know they won’t get everything they want,” Beachy said. “But they think they can get a lot.”

The least expensive petrol in the world is in Venezuela. Credit: Fidel Márquez/IPS

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

A shift in U.S. foreign policy towards Venezuela may be pending as a bilateral rapprochement suddenly appears more possible than it has in years.

On the sidelines of talks held earlier this month in Guatemala by the Organisation of American States (OAS), U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua, with Kerry’s subsequent statements indicating that relations could be heading in a friendlier direction.

“We agreed today – both of us, Venezuela and the United States – that we would like to see our countries find a new way forward, establish a more constructive and positive relationship and find the ways to do that,” Kerry said following the meeting with Jaua, which was reportedly requested by the Venezuelans.

The meeting happened on the heels of the release of Timothy Tracy, a U.S. filmmaker whom Venezuela had been holding on accusations of espionage. His release was interpreted by many as an “olive branch” being offered by the new Venezuelan government of Nicholas Maduro, whose presidency Washington still has not formally recognised.

Only months ago, before the death of Venezuela’s long-time socialist leader Hugo Chavez, any normalisation of relations between Venezuela and the United States seemed highly unlikely.

In 2002, Chavez was briefly removed from power by a military coup d’état that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had known was imminent. Chavez immediately accused the United States of having played a part in the event. After his suspicions were confirmed partly valid, his rhetoric grew more scathing.

In 2006, he famously told the United Nations General Assembly that then-U.S. President George W. Bush was “the devil himself”.

Following Chavez’s death from cancer in March, however, his hand-picked successor, Maduro, the former vice-president, has not been as vitriolic in his posturing vis-à-vis the United States.

According to Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank, Maduro has offered “conflicting signals”.

“Maduro has so far shifted in his position toward the U.S. between a moderate approach and a more hard-line one,” Shifter told IPS."Venezuela cannot confront its economic crisis and the United States at the same time."
-- Diana Villiers Negroponte

The new president’s waffling may be a reflection of his tenuous grip on power. By many accounts, Maduro lacks the political prowess and rabble-rousing charm of Chavez, who enjoyed military backing as well as fervent support from the lower classes.

In addition to a strong anti-Chavista opposition that openly challenges the legitimacy of his narrowly won election, Maduro has had to deal with a split within Chavez’s own former political base.

Shifter pointed out that among the military, which was once a source of significant strength for Chavez, more support is given to Diosdado Cabello, currently head of Venezuela’s parliament and whose supporters believe he was the rightful heir to the presidency.

Maduro’s legitimacy stems largely from his perceived ideological fidelity, the reason for his selection by Chavez to lead in the first place. Shifter said this leads him to “emulate” his predecessor and makes rapprochement with the United States less probable.

Still, ideological concerns may not ultimately decide the issue. Venezuela has inherited from Chavez an economy in difficult straits, which continues to suffer from notorious shortages and high inflation.

Oil economy

Over half of Venezuela’s federal budget revenues come from its oil industry, which also accounts for 95 percent of the country’s exports. Estimated at 77 billion barrels, its proven reserves of black gold are the largest of any nation in the world.

Despite a troubled political relationship, its principal customer is the United States, which imports nearly a million barrels a day from Venezuela.

Venezuela’s oil industry has been officially nationalised since the 1970s, and, as president, Chavez further tightened government control over its production. His government took a greater chunk of revenues and imposed quotas that ensured a certain percentage would always go directly towards aiding Venezuelans via social spending and fuel subsidies.

While these measures may be popular with Venezuelans, who pay the lowest price for gasoline in the world, critics argue such policies hampered growth and led to mismanagement of Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA), the main state-run oil company.

The same critics also point to increasing debt levels, slowdowns in productions and accidents stemming from faulty infrastructure.

In order to boost production, PdVSA agreed in May to accept a number of major loans. This includes one from Chevron, one of the largest U.S. oil companies, which will work with Venezuelans to develop new extraction sites.

“The oil sector is in deep trouble in Venezuela – production is down and the economic situation is deteriorating,” explained Shifter. “They know they need foreign investment to increase production, and this is in part what has motivated Maduro to reach out.”

If its economy continues to falter, Venezuela may be further tempted to embrace the United States, which has the largest, most sophisticated fossil fuel industry in the world. Kerry’s recent words suggest that the administration of President Barack Obama would be waiting with open arms.

“Venezuela cannot confront its economic crisis and the United States at the same time,” Diana Villiers Negroponte, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank, told IPS, “and we are a pragmatic country which will deal with Maduro if it is in our interests.”

Indeed, Negroponte said she was “optimistic” about the possibility of rapprochement between the two countries within the next six months. She notes a “troika” of issues on which the United States is looking for Venezuelan cooperation: counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics and assistance in ridding Colombia of its FARC rebels.

Nonetheless, major actions remain to be taken if normalisation is to even begin, such as the exchange of ambassadors and official U.S. recognition of the Maduro government. Shifter (who regards the Kerry-Jaua meeting as “a small step”) was not optimistic that these larger requirements will be completed in the short term.

“I don’t think Washington is going to push hard to send an ambassador to Caracas,” he said. “It will probably take more time to observe the new government and see where it is going.”

Natural gas extraction methods are extremely controversial in the United States. Above, a shale gas drilling site. Credit: Bigstock

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

Energy specialists say that advancements in fossil fuel extraction technologies have sparked a “revolution” in U.S. energy production, especially given radical recent changes in the global energy market and the U.S. role within it.

New extraction methods, such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), have allowed producers to access natural gas and oil (known as “tight” or “unconventional” oil) in recent years that was once inaccessible.

Such access, brought about by technologies developed and still used primarily in the United States, have already changed the country’s approach to producing and consuming energy.

“The tight oil boom holds the potential to free [the United States] from spending literally trillions of dollars to buy petroleum products from the politically unstable areas of the world,” Pete Domenici, a former senator and currently a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Centre (BPC), a Washington think tank that hosted a discussion on energy Wednesday.

“Tight oil has truly been an unexpected gift to our nation and to our hemisphere.”

Propelled by the boom in U.S. production, North America is today the fastest-growing region in the world in terms of fossil fuel production. As Daniel Yergin, an energy scholar, pointed out during Wednesday’s conference, the United States produces 43 percent more oil than it did in 2008 – the equivalent, he said, of having another major producing country enter the market.

A recent study by CitiGroup indicates if this growth continues, real gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States could increase by 3 percent, a bump that analysts say would help lower the country’s deficit and create jobs."The exploitation of these new, extreme sources of carbon-based energy is moving us in the wrong direction."
-- Jamie Henn

It would also give the United States more flexibility in dealing more harshly with oil-producing adversaries, such as Iran.

A new role in the global energy market

Yet while many had hoped that increased U.S. production would significantly reduce prices both in the United States and internationally, others believe it will have the opposite result.

Participants in Wednesday’s discussion generally agreed that the United States will likely become an exporter of both liquefied natural gas (LNG) and even crude oil in the near future. Like other exporters, it will prefer higher world energy prices.

“The U.S. no longer looks at prices purely from a consumer’s perspective,” Katherine Spector, head of commodities strategy at CIBC World Markets, said Thursday. Instead, she suggested that the country now looks for “goldilocks” prices: those that are neither too high nor too low.

Her statement corroborates analysis, such as that of Public Citizen‘s Energy Program, a non-profit public advocacy group, which concluded that “because oil prices are priced globally, the domestic oil boom can’t – and won’t – provide relief for consumers”.

Opponents of U.S. LNG exports have sought to prevent them, but in recent months two deals were reached with the Obama administration to allow U.S. companies to liquefy and export gas.

Along with what Domenici called a formerly “heretical” notion that the United States may export light crude oil, the deals represent a drastic shift from the country’s current model, under which its fossil fuel-related exports are almost exclusively finished petroleum products.

Holding back alternatives

Meanwhile, environmentalists are increasingly warning that the new technologies could worsen global warming, despite widespread suggestions that natural gas burns more cleanly than coal, for example.

“We are already seeing the devastating effects of global warming due to an overuse of fossil fuels,” Jamie Henn, communications director for the environmental advocacy group 350.org, told IPS. “The idea should be to de-carbonise the economy, but the exploitation of these new, extreme sources of carbon-based energy is moving us in the wrong direction.”

Henn also pointed to an additional danger of non-U.S. companies, with less advanced technologies, trying to replicate these extraction methods and potentially leading to environmental disaster. Leaking methane from fracking operations is one of the most potent climate change-causing greenhouse gases.

While Henn would like to see the global energy market transition away from fossil fuels and towards alternative energy sources, he said the primary obstacle is money.

“We already have access to cleaner, renewable energy sources,” he says. “But the transition to these sources is being held back because more profit can be made by exploiting these new, extreme sources of fossil fuels.”

In order for the North American production boom to continue, experts who spoke Wednesday said investments in controversial infrastructure projects, such as the Canada-United States Keystone XL pipeline and LNG export terminal facilities, will have to be realised.

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was one of the speakers in favour of these investments.

The senator pointed to Canada’s “abundant” supply of heavy crude oil, which she said is well-suited for the Gulf of Mexico refineries, and a problem of “too much oil and too few pipelines”, thus advocating for the controversial Keystone pipeline, which is currently pending U.S government approval.

She also stated her support for investment in U.S. capabilities to liquefy and export its natural gas surplus, saying it could lead to a “golden age of gas”.

Objections to the Keystone project have come to define the environmental movement in Washington over the past year, but the proposed LNG export terminal facilities also raise important environmental concerns.

Without strong government policies regulating emissions from natural gas production and use, the likely results of U.S. LNG exports would be “an increase in domestic greenhouse gas emissions, and questionable, if any, benefits to the global climate”, James Bradbury, a senior associate on climate and energy issues at the World Resource Institute, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

Furthermore, facilities that liquefy natural gas consume substantial electricity, while public debate has barely begun here on how energy prices would change once significant U.S. natural gas becomes available on the global market.

“Any amount of LNG exports would put upward pressure on U.S. natural gas prices,” Bradbury says. “This would make natural gas less competitive in U.S. electricity markets, likely causing a shift toward greater coal-fired power generation. This would cause an increase in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”

Experts here are stepping up calls for the U.S. government to remove Cuba from an official list of “state sponsors of terrorism”, arguing that the country’s presence on the list is anachronistic and makes neither legal nor political sense.

The calls come just weeks after the U.S. State Department, which oversees the “state sponsors” list, released an annual report on terrorism. Its section regarding Cuba varied only slightly from that of the previous year, disappointing those who had hoped for a step in the direction of normalisation of U.S.-Cuba relations.

“At a time when the U.S. is best positioned to help facilitate change in the island and to take advantage of the changes inside the country, this continued inclusion is actually an obstacle to taking advantage of that window of opportunity,” Tomas Bilbao, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, said Tuesday at a panel discussion at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank here.

Bilbao noted the continued influence of a “shrinking minority” of anti-Cuba hardliners in the United States who fervently oppose Cuba’s removal from the list, as well as a lack of political will on the part of U.S. policymakers to square off with that minority."[Delisting Cuba] would help Cubans lead more prosperous and independent lives."
-- Sarah Stephens

Nonetheless, he asserted that the time is ripe for the United States to take Cuba off the list and prioritise helping the Cuban people over harming the Cuban regime.

President Barack Obama’s administration has overseen some notable policy shifts, such as a relaxation of laws restricting travel by U.S. citizens with family in Cuba. Certain realities have also been changing within Cuba, including the abdication of Fidel Castro from power, which make friendlier policies toward the island nation more feasible.

Sarah Stephens, executive director of the Centre for Democracy in the Americas, a U.S. organisation that promotes reconciliation with Cuba, told IPS that delisting Cuba now would “enable the U.S. to support Cuba’s drive to update its economic model, make it easier to facilitate trade and easier for Cuba to access high technology items”.

“Doing so,” she said, “would in turn help Cubans lead more prosperous and independent lives.”

Debating Cuba’s qualifications

Cuba has been on the State Department list since 1982, but some analysts maintain that the country did not fit the definition of a state sponsor of terror even then. In order to fit that legal definition, a country must have “repeatedly provided support for international terrorism”.

According to Robert L. Muse, a specialist on the legality of U.S. policy toward Cuba, there are currently three ostensible reasons for Cuba’s inclusion in the most recent list: that it has allowed Basque separatists to reside within its borders, that it has dealings with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and that it harbours fugitives wanted for crimes committed in the United States.

Muse, who spoke Tuesday at CSIS, claimed the first two reasons were void because the countries concerned actually condone Cuba’s relationship with their adversaries. Cuba is currently host to negotiations between FARC and the Colombian government, and Spanish leaders prefer that Basque rebels remain in Cuba – and out of Spain.

These interactions with rebel groups, in Muse’s opinion, “can hardly be a basis even for criticism”. It is only the third justification, that Cuba harbours U.S. fugitives, which he said “could fairly bear description as a reason” for keeping Cuba on the list.

Cuba has harboured a number of fugitives seeking refuge from the U.S. justice system. The most prominent is Assata Shakur, an African-American poet and participant in 1970s black liberation movements who was allegedly involved in the killing of a police officer. She was convicted for the murder but escaped and in 1984 gained political asylum in Cuba, where she has remained ever since.

Early last month, Shakur became the first woman to be added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Most Wanted Terrorist list. But Muse notes that this designation was “arbitrary and capricious”, as neither she nor any other fugitive residing in Cuba has been accused, let alone convicted, of international terrorism.

Politics as usual

Both Muse and Bilbao concluded that Cuba’s continued presence on the State Department’s terrorism list arises less from these shaky legal justifications than from political calculations.

Others have arrived at similar conclusions for years. In 2002, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton suggested that maintaining Cuba on the list keeps happy a certain part of the voting public in Florida – a politically important state with a large Cuban exile population – and “it doesn’t cost anything”.

Muse disagreed with the latter part of that statement, however. He noted that by behaving arbitrarily in what should be a strictly legal matter, the United States was damaging its “credibility on the issue of international terrorism” and diminishing its “seriousness of purpose” in using the term “terrorism” in a meaningful manner.

Proponents of the status quo argue the opposite, saying that by removing Cuba the United States would damage its credibility by effectively making a concession. Bilbao explained to IPS that those such views focus on the “spin” of the Cuban government rather than on the actual consequences of taking Cuba off the list, a move he believes would ultimately benefit the United States.

“I think the priority of the U.S. government should be to determine what’s in its best interests,” he told IPS.

Muse went a step further, saying the list itself is a problem. He noted that even while the list includes countries that don’t deserve to be on it, proven sponsors, such as Pakistan, of international terrorism – albeit those with friendly relations with the U.S. – are absent from it.

His recommendation to solve the problem was simple: “Just scrap the list.”