By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 19 2015 (IPS)

The victory of the Conservative Party and the debacle of the Labour Party in the recent British general elections is yet another sign of the crisis facing left-wing forces today, leaving aside the question of how, under the British electoral system, the Labour Party actually increased the number of votes it won but saw a reduction in the number of seats it now holds in Parliament (24 seats less than the previous 256).

Roberto Savio

If the proportional rather than uninominal system had been used, the Conservative Party with its 11 million votes would have won 256 and not 331 seats in Parliament (far short of the absolute majority of 326 needed to govern), while at the other extreme the United Kingdom Independence Party with nearly four million votes would have landed 83 and not just the one seat it ended up with – results that would be hard to imagine anywhere else and a good example of insularity.

To an extent, the recent British general elections mirrored the U.S. presidential elections in 2000 when Democratic candidate Al Gore won around half a million more popular votes than Republican candidate George W. Bush but failed to win the majority of electoral college votes on which the U.S. system is based. The outcome was eight years of George W.  Bush administration, the war in Iraq, the crisis of multilateralism, and all the paraphernalia of “America’s exceptional destiny”.

Let us venture now into an analysis that will have the politologues among us cringing.“The left has tried to mimic the winners, instead of trying to be an alternative to the process of neoliberal globalisation and, since the beginning of the world financial crisis in 2008 … it has had no real answer to the crisis”

It is now generally recognised that the end of the Soviet Union has given free way to a kind of capitalism without control, marked by an unprecedented supremacy of finance which, in terms of volume of investments, overwhelmingly exceeds the real or productive economy.

In its wake, neoliberal thinking has found the left totally unprepared, because part of its function had been to provide a democratic alternative to Communism, which was suddenly no longer a threat.

The left therefore has tried to mimic the winners, instead of trying to be an alternative to the process of neoliberal globalisation and, since the beginning of the world financial crisis in 2008 (with its bail-out cost so far of over four trillion dollars), it has had no real answer to the crisis.

Ever since the industrial revolution, the identity of the left had been to press for social justice, equality of opportunities and redistribution, while the right placed the emphasis on individual efforts, less role for the state and success as motivation.

Continuing with this brutal simplification, we have to add that the left, from Marx to Keynes, always studied how to create economic growth and redistribution – Marx by abolishing private property, social democrats through just taxation.

But it never studied the creation of a progressive agenda in the event case of an economic crisis such as the one we are now facing, with structural unemployment, young people obliged  to accept any kind of contract, new technologies which are making the concept of classes disappear, and rendering trade unions – erstwhile powerful actors for social justice – irrelevant.

It is unprecedented that the top 25 hedge fund managers received a reward in 2014 of 11.62 billion dollars, yet neither U.S. President Barack Obama nor Ed Miliband, then still leader of the Labour Party at the recent British general elections (until he resigned after election defeat), saw it fit to denounce this obscene level of greed.

Meanwhile, Europe as a political project is clearly in disarray, and now faces a “Grexit” on its southern flank and a “Brexit” on its northern flank.

In the case of a “Grexit” (the possible abandonment of the European Union by Greece), Greece faces the prospects of having to make substantial concessions to Europe, thus reneging on the promises of Alexis Tsipras who was voted in as prime minister in rebellion against years of dismantlement of public and social structures imposed in the name of austerity.

What is at stake here is the very neoliberal model itself and not only is ordoliberal Germany supported by allies like Austria, Finland and the Netherlands erecting a wall against any form of leniency, but countries which accepted painful cuts and where conservatives are now in power, like Spain, Portugal and Ireland, see leniency as giving in to the left.

A “Brexit” (the possible abandonment of the European Union by Britain) is a different affair. It is a game being played by British Prime Minister David Cameron to negotiate a more favourable agreement for Britain with the European Union.

A referendum will be held before the end of 2017 and the four million people who voted for the UKIP in the recent elections, plus the country’s “Euro-sceptics”, threaten to push Britain out of the European Union, especially if Cameron does not manage to obtain some substantial concessions from Brussels.

Meanwhile, if Europe is in disarray, the United States has a serious problem of governance. Analyst Moisés Naím, who served as editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine from 1996 to 2010, has pinpointed a few examples of how this has translated into self-inflicted damage.

One concerns China which, after waiting five years trying to get the Republican-dominated Congress to authorise and increase in its stake in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from a ridiculous 3.8 percent to 6 percent (compared with the 16.5 percent of the United States), got fed up and established an alternative fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Washington tried unsuccessfully to kill the initiative by putting pressure on its allies but first the United Kingdom, then Italy, Germany and France announced their participation in the new bank, which now has 50 member countries and the United States is not one of them.

Another example was the attempt by the Republican-dominated Congress to kill the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) which has provided support for U.S exporters to the tune of 570 billion dollars since it was set up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934.  In just the last two years, China has provided 670 billion dollars in support for its exporters. Moral of the story: U.S. companies will be at a clear disadvantage.

As Larry Summers, a great proponent of U.S. hegemony, put it, “the US will not be in a position to shape the global economic system”.

The latest snub to the U.S. role of world leader came from four Arab heads of state who snubbed a U.S.-Gulf States summit at Camp David on May 14. The summit had been called by Obama to reassure the Gulf states that the ongoing negotiations with Iran over a nuclear agreement would not diminish their relevance, but the rulers of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain deserted the summit.

However, there is no more striking example of mistake-making than the joint effort by the United States and Europe to push Russian President Vladimir against the wall over his engagement in Ukraine by imposing heavy sanctions.

There was no apparent reflection on the wisdom of encircling a paranoid and autocratic leader, albeit one with strong popular support, by progressively also bringing in all Eastern and Central European countries. The result of this encirclement of Russia is that China has now come to the rescue of Russia, by injecting money into the country’s asphyxiated economy.

China will invest around six billion dollars in the construction of a high speed railway between Moscow and Kazan, is financing a 2,700 kilometre pipeline for the supply of 30 billion cubic metres of Russian gas over a period of 30 years, plus several other projects, including the establishment of a two billion dollar common fund for investments and a loan of 860 million dollars to the Russian Sberbank bank.

So, the net result is that Russia has been pushed out of Europe and into the arms of China, and the two are now starting joint naval and military manoeuvres.  Is this in the interest of Europe?

At the end of the day, the decline of Europe and the United States perhaps comes down to a decline of political vision, with democracy being substituted by partocracy, and the statesman of yesteryear being substituted by very much more modest and self-referential political leaders.

This is all taking place amid a growing disaffection with politics, which is now aimed basically at administrative choices, making corruption easy. At least this is what around one-third of electors now appear to believe when they are asked if they think that they can make a difference at elections … and this is why a rapidly growing number of people are deserting the ballot box. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, May 10 2015 (IPS)

President Barack Obama’s Nowroz greeting to the Iranian people earlier this year was the first clear indication to the world that the United States and Iran were very close to agreement on the contents of the nuclear agreement they had been working towards for the previous 16 months.

In contrast to two earlier messages which were barely veiled exhortations to Iranians to stand up to their obscurantist leaders, Obama urged “the peoples and the leaders of Iran” to avail themselves of “the best opportunity in decades to pursue a different relationship between our countries.”

Prem Shankar Jha

This moment, he warned, “may not come again soon (for) there are people in both our countries and beyond, who oppose a diplomatic solution.”

Barely a fortnight later that deal was done. Iran had agreed to a more than two-thirds reduction in the number of centrifuges it would keep, although a question mark still hung over the timing of the lifting of sanctions against it. The agreement came in the teeth of opposition from hardliners in both Iran and the United States.

Looking back at Obama’s unprecedented overtures to Iran, his direct phone call to President Hassan Rouhani – the first of its kind in 30 years – and his letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in November last year, it is clear in retrospect that they were products of  a rare meeting of minds between him and  Rouhani and their foreign ministers John Kerry and Muhammad Jawad Zarif that may have occurred as early as  their first meetings in September 2013.

The opposition to the deal within the United States proved a far harder obstacle for Obama to surmount. The reason is the dogged and increasingly naked opposition of Israel and the immense influence of the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) on U.S. policymakers and public opinion.

Both of these were laid bare came when the Republican party created constitutional history by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address  a joint session of Congress  without informing the White House, listened raptly to his diatribe against Obama, and sent a deliberately insulting letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in a bid to scuttle the talks.

Obama has ploughed on in the teeth of this formidable, highly personalised, attack on him  because he has learnt from the bitter experience of the past four years what Harvard professors John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt had exposed in their path-breaking  book, ‘The Israel lobby and American Foreign Policy’ in 2006.“Quietly, and utterly alone, Obama decided to reverse the drift, return to diplomacy as the first weapon for increasing national security and returning force to where it had belonged in the previous three centuries, as a weapon of last resort”

This was the utter disregard for America’s national interest and security with which Israel had been manipulating American public opinion, the U.S. Congress and successive U.S. administrations, in pursuit of its own security, since the end of the Cold War.

By the end of 2012, two years into the so-called “Arab Spring”, Obama had also discovered how cynically Turkey and the Wahhabi-Sunni sheikhdoms had manipulated the United States into joining a sectarian vendetta against Syria, and created and armed a Jihadi army whose ultimate target was the West itself.

Nine months later, he found out how Israel had abused the trust the United States reposed in it, and come within a hairsbreadth of pushing it into an attack on Syria that was even less justifiable than then U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.  And then the murderous eruption of the Islamic State (ISIS) showed him that the Jihadis were out of control.

Somewhere along this trail of betrayal and disillusionment, Obama experienced the political equivalent of an epiphany.

Twelve years of a U.S. national security strategy that relied on the pre-emptive use of force had  yielded war without end, a string of strategic defeats, a  mauled and traumatised army, mounting international debt and a collapsing hegemony reflected in the impunity with which the so-called friends of the United States were using it to serve their ends.

Quietly, and utterly alone, Obama decided to reverse the drift, return to diplomacy as the first weapon for increasing national security and returning force to where it had belonged in the previous three centuries, as a weapon of last resort. His meeting and discussions with Rouhani and Iranian foreign minister Zarif gave him the opportunity to begin this epic change of direction.

Obama faced his first moment of truth on Nov. 28, 2012 when a Jabhat al Nusra unit north of Aleppo brought down a Syrian army helicopter with a Russian man-portable surface-to-air missile (SAM).

The White House tried to  pretend that that the missile was from a captured Syrian air base, but by then U.S. intelligence agencies were fed up with its suppression and distortion of their intelligence and  leaked it to the Washington Post that 40 SAM missile batteries with launchers, along with hundreds of tonnes of other heavy weapons had been bought from Libya, paid for by Qatar, and transported to the rebels in Syria  by Turkey through a ‘rat line’ that the CIA had helped it to establish, to funnel arms and mercenaries into Syria.

A day that Obama had been dreading had finally arrived: heavy weapons that the United States and the European Union had expressly proscribed, because they could bring down civilian aircraft anywhere in the world, had finally reached Al Qaeda’s hands

But when Obama promptly banned the Jabhat Al Nusra, he got his second shock. At the next ‘Friends of Syria’ meeting in Marrakesh three weeks later, not only the   ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels that the United States had grouped under a newly-formed Syrian Military Council three months earlier, but all of its Sunni Muslim allies condemned the ban, while Britain and France remained silent.

Obama’s third, and worst, moment of truth came nine months later when a relentless campaign by  his closest ‘allies‘, Turkey and Israel, brought him to the verge of launching an all-out aerial attack  on Syria in September 2013 to punish it for “using gas on rebels and civilians in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus.”

Obama learned that Syria had done no such thing only two days before the attack was to commence, when the British informed him that soil samples collected from the site of the Ghouta attack and analysed at their CBW research laboratories at Porton Down, had shown that the sarin gas used in the attack could not possibly have been prepared by the Syrian army.

This was because the British had the complete list of suppliers from which Syria had received its precursor chemicals and these did not match the chemicals used in the sarin gas found in the Ghouta.

Had he gone through with the attack, it would have made Obama ten times worse than George Bush in history’s eyes.

Hindsight allows us to reconstruct how the conviction that Syria was using chemical weapons was implanted into policy-makers in the United States and the European Union.

On Sep. 17, 2012, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the highly-reputed German magazine Der Speigel, had learned, “quoting several eyewitnesses”, that Syria had tested delivery systems for chemical warheads   at a chemical weapons research centre near Aleppo in August, and that the tests had been overseen by Iranian experts.

Tanks and aircraft, Der Speigel reported, had fired “five or six empty shells capable of delivering poison gas.”

Since neither Der Speigel nor any other Western newspaper had, or still has, resident correspondents in Syria, it could only have obtained this report second or third-hand through a local stringer. This, and the wealth of detail in the report, suggests that the story of a test firing, while not necessarily untrue, was a plant by an intelligence agency. It therefore had to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

One person who not only chose to believe it instantly, but also to act on it was Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On Dec. 3, 2012, Haaretz reported that he had sent emissaries to Amman twice, in October and November, to request Jordan’s permission to overfly its territory to bomb Syria’s chemical weapons facilities.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service.

* The second part of this two-part analysis can be accessed here.

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 4 2015 (IPS)

The ‘West’ is a concept that flourished during the Cold War. Then it was West against East in the form of the Soviet empire. The East was evil against which all democratic countries – read West – were called on to fight.

I recall meeting Elliot Abrams, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State during the Ronald Reagan administration, in 1982. He told me that at the point in history, the real West was the United States, with Europe a wavering ally, not really ready to go up to the point of entering into war with the  Soviet Union.

Roberto Savio

When I tried to explain to him that the East-West denomination dated back to Roman times, long before the United States even existed, he brushed this aside, saying that the contemporary concept was that of those standing against the Soviet Empire, and the United States was the only power willing to do so.

The Reagan presidency changed the course of history, because he was against multilateralism, the United Nations and anything that could oblige the United States to accept what was not primarily in the interests of Washington. The fact that United States had a manifest destiny and was therefore a spokesperson for humankind and the idea that God was American were the bases of his rhetoric.

In one famous declaration, he went so far as asserting that United States was the only democratic country in the world.

After the end of the Cold War, President George W. Bush took up the Reagan rhetoric again. He declared that he was president because of God, which justified his intervention in Iraq, albeit based on false data about weapons of mass destruction (Abrams was also by his side). Now it turns out that he has an indirect responsibility for the creation of the Islamic State (IS).“The [Ronald] Reagan presidency changed the course of history, because he was against multilateralism, the United Nations and anything that could oblige the United States to accept what was not primarily in the interests of Washington”

All this starts in Iraq.  The first governor at the end of the U.S. invasion was retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner who did not last very long because his ideas about how to reconstruct Iraq were considered too lenient. He was replaced by U.S. diplomat Paul Bremer.

Bremer took two fateful decisions: to eliminate the Iraqi army, and to purge all those who were members of the Baath party from the administration, because they were connected to Saddam Hussein. This left thousands of disgruntled officers and a very inefficient administration.

Now we have learned that the mind behind the creation of IS was a former Iraqi colonel from the secret services of the Iraqi Air Force, Samir Abed Al-Kliifawi. The details of how he planned the takeover over of a part of Iraq (and Syria), have been published by Der Spiegel, which came to have access to documents found after his death. They reveal an organisation which is externally fanatic but internally cold and calculating.

After the invasion of Iraq, he was imprisoned by the Americans, and there he connected with several other imprisoned Iraq officers, all of them Sunnis, and started planning the creation of the Islamic State, which now has a number of former Iraqi army officers in its ranks. Without Bremer’s fateful decision, Al-Kliifawi would probably have continued in the Iraqi army.

What we also have to remember here is that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was rendered useless by the Cold War, and many saw its demise. However, it was given the war against Serbia as a new reason for existence, and the concept of the West, embodied in a military alliance, was kept alive.

According to a report by scholars with the ‘Costs of War’ project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, the terrible cost of the Iraqi invasion had been 2.2 trillion dollars by 2013, not to speak of 190,000 deaths. If we add Afghanistan, we reach the staggering amount of 4 trillion dollars – compared with the annual 6.4 trillion dollar total budget of all 28 members of the European Union – for “resolution” of the conflict.

One would have thought that after that experience, Europe would have desisted from invading Arab countries and aggravating its difficult internal financial balance sheet. Yet, Europe engaged in the destabilisation of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, leading to the explosion of Jihadists from there, 220,000 deaths and five million refugees.

In the case of Libya, under the prodding of France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and the United Kingdom’s David Cameron, both for electoral reasons, Europe entered with the aim of eliminating Mu’ammar Gheddafi, then leaving  the country to its destiny. Now thousands of migrants are using Libya in the attempt to reach the shores of Europe and Cameron has decided to ignore any joint European action.

For some reason, Europe always follows United States, without further thinking. The case of Ukraine is the last of those bouts of somnambulism. It has invited Ukraine to join the European Union and NATO, prodding a paranoiac Putin (with the nearly unanimous support of his people), to act to finally stop the ongoing encirclement of the former Soviet republic.

The problem is that Europeans are largely ignorant of the Arab world. A few days ago, Italian police dismantled a Jihadist ring in Bergamo, a town in northern Italy, arresting among others an imam, or preacher, No Italian media took the pain to ascertain which version of Islam he was preaching. All spoke of an Islamic threat, with attacks being planned on the Vatican.

If they had looked with more care, they would have found out that he preached the Wahhabi version of Islam, which is the official version of Islam in Saudi Arabia, and which consider all other Muslims as apostates and infidels. This is very similar to IS, which has adopted its Wahhabi version of Islam, but is a far cry from equating Wahhabism with terrorism – all terrorists may be Wahhabis but not all Wahhabis are terrorists.

Saudi Arabia has already spent 87 billion dollars in promoting Wahhabism, has paid for the creation of 1,500 mosques, all staffed with Wahhabi imams, and continues to spend around three billion dollars a year to finance Jihadist groups in Syria, along with the other Gulf countries. This has made Assad an obliged target for the West, and he has succeeded in his claim: better me than chaos, a chaos that he has been also fomenting.

Now the debate is what to do in Libya and NATO is considering several military options. The stroke of luck this time is that U.S. President Barack Obama does not want to intervene. However, with the 28 countries of the European Union increasingly reclaiming their national sovereignty and seldom agreeing on anything, a military intervention is still in the air.

Meanwhile, thousands of refugees try crossing the Mediterranean every day (with the known number of deaths standing at over 20,000 people) to reach Europe, thus strengthening support for Europe’s xenophobic parties which are exploiting popular fear and rejection.

It is a pity that, according to United Nations projections, Europe needs at least an additional 20 million people to continue to be competitive … but this is politically impossible. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

The Third Geneva Convention and the UN Covenant Against Torture do not exempt tortures that somebody believes to be “effective”. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Washington, Feb 7 2015 (IPS)

“Enhanced interrogation”: the George W. Bush administration bureaucrats who coined the term had perfect pitch. The apparatchiks of Kafka’s Castle would have admired the grayness of the euphemism. But while it sounds like some new kind of focus group, it turns out it was just anodyne branding for good old-fashioned torture.

Unfortunately, the debate around it unleashed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report has largely missed the point.If the leaders of the richest and most powerful empire in history can claim that defending it requires torturing prisoners, what other government or non-state actor will hesitate to make the same claim?

Certainly, the report did provide overwhelming evidence that torture did not produce useful intelligence.  The CIA had concluded previously that torture is “ineffective”, “counterproductive”, and “will probably result in false answers”.

An FBI agent wrote that one prisoner had cooperated and provided “important actionable intelligence” months before being tortured.  Some CIA agents and soldiers reportedly questioned the legality of the policies and resisted carrying them out.

A Bush Justice Department lawyer acknowledged: “It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program.”  In any case, it is inherently impossible to know that any intelligence purportedly extracted by torture could not have been elicited by legal interrogation.

Fundamentally, though, whether torture “works” or not is immaterial.

The Third Geneva Convention and the U.N. Covenant Against Torture do not exempt tortures that somebody believes to be “effective”.  The codes are based on the hard-headed calculation that by agreeing not to torture non-combatants, nations can reduce the probability of their own non-combatants being tortured.

Post-WWII trials imprisoned and executed German and Japanese officials for war crimes including torture.  Nuremberg and Tokyo established the indelible principle that acting as responsible government officials, or following the orders of one, is not a defense against accusations of war crimes.

Granted, these norms have been observed as much in the breach as in practice.  And on the blood-soaked canvas of the past century, the damages of torture pale beside the scope of suffering inflicted by the “legal” savageries of war.  Yet if the leaders of the richest and most powerful empire in history can claim that defending it requires torturing prisoners, what other government or non-state actor will hesitate to make the same claim?

Dick Cheney, former Vice President and current Marketing Director for the Spanish Inquisition, says: “I’d do it again in a minute.”  No one should doubt his sincerity.

One of the “enhancements” was reportedly an effort to fabricate a justification for invading Iraq.  High Bush administration officials allegedly put heavy pressure on interrogators “to find evidence of cooperation between al-Qaeda and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime,” in an effort to fabricate a justification for invading Iraq, according to a former senior US intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist cited by McClatchy News.  No such evidence was found.

But beyond such immediate imperatives, the torture policy meshed seamlessly with a discretionary war premised on lies and optimized for “Shock and Awe”.  This neat ideological package asserted the unchallengeable power of a “Unitary Executive” above constitutional checks and balances, national law and international treaties.

Echoing Richard Nixon’s circular self-justification of three decades earlier, Justice Department lawyer Steven Bradbury told Congress: “The president is always right.”

Strategically, the Bush-Cheney project targeted conceptual smart bombs on the very idea of human rights.  The rest of the world got the message, and the damage to US national security has yet to be repaired.

“Enhanced interrogation”, however, has roots reaching back decades into CIA collaboration with dictatorships in Latin America.

Brazil’s National Truth Commission recently concluded that from 1954 through 1996 the US gave some 300 military officers “theoretical and practical classes in torture”.  Current President Dilma Rousseff was one of those tortured by the military, which ruled the largest country in Latin America from 1964 through 1985.

Over the past half-century, the CIA has been implicated in providing similar training to military dictatorships across South and Central America.  The United States also provided military aid and advice to many of them, participated in coups against elected governments, and was complicit in the murder and disappearance of hundreds of thousands, according to investigative journalist Robert Parry.

In Guatemala, for example, the CIA trained and supported a military and intelligence apparatus that exterminated close to 200,000 people over 30 years and committed genocide against Mayan communities, according to an independent Historical Clarification Commission.

The origins of US torture policies go back to early in the Vietnam War. According to the Senate report, “In 1963, the CIA produced the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, intended as a manual for Cold War Interrogations, which included the ‘principal coercive techniques of interrogation …’”.

In 1983, sections of KUBARK were incorporated into the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, “used to provide interrogation training in Latin America in the early 1980s”.

One of the CIA officers who provided these trainings was later “orally admonished for inappropriate use of interrogation techniques.”  But his efforts ultimately proved to be a good career move.  In 2002, the CIA made him chief of interrogations.

Bush’s head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center allegedly destroyed videotapes of torture and discouraged field agents from questioning the practices, according to historian Greg Grandin.

In 1992, the Pentagon destroyed most documentation of these training programmes, Parry reported.  The orders came from the office of then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

In response to mounting evidence of decades of torture, what would an “indispensable nation” do?

The release of the Senate report was an important precedent. But until perpetrators all the way to the top are brought to justice, our government will rightly be seen as hypocritical when it criticises the human rights violations of others.

Ultimately, the gravity and scope of wrongdoing call for a reincarnation of the 1975 Church Committee, which investigated abuses by intelligence agencies in the wake of Watergate. It should serve as a truth commission exposing the US government’s use of torture, terror and other human rights violations, going back 40 years to where Church left off.

The official U.S. Senate history of the Church Committee cites historian Henry Steele Commager, referring to executive branch officials who seemed to consider themselves above the law: “It is this indifference to constitutional restraints that is perhaps the most threatening of all the evidence that emerges from the findings of the Church Committee.”

Meanwhile, allies have begun digging.  In 2009, Spanish jurist Baltasar Garzón Real opened two investigations of the Bush torture programme, one of which is still pending.  In December, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin filed complaints accusing several high Bush administration figures of “the war crime of torture” under German and international law.

The odds of seeing Cheney and company in a glass booth may be slim.  But it would be a small victory for humanity if they had to look over their shoulders whenever they travel abroad.

As some of us never seem to learn, genuine national security is about not black ops and drones, but hearts and minds.

As an epitaph for the Bush-Cheney vision, consider Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Sen. Feinstein accused the CIA of trying to intimidate Committee staffers by asking the Justice Department to carry out a criminal investigation into how the staffers obtained an internal CIA report on the “enhanced interrogation” programme which U.S. and international human rights groups say amounted to torture. Credit: Sen. Rockefeller/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 12 2014 (IPS)

An ongoing battle between the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over reports about the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” practices during the George W. Bush administration has escalated sharply.

The widely respected Committee chair, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, took to the Senate floor here Tuesday to accuse the CIA of violating U.S. law and the Constitution by secretly removing documents from computers used by the Committee to investigate the agency’s torture and abuse of detainees during Bush’s “global war on terror.”"This is truly a defining moment, not only for congressional oversight of the intelligence community, but also for President Obama’s legacy on torture." -- Virginia Sloan

She also accused the agency of trying to intimidate Committee staffers by asking the Justice Department to carry out a criminal investigation into how the staffers obtained an internal CIA report on the “enhanced interrogation” programme which U.S. and international human rights groups say amounted to torture.

“(T)here is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime,” Feinstein declared in a lengthy recounting of her committee’s efforts to investigate the programme and declassify its 6,300-page report to make it available to the public.

“I view the [CIA’s] acting counsel general’s referral [to the Justice Department] as a potential effort to intimidate this staff, and I am not taking this lightly,” she said, noting that the counsel general, whom she did not name, had served as the chief lawyer in the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre which oversaw the controversial interrogation programme until its termination by incoming President Barack Obama in January 2009.

Speaking at a forum at the Council on Foreign Relations, CIA Director John Brennan strongly denied Feinstein’s allegations, insisting that “We wouldn’t do that. I mean it’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.”

But a number of groups that have themselves investigated the interrogation programme said they had no reason to doubt Feinstein’s account, particularly given the CIA’s past efforts to impede external investigations and the publication of the Senate committee’s report which Feinstein said she hoped to release by the end of the month.

“We are outraged by Sen. Feinstein’s description of repeated efforts by the CIA to thwart critical and legitimate congressional oversight through delays, attacks, intimidation and attempts to conceal,” said Virginia Sloan, president of the bipartisan legal watchdog group, the Constitution Project, which last year issued its own damning review of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation practices.

“This is not a partisan issue. This is truly a defining moment, not only for congressional oversight of the intelligence community, but also for President Obama’s legacy on torture. The White House cannot allow the CIA to drive this process any longer,” she said, adding that the president should not only declassify the Senate report “to the fullest extent possible”, but also release the internal CIA report, which is said to confirm the Senate committee’s reportedly harsh conclusions about both the cruelty and ineffectiveness of the interrogation programme.

“Senators who have seen the Intelligence Committee report say it not only documents serious abuses by the CIA but also the agency’s false reporting about the programme’s value,” added Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch. “If the CIA manages to block even a public accounting of these abuses, it suggests either that the Obama administration can’t control its own intelligence agency, or that it doesn’t want to.”

The Senate committee report, which was approved in December 2012 on a mainly party-line vote, took five years and more than 40 million dollars to complete.

While it remains classified, it includes a detailed chronology of the formulation and implementation of the “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including water-boarding, and other practices used to extract information from “high-value” terrorist suspects who were often subject to “rendition” and held for incommunicado at secret “black sites” in various countries around the world.

Sen. John McCain, one of the handful of Republicans who had campaigned against those techniques, said the report “confirms for me what I have always believed and insisted to be true – that the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience, but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.”

Feinstein called the CIA’s programme “terrible mistakes.”

Seven months later, the CIA completed its own classified rebuttal, insisting that the Committee’s methodology was flawed. But the rebuttal reportedly contradicted not only the Committee’s conclusions, but also the findings of another secret internal review that was conducted by then-CIA director Leon Panetta, drafts of which had been obtained by the Committee staff in 2010.

“Unlike the official response [by the CIA], these Panetta review documents were in agreement with the committee’s findings,” Feinstein, who insisted that the documents had been lawfully obtained, stressed Tuesday.

The Panetta documents lie at the heart of the current dispute. Published reports over the past week indicated that the CIA had gained access the Committee’s computer system in order to determine how the documents were obtained and removed other documents pertinent to the investigation.

Feinstein charged that, in so doing, the CIA, which is part of the executive branch of government, was essentially spying on the committee in violation of the Constitution’s doctrine of “separation of powers” doctrine, several federal laws, and a presidential order that bans the CIA from conducting domestic surveillance.

The CIA’s inspector general last week asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the agency had acted unlawfully.

But the Justice Department has also been asked by the CIA’s general counsel to open a criminal investigation into how the Panetta documents were obtained – a move that Feinstein and her supporters charged was aimed at intimidating the Committee staff.

While Obama ended the detention programme on taking office, he has repeatedly rebuffed demands by human rights groups to prosecute the Bush administration officials responsible for authorising the interrogation policies or for carrying them out.

Brennan, a career CIA officer who became Obama’s most influential counter-terrorism adviser until his appointment as the agency’s chief one year ago, also served in a top CIA post during the Bush administration but denied he played any role in the interrogation programme.

While during his confirmation hearings he expressed surprise by the findings of the Senate Committee and denounced the use of torture, he later personally delivered the CIA’s rebuttal of its report.

An 11-member Constitution Project task force, which included a number of prominent Republicans and former policy-makers from both parties, issued its own review of the interrogation and detention programme last April.

Among other findings, it concluded that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” for which there was “no justification” and “no firm or persuasive evidence” that the information obtained by the programme could not have been gained through other means.

Feinstein’s denunciation of the CIA’s action was particularly remarkable because she has long been criticised by rights advocates for being too protective of the intelligence community.

But she was praised by those same groups Tuesday. “After so many years of congress being unable or unwilling to assert its authority over the CIA, Sen. Feinstein today began to reclaim the authority of Congress as a check on the Executive Branch,” said Christopher Anders, senior counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Public release of the Senate torture [report] will be the next step reining in a CIA that has tortured, destroyed evidence, spied on Congress, and lied to the American people,” he said.

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

Tarzie Vittachi, a Sri Lankan journalist who in his final years was the bemused occupant of a high United Nations office, once summed up with his characteristic terse wit a central truth about international affairs: “Everything is about something else.”

The situation in Syria, and indeed, across the Middle East, exemplifies that truth: amidst unprecedented confusion and stir, surface developments make little sense. Why, for instance, is the United States supporting an opposition grouping in Syria dominated by Islamist forces it has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan?

What caused Britain to shy away from supporting the Barack Obama administration’s move to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons?

Why did Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar bin Sultan, for 22 years ambassador in Washington and rumoured killed in a 2012 terrorist attack, suddenly reappear and meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, offering arms deals and a guarantee that Chechen terrorists would not attack the Sochi Winter Olympics?

To understand what is happening we have to look to the beginnings of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States in the deal Winston Churchill struck in 1946 with the U.S. military-industrial establishment to manage the post-World War Two world.

The quid pro quo of that arrangement was that Britain would help an unconstitutional nexus of power in Washington to rule the world, and be allowed in return to preserve its lucrative imperial interests; in effect, it was a British-sponsored coup that subverted U.S. democracy.

In the Middle East, that dispensation meant U.S. support for extremely corrupt regional power structures that Britain and France had put in place as they took charge of Ottoman territories after World War I.

As the United States was by then entering a period of increasing dependence on Saudi Arabian oil, this was in line with its own interests; in fact, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had struck a deal with King Ibn Saud in February 1945, assuring the country’s security in return for preferred U.S. access to its petroleum.

Over the last two years, as domestic shale oil production has moved the United States towards energy independence, fundamental aspects of the transatlantic “special relationship” have come unstuck. Two aspects of change are particularly important:

The United States has moved vigorously against the money laundering system the British put in place as their Empire declined. The 1.9-billion-dollar fine that U.S. regulators imposed in 2012 on HSBC, Britain’s largest bank, is indicative of the pressures on the system central to Britain’s post-imperial power.

Washington has withdrawn support for dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, setting off the wave of instability the media have presented as the “Arab Spring”.

Although the “Arab Spring” has turned into an increasingly bloody Summer as the extremist Muslim Brotherhood has come to the fore, the writing on the wall for Britain’s imperial interests is clear: the cozy arrangements with the old dictatorial regimes cannot be renewed.

The latest Russian initiative to head off a U.S. strike on Syria points to an interesting aspect of the emerging scene in the Middle East. Despite the Russian defence of the Assad regime, Moscow and Washington have a shared interest in changing existing realities in the region, and especially in Saudi Arabia, which supplied most of the 9/11 attackers and has been quite openly behind the Chechen terrorist uprising.

The Saudi gift of 100 million dollars to the U.N. Counter-Terrorism Centre and Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s offers to President Putin should be read as signs that Riyadh is acutely aware of its danger.

The involvement of Prince Bandar also points to intriguing developments in Washington.

During his long stay in Washington Bandar developed very close relations with the nexus of oil, arms and military/intelligence interests central to the shadow government established by the British coup of 1946. The nickname “Bandar Bush” captures his intimacy with the family that has been for two generations at the centre of that unconstitutional power structure.

The presidency of the senior Bush saw the Iraq war segue the world from the Cold War to the “War of Civilisations”. The stolen presidency of the junior Bush saw the 9/11 attacks inaugurate the “Homeland Security” era under the “Patriot Act”, with widespread violations of fundamental constitutional provisions.

The fact that Bandar Bush has emerged from the shadows in an attempt to win Russian support for the Saudi regime points to the threat felt by the Bush family.

In the past, a few choice assassinations would have resolved this situation. That might still happen, but I think the U.S. military/intelligence establishment has swung away from the Bush-centred power nexus. Edward Snowden’s decision to flee the farm is probably indicative of that, as is the “wrong name” on the papers sent to the Chinese authorities to extradite him from Hong Kong.

To sum up, the grim and confused situation in the Middle East could be the most tangible indicator of a historic U.S. shift back to fully constitutional government.

The “something else” that Syria signifies could be the exact opposite of all the dark readings of the situation.

Bhaskar Menon is the editor of Undiplomatictimes.com, which carries a longer version of this analysis.

Former U.S. Republican Congressman Asa Hutchinson hopes his country can redeem itself after torturing an unknown but certainly large number of detainees.

“There is no persuasive evidence in the public record that the widespread use of torture against suspected terrorists was necessary,” he said during a press briefing Tuesday in Washington.

“Torture often produces false information, and it is difficult and time-consuming for interrogators and analysts to distinguish what may be true and usable from that which is false and misleading,” Hutchinson continued.

“We see no evidence in the public record that the traditional means of interrogation would not have yielded the necessary intelligence following the attacks of 9/11,” he added.

Hutchinson is co-chair of the Constitution Project’s blue-ribbon Task Force on Detainee Treatment, a bipartisan group comprised of high-ranking U.S. officials from the judiciary, Congress, diplomatic service, military and intelligence agencies, as well as experts in law, medicine and ethics.

For over two years, the task force amassed public records and conducted over 100 interviews to shed light on the U.S.’s treatment of suspected terrorists since Sep. 11, 2001.

The task force concluded in a 560-page report that it is “indisputable that the U.S. engaged in the practice of torture” and that “the nation’s highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture”.

Hutchinson said that the task force’s definition of torture stems from historical and legal court cases. He explained that interrogation techniques the U.S. State Department identifies as torture when implemented by other nations are similar, if not identical, to some U.S. interrogation techniques.

Hutchinson said, “We as a nation have to get this right. I look back at history to the time during World War II when we interned some Japanese Americans. At the time, it seemed like a right and proper thing to do. But in the light of history, it was an error.”

He added, “This report will hopefully put into focus some of the actions taken in the post-9/11 environment.”

U.S. Ambassador James Jones, a democrat from Oklahoma and co-chair of the task force, noted the importance for his country to uphold and value the rule of law. “What we tried to do in this report is to point out where we separated ourselves and our official actions from those values, and how we must get back on track,” he said.

“We believe that this report is the most comprehensive record of detainee treatment across multiple administrations and multiple geographic theatres,” he added.

Laura Pitter, a counterterrorism adviser at Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Programme, told IPS, “It’s an incredibly important report.”

She added, “It’s not some kind of a political witch-hunt, it’s a bipartisan effort to look at things objectively.”

The report’s 11 chapters cover a span of topics, including detention at Guantanamo Bay, the role of psychologists in interrogation techniques, the U.S. rendition programme and the efficacy of torturing for information.

The report also includes character sketches of both victims and perpetrators of torture, such as Captain Albert Shimkus of the U.S. Naval Medical Corps, who was in charge of a medical facility in Guantánamo’s Camp Delta detention centre.

According to the report, Shimkus initially lauded Camp Delta’s treatment of detainees, comparing their medical treatment in Guantánamo to that received by U.S. troops.

But Shimkus now believes the commanders he reported to walled him off from the abuse U.S. detainees suffered. He told the task force that he had been used “as a tool” by those who wanted to draw a misleading picture of Guantánamo.

Asked why President Barack Obama’s administration has kept U.S. treatment of detainees in the shadows, Pitter told IPS, “There doesn’t appear to be the political will to unseal what the U.S. did in its name.”

She added, “It’s very unfortunate because it makes it very difficult for the U.S. to then argue that other countries should abide by these principles when (the U.S.) clearly did not… and then fails to account for it publically.”

Asked how U.S. torture of non-U.S. nationals affects diplomatic relations abroad, Pitter said, “When the U.S. engages in torture and abuse and fails to account for that abuse and hold those responsible for abuse, it undermines U.S. credibility to argue for the same type of adherence to those principles in other countries.”

She continued, “The impact is on U.S. foreign policy because (the U.S.) is working with these nations and these countries on a number of issues and (is undermining) their relationships.”

Pitter said that the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the U.S.’s own domestic laws obligate the U.S. to investigate torture and prosecute those who are responsible. But the report stated that “no CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) personnel have ever been convicted or even charged for numerous instances of torture in CIA custody.”

Pitter noted the existence of a 6,000-page classified report detailing the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme, and called for it to go public.

Pitter also noted that the U.S. is legally obligated to “provide redress to these victims… who were never charged for the crime and are released”.

She argued, “The wrongdoing that was done to them should be acknowledged, and there should be some ability to provide some kind of compensation to them for the years that they lost and the abuse that they suffered… So perhaps that’s the next step.”

“We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world,” said then Vice President Dick Cheney (left) in 2001. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quickly, without any discussion."

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Feb 6 2013 (IPS)

Shedding new light on a chapter of the U.S. “war on terror” that has largely remained shrouded in secrecy, the Open Society Justice Initiative released a report Tuesday detailing the cases of 136 individuals who were extraordinarily rendered or secretly detained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Entitled “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition”, the report confirms that the CIA held suspected terrorists in undisclosed prisons, known as “black sites”. The agency also carried out “extraordinary renditions” – defined by the report as the illegal transfer of a detainee to the custody of a foreign government for detention or interrogation.

According to the Justice Initiative’s report, CIA detainees were tortured and abused in detention sites around the world. Some were wrongfully detained, and others were never charged for a crime.

“That’s the thing with these cases, each one is quite disturbing,” Amrit Singh, author of the report and senior legal officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative’s National Security and Counterterrorism programme, told IPS.

Take the case of Fatima Bouchar, one of 136 individuals whose experience the report documented. In 2004, the CIA and Thai authorities abused Bouchar at an airport in Bangkok. She was chained to a wall and starved for five days, before being rendered to Libya. Bouchar was four and a half months pregnant at the time.

“Part of the reason why this report was written is because it’s really important to tell the stories of what happened to these victims,” said Singh.

The report argues that along with its illegality, torture produces faulty information. It cites the case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who was extraordinarily rendered by the U.S. to Egypt in 2002. Under the threat of torture, al-Libi fabricated information about Iraq, Al-Qaeda and the use of biological and chemical weapons.

In 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell cited this fabricated information in his speech to the U.N., while advocating for war in Iraq.

The report was written in the context of post 9/11 U.S. counterterrorism policies. Its opening epigraph draws from a 2001 television interview with Vice President Dick Cheney, conducted by Tim Russert for “Meet the Press” on NBC News.

“We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world,” said Cheney. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quickly, without any discussion.”

The report also lists 54 complicit “foreign governments” that participated with the CIA in various ways: by hosting CIA. prisons on their territories; by capturing, transporting and torturing detainees; by providing intelligence, etc.

“It really speaks to the power that the U.S. wields over the world,” said Singh. “In this case, the U.S. has power essentially to recruit partners in committing human rights violations in the name of countering terrorism.”

Checks and balances and extrajudicial killings

In 2002, Maher Arar was detained by U.S. authorities at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. The CIA flew him out to Amman, Jordan, where he was abused by Jordanian guards. Then he was extraordinarily rendered to Syria, locked in a grave-like cell for 10 months, beaten with cables and threatened with electric shocks.

Arar’s lawyer Maria LaHood, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told IPS that they sued the U.S. government officials who sent him to be tortured. But their case came up short.

“Basically, the defendants (the U.S. government) came back with the same arguments as they always do, saying even if what (Arar) says is true – that the U.S. sent him to Syria to be tortured – the officials can’t be held liable,” said LaHood.

She said that when U.S. government officials associate their actions with “national security”, it is nearly impossible to prosecute them. “The judiciary cannot touch it.”

“Even though there’s constitutional violations here, there’s no remedy,” she added. “(Arar) couldn’t go anywhere with his case in the U.S. He hasn’t gotten an apology. He’s still on the watch-list.”

LaHood told IPS about similar challenges in prosecuting extrajudicial killings. She noted an ongoing case Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta in which the families of three U.S. citizens – who were killed in U.S. drone strikes – are suing the U.S. executive branch.

“The defendents – Panetta, Petraeus and a couple of others – have moved to dismiss the case, arguing that the judiciary can’t adjudicate the case,” she said.

When asked about the balance of power between the executive and judicial branches of the U.S. government, LaHood said, “(The) executive power has grown and grown, and that’s in part because the executive is increasing its own power, and in part because the judiciary is deferring to it.”

Philip G. Alston, a professor of law at New York University School of Law and a former U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, told IPS, “The executive branch is effectively given carte blanche by the judicial branch.

“The latter has particularly abdicated its responsibility to uphold the rule of law in any matter that involves the CIA,” he added. “The result is that it is left to make its own decisions, subject only to pro forma Congressional oversight – which, as far as can be judged from the public record, is little short of cheerleading.”

Singh told IPS, “There’s no doubt that there are serious terrorist threats today in the world, and they must be dealt with in an appropriate an lawful manner, but the fact that these threats exist does not constitute grounds to deviate from established domestic and international law.

“U.S. courts have largely denied victims of torture their (compensations). U.S. courts have not acted as a constraint on the abuse of executive power, which is how they should conduct their business,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released a statement in response to a controversial U.S. Department of Justice white paper, entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associate Force.”

“The parallels to the (George W.) Bush administration torture memos are chilling,” said Vincent Warren, executive director at CCR, of the white paper. “Those were unchecked legal justifications drawn up to justify torture; these are unchecked justifications drawn up to justify extrajudicial killing.”

Startling new evidence of the torture, unlawful rendition, and other abuse of Libyan anti-Gaddafi rebels in U.S. detention facilities during the George W. Bush administration was revealed Wednesday by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The groundbreaking report, “Delivered into Enemy Hands: U.S.-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya”, was made public one week after Attorney General Eric Holder announced the Justice Department’s decision to cease investigations of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners.

The investigation, which initially began with the examination of 101 prisoner cases, was reduced to that of only two already dead prisoners. Additionally, the investigation only encompassed the abuses which were unauthorised by Bush.

Thus, the investigations did not include alleged waterboarding and other forms of torture which were approved by the president, according to Laura Pitter, counter-terrorism advisor at HRW and author of the report.

Pitter told IPS, “The investigation needs to be reopened, it needs to be broadened, and the U.S. needs to make a full accounting of what went on at these sites.”

Pitter’s report unveiled, for the first time, secret service documents recovered from Tripoli, as well as many personal testimonies of former detainees who were released after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi a year ago. These documents and testimonies shed light on unlawful and unethical practices of detention programmes and CIA investigation tactics that had been kept in the dark for years following the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks.

Fourteen former detainees were interviewed, all of whom reported being transported back to Libya after their capture outside of the country, in what is known as rendition. Most of these detainees who had worked to overthrow Gaddafi were involved in the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group (LIFG).

All persons interviewed report having been returned to Libya by the U.S. or other collaborating countries at a time when it was clear they would be tortured by the Libyan government.

International law strictly forbids this sort of rendition, as well as all acts of torture and ill-treatment. Other countries in collaboration with Gaddafi’s regime and the renditions were the United Kingdom, Afghanistan, Chad, China and Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Sudan, and Thailand.

In addition to these reports of renditions, five detainees described various methods of torture and cruel treatment by the CIA secret prisons in Afghanistan prior to their transport. Two men described experiences of water torture tactics, and one accurately described what is known as waterboarding.

Pitter wrote, “The allegations cast serious doubts on prior assertions from U.S. government officials that only three people were waterboarded in U.S. custody. They also reflect just how little the public still knows about what went on in the U.S. secret detention program.”

Other reports of physical abuse include being forced into cramped spaces and denied the ability to bathe for nearly five months, being denied food and sleep, and being chained to walls naked. One man, Majid Mokhtar Sasy al-Maghrebi, described a time when he was chained and abused.

According to Pitter’s report, al-Maghrebi said, “I was there for 15 days, hanging from my arms, another chain from the ground. They put a diaper on me but it overflowed so there was every type of stool everywhere, the temperature was freezing.”

Pitter’s 154-page report brings to light never before seen evidence of what could be a very serious offence against International Law. The Tripoli Documents highlighted in the report show how the United States may have tried to side-step the law against rendition through extracted promises from Libya that the prisoners would not be ill-treated.

The Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions set down protections against unfair rendition and ill-treatment, and HRW claims that the United States “violated its international legal obligations”.

Pitter told IPS, “Failure to account for past abuses undermines the United States’ credibility when trying to argue for human rights in other places.”

“It’s in National Security’s interest, really, to acknowledge past mistakes so they can make clear this was a mistake and it’s never going to happen again.”

Rights groups denounced the decision not to pursue prosecutions of CIA officers who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners in their custody. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 1 2012 (IPS)

U.S. human rights groups have roundly condemned Thursday’s announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder that the Justice Department will not pursue prosecutions of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners in their custody.

The announcement appeared to mark the end of all efforts by the U.S. government to hold CIA interrogators accountable for torture and mistreating prisoners detained during the so-called “Global War on Terror” launched shortly after the Al Qaeda attacks on Sep. 11, 2001.

For rights activists and for supporters of President Barack Obama, it was the latest in a series of disappointing decisions, including the failure to close the detention facility at the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba. They had hoped Obama would not only end the excesses of President George W. Bush’s prosecution of the war, but also conduct a full investigation of those excesses, if not prosecute those responsible.

“This is truly a disastrous development,” said Laura Pitter, counter-terrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch (HRW). “To now have no accountability whatsoever for any of the CIA abuses for which there are now mountains of evidence is just appalling.”

“It completely undermines the U.S.’s ability to have any credibility on any of these issues in other countries, even as it calls for other countries to account for abuses and prosecute cases of torture and mistreatment,” she told IPS.

“Continuing impunity threatens to undermine the universally recognised prohibition on torture and other abusive treatment and sends the dangerous signal to government officials that there will be no consequences for their use of torture and other cruelty,” noted Jameel Jaffar, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Today’s decision not to file charges against individuals who tortured prisoners to death is yet another entry in what is already a shameful record.”

In his announcement, Holder suggested that crimes were indeed committed in the two cases that were being investigated by Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham but that convictions were unlikely.

“Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths, the department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.

The two deaths took place at a secret CIA detention facility known as the Salt Pit in Afghanistan in 2002 and at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison the following year. The victims have been identified as Gul Rahman, a suspected Taliban militant, and Manadel Al-Jamadi, an alleged Iraqi insurgent.

The two were the last reviewed by Durham, who had originally been tasked by Bush’s attorney general, Michael Mukasey, in 2008 with conducting a criminal investigation into CIA interrogators’ use of “waterboarding” against detainees and the apparently intentional destruction of interrogation videotapes that recorded those sessions.

In August 2009, Holder expanded Durham’s mandate to include 101 cases of alleged mistreatment by CIA interrogators of detainees held abroad to determine whether any of them may be liable to prosecution.

At the time, he also stressed that he would not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the controversial legal guidance given by the Bush administration regarding possible “enhanced interrogation” techniques that could be used against detainees.

Such techniques, which include waterboarding, the use of stress positions and extreme heat and cold, are widely considered torture by human rights groups and international legal experts. As such, they violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT), as well as the Geneva Conventions and a 1996 U.S. federal law against torture.

Holder’s position was consistent with Obama’s statement, which human rights groups also strongly criticised, shortly after taking office in 2009 that he did not want CIA officials to “suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering” to escape prosecution and that he preferred “to look forward as opposed to…backwards”.

In his first days in office, Obama ordered all secret CIA detention facilities closed and banned the enhanced techniques authorised by his predecessor.

In late 2010, Durham announced that he would not pursue criminal charges related to the destruction of the CIA videotapes. Seven months later, he recommended that, of the 101 cases of alleged CIA abuse referred to him, only two warranted full criminal investigations in which CIA officers had allegedly exceeded the Bush administration’s guidelines for permissible interrogation techniques.

Now that Holder and Durham have concluded that prosecutions of the individuals involved are unlikely to result in convictions, it appears certain that no CIA officer will be prosecuted in a U.S. jurisdiction. Prosecutions of Bush officials responsible for authorising the “enhanced interrogation” techniques have also been ruled out.

In 2006, a private contractor for the CIA was successfully prosecuted and sentenced to six years in prison for beating an Afghan detainee to death three years before.

Some commentators suggested that these decisions, including the dropping of the two remaining cases, have been motivated primarily by political considerations. Indeed, HRW director Kenneth Roth wrote in an op-ed last year that “dredging up the crimes of the previous administration was seen as too distracting and too antagonistic an enterprise when Republican votes were needed”.

In a statement Thursday, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee praised Holder’s decision. Republicans protested Holder’s referral of the 101 cases to Durham in 2009.

But rights activists expressed great frustration. Holder’s announcement “is disappointing because it’s well documented that in the aftermath of 9/11, torture and abuse were widespread and systematic,” said Melina Milazzo of Human Rights First (HRF), which has been one of the most aggressive groups in investigating and publicising torture and abuse by U.S. intelligence and military personnel.

“It’s shocking that the department’s review of hundreds of instances of torture and abuse will fail to hold even one person accountable.”

Similarly, the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR) noted that Holder’s announcement “belies U.S. claims that it can be trusted to hold accountable Americans who have perpetrated torture and other human rights abuses”.

It said the decision “underscores the need for independent investigations elsewhere, such as the investigation in Spain, to continue”. Victims and rights groups including CCR filed criminal complaints against former Bush officials in Spanish courts in 2009, launching two separate investigations by judges there.

When a reluctant George H.W. Bush, Sr., then U.S. president, changed his mind and decided at the eleventh hour to address the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, he sounded defensive in his strong response to charges that the United States was one of the major powers responsible for the some of the world’s worst environmental ills – from greenhouse gases to conspicuous consumption.

“I didn’t come here to apologise,” Bush told world leaders in a defiant seven-minute speech, even as the IPS daily conference newspaper Terra Viva led off with the story in an arresting headline: “U.S. President Snubs His Nose at Rest of the World.”

Obama aboard Airforce One – although not headed for Rio. Credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza

Before he left Washington DC for the Earth Summit, Bush had told reporters, “The day of the open chequebook is over” – indicating that the financing scheme for the biodiversity convention will not work.

“Sometimes leadership means standing alone,” he said.

In that U.S. presidential election year, Bush was virtually forced to attend the summit under political pressure from his Democratic rival Bill Clinton, who went on to win the presidency and beat Bush at the polls.

At a press conference in Washington DC, Clinton criticised Bush’s stance at the Earth Summit and accused him of “delaying world progress towards a more prosperous and healthy planet”.

Twenty years later, President Barack Obama, who like Bush is running for re-election, has disappointed the United Nations by deciding to skip the Rio+20 summit, also known as the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development.

The three-day summit, which begins Jun. 20, is to be attended by over 100 world leaders.

A U.N. source told IPS the list of participating world leaders is likely to be finalised next week because it is being updated almost on a daily basis.

But according to the White House, the U.S. delegation to the summit will be led not by Obama but by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Meena Raman of the Malaysia-based Third World Network told IPS, “Given the stance of the United States thus far in the Rio+20 negotiations and the position they have taken in the climate change negotiations in Durban, it may perhaps be a blessing that President Obama is not coming to Rio.”

Just as George Bush Sr. refused to show leadership in committing to changing production systems and consumption patterns by saying that U.S. lifestyles are not up for negotiation, officials in the Rio plus 20 process are refusing to even reaffirm the Rio principles, in particular that of common but differentiated responsibility, she pointed out.

“They are also backtracking on technology transfer, where they do not even want the word ‘transfer’ referred to,” Raman said.

Funding remains a contentious issue. On Thursday, delegates from the G77 bloc of developing countries walked out of negotiations on a green economy until commitments on “means of implementation” were made.

At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Durban, South Africa, the U.S. refused to acknowledge its historic responsibility as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, said Raman.

“It is not making real ambitious and gravely needed emission cuts. It did not want any reference to equity and CBDR (common but differentiated responsibility) in Durban and wants to shift most of the responsibility for emission reductions to developing countries.

“Given the U.S. stance, we do not want President Obama or any U.S. leader to come to Rio to bury what was agreed in 1992 in Rio. We cannot expect the U.S. to show any leadership in truly wanting to save the planet and the poor. So it is better for President Obama to stay at home,” she said.

Phil Kline, senior campaigner at Greenpeace USA, told IPS, “We are disappointed President Obama did not show leadership by coming to Rio, but much worse than that is the U.S. standing in the way of ending the plunder of the High Seas at Rio+20.”

He said the majority of countries want to move forward and kickstart a High Seas Biodiversity Agreement at Rio. “If President Obama wants to prove he cares about sustainable development, he should instruct his negotiators to finally protect the High Seas,” Kline said.

Tricia O’ Rourke of Oxfam International told IPS, “What is important is that the U.S. negotiators arrive in Rio ready and willing to show real leadership with substantive commitments to establish a new set of global development goals that address both poverty and environmental sustainability.”

At the 1992 summit, Bush also came under fire at the hands of activists and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Greenpeace described Bush as “an environmental degenerate” whose speech at the summit gave no hope for averting the historic failure of that summit.

“President Bush has played the role of a highway robber on the road to the Earth Summit’s conclusion by insisting on undermining key initiatives to protect the planet,” said Greenpeace lobbyist Clifton Curtis.

He said U.S. negotiators had brazenly adopted the tactic of holding the consensus-dependent summit hostage until other nations capitulated to U.S. demands.

The question lingering in the minds of some NGOs in Rio this week was will history repeat itself, considering the fact that the Preparatory Committee of 193 countries negotiating the final document remains deadlocked because of the intransigent stand taken by the United States and other Western nations.

While confidence in Barack Obama overseas has declined – in some countries, quite sharply – since his 2009 election, the U.S. president and the U.S. in general still receive higher approval ratings among publics abroad compared to 2008, George W. Bush’s last year in office, according to a major new survey of 21 countries released here Wednesday.

The survey, which was based on interviews conducted with some 26,000 respondents, also found that majorities and pluralities of respondents in 11 of the 21 countries, including the U.S. and most European nations, believe that China has eclipsed the U.S. as the world’s “leading economic power”.

Respondents in predominantly Muslim countries have been particularly disappointed by Obama and his foreign policies, although he remains highly popular in Europe, Japan and Brazil where his re-election is supported by large majorities, according to findings of the latest survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

Much of the fall in Obama’s overseas approval ratings appear related to his failure to meet initially high expectations, particularly regarding the persistence of U.S. unilateralism under his stewardship, and his failures both to change U.S. policy toward the Israel-Palestinian conflict and to more seriously address the challenge posed by climate change.

Significant majorities in all but three countries of the 21 countries surveyed – the U.S. itself, Britain and India – disapprove of his growing use of drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, as his favoured counter-terrorist weapons. The tactic is particularly unpopular in predominantly Muslim countries, according to the survey.

The new survey, which was conducted between mid-March and mid-April is the eleventh in an annual series that has polled opinion on various international issues in as many as 47 nations at a time.

This year’s editions included the U.S. and Mexico in North America; Brazil in South America; and nine European countries: Britain, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia and Spain.

In the Greater Middle East, the survey included Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey; while Asian countries included China, India, and Japan. Pakistan was also surveyed, but most detailed findings gained from that poll will be released at a later date, according to Pew which released findings from this year’s survey about global perceptions of Iran’s nuclear programme last month.

Unlike previous polls, no Sub-Saharan country was included this year.

While the report released Wednesday focused primarily on the global perceptions of Obama, U.S. foreign policy, and the United States more generally, the standing of other major powers was also addressed.

For the first time since Pew began its Global Attitudes Project, it found that more people believe that China has become the world’s leading economic power than those who believe the U.S. retains the title. That view was most pronounced among European nations, as well as Japan, Turkey and Lebanon.

Months before the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis, 45 percent of all respondents named the U.S. as the world’s leading economic power, while only 22 percent named China. In the latest poll a median of 42 percent named China, compared to 36 percent who cited the U.S.

“The global financial crisis has taken a toll on the image of the United States as an economic power,” said Andrew Kohout, director of the Global Attitudes Project.

At the same time, however, China’s image grew more negative over the past year, particularly compared to the U.S. While majorities or pluralities gave China positive ratings in nine of the countries, opinions were essentially divided in five others and largely negative in another six.

Its favourability rating in Japan fell 10 percentage points or more during the past year in Japan (from 34 to 15 percent), the U.S. (from 51 to 40 percent), Britain (59 to 49 percent), and France (59 to 49 percent). By contrast, Beijing made modest gains in most of the predominantly Muslim countries.

Its highest favourability rating were found in Pakistan (85 percent favourable); Tunisia (69 percent), Russia (62 percent), Lebanon (59 percent), and Greece (56 percent).

Overall ratings for the U.S. were mostly higher, particularly in Japan (72 percent), Brazil, Mexico, and Europe, where majorities ranging from 52 percent to 74 percent (Italy) in all countries except Greece said they held a favourable overall opinion of the United States.

With the exception of Lebanon and Tunisia, on the other hand, less than 20 percent of the publics in the other predominantly Muslim countries said they had a favourable opinion of the U.S., with the lowest ratings (12 percent) found in Jordan and Pakistan. Indeed, in those two countries, as well as in Egypt, Washington’s image has slipped to below the levels of 2008, the last year of Bush’s presidency.

In 13 of the 16 countries that were polled in both 2008 and 2012, Washington’s image has improved. The improvements were most spectacular in Europe and Japan. In France, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, Washington increased its favourability ratings among respondents by 21 percent or more.

Much of that improvement reflects continued support and hope for Obama himself, according to Kohout who noted that “the U.S. image trails how (its) president is regarded.”

Asked whether they at least some confidence in four leaders – Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and Russian President Vladimir Putin – in dealing with world affairs, Obama received the highest median score of 61 percent, 16 percent more than runner-up Merkel, and 33 percent more than Putin.

With the exception of Greece, Russia and Poland, strong majorities in Europe, particularly in France and Germany (nearly 90 percent) expressed confidence in Obama’s foreign policy leadership as well as in Brazil (68 percent), and Japan (74 percent).

On the other hand, confidence was lowest in the predominantly Muslim countries, where the median score was only 24 percent, down from 33 percent in 2009. Indeed, confidence in Obama has fallen in almost all regions and countries since when he first became president – 11 percent in Japan, 13 percent in Mexico, a median score of six percent in Europe, and a whopping 24 percent in China (from 62 percent to 38 percent).

Approval of his actual international policies fell even more sharply over the past three years – by a median score of 15 percentage points in Europe (from 78 to 63 percent), 19 percent in Muslim countries (from 34 percent to 15 percent) , 18 percent in Russia, 30 percent in China, and 19 percent in Japan, according to the survey.

Kohut attributed these results primarily to the perceived failure by Obama to meet the sometimes sky-high expectations that he would change U.S. policies on key issues.

In 2009, for example, Pew found that a median of 45 percent of respondents in the 15 countries that were polled again this year predicted that Obama would give more consideration to their country’s national interests and seek international approval before deploying military force. Three years later, a median of only 27 percent and 29 percent, respectively, of those same countries said that he has met those expectations.

Similarly, a median of 46 percent predicted he would be “fair with the Israelis and the Palestinians”, while 56 percent said that he would take “significant measures to control global climate change”. Asked whether he has followed through, a median of only 18 percent and 22 percent respectively, answered affirmatively.

In all four cases, medians ranging from 54 percent to 61 percent said Obama had failed to meet those expectations.

At the same time, majorities or pluralities in 12 of the countries said they favoured his re-election, with support highest among traditional U.S. allies in Western Europe, in Brazil, and Japan.

Respondents in Russia and Tunisia were evenly split, while, with the exception of Turkey, pluralities or majorities in the other Muslim states, China, and Mexico said he should not be re-elected.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Feb 23 2012 (IPS)

The failure of a mission by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to get Iranian permission to visit a military testing site mentioned in its latest report has been interpreted in media coverage as a stall to avoid the discovery of confirming evidence of past work on nuclear weapons.

But the history of Iranian cooperation with the IAEA on carrying out inspections at the Parchin military testing centre, as well as a previous IAEA-Iran work programme agreement, suggests that Iran is keeping permission for such a visit as bargaining leverage to negotiate a better deal with the agency.

The IAEA statement Wednesday emphasised the fact that the mission to Tehran had been denied permission to visit the site at Parchin. That prompted Associated Press correspondent in Vienna George Jahn to call Iran’s refusal to agree to an IAEA visit to Parchin “stonewalling” and evidence of “hard line resistance” to international pressure on its nuclear programme.

IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria. Credit: Sarajevo-x.com/publix domain

International Herald Tribune blogger Harvey Morris wrote that Iran’s strategy was to “play for time”.

But access to Parchin was discussed as part of broader negotiations on what the IAEA statement called a “document facilitating the clarification of unresolved issues” in regard to “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program. The negotiations were focused on what cooperation the IAEA is demanding and what the agency is ready to offer in return for that cooperation.

Judging from past negotiations between Iran and the IAEA, Iran is ready to offer access to Parchin as well as other sites requested by the agency as part of an agreement under which the IAEA would stop accusing Iran of carrying out covert nuclear weapons experiments.

The IAEA’s position in the negotiations was revealed by the AP’s Jahn, who reported that the agency mission had hoped to get Iranian agreement to meetings with “scientists suspected of working on the alleged weapons program” and to “inspect documents related to nuclear weapons work”.

The September 2008 IAEA report said the agency had “proposed discussions with Iranian experts on the contents of the engineering reports (on the Shahab-3 missile) examining in detail modeling studies….”

Iran has rejected such demands as threatening its legitimate national security interests, in violation of the IAEA statute.

The scientists that the agency is demanding to see are publicly known officials of Iran’s military research institutions. Even before Israel had begun assassinating Iranian scientists, Iran had made it clear it will not give the IAEA physical access to any individual scientists.

The IAEA wants to visit a specific site at Parchin because of information from an unnamed member state, cited in its November 2011 report, that Iran had “constructed a large explosives containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments” – tests of nuclear weapons designs without the use of fissile material.

The report said the construction had been carried out at Parchin military complex in 2000 and that the IAEA had satellite imagery that was “consistent with” that information, meaning only that there were structures that could have housed such a vessel at Parchin in 2000.

The previous history of IAEA inspections at Parchin make it clear, however, that Iran knew it had nothing to hide at Parchin after 2000.

In 2004, John Bolton, the point man in the George W. Bush administration on Iran, who coordinated closely with Israel, charged that satellite imagery showed a bunker at Parchin appropriate for large-scale explosives tests such as those needed to detonate a bomb that would use a neutron trigger.

Bolton put heavy pressure on the IAEA to carry out an investigation at Parchin. A few months later, Tehran agreed to allow the agency to select any five buildings and their surroundings to investigate freely.

That gave U.S. and Israeli intelligence, as well as IAEA experts, an opportunity for which they would not have dreamed of asking: they could scan satellite imagery of the entire Parchin complex for anything that could possibly suggest work on a nuclear weapon, including a containment vessel for hydrodynamic testing, and demand to inspect that building and the grounds around it at their leisure.

In January 2005, an IAEA team visited Parchin and investigated the five areas they had chosen, taking environmental samples, but found nothing suspicious. In November 2005, Iran allowed the IAEA to do the same thing all over again on five more buildings of its own choice.

The Iranian military and nuclear establishment would never have agreed to such terms for IAEA inspection missions at Parchin – not once but twice – if they had been concealing a hydrodynamic test facility at the base.

Other information suggests that no such vessel ever existed at Parchin. The November report claimed the IAEA had obtained information on the dimensions of the containment vessel from the publication of a foreign expert identified as someone who worked “in the nuclear weapons program of the country of his origin”.

That was a reference to Vlachyslav Danilenko, a Ukrainian scientist who has acknowledged having lectured in Iran on theoretical physics and having helped the country build a cylinder for production of nano-diamonds, which was his research specialty. However, Danilenko has firmly denied ever having done any work related to nuclear weapons.

The claim that the dimensions of the putative bomb test chamber at Parchin could be gleaned from a publication by Danilenko is implausible.

The report said the bomb containment chamber at Parchin was “designed to contain the detonation of 70 kilograms of high explosives”. Danilenko’s patented 1992 design for a cylinder for nano-diamond production, however, was built to contain only 10 kg of explosives.

Former IAEA weapons inspector and nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley has pointed out, moreover, that a container for only 70 kg of explosives could not possibly have been used for hydrodynamic testing of a nuclear weapon design.

The negotiations on a “framework” for Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA recall the negotiation of a “work programme” in August 2007 aimed at resolving a series of issues on which the IAEA Safeguards Department suspected links to nuclear weapons. The issues included experiments involving the extraction of polonium-210, plutonium experiments and possible military control of the Gchine uranium mine.

In previous years, Iran had failed to provide sufficient information to overcome those suspicions. But after the negotiation of the “work programme”, Iran began to move with dispatch to provide documentation aimed at clearing up the six remaining issues.

The IAEA acknowledged that all six of the issues had been effectively resolved in two reports in late 2007 and early 2008.

The reason for the dramatic change in cooperation was simple: the IAEA had pledged that, in return for Iran’s resolving the six issues, “the implementation of safeguards in Iran will be conducted in a routine manner.” That was seen as a significant step toward finally getting a clean bill of health from the agency.

But the IAEA instead then began focusing its questioning entirely on the purported Iranian documents of unknown origin and doubtful authenticity which the IAEA called the “alleged studies”.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

Excerpt:

By Stephen Leahy
VANCOUVER, Canada, Feb 21 2012 (IPS)

Amid revelations of a well-funded U.S. organisation’s plans to deliberately distort climate science, scientists and journalists at a major scientific conference called on the Canadian government to stop its muzzling of scientists.

For the past four years, the Canadian government has been denying timely access to government scientists even when their findings are published in leading scientific journals, said scientists and journalists in a special session of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science meeting here in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“The Canadian public doesn’t know as much as they could about science and climate change,” said Margaret Munro, who is a science writer for Postmedia News, based in Vancouver.

Canadian media coverage of climate change has fallen by 80 percent since 2007 when the Stephen Harper government put restrictive policies into place. Credit: flickr/CC BY 2.0

“The more controversial the story, the less likely you are to talk to the scientists,” Munro told IPS.

Last year, journalists from around the world were denied access to Canadian government scientist Kristi Miller, who had published a groundbreaking paper on the decline of salmon populations in western Canada in the journal Science.

However, lobbyists for the oil and gas industry appear to have direct access to scientists, according to emails obtained under access to information legislation. Internal government documents reported an 80-percent decline in Canadian media coverage of climate change since 2007 when the new Stephen Harper Conservative government put restrictive policies into place.

“It is unacceptable that the Canadian public sits back and allows access to the science they’re funding to be denied them,” said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria.

When the science community starts having “panels about the muzzling of scientists, you know the situation is pretty desperate,” Weaver said.

Media provides the public with information so they can make informed decisions. But without timely access, the media cannot perform its role, he said.

“When government muzzles scientists for political reasons, it cuts at the fundamental principals of good science,” said Stephen Hwang, professor of general internal medicine at the University of Toronto.

“The open discussion of ideas is essential to science, just as a free press is essential to democracy,” Hwang said in a statement.

The U.S. government has also controlled its own media’s access to scientists, especially under the George W. Bush administration. Many of those restrictive policies are still in place under the current administration, said Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But lobby groups in the U.S. face no such restrictions, and have been instrumental in the decline in awareness about the risks of climate change, various surveys have shown. In a January survey of the top 22 policy priorities for the U.S., the public ranked climate change dead last, according to the Pew Research Center.

Confidential documents obtained last week from the Heartland Institute, a U.S. libertarian think tank, reveal a multi-million-dollar campaign to mislead the public about climate change and subvert government action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One project intended to undermine science lessons for schoolchildren. Heartland is also funding climate change contrarians in Canada and other countries, the documents reveal.

Heartland has responded to this exposure with threats against media. On the weekend, it issued legal notices to websites and news organisations such as Canada’s “DeSmog Blog”, which broke the story, for “what it views as malicious and false commentary”. The notices demand the removal of alleged Heartland documents and any and all commentary.

“‘Bad science and spin must be challenged more,” said European scientists here at AAAS as part a call for greater integrity, openness and clarity, and public engagement on complex issues of global significance.

Despite promises of accountability and transparency, Canada’s government scientists remain “muzzled”, various media organisations including the World Federation of Science Journalists wrote in an open letter to Harper. The letter noted that efforts to resolve the issue have been ignored and now the only recourse is to draw public attention in Canada and around the world.

Last December, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) introduced a communication policy that allows scientists to freely speak to the media whenever they wish. Harper is being urged to adopt a similar policy for Canada’s government scientists.

“Canadians have the right to… unfettered access to the expertise of publicly-funded scientists,” the letter concluded.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
NEW YORK, Oct 24 2011 (IPS)

Beaten. Chained to walls. Exposed to extreme temperatures. Deprived of food, water and sleep. Hassan bin Attash, Sami el- Hajj, Muhammed Khan Tumani and Murat Kurnaz suffered years of inhumane and illegal treatment while in U.S. custody either at Guantánamo Bay or in military bases in Afghanistan.

George W. Bush, shown here on his last day in office, Jan. 19, 2009, is accused of authorising and overseeing torture programmes. Credit: White House photo by Eric Draper

Previously, CCR and CCIJ had submitted two letters, one on Sep. 29 and another on Oct. 14, to Robert Nicholson, Canadian minister of justice and attorney general, with the first letter urging him to launch a criminal investigation against former U.S. President George W. Bush for “authorising and overseeing his administration’s well- documented torture program”.

Attash, currently detained at Guantánamo, has been imprisoned without formal charges for more than nine years. El-Hajj, Tumani and Kurnaz have all been released.

The attorney general took no action in response to the letters, so as promised, CCIJ submitted a private prosecution case on Oct. 20 on behalf of the four men. More than 50 human rights groups and prominent individuals supported the case.

As a signatory to the Convention Against Torture, Canada is “obligated to prosecute or extradite for prosecution anyone present in its territory for whom there is a reasonable belief he has committed torture”, the Sep. 29 letter noted.

Bush was scheduled to, and was, on Canadian territory during his visit Surrey, British Columbia for a speaking engagement at an economic summit on Oct. 20.

Under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which has 147 signatories, including the U.S. and Canada, parties to the convention are supposed to have committed to promptly investigate, prosecute and punish torturers.

Multiple efforts

CCR and CCIJ had compiled a 65-page indictment, with 4,000 pages of supporting material, presenting the case against former Bush for authorising and overseeing torture programmes. The indictment was included in the Sep. 29 letter to the attorney general.

In that letter to Nicholson, CCR and CCIJ said, “Mr. Bush bears individual and command responsibility for the acts of torture committed by his subordinates that he ordered, authorised, condoned, or otherwise aided and abetted.”

“The legal basis for the case is exceptionally strong,” Matt Eisenbrandt, legal director of CCIJ, said in a statement. The four men “have a right to have a court of law examine the evidence and hear the legal arguments”.

In a statement, Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at CCR, who worked on the case, called Canada’s decision “a stark example of politics trumping law”, adding, “The government of Canada obviously did everything it could to protect George Bush from facing criminal accountability for torture.”

Earlier this year, in February, two torture victims planned in Geneva to file criminal complaints for torture against Bush during a scheduled visit to the country, because Swiss law requires alleged torturers to be on Swiss soil before any investigation against them can be opened.

Bush cancelled his visit the night before the complaints, which over 60 human rights organisations supported in a joint letter.

In an interview with IPS, Gallagher called the move by the Canadian government “deeply, deeply disappointing” and “a shocking departure for a country that’s supposed to live under the rule of law”.

This decision “can only be described as a political move” to protect Bush, she said.

Setting a precedent

The case may be considered disappointing in itself, but its potential implications could be downright alarming, rights activists warn.

Both the Canadian government’s decision and the lack of U.S. action against Bush and officials in his administration, which oversaw the U.S.’s well-documented torture programme, leave a “dangerous and lasting legacy of the impunity of U.S. officials” and serve as “a real degrading of the entire system of law and international human rights”, Gallagher said.

As much as the U.S. and Canada talk about supporting a robust human rights programme or invoke human rights to justify some of their actions, Gallagher said, they “make a mockery of the system” when they draw on human rights to justify their choices, coming to be seen as hypocrites.

From here, future steps depend on the information CCR and CCIJ can obtain regarding the Canadian government’s basis for moving to stay the case, especially if it can be determined that the reasons the government presented to justify shutting down the case were insufficient.

They also plan to call upon the United Nations Committee Against Torture and ask them to review and comment on Canada’s actions regarding this particular case.

This decision has implications far beyond North America, opening the doors for dictators and other leaders to justify illegal, inhumane actions, Gallagher said. “If the U.S. doesn’t have to follow the law,” she posed, “Why should we?”

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 8 2011 (IPS)

A decade after its spectacular Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York City’s twin World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and despite the killing earlier this year of its charismatic leader, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda appears to have largely succeeded in its hopes of accelerating the decline of U.S. global power, if not bringing it to the brink of collapse.

Since 9/11, the United States' global standing has plunged dramatically -- a decline largely fueled by its alienating and costly "war on terror". Credit: A. Golden/eyewash design

That over-reaction was driven in major part by a close-knit group of neo-conservatives and other hawks who seized control of Bush’s foreign policy even before the dust had settled over Lower Manhattan and set it on a radical course designed to consolidate Washington’s dominance of the Greater Middle East and “shock and awe” any aspiring global or regional rival powers into acquiescing to a “unipolar” world.

Led within the administration by Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and their mostly neo-conservative aides and supporters, the hawks had four years before joined the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The letter-head organisation was co- founded by neo-conservative ideologues William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who, in an important 1996 article, called for the U.S. to preserve its post-Cold War “hegemony as far into the future as possible.”

In a series of subsequent letters and publications, they urged ever more military spending; pre-emptive, and if necessary, unilateral military action against possible threats; and “regime change” for rogue states, beginning with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

On the eve of 9/11, PNAC’s notion that Washington could extend its “benevolent global hegemony” indefinitely did not appear unreasonable. With more than 30 percent of the global economy, the strongest fiscal position in a generation, and a defence budget greater than the 20 next-most-powerful militaries combined, Washington looked unchallengeable, a perception soon enhanced by the show of national unity that followed the attacks and the speed and apparent ease with which Washington orchestrated the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan later that year.

“I’ve gone back in world history and never seen anything like it,” exclaimed Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, a leading exponent of the “declinist” school of U.S. power 15 years before, about Washington’s dominance, which he compared favourably to the British Empire in its day.

PNAC’s associates were similarly impressed. “People are now coming out of the closet on the word ’empire’,” exulted the Washington Post’s neo-conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer, a Cheney favourite and long-time advocate of a U.S.-led “unipolar” world. “The fact is no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically, and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman Empire.”

Such exuberance (or hubris) naturally fueled the next phase in PNAC’s quest – originally laid out in an open letter to Bush published by the group just nine days after 9/11 – for victory in what was now called the “global war on terror”: regime change in Iraq.

“Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism,” PNAC had warned, arguing that Washington must expand its target list to include states — particularly those hostile to Israel — that support terrorist groups, as well as the terrorist groups themselves.

So, instead of focusing on capturing bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and providing the kind of security and material assistance needed to pacify and begin rebuilding Afghanistan, Bush turned his attention — and diverted U.S. military and intelligence resources — to preparing for war against Iraq.

That decision is now seen universally — with the exception of Cheney and his die-hard PNAC supporters — as perhaps the single-most disastrous foreign policy decision by a U.S. president in the past decade, if not the past century.

Not only did it effectively set the stage for an eventual Taliban comeback in Afghanistan (which is now costing the U.S. some 10 billion dollars a month), but it also destroyed the international support and solidarity Washington had enjoyed immediately after the 9/11 attacks — a fact made excruciatingly clear by Bush’s failure to gain U.N. Security Council backing for his invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It also helped persuade tens of millions of Muslims that the U.S. was waging war on Islam, according to dozens of public-opinion surveys.

Indeed, by invading Iraq, the U.S. fell into a trap set by bin Laden who, convinced that Moscow’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan contributed critically to the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse, clearly believed that the U.S. was susceptible to the same kind of over-extension.

“We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat,” he said in a 2004 video-tape describing what he called a “war of attrition.”

“We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” he added. “All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘Al Qaeda’, in order to make generals race there and to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations,” he went on.

Of course, by the time bin Laden recorded those remarks, the U.S. forces in Iraq were battling a growing insurgency, one that not only would result in hugely costly abuses by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib that inflicted serious damage to Washington’s already-tattered moral image, but that would also push Iraq to the very brink of civil war and lead to an even deeper and more expensive intervention by the U.S. military.

True to bin Laden’s prediction, Washington, goaded by PNAC associates and alumni, also deployed forces — or drone missiles at the very least — to virtually wherever Al Qaeda or its alleged affiliates raised its flag, often at the cost of weakening local governments and incurring the wrath of local populations, particularly in Somalia and Yemen.

More importantly, the same held true in nuclear-armed Pakistan, not to mention Afghanistan, where Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, more than doubled U.S. troop strength to 100,000 in his first two years in office, even as he withdrew an equivalent number from Iraq.

The costs have been staggering in almost every respect. The estimated three to 4.4 trillion dollars Washington has incurred either directly or indirectly in conducting the “global war on terror” account for a substantial portion of the fiscal crisis that transformed the country’s politics and brought it to the edge of bankruptcy last month.

And while the U.S. military remains by far the strongest in the world, its veil of invincibility has been irreparably pierced by the success with which rag-tag groups of guerrillas have defied and frustrated it. The result, according to conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has been “a steady erosion of America’s position in the world,” which Obama has so far been unable to reverse.

“…(F)or a long time,” wrote Richard Clarke, a top national-security official under Bush who warned the White House several months before 9/11 that Al Qaeda was planning a major operation against the U.S. homeland, in the dailybeast.com, “we actually played into the hands of our opponents, doing precisely what they had wanted us to do, responding in the ways that they had sought to provoke, damaging our economy and alienating much of the Middle East.”

And leading the charge were precisely those hawks whose fondest wish was to extend, rather than cut short, Washington’s global hegemony.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Sep 7 2011 (IPS)

Of all the mistakes and missed opportunities that have characterised U.S. foreign policy since Sep. 11, 2001, few may have been as consequential as the failure to improve relations with Iran.

Had the George W. Bush administration responded to repeated overtures from Tehran, it might have cemented a powerful ally against Al-Qaeda, had an easier time pacifying Iraq and reduced Iranian motivation to acquire nuclear weapons and oppose Arab-Israeli peace.

Unlike the reaction in many Arab states, where people saw 9-11 as punishment of the United States for its pro-Israeli policies, in Iran both government officials and ordinary citizens expressed genuine sympathy for the victims.

The government of then President Mohammad Khatami – with the backing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – strongly supported U.S. efforts to topple the Taliban government and create a new administration for Afghanistan. Its reward: being labeled a member of an “axis of evil” along with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea.

Iranian efforts to reconcile with the United States persisted despite this diplomatic slap. There were monthly one-on-one talks in Europe between fairly senior Iranian and U.S. diplomats from the fall of 2001 until May 2003 that dealt with Afghanistan and the looming U.S. invasion of Iraq.

James Dobbins, a special U.S. envoy for Afghanistan after 9-11, recalls a remarkable overture in March 2002 – two months after the “axis of evil” comment by President Bush – when an Iranian general offered his country’s assistance in training 20,000 members of a new Afghan army.

Dobbins, in an article last year in the Washington Quarterly, wrote that Secretary of State Colin Powell called the proposal “very interesting” and told him to talk to then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Rice put the offer on the agenda at a meeting of National Security Council principals, including then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“When we came to that item on the agenda, I again recounted my conversation with the Iranians,” Dobbins wrote. “Rumsfeld did not look up from the papers he was perusing. When I finished, he made no comment and asked no questions. Neither did anyone else. After a long pause, seeing no one ready to take up the issue, Rice moved the meeting on to the next item on her agenda.”

Dobbins told IPS that the Iranian offer would likely have been scaled back and Afghanistan’s other neighbours and interested parties such as Pakistan and India would also have to have been included. Still, he regards the lack of a U.S. counter-proposal as a major missed opportunity. The Iranians, he said, “were making it clear that they had a broader agenda [of reconciliation with the U.S.] in mind.”

This pattern of non-response to Iranian overtures persisted. There was no U.S. reply to an Iranian agenda for comprehensive negotiations sent to the State Department in May 2003, no answer when Iran offered that year to trade senior Al-Qaeda detainees for members of an Iranian terrorist group in Iraq, and no response to an admittedly idiosyncratic letter to Bush by new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.

By then, of course, the power dynamics in the region had shifted toward Iran and away from the United States, which was bogged down in sectarian warfare in Iraq and about to face a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

Dobbins said that continued Iranian cooperation might not have been decisive in Afghanistan given the Taliban’s stronger links to Pakistan. “In terms of Iraq, however, it could have made all the difference since at least 50 percent of the violence since 2003 has come from Shi’ite militants” who are either backed by Iran or otherwise susceptible to Iranian pressure, he said.

Those in the Bush administration who opposed rapprochement with Iran feared that restoring U.S. relations would preserve an authoritarian regime that had been responsible for acts of terrorism against Americans in the past and that still supported groups opposed to Israel’s existence.

However, improved U.S.-Iran relations under Khatami would likely have strengthened Iranian reformists and might have even prevented the election of the neoconservative Ahmadinejad. U.S. refusal to negotiate with Iran about its nuclear programme – unless Iran first suspended that programme – certainly did not stop the programme; if anything, it resulted in Iran accelerating uranium enrichment.

The Barack Obama administration tried to correct course and sought to engage Iran without preconditions in 2009. However, disputed Iranian presidential elections and their bloody aftermath so divided the Iranian political elite that progress on the diplomatic front was impossible.

Since then, both sides have hardened their positions. Iran has continued support for anti-U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq to chase the U.S. from the region and retaliate for mounting U.S. and international sanctions over the nuclear programme.

John Limbert, a former U.S. hostage in Iran who was deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran in the early part of the Obama administration, blames inertia for Washington’s inability to take yes for an answer from Iran.

“We know how to do certain things but not act constructively” with Iran, he said. “We assume there is a trick whenever they come to us.”

Iranians also have difficulty trusting a country that is slowly squeezing the Iranian economy and anticipating the demise of the Islamic regime. Newly minted Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said Tuesday that another Iranian revolution is “a matter of time” given the pro-democracy ferment in the neighbourhood. That may well be the case, but talking about it openly is unlikely to help Iranians bring that about.

Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution, said she doubted that U.S. policies have impacted Iran’s complicated internal dynamics, noting that Ahmadinejad has gotten no bounce from his occasional efforts to engage Washington.

However, she told IPS that allowing the 2001-2003 talks to end was “a fantastic mistake… The dialogue that existed on Afghanistan was the single unparalleled opportunity to create a diplomatic process” with Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

“It’s wholly improbable that we’ll see anything like that in the foreseeable future,” she added, “because the political conditions in Iran are so inappropriate for any meaningful dialogue.”

She might have said the same about the United States in a presidential election year.

Excerpt:

By Kanya D'Almeida
WASHINGTON, Aug 9 2011 (IPS)

On Apr. 16, 2006, for reasons still unknown to them, two U.S. contractors in Iraq’s Red Zone were handcuffed, blindfolded and transported to Camp Cropper, a U.S. military facility located a few miles from Baghdad International Airport.

The court found that the plaintiffs endured conditions "perfectly consistent with torture treatments approved by Rumsfeld's Defense Department". Credit: U.S. government photo

This Monday, nearly five years since their ordeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago ruled that the plaintiffs could move forward with a lawsuit against the person who allegedly approved the operation – former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Held without a trial or court hearing and tortured – Ertel for six weeks, Vance for nearly three months – the plaintiffs are suing for damages rendered against them in Camp Cropper, where Rumsfeld and several other unnamed officials allegedly “developed, authorized and used harsh interrogation techniques [on them]”, thus violating their basic civil, constitutional and human rights.

Upholding a 2010 lower court ruling on the issue, the three-judge panel voted two-to-one Monday to allow the case to move forward, on the basis that “[the plaintiffs’] complaint alleges in detail that they were detained and illegally tortured by U.S. military [and] released from military custody without ever being charged with a crime.”

In the final court decision, Judge David Hamilton wrote, “This appeal raises fundamental questions about the relationship between the citizens of our country and their government,” adding that the plaintiffs were also justified in bringing a claim against the U.S. under the Administrative Procedure Act to recover personal items such as laptops and cell phones that were seized by U.S. forces prior to their detention.

“While the United States government has failed to live up to its legal and moral obligation to provide remedies for so many victims of U.S. sponsored torture, these two cases demonstrate that holding officials accountable in U.S. courts remains a possibility,” Melina Milazzo, a Law and Security Program fellow with Human Rights First, said in a press release Tuesday.

“A state of war is not a blank cheque for senior officials to authorise torture. The integrity and security of our armed forces are [only] safeguarded when those who violate our core principles and values are held to account,” Milazzo told IPS.

From corruption to intelligence to “interrogation”

The Vance-Ertel case exposes the myriad links between private contractors, U.S. forces, U.S. government officials and intelligence agencies that often converge in the dark cells of detention centres such as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Camp Cropper.

According to court documents, both Vance and Ertel were employees of the private U.S. government contractor Shield Group Security at the time of their arrest, stationed just outside the so-called safe or ‘Green’ Zone in Bagdad.

In 2005 and 2006, Vance and Ertel became increasingly aware of corruption within Shield Group Security, noting, among other suspicious activity, that the company was making payments to Iraqi sheikhs – likely to “obtain influence” with powerful local players – and accumulating a cache of weapons that was flowing steadily to officials from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which had ties to armed militias and death squads.

Alarmed by situation, Vance and Ertel began passing information on the company, sometimes on a biweekly basis, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation – until they were whisked away to Camp Cropper in early April 2006 for “work[ing] for a business entity that possessed weapons… on its premises and [being] involved in the possible distribution of these weapons to insurgent/terrorist groups,” Ertel’s detention notice read.

According to the Chicago court’s decision, the men then endured conditions that were “perfectly consistent with torture treatments approved by Rumsfeld’s Defense Department,” including living in cells whose walls were smeared with feces, being deprived of food and water, forcibly kept awake in brightly lit rooms, and made to endure “intolerably” cold temperatures.

“Even Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had,” Vance told the New York Times in 2006, adding that he and Ertel wrote a letter to the camp commandant claiming that, “the same democratic ideals we [the U.S.] are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.”

At the same time, First Lieutenant Lea Ann Fracasso, spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s detention operations in Iraq, insisted that the men had been “treated fair and humanely”, adding that there was no record of their written complaints.

U.S. government’s response

Rumsfeld’s attorneys attempted to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that the secretary of defence should enjoy immunity from criminal actions.

Rumsfeld also claimed that the plaintiffs should be denied recompense, since the violation of their constitutional rights occurred in a war zone.

The court rejected the claim that government officials should be above the law, stating in its final decision, “We see no persuasive justification in … case law or otherwise for [Rumsfeld’s] most sweeping argument, which would deprive civilian U.S. citizens of a civil judicial remedy for torture or even cold-blooded murder by federal officials and soldiers, at any level, in a war zone.”

“United States law provides a civil damages remedy for aliens who are tortured by their own governments. It would be startling and unprecedented to conclude that the United States would not provide such a remedy to its own citizens,” the decision said.

Civil liberties and human rights advocates say that while the court’s decision sends out an extremely hopeful message about accountability and justice, it is a sobering reminder of the detainees who are either still languishing in detention cells or have yet to receive any compensation for the months, or even years, of their lives that may have been stolen by U.S. interrogators.

“This is a good first step, but it would be even better if the administration authorised a full criminal investigation into overwhelming evidence of other instances of detention and torture,” Andrea Prasow, senior counsel in Human Rights Watch’s Terrorism and Counterterrorism Programme, told IPS.

In July, HRW published a detailed report on the mistreatment of detainees under the administration of former President George W. Bush, which the group said presented more than sufficient evidence to warrant criminal investigations into the possible complicity of top U.S. officials like Rumsfeld, former Vice President Dick Cheney and George Tenet, then-director of the CIA.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, Jul 12 2011 (IPS)

Senior officials under the former George W. Bush administration knowingly authorised the torture of terrorism suspects held under United States custody, a Human Right Watch (HRW) report released here Tuesday revealed.

Titled “Getting Away with Torture”, the 107-page report presents a plethora of evidence that HRW says warrants criminal investigations against former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet and Bush himself, among others.

Newly de-classified memos, transcriptions of congressional hearings, and other sources indicate that Bush officials authorised the use of interrogation techniques almost universally considered torture – such as waterboarding – as well as the operation of covert CIA prisons abroad and the rendition of detainees to other countries where they were subsequently tortured.

HRW also criticised the United States under the current Barack Obama administration for failing to meets it obligations under the United Nations Convention Against Torture to investigate acts of torture and other inhumane treatment.

“President Obama has defended the decision not to prosecute officials in his predecessor’s administration by arguing that the country needs ‘to look forward, not backward,'” said HRW executive director Kenneth Roth. “[He] has treated torture as an unfortunate policy choice rather than a crime.”

To date, both the Bush and Obama administrations have successfully prevented courts from reviewing the merits of torture allegations in civil lawsuits by arguing that the cases involve sensitive information, which, if revealed, might endanger national security.

Last year, Bush defended the use of waterboarding on the grounds that the Justice Department deemed it legal. In 2002, lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel had drafted memos approving the legality of a list of abusive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. However, HRW documents evidence that shows senior administration officials pressured the politically-appointed lawyers to write these legal justifications.

“Senior Bush officials shouldn’t be allowed to shape and hand-pick legal advice and then hide behind it as if were autonomously delivered,” Roth said.

HRW further recommends that Congress establish an independent, nonpartisan commission to examine the mistreatment of detainees in U.S. custody since the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon and compensate victims of torture, as required by the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

“Without [a commission], torture very much remains within the toolbox of accepted policies. People are not going to back away from it until there is accountability,” Karen Greenberg, executive director of New York University’s Centre on Law and Security and author of “The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days”, told IPS.

In 2009, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appointed a special prosecutor to investigate detainee abuse, but limited the mandate to only “unauthorised” acts, which effectively excluded violations like waterboarding and forcing prisoners to maintain stress positions that were approved by the Bush administration.

But on Jun. 30 of this year, the Justice Department announced that it would continue probing only two of nearly 100 allegations of torture. The open cases involve the deaths of two men – Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi, and Gul Rahman, an Afghan – in CIA custody.

Human and civil rights group criticised the narrow scope of the torture investigations, while HRW said they failed to address the systematic character of the abuses.

“The U.S. government’s pattern of abuse across several countries did not result from acts of individuals who broke the rules,” Roth said. “It resulted from decisions made by senior U.S. officials to bend, ignore, or cast aside the rules.” If the U.S. does not pursue criminal investigations, HRW is urging other countries to exercise universal jurisdiction under international law and prosecute the aforementioned officials.

A number of former detainees have already taken this step by filing criminal complaints in courts outside of the U.S.

In February 2011, alleged victims of torture living in Switzerland planned to file a suit against Bush, causing him to cancel his trip there.

Another investigation is underway in Spain, where the Centre for Constitutional Rights and the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights requested a subpoena for a former commander of the Abu Ghraib prison to explain his role in the alleged torture of four detainees.

Washington’s failure to investigate its own citizens for abuses like torture ultimately undercuts its efforts to hold other governments accountable for human rights violations, according to HRW.

“The U.S. is right to call for justice when serious international crimes are committed in places like Darfur, Libya, and Sri Lanka, but there should be no double standards,” Roth said.

“When the U.S. government shields its own officials from investigation and prosecution, it makes it easier for others to dismiss global efforts to bring violators of serious crimes to justice,” he added.

Failing to prosecute ultimately sends the message that “if you are powerful, you can get away with even torture,” Greenberg said.

Excerpt:

Exactly 40 years after former United States President Richard Nixon labelled his administration’s drug policy a “war” in 1971, a huge coalition of civil rights leaders, advocates and educators converged in Washington D.C. to expose an on-going conflict that they believe is less ‘a war on drugs’ and more an assault on the rights of African Americans in the 21st century.

“The War on Drugs has not failed to achieve its purpose,” Reverend Jesse Jackson, founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, told a crowded room at the National Press Club here Friday. “It has certainly failed to stop the trade and abuse of drugs, but it has succeeded in its original design: to ensure profit for some, political disenfranchisement of minorities, and the structural exclusion of a people based on their race.”

A 2010 report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the U.S. Department of Justice claims that a drug arrest is made every 19 seconds, making the U.S. home to 25 percent of the world’s inmates – most of them detained on non-violent charges of drug possession.

With one out of every hundred American adults behind bars, the U.S.’s bulging jails easily exceed even the prison population in China. These jails, experts say, have become the most racially biased institutions in the country.

In its 2011 annual report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented that, though African Americans comprise a mere 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for a stunningly disproportionate 35 percent of incarcerated drug offenders in the country.

The New Jim Crow?

Today, there are more African American men in jails, correctional facilities, prisons and detention centres in the U.S. than there were slaves in 1850 – a decade before the civil war began.

In fact, more black men are behind bars in the U.S. in 2011 than in South Africa in the 1990s during the height of apartheid.

According to Michelle Alexander, author of the ‘The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in an age of colorblindness’, the War on Drugs has effectively robbed people of colour in the U.S. of their hard-won civil rights by legalising discrimination against ‘criminals’ in much the same way that the notorious Jim Crow laws legalised discrimination against blacks.

“The War on Drugs has put in place a set of policies and practices that operate to collectively lock people into a permanent second class status for the rest of their lives,” Alexander told IPS. “African American men in particular are targeted by the police, stopped, searched, arrested on minor charges of possession – the very sorts of offenses that go unnoticed on wealthy college campuses across town – imprisoned and then ushered into a parallel social universe where they are stripped of their most basic civil and human rights.”

“Suddenly being denied access to public housing, stripped of equal education and employment opportunities, refused the right serve on a jury – all the old forms of discrimination – are legal again once you’ve been branded a felon,” Alexander added. “The drug war has been the primary vehicle of mass incarceration and this new form of racial and social control – it has been responsible for the quintupling of our prison population since the 1980s.”

The report by HRW makes clear that although blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at equal rates, African Americans make up 44 percent of state convictions of drug felonies and black males are incarcerated at a rate more than six times that of whites. In fact, in 2009, one in ten young black men between the ages of 25 and 29 were imprisoned – compared to one in 64 white males.

Numbers Belie Rhetoric in On-going Conflict

“The drug war has arguably been the single most devastating, dysfunctional policy since slavery,” Norm Stamper, retired chief of police for Seattle, told a press conference in D.C. last week.

Speaking on behalf of the advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) – who handed over their new report ‘Ending the Drug War: a Dream Deferred’ to Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske Tuesday – Stamper laid bare the details of a strategy that President Barack Obama’s administration claims to have abandoned, but is in fact still deeply rooted in the budgets and practices of virtually every law enforcement agency in the U.S.

“I was optimistic when [Kerlikowske] said, early in his tenure, that we cannot arrest ourselves out of this problem,” Stamper said. “But that statement has been made and repeated on numerous occasions to no practical effect.”

LEAP’s report crunched the numbers of Obama’s 2010 National Drug Control Strategy budget and found that – compared to the expenditures of Republican President George W. Bush – the Obama administration approved a 13 percent increase in the Department of Defence’s anti-drug spending, an 18 percent increase in drug control funds allocated to the Bureau of Prisons, and a 34 percent decrease in support for Department of Education-sponsored awareness programmes in fiscal year 2011.

Even after adjusting for inflation, Nixon’s 100 million dollar annual drug-war budget has multiplied 50 times since 1971. Despite the government’s National Drug Assessment’s finding that narcotics are cheaper and more easily accessible than ever before, the current administration has requested 26.2 billion dollars to continue fighting the war.

Contrary to claims by government officials, the Drug War is far from over – leading experts and advocates to call for urgent mobilisation.

“Nothing short of a major social movement has any hope of ending mass incarceration in America,” Alexander told IPS. “In order to go back to pre-Drug War incarceration rates we would have to release four out of five prisoners; a million people employed by the criminal justice system would lose their jobs; private prison companies would be forced to watch their profits vanish; but it can be done,” she added.

“Many people argued that Jim Crow was so deeply rooted in our political, economic and social structure that it would never die and the same is being said today, but the reality is that when people awaken to the injustice of a system and discover their own voice it is possible to end it,” Alexander told IPS. “Just like advocates were able to bring Jim Crow to its knees in a remarkably short period of time, I believe it is possible to end the drug war and this system of mass incarceration as well.”

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 15 2011 (IPS)

Nearly ten years after seizing control of Republican foreign policy, neo- conservatives and other hawks appear to be losing it.

That is at least the tentative conclusion of a number of political analysts following Monday’s first nationally televised debate of the party’s declared Republican candidates – none of whom defended the current U.S. engagement in Libya, while several suggested it was time to pare down Washington’s global military engagements, including in Afghanistan.

“This sure isn’t the Republican Party of George Bush, [former Vice President] Dick Cheney, and [former Pentagon chief] Donald Rumsfeld,” exulted one liberal commentator, Michael Tomasky, in the ‘Daily Beast’. “The neo-cons are gone.”

“Is the Republican party turning isolationist for 2012?” asked ‘Washington Post’ columnist Jackson Diehl, a liberal interventionist who has often allied himself with neoconservatives in support of “regime change” against authoritarian governments hostile to the U.S. or Israel.

“All in all, this first Republican debate offered a striking change of tone for a party that a decade ago was dominated, in foreign policy, by the neoconservative movement, which favoured [and still does favour] aggressive American intervention abroad,” Diehl wrote on his blog.

Of particular note during the debate was a comment about Afghanistan by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who is widely acknowledged to be the current front-runner in the Republican field.

“It’s time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can, consistent with the word that comes to our generals that we can hand the country over to the [Afghan] military in a way that they’re able to defend themselves,” Romney said, adding, perhaps fatefully, “I also think we’ve learned that our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation.”

What precisely he meant by the latter sentence was left unclear, but it was sufficiently negative for one prominent neoconservative, Danielle Pletka, to tell ‘Politico’ that her inbox had been flooded Tuesday morning with emails calling Romney’s remarks a “disaster”.

“I’d thought of Romney as a mainstream Republican – supporting American strength and American leadership, but this doesn’t reflect that,” Pletka, who heads the foreign policy and defence division of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), told ‘Politico’, adding that perhaps the front-runner was “a little bit of a weathervane”.

Whatever Romney meant, Monday’s debate – and the candidates’ apparent lack of enthusiasm for the military adventures of the near-decade that followed the 9/11 attacks – marked at least an “incremental… shift”, as the ‘New York Times’ put it, in the party’s foreign-policy stance from “the aggressive use of American power around the world” to a “new debate over the costs and benefits” of deploying that power, particularly in a time of “extreme fiscal pressure”.

Since the mid-1970’s, Republicans have been divided between aggressive nationalists, like Cheney, and Israel-centred neoconservatives – who also enjoyed the support of the Christian Right – on the one hand, and isolationists and foreign-policy realists on the other.

The balance of power between the two groups has shifted more than once in the nearly four decades since. Under most of President Ronald Reagan’s tenure, for example, the nationalists and neoconservatives largely prevailed until they were overcome by the combination of the Iran-Contra scandal, Secretary of State George Shultz, and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Under President George H.W. Bush, the realists gained virtually total control.

The two factions spent much of President Bill Clinton’s eight years fighting each other. Indeed, it was during that period that the nationalists, neoconservatives, and Christian Rightists formed the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – initially to counteract what they saw as growing isolationism and anti-interventionism among Republican lawmakers in Congress.

PNAC’s founders, neoconservatives Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, backed John McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries, against George W. Bush – whose calls for a “more humble” and “modest” foreign policy conjured bad memories of his father.

Once in office, however, President George W. Bush chose leaders of both factions as his main advisers – most importantly Cheney and Rumsfeld, both nationalists surrounded by neoconservatives; and Colin Powell, a classic realist, as his secretary of state. For the first eight months, the two sides locked horns on virtually every major foreign-policy issue.

But the 9/11 attacks changed the balance of power decisively in favour of the hawks who, even as they gradually lost influence to the realists within the administration during Bush’s second term, retained the solid support of Republicans in Congress for all eight years. The fact that McCain, whose foreign-policy views were distinctly neoconservative, won the party’s presidential nomination in 2008 testified to the hawks’ enduring strength.

But the Sep 2008 financial crisis – and the economic distress it caused – laid the groundwork for the resurgence of the party’s realist-isolationist wing, according to political analysts.

“The economic duress is undermining the national greatness project of Bill Kristol and the neo-cons,” according to Steve Clemons, a national-security expert at the New America Foundation (NAF), whose washingtonnote.com blog is widely read here.

“What we are seeing evolve among Republicans is a hybrid realism with some isolationist strains that believes the costs of American intervention in the world at the rate of the last decade simply can’t be sustained,” wrote Clemons.

That evolution has gained momentum in the past few months, particularly since President Barack Obama yielded to pressure from a coalition of neoconservatives, liberal interventionists, and nationalists like McCain, to intervene in Libya, and, more importantly since the May 2 killing by U.S. Special Forces of the Al-Qaeda chief in Pakistan. The killing of Osama bin Laden, according to Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), “symbolised a closure in some ways to the wars that began after the 9/11 attacks.”

Indeed, in just the last month, 26 Republican congressmen deserted their leadership and joined a strong majority of Democrats in calling for an accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan, while last week, in an action that drew charges of “isolationism” from the neoconservative ‘Wall Street Journal’, 87 Republicans voted for a resolution that would require Obama to end military action in Libya within 15 days. And each new day seems to offer a story about yet another Republican insisting that the defence budget should not be exempt from major cuts to reduce the yawning federal deficit.

“The party was moving in this direction quite decidedly before 9/11, and then 9/11 silenced the voices of restraint and neo-isolationism,” Kupchan told IPS. “And now, they are finally coming back with a vengeance.”

“That emergence may make for some interesting alliances across partisan lines where you have left- leaning Democrats uncomfortable with the use of force lining up with Republicans interested in bringing down the deficit,” Kupchan noted.

Tomasky observed, Republican candidates might now be changing their tune not so much out of conviction as out of the desire to win elections.

Just last week, the Pew Research Center released its latest poll on U.S. foreign policy attitudes which found that “the current measure of isolationist sentiment is among the highest recorded” in more than 50 years.

While, for much of the Bush administration, only one in four Republicans said the U.S. should “mind its own business” internationally, that percentage has nearly doubled since Bush left office. The Pew survey also found a 50 percent increase in Republican support for “reducing [U.S.] military commitments overseas” – from 29 percent in 2008, to 44 percent in May, 2011. Moreover, 56 percent of Republicans said they support reducing those commitments as a way to cut the budget deficit.

Similarly, Republicans appear to have lost virtually all interest in promoting Bush’s and the neoconservatives’ “Freedom Agenda” abroad. According to the Pew poll, only one in ten Republicans said they believe democracy-promotion should be a long-term U.S. priority.

Excerpt:

Almost a decade of neglect has raised serious concerns about the readiness of Afghan security forces to take over from foreign forces by the end of 2014, a new report claims.

Afghan security forces in Kabul in 2007. Credit: David Swanson/IRIN

The report, released on May 10 by the British charity Oxfam and three other rights groups, also cited evidence of human rights abuses committed by Afghan forces, including killings and child sex abuse.

Under a plan agreed last year, NATO-led forces will begin a gradual handover of security responsibility to Afghan forces from July. Seven areas have been identified to begin stage one of that process.

But Oxfam said that until 2009 there had been a “striking lack of attention” to developing the quality of Afghanistan’s security forces.

The report said there were no effective systems for citizens to lodge a complaint against the police and the army or to receive compensation.

Foreign troops also needed to do more to prevent growing rights abuses by Afghan forces, Oxfam noted.

It said the Afghan national police and troops were responsible for at least 10 percent of the 2,777 civilian deaths in Afghanistan in 2010, though the Taliban were to blame for most of the killings.

“There is a serious risk that unless adequate accountability mechanisms are put in place, violations of human rights and humanitarian law will escalate – and Afghan civilians will pay the price,” the report said.

‘Moral, political and legal imperative’

The report said rights groups had documented abuses including “night raids carried out without adequate precautions to protect civilians, the recruitment and sexual abuse of children, mistreatment during detention, and the killing and abuse of civilians by local police”.

“Combating abusive conduct on the part of the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] and the climate of impunity in which abuse takes place … is a moral, political and legal imperative for both the international community and the Afghan government,” it added.

Under the handover plan, all foreign combat troops are due to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

There are now about 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan and 285,000 Afghan troops and police, with plans to increase Afghan forces to a total 305,000 by October 2011, according to U.S. defense department figures.

However, that tight timeframe, set against the backdrop of a growing Taliban-led insurgency, has raised questions among some analysts and non-government organisations about whether Afghan forces will be ready in time.

“It’s not too late, but an adequate response will not be possible without genuine political will at the highest levels of civilian and military leadership, both Afghan and international,” the report said.

US and NATO commanders say they are on track to reach the targets set for Afghan security forces, although they acknowledge that high drop-out rates remain a major problem.

The head of NATO’s training mission in Afghanistan said in February that the “attrition” rate in the Afghan army had hit 32 percent in 2010. Such drop-out rates for the army and police meant the NATO training mission had to take in 111,000 recruits last year to expand the force by 79,000.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, May 3 2011 (IPS)

When George W. Bush rejected a Taliban offer to have Osama bin Laden tried by a moderate group of Islamic states in mid- October 2001, he gave up the only opportunity the United States would have to end bin Laden’s terrorist career for the next nine years.

"You know, I just don't spend that much time on him," Bush said of bin Laden at a Mar. 13, 2002 press conference. Credit: White House photo

The last Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, offered at a secret meeting in Islamabad Oct. 15, 2001 to put bin Laden in the custody of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), to be tried for the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, Muttawakil told IPS in an interview in Kabul last year.

The OIC is a moderate, Saudi-based organisation representing all Islamic countries. A trial of bin Laden by judges from OIC member countries might have dealt a more serious blow to al Qaeda’s Islamic credentials than anything the United States would have done with bin Laden.

Muttawakil also dropped a condition that the United States provide evidence of bin Laden’s guilt in the 9/11 attacks, which had been raised in late September and reiterated by Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef on Oct. 5 – two days before the U.S. bombing of Taliban targets began.

There had been sketchy press reports at the time that the Taliban foreign minister had made a new offer in Islamabad to have bin Laden tried by one or more foreign countries. No Taliban or former Taliban official, however, had provided details of what had actually been proposed until Muttawakil’s revelation.

Muttawakil, who was detained at Bagram airbase for 18 months after the ouster of the Taliban regime and now lives in Kabul with the approval of the Hamid Karzai government, told IPS he had also offered a second alternative – a “special court” to try bin Laden that Afghanistan and two other Islamic governments would establish.

Muttawakil was believed by U.S. officials to have had the trust of Taliban leader Mullah Omar. A December 1998 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad said he was “considered Omar’s closest adviser on political issues” and that he had become Omar’s “point man” on foreign affairs in 1997.

The new Taliban negotiating offer came almost immediately after the U.S. began bombing Taliban targets on Oct. 7, 2001. The fear of the bombing – and what was likely to follow – evidently spurred the Taliban leadership to be more forthcoming on bin Laden.

But Bush brusquely rejected any talks on the Taliban proposal, declaring, “They must have not heard. There’s no negotiations.”

Bush rejected the Taliban offer despite the fact that U.S. intelligence had picked up reports in the previous months of deep divisions within the Taliban regime over bin Laden. It was because of those reports that Bush had authorised secret meetings by a CIA officer with a high-ranking Taliban official in late September.

Former CIA director George Tenet recalled in his memoirs that the CIA station chief in Pakistan, Robert Grenier, met with Mullah Osmani, the second ranking Taliban official, in Baluchistan province of Pakistan.

But Grenier was only authorised to offer Osmani three options: turning bin Laden over to the United States; letting the Americans find him on their own; or a third option, as Tenet described it, to “administer justice themselves, in a way that clearly took him off the table”.

Osmani rejected those three options, as well as a subsequent proposal by Grenier on Oct. 2 that he oust Mullah Omar from power and publicly announce on the radio that bin Laden would be handed over to the United States immediately.

On Oct. 3, Bush publicly ruled out negotiations with the Taliban. They had to “turn over the al Qaeda organisation living in Afghanistan and must destroy the terrorist camps,” he said, adding “There are no negotiations.”

Milton Bearden, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan during the Mujahideen war against the Soviets, observed to the Washington Post two weeks after Bush had rejected Muttawakil’s new offer that the Taliban needed a face-saving way of resolving the issue consistent with its Islamic values.

“We never heard what they were trying to say,” Bearden said.

The Bush refusal to negotiate with the Taliban was in effect a free pass for bin Laden and his lieutenants, because the Bush administration had no plan of its own for apprehending bin Laden in Afghanistan. It did not even know what level of military effort would have been required for the United States to be able to block bin Laden’s exit routes from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

The absence of any military planning to catch bin Laden was a function of Bush’s national security team, led by Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, which had firmly opposed any military operation in Afghanistan that would have had any possibility of catching bin Laden and his lieutenants.

Rumsfeld and the second-ranking official at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, had dismissed CIA warnings of an al Qaeda terrorist attack against the United States in the summer of 2001, and even after 9/11 had continued to question the CIA’s conclusion that bin Laden and al Qaeda were behind the attacks.

Cheney and Rumsfeld were determined not to allow a focus on bin Laden to interfere with their plan for a U.S. invasion of Iraq to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime.

Even after Bush decided in favour of an Afghan campaign, CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks, who was responsible for the war in Afghanistan, was not directed to have a plan for bin Laden’s capture or to block his escape to Pakistan.

When the CIA received intelligence on Nov. 12, 2001 that bin Laden had left Kandahar and was headed for a cave complex in the Tora Bora Mountains close to the Pakistani border, Franks had no assets in place to do anything about it. He asked Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, commander of Army Central Command (ARCENT), if he could provide a blocking force between al Qaeda and the Pakistani border, according to Col. David W. Lamm, who was then commander of ARCENT Kuwait.

But that was impossible, because ARCENT had neither the troops nor the strategic lift in Kuwait required to put such a force in place.

Franks then had to ask for Pakistani military help in blocking bin Laden’s exit into Pakistan, as Rumsfeld told a National Security Council meeting, according to the meeting transcript in Bob Woodward’s book “Bush at War”.

But Rumsfeld and other key advisers knew it would a charade, because bin Laden was a long-time ally of the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, and the Pakistani military was not about to help capture him.

Franks asked President Pervez Musharraf to deploy troops along the Afghan-Pakistan border near Tora Bora, and Musharraf agreed to redeploy 60,000 troops to the area from the border with India, according to U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, who was present at the meeting.

But the Pakistani president said his army would need airlift assistance from the United States to carry out the redeployment. That would have required an entire aviation brigade, including hundreds of helicopters, and hundreds of support troops to deliver that many combat troops to the border region, according to Lamm.

Those were assets the U.S. military did not have in the theatre.

Osama bin Laden had been effectively guaranteed an exit to Pakistan by a Bush policy that had rejected either diplomatic or military means to do anything about him.

In an implicit acknowledgement that the administration had not been seriously concerned with apprehending bin Laden, Bush declared in a Mar. 13, 2002 press conference that bin Laden was “a person who’s now been marginalised”, and added, “You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him…”

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

Excerpt:

Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, is dead. U.S. president Barack Obama said bin Laden, the most-wanted fugitive on the U.S. list, had been killed on Sunday in a U.S. operation in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, about 150km north of Islamabad.

“Tonight, I can report to the people of the United States and the world, the United States had carried an operation that has killed Osama Bin Laden, a terrorist responsible for killing thousands of innocent people,” Obama said in a statement.

“Today, at my direction, the United States carried out that operation… they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

“The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date against al-Qaeda.

“We must also reaffirm that United states is not and will never be at war against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader, in fact, he slaughtered many Muslims,” Obama said.

According to the New York Times, bin Laden’s body was taken to Afghanistan and later buried at sea.

U.S. celebrations

As the news of bin Laden’s death spread, crowds gathered outside the White House in Washington DC to celebrate.

Former U.S. president George Bush called his death a “momentous achievement”.

“The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done,” Bush said in a statement.

According to Al Jazeera’s Rosalind Jordan in Washington, the operation had been in the making for the last nine or 10 months.

“The fact that it happened inside Pakistan, there have been suggestions that Pakistani intelligence may have been protecting them,” she said.

Patty Culhane, another Al Jazeera correspondent, said the U.S. authorities got intelligence last September and were able to track bin Laden down through his couriers. They followed them to his compound which was reported to be worth over a million dollars.

Reporting from Pakistan, Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder said the development had caught a lot of people by surprise.

“He was considered by many as a hero, but not to the extent that people would come out on the streets. The reaction so far is not likely to be strong on the streets, perhaps a protest here or there by the religious parties,” he said.

‘Symbolic victory’

Qais Azimy, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Kabul, said Afghan officials described bin Laden’s killing as a “symbolic victory”, since he was no longer directly connected to the group’s field operations.

Mark Kimmit, a U.S. military analyst, said bin Laden’s death “was not the end of terrorism, but an end of a chapter.”

“Capturing or killing bin Laden has more iconic value. It will have symbolic value, because it has been a number of years since bin Laden has exercised day to day control over operations. We still have an al- Qaeda threat out there and that will be there for a number of years.

“This organisation (al-Qaeda) is more than bin Laden, it may be symbolised by bin Laden, but it definitely is more than bin Laden,” he said.

It is, however, a major accomplishment for Obama and his national security team. Obama’s predecessor, George Bush, had repeatedly vowed to bring to justice the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, but failed to do so before leaving office in early 2009.

He had been the subject of a search since he eluded U.S. soldiers and Afghan militia forces in a large- scale assault on the Tora Bora mountains in 2001. The trail quickly went cold after he disappeared and many intelligence officials believed he had been hiding in Pakistan.

While in hiding, bin Laden had taunted the West and advocated his views in videotapes spirited from his hideaway.

Besides September 11, Washington has also linked bin Laden to a string of attacks – including the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2000 bombing of the warship USS Cole in Yemen.

* Published under an agreement with Al-Jazeera.

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 7 2011 (IPS)

Former U.S. President George W. Bush may have mostly vanished from the headlines since January 2009, but the alleged crimes committed by his administration are not forgotten.

On Monday, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released the ‘Preliminary Bush Torture Indictment’, a document outlining the core aspects of the case against Bush for torture, and his violations of the Convention Against Torture to which the United States is a signatory.

The move by the CCR, in conjunction with over 60 other human rights and legal advocacy groups, including the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), coincides with the ninth anniversary of the day Bush decided that “enemy combatants” were no longer entitled to the fundamental protections granted to every human being by the Geneva Conventions.

On Monday morning, two torture victims in Geneva had been planning to file criminal complaints against the former U.S. president, who was scheduled to arrive in Switzerland on Feb. 12 to speak at an event there.

Since Swiss law requires the presence of a torturer on Swiss soil before the investigation can proceed, rights activists say this would have been the perfect opportunity to hold Switzerland to its obligations as a signatory to the Convention Against Torture and send a strong message to the ex-president that he is not eligible for special exemption under the law, even as a former head of state.

Ultimately, Bush canceled his travel plans.

“In November 2009, Bush admitted that he authorised the torture of detainees in U.S. custody,” Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at CCR and vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), told IPS.

“We are supposed to be a country with a strong rule of law and when we act with such blatant impunity here at home it sends a very bad message to the rest of the world,” she added.

In an interview with Matt Lauer on MSNBC in November last year, Bush claimed, “waterboarding [simulated drowning of a prisoner] is legal because the lawyer said it was legal. I’m not a lawyer.” Asked if he would make the same decision again today, Bush answered, “Oh yeah, I would.”

Along with the indictment brought by the CCR, two other cases of universal jurisdiction in Spain are already well underway, investigating the actions of the ‘Bush 6’ – constitutional lawyers in Bush’s administration, all authors of the torture manual and architects of the legal framework that Bush invoked when prosecutions were brought against him.

“Both of these issues are part of a global accountability effort which I hope will come full circle to the United States,” Gallagher told IPS. “With the Bush 6, we see this pattern of people trying to get each other off the hook and pretend like this is acceptable – but it’s not.”

While judges from Madrid to Geneva take on the previous U.S. administration, the White House is silent. Neither President Barack Obama, nor any spokesperson of his administration, has offered a word in support of its citizens who are fighting to end impunity.

Leading rights watchdogs Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called on the U.S. government to thoroughly investigate the complaints being brought against the former president, stressing the need for impunity to be addressed immediately.

“We are asking the U.S. to at least investigate the potential for prosecution,” Laura Pitter, a counter- terrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

“Based on just what Bush said publically, there is at least enough for the U.S. to investigate a potential prosecution,” she said. “It is irresponsible for the U.S. to abdicate its duty in this regard.”

Obama’s public poker face was belied by scores of leaked cables in the deluge released by the whistle-blower Wikileaks in December last year. The documents exposed that behind its silent exterior, the Obama administration was corresponding furiously with Spanish officials to keep the investigative cases off the radar.

“This is very disappointing coming from a president who used to be a constitutional law professor,” Gallagher told IPS.

Regardless of Washington’s indifference, human rights champions are forging ahead with their case.

“Bush is a torturer and deserves to be remembered as such,” said Gavin Sullivan, solicitor and counterterrorism programme manager at ECCHR.

“He bears ultimate responsibility for authorising the torture of thousands of individuals at places like Guantánamo and secret CIA ‘black sites’ around the world. As all states are obliged to prosecute such torturers, Bush has good reason to be very worried.”

And perhaps even more important than the success of the indictment, Gallagher said, are the scores of survivors of torture whose voices are not being heard, or who are still hidden away in Guantanamo who deserve, at least now, to see justice.

Excerpt:

By Peter Custers
LEIDEN, the Netherlands, Jan 14 2011 (IPS)

Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev signed a large number of contracts with India during a two-day visit to New Delhi in December. These deals were part of a series of agreements that have placed India in progressively more advantageous positions in global arms markets.

The most prominent agreements, as reported in the world press, relate to arms sales and to construction of nuclear reactors. One order focused on the supply of 300 advanced fighter planes – spread over a period of ten years; Russia is set to sell ‘fifth generation’ military aircraft to India. The order is presently valued at more than 25 billion euros.

Under another agreement, Russia will help India to construct two more nuclear reactors – on top of the two reactors it is already building in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

At first sight, these deals may not seem very sensational. Russia’s military and nuclear relations with India have a long history, dating back to the era of the former Soviet Union. Until the early nineties, roughly 80 percent of the military hardware used by India’s armed forces was of Soviet origin. Subsequently, in the post-Soviet period, relations temporarily ‘dipped’, as both sides quarrelled over India’s outstanding debt – which Russian sources have estimated at 16 billion dollars.

In the later part of the 1990s, military-commercial relations between the two powers were reconsolidated. Today, the majority of the armaments used by the Indian military still hail from Russia.

In light of this, the outcome of Medvedev’s Delhi visit may seem unexceptional. Yet, President Medvedev is not the only leader of a world power who recently prioritised visiting the Indian capital.

Medvedev’s visit was very closely preceded by visits of U.S. President Barack Obama, in November; of French President Nicolas Sarkozy in the beginning of December; and of the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

The visits of Obama and Sarkozy are especially noteworthy, if one is to assess India’s current policy regarding foreign military and nuclear purchases. The American president succeeded in finalising two defence deals. The most important of these two covers the sale of ten military transport planes – C-17 Globemaster III airlift aircraft, manufactured by the U.S.’s Boeing Corporation. The plane reportedly can carry tanks and combat troops over 2,500 nautical miles.

The French president brought home contracts for French and European corporations that are equally lucrative. According to the French daily Le Monde, these include: a contract for Thales and Dassault to update 51 Mirage fighter planes, worth 1.5 billion euros; a contract for major European missile manufacturer MBDA, to construct ground-to-air missiles; plus a contract for France’s nuclear company Areva to build two civilian nuclear reactors near the densely populated city of Bombay.

Delhi’s season of foreign military and nuclear orders even at first glance appears quite unprecedented. Yet, it would be wrong to leave it at this, and fail to notice other peculiar coincidences.

Historically, the Indian state maintained intimate relations with Russia’s precursor, the USSR. Yet the above-described military and nuclear deals – both with Russia and with Russia’s former adversaries, the U.S. and France – are best understood against the background of changed relationships between India and the United States.

In July 2005, then U.S. President George W. Bush and India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed a framework-agreement for nuclear cooperation. The deal brought to an end the West’s previous attempts to stem India’s rise as an atomic world power.

Officially, the aim of the new deal was to help India expand its production of nuclear energy, through promotion of the country’s access to uranium and to international civilian nuclear technology.

Indian newspapers in 2008 speculated that the size of business to be generated through the deal for Indian and foreign enterprises totalled 40 billion dollars.

When the nuclear deal was being prepared, it was severely criticised by the Indian government’s leftwing allies and by leading Indian peace activists. They emphasised that the controversial deal would legitimise India’s status as a nuclear weapons’ state, and that not all of India’s ‘civilian’ reactors would be put under an international inspection regime. India, Indian critics estimated, would be able to manufacture an extra one hundred nuclear bombs at least.

While public controversies in India have rightly highlighted the dubious implications of the deal for India’s status as military-nuclear world power, Indian media in the wake of the signing of the deal also pinpointed other, equally dramatic implications of the agreement.

Coincidentally, I happened to be teaching at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in September 2008. At the time, consolidation of the nuclear deal had just been cleared by the American and Indian governments. Reading leading Indian dailies, I was stunned by speculation about expansion of exports of U.S. armaments to India under the nuclear agreement.

In an article that appeared in The Times of India for instance, figures were cited for the amount of money India had spent on international arms’ orders since the 1999 Kargil conflict with Pakistan (25 billion dollars), and was ‘poised’ to spend on arms purchases over the next five to six years (another 30 billion).

Arms exports, it was argued, were the U.S.’s objective in the deal. One deal for the sale of weaponry that had already been clinched – described as India’s biggest ever with the U.S. – was one whereby U.S. giant Boeing would supply the Indian air force with eight reconnaissance aircraft.

When Obama visited Delhi in November, further defence contracts were mentioned as having meanwhile been concluded with three U.S. corporations – Boeing, Lockheed Martin and GE Aviation.

According to American sources cited in the Delhi press, U.S. companies had ‘bagged’ 40 percent of military-commercial contracts signed by India.

The deals that have been clinched with the American, French and Russian presidents who were in Delhi in November and December – read conjointly – confirm that the US-India nuclear deal had another goal. It did not just target expansion of India’s production of nuclear energy.

The deal has both legitimised India’s status as a nuclear weapons’ state on the subcontinent, and has also legitimised a new approach of the Delhi government towards handling its international military-commercial relationships.

In the Cold War era, the Indian government needed to walk a tightrope whenever it bought foreign arms. It had to weigh and balance its privileged military relationship with the Soviet Union against its desire to buy weaponry from Western arms’ suppliers.

Now, India is re-strategising its military relations with world powers. India now has a free hand in buying from or co-constructing advanced weaponry with the U.S. and thanks to the U.S.-India nuclear deal – and, one may add, Obama’s follow-up to Bush’s policymaking – India has become a full-fledged participant in the militarisation of the world economy.

Excerpt:

Wikileaks’ spectacular paper dump of U.S. diplomatic cables may not yet have produced any blockbusters, but many of the restricted or secret documents released to the world on Sunday have served to peel back the scabs of serious injuries inflicted by the administration of George W. Bush.

For example, the documents reveal that U.S. officials, including the U.S. ambassador, William R. Timken Jr., sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months in Afghanistan.

A senior U.S. diplomat tells a German official “that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S.”

Observers are characterising that as the thinnest of veiled threats.

The German victim of mistaken identity is Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. In a lawsuit brought by El-Masry, he alleged that he was kidnapped in 2004, “rendered” to Albania and then to Afghanistan, where he was falsely held by the CIA for several months – which the CIA acknowledges – and was beaten, drugged, and subjected to various other inhumane activity while in captivity.

In 2005, the American Civil Liberties Union sued former CIA Director George Tenet and three U.S.-based aviation corporations that owned or operated the aircraft used by the CIA to render El-Masri to Afghanistan. The lawsuit charged Tenet and others with violating the U.S. constitution and universal human rights laws.

In May 2006, El-Masri’s court case was dismissed based on invocation of the “state secrets privilege” by the CIA. The U.S. District Court dismissed his case because, according to the court, the simple fact of holding proceedings would jeopardise state secrets, as claimed by the CIA.

On Mar. 2, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision. On Oct. 9, 2007, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the Fourth Circuit’s decision, letting the doctrine of state secrets privilege stand.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy of the Federation of American Scientists, told IPS, “There are innocent individuals who have been swept up in U.S. government counterterrorism operations, wrongly detained, ‘rendered’ surreptitiously to foreign countries, subjected to extreme physical and mental stress, or otherwise wronged.”

“In some cases, like those of persons such as Maher Arar and Khaled el-Masri, efforts to seek legal remedies have been blocked by the government’s invocation of the state secrets privilege,” he added. “As a result, the alleged abuses committed in such cases remain unresolved, and there is no way for the affected individuals to be made whole.”

Thwarted by U.S. Courts, El-Masri took his case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The IACHR accepted a petition filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

It asks the IACHR to declare that the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme violates the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, to find the U.S. responsible for violating El-Masri’s rights under that declaration, and to recommend that the U.S. publicly acknowledge and apologise for its role in El-Masri’s forcible disappearance, detention and torture.

At that time, Steven Watt, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Programme, told IPS, “This petition gives the U.S. yet another opportunity to account for one of the most heinous practices of the George W. Bush administration.”

“Our government kidnapped an innocent man, tortured him and then, adding insult to injury, denied him his day in court through bogus claims of harm to national security. President Obama has often stated that he wants to look forward, not backward. Engagement in this commission process will be a means of putting those words into action and revealing the truth to El-Masri and the American people,” he said.

The Wikileaks dump revealed a 2007 State Department document showing that the U.S. “warned” the German government against making any moves to secure the arrests of the CIA agents responsible for the kidnapping, saying any such move would have “repercussions” to the relationship between the two nations.

German officials, according to the document, conceded that they understood the possible diplomatic consequences but also warned that given the outcry from the German media, their options were limited. The U.S. admonished them to consider the “political context” of the kidnapping of the innocent man.

Despite the warnings, the German government did issue Interpol arrest warrants for CIA officials involved in the kidnapping, though they dropped them a few months later.

The British government will reportedly pay millions in compensation to seven British nationals who were unlawfully “rendered” to U.S.-run prisons and tortured with the cooperation of British intelligence.

The British press is reporting that ministers and the security services appear to have decided that exposure of thousands of documents in open court was a risk they could not take. The documents presumably would confirm British complicity with the U.S. in the so-called “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) represents two of those slated to receive reparations in a lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan for its role in the U.S. extraordinary rendition programme.

The organisation said in a statement it was “deeply troubling that while the U.K. and many other countries are now acknowledging and addressing their official complicity in the Bush administration’s human rights abuses, here in the United States the [Barack] Obama administration continues to shield the architects of the torture program from civil liability while Bush-era officials, including former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney, boast of their crimes on national television.”

The ACLU added, “To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture program has had his day in a U.S. court. The U.S. can no longer stand silently by as other nations reckon with their own agents’ complicity in the torture programme. Reckoning with the legacy of torture would restore our standing in the world, reassert the rule of law and strengthen our democracy.”

“If other democracies can compensate survivors and hold officials accountable for their endorsement of torture, surely we can do the same,” the group said.

Last week, during television interviews to promote his new memoir, “Decision Points”, former U.S. president George W. Bush claimed that techniques such as waterboarding were legal and had protected the U.K. from terrorist attacks.

British Prime Minister David Cameron disagreed with Bush. In fact, it was Cameron’s agreement that lawyers for the former prisoners should begin negotiations with the government that led to the settlement expected to be announced imminently.

The detainees understood to be in line for settlements include Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Moazzam Begg and Martin Mubanga. Mohamed and Al Rawi, plaintiffs in the Jeppesen case, claim they were kidnapped, forcibly rendered to U.S.- run prisons overseas, and tortured.

The Obama administration invoked the so-called state secrets privilege to have the Jeppesen case thrown out, and a federal appeals court dismissed the case in September. The ACLU has asked the Supreme Court to review that decision.

Britain is one of several nations that have taken responsibility for their role in the illegal torture programme run by the Bush administration by initiating investigations or public inquiries.

A forthcoming British inquiry will investigate the role U.K. officials played in the programme. It was Cameron’s agreement that the government should negotiate with the former prisoners that opened the way for a broad inquiry into what British intelligence officials knew about the U.S. rendition and torture programmes, and what they did about it. The inquiry is scheduled to report by the end 2011.

The British high court had ruled that confidential documents would have to be released during court hearings. This would take inordinate amounts of time and the documents would likely be highly embarrassing to U.K. officials.

When Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed sued the British government last year for being complicit in his imprisonment and torture, it caused a major furor in the U.K. foreign office establishment.

The former foreign secretary, David Miliband, fought in the high court to have the suit dismissed, on grounds that U.S. officials had threatened to stop exchanging intelligence with their British allies if the case went ahead. The high court ruled in favour of Mohamed.

The ruling said that Mohamed was subjected to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” by U.S. authorities and ordered the release of a previously secret seven-paragraph summary of CIA documents on his treatment.

Paying reparations to Mohamed will inevitably further diminish Miliband’s reputation.

It appears that the payment to former Guantanamo prisoners would represent the first time a group of former prisoners has successfully sought financial restitution.

The only other known instance of a prisoner receiving a money award is the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen. He was stopped by U.S. authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York while en route from North Africa to his home in Canada, shipped off first to Jordan, and finally to Syria, where he was imprisoned, held incommunicado without charge, and tortured for almost a year. The Syrian authorities then released him without charge.

The U.S. had acted on information supplied by the Canadian Government. After a two-year investigation of the incident, Canada made a formal apology to Arar and awarded him close to $10 million.

However, he remains on a U.S. “no fly” list and cannot enter the United States.

After a three-year investigation, President Barack Obama’s mantra – “look forward and not backwards” – appears to have trumped the rule of law as a special prosecutor declined to pursue criminal charges against the Central Intelligence Agency operatives involved in the destruction of video recordings of interrogations of “war on terror” suspects.

The human rights community and many legal scholars from both ends of the political spectrum are up in arms about the decision. And they were further angered by the remarks made by former president George W. Bush during recent television and radio interviews promoting his new memoir, “Decision Points”.

For example, Bush admitted to Matt Lauer of NBC’s “Today” programme that he authorised the use of waterboarding on two CIA prisoners. He said further that the technique was legal and that he would make the same decision again.

Lauer then asked him, “Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?”

Bush responded: “Because the lawyer said it was legal. He said it did not fall within the anti-torture act. I’m not a lawyer. But you gotta trust the judgment of the people around you, and I do.”

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, spoke to IPS with a hint of despair. “The failure of DOJ [the Justice Department] to bring criminal charges against the CIA officials who destroyed the tapes of the waterboarding of detainees is another awful decision insuring that the torture conspirators including President Bush will not be held accountable for their crimes – at least not by the Obama administration,” he said.

“One hope remains,” Ratner added. “International justice against the torture conspirators that is currently being pursued in the Spanish courts by the Center for Constitutional Rights and others. If I were former President Bush, my next vacation would not be a visit to the Prado.”

Chris Anders, a senior attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said, “I find Bush’s remarks about waterboarding [in the Lauer interview] more important than the narrow issue of the destroyed CIA tapes. That’s because he confessed to war crimes.”

“Everything in our legal history makes waterboarding a crime,” Anders said. “Bush said he authorised it. What he should know about the rule of law is that no one is above it. Yet Bush doesn’t seem in the least concerned about the consequences of what he is confessing to.”

Criticism of both the special prosecutor’s decision and of Bush’s remarks appeared to come from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

A well-known conservative lawyer, Bruce Fein, who was a senior attorney in the Department of Justice under President Ronald Reagan, told IPS, “Obama decided against prosecution for the same reason he has desisted from prosecuting former President Bush and former VP Cheney despite confessing to authorising waterboarding: political inconvenience or popular opinion.”

Professor Jordan J. Paust of the Law Center at the University of Houston, author of “Beyond the Law The Bush Administration’s Unlawful Responses in the ‘War’ on Terror,” charges that Bush’s remarks were “in apparent violation of a court order and does not bode well for the rule of law or the need to end impunity for international crimes.”

“Clearly, former President Bush has admitted that he had a ‘programme’ of secret detention, which is forced disappearance of persons, a war crime, and a crime against humanity over which there is universal jurisdiction and a universal responsibility to either initiate prosecution or to extradite,” he said.

Paust noted that 29 U.S. legal cases and seven U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights criticising the records of other nations affirm that waterboarding is “torture”, or at very least “cruel” and “inhumane”.

Jonathan Hafetz, a professor at Seton Hall University law school, believes that “The U.S. government’s failure to hold accountable those responsible for the torture and other gross human rights constitutes one of the darkest legacies of our era.”

“The problem with President Obama’s approach is that it is not enough only to ‘look forward and not backward’. Non- action can itself serve as tacit approval for past abuses – or at least that is how it can be interpreted,” he told IPS.

“The recent comments by Mr. Bush about his knowledge and approval of waterboarding, makes the need for accountability more, not less, important,” he said.

Chip Pitts, a Lecturer in Law at Stanford University Law School, is focused on what he calls the “complicity” between the Bush and Obama administrations.

“The crisis of accountability in America is starkly highlighted by the former president’s public confession of recourse to torture and war crimes,” he told IPS. “But that should not detract attention from the complicity of the current administration, which has resorted to secrecy and backroom deals that blatantly ignore laws – like the Convention Against Torture, in this case – and the administration’s duty to ‘faithfully execute the laws’.”

Robert S. Bennett, attorney for the former C.I.A. agent who ordered the tapes destroyed, said in an interview with the New York Times that the Justice Department “did the right thing”.

Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, said in a statement that the C.I.A. was “pleased with the decision” not to bring charges against agency officers involved in destroying the tapes, and that the agency would continue to cooperate with other aspects of the Justice Department’s investigation.

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 3 2010 (IPS)

While all parties maintained a spirit of cordiality and mutual understanding, no new promises emerged from this week’s talks between the leaders of Israel and the Palestine Authority (PA) that offered tangible hope for a major breakthrough in resolving the more than 60-year-old conflict.

Concretely, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to meet again in two weeks – and roughly every two weeks thereafter – as part of an effort to work out what U.S. Special Envoy George Mitchell described as a “framework agreement” that would lay the groundwork for a final peace treaty to be negotiated within a year.

They will be joined at the next meeting not only by Mitchell himself, but also by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton whose prominent role in hosting Thursday’s talks at the State Department appeared designed to highlight the degree to which the administration of President Barack Obama is taking ownership of the process.

Obama, who met one-on-one with Netanyahu and Abbas Wednesday, underlined the importance of progress toward a final settlement during a White House dinner that evening for the two leaders; as well as for visiting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, and the Quartet’s Special Envoy, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“…[W]e know that the status quo is unsustainable – for Israelis, for Palestinians, for the region and for the world,” he said. “It is in the national interests of all involved, including the United States, that this conflict be brought to a peaceful conclusion.”

Obama has made similar statements in the past, and perhaps the most important question left hanging as his guests flew homeward was how seriously he meant those words; specifically, how hard he is prepared to push Israel – by far the strongest of the two parties – to make what Netanyahu called a “historic compromise” for peace.

Thus far, the evidence is mixed at best.

While U.S. officials, before this week’s meeting, declared that Washington is prepared to offer “bridging proposals” on key issues – such as East Jerusalem’s status and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to land inside the Green Line – on which the two parties are certain to reach impasse, they have merely hinted under the cloak of anonymity that the administration might go further by tabling a comprehensive peace plan, presumably backed by the Quartet and interested Arab states.

Given the extreme weakness and division within the Palestinian camp compared to the relative strength of Netanyahu and his right-wing government, many experts here believe that putting forward such a plan – and imposing real costs on any party that does not accept it – is likely the only way to resolve the conflict.

But there is little indication that the administration is prepared to go that far.

While Clinton pledged Thursday that Washington will remain an “active and sustained partner” in the talks, she also stressed that “…[W]e cannot and we will not impose a solution. Only you can make the decisions necessary to reach an agreement and secure a peaceful future for the Israeli and Palestinian people.”

Moreover, few can forget the administration’s backing down on its demands early in the year that Israel implement a total freeze on Jewish settlement expansion on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.

Under pressure from Israel’s allies in Congress, including many Democratic lawmakers, the administration settled instead for a “voluntary” ten-month moratorium on settlement construction confined only to the West Bank. But, according to independent monitors, the moratorium has not resulted in any appreciable slowdown in settlement activity in the area.

The moratorium is due to expire Sep. 26, and Netanyahu made clear this week that he does not intend to renew it. Abbas, on the other hand, has promised to pull out of the new talks if the moratorium is not renewed.

As a result, U.S. officials are currently focused on working out a compromise with Netanyahu’s team that would give Abbas sufficient political cover to keep him at the table.

Such a compromise, according to U.S. officials, may result in a de facto moratorium that would nonetheless permit limited construction in the large settlement blocs along the Green Line that are likely to be annexed by Israel in any final settlement, in exchange for continued “restraint” on Jewish expansion in East Jerusalem, the closure of more Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank and the transfer of more control to Palestinian security forces there.

While that compromise may be sufficient to prevent a premature derailment of the talks, it will also likely be seen – particularly by Palestinians and Arab states – as yet another example of the administration’s reluctance to challenge Netanyahu even if, by doing so, it would enhance its badly tarnished credibility in the region.

Indeed, the fact that only the leaders of Egypt and Jordan – apart from Iraq, the two biggest recipients of U.S. aid in the Arab world – showed up to bless this week’s launch showed the degree to which Obama’s credibility in the region has declined over the past year.

Commentators also noted that Abbas’s decision to participate was opposed by virtually every active Palestinian faction except his own, Fatah, whose leadership was reported to be divided on the issue.

Still, some analysts insisted that all of the scepticism surrounding the talks – and Obama’s lack of commitment – could yet prove unfounded.

In contrast to his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who pushed hard for a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement only in their last years in office, they point out, Obama has worked at it from his second day in office when he named Mitchell as special envoy.

Also unlike Clinton and Bush, he has repeatedly stressed, as he did again this week, that such a settlement served vital U.S. national-security interests, a point helpfully echoed by top Pentagon commanders who have publicly expressed concern that failure to advance a credible peace process makes their work in the region more difficult.

And, while Obama backed off from a confrontation with Netanyahu over settlements, that decision may have resulted more from political pressure from Democratic lawmakers concerned that hostility between the two men could hurt their ability to raise campaign funds from Jewish donors, in particular.

In this view, the test of Obama’s seriousness in pushing the current process forward – and possibly tabling a U.S. plan – will come only after the mid-term elections in November.

Moreover, the fact that he has set a one-year deadline, whose expiration will coincide with the launch of his presumed re-election campaign, “voluntarily and consciously rais[es] the bar of expectations,” according to Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who heads a Middle East Project at the New America Foundation here.

Finally, a growing number of analysts – a few of them from Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party – believe this may be the last chance to achieve a two- state solution to the conflict, a point made explicitly by Obama Wednesday.

That – and Israel’s growing international isolation in the wake of the 2008-9 Gaza War and the ill-fated May 31 flotilla raid – may yet strengthen Obama’s hand in dealing with an Israeli leader as the process plays out, according to Levy.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Aug 31 2010 (IPS)

Military auditors failed to complete an audit of the business systems of an Ohio- based company – Mission Essential Personnel – even though it had billed for one billion dollars worth of work largely in Afghanistan over the last four years.

In September 2007 the U.S. Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) awarded Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) a five-year-contract worth up to 414 million dollars to provide 1,691 translators in Afghanistan. MEP was a start-up company created by three men, including Chad Monnin, a U.S. Army Special Forces reservist who was injured in a parachute accident. Procurement rules give preference to companies owned by injured veterans, even if they have no prior experience.

When the Obama administration decided to expand the war in Afghanistan last year, MEP quickly hit the ceiling of what it could bill. On May 10, INSCOM gave MEP a 679 million dollar extension without bothering to put it up for competitive bid. MEP will also get a share of the Intelligence Support Services Omnibus III contract, a five-year contract, with a ceiling of 492 million dollars, announced on Aug. 10, 2010.

The only two other contractors that have held multi-billion dollar contracts to supply translators to soldiers and diplomats in the Global War on Terror – L- 3/Titan and Global Linguist Services – have both been investigated for alleged overcharging, suggesting that this type of work falls in the high risk category of government spending.

Yet the Defence Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) failed to conduct a full business systems audit for MEP.

Concerned about DCAA’s failure, Christopher Shays, one of the co-chairs of the Commission on Wartime Contracting told MEP CEO Chris Taylor: “You don’t have to compete for it, and you, whatever your costs are, you get something plus, and you haven’t had any audits.” Shays assured MEP that he was not suggesting that the company had done anything wrong, re-iterating that the commission considered MEP a “a great American success story.”

“We currently have DCAA auditors on our property in Columbus, Ohio, working through any number of audit issues. But we welcome it,” Taylor told the commission. “We are current on our 2008 and 2009 incurred-cost submissions,” he added, referring to the invoices that the company sends INSCOM for payment.

DCAA Director Patrick Fitzgerald says that the problem was that the contract grew quicker than expected. “Are we behind the curve? Yes. We should have been in there quicker,” he told commissioners. “Our experience has shown that when contractors grow that fast, the procedures, processes, and systems have trouble keeping up with that growth.”

When asked to respond to the charges levelled at DCAA at the hearing, a Pentagon spokesperson emailed the following statement: “We agreed with the commission that additional resources were required at MEP and have worked to ensure that additional DCAA assets are directed to MEP.” The spokesperson estimated that it will complete “much of the critical audit work needed to assess MEP’s business systems within the next six months.”

DCAA History

DCAA has oversight over half a trillion dollars of taxpayer money every year. It is supposed to constitute the “first line of defence” against corruption when the Pentagon contracts anything from bunker-buster-bombs from Lockheed Martin, to rockets from Boeing, or when it subcontracts military support operations as it did when it paid Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, to hire Sri Lankans to clean toilets in Iraq.

Founded in 1965 to provide the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, and Ordnance Department with uniform oversight of contractors, DCAA was first headquartered in the now closed Alexandria, Virginia Cameron Station, a cold windowless building fitted with rows of steel gray desks.

DCAA expanded quickly. By 1966, it had 3,662 staffers around the country with oversight over 21.5 billion dollars. As the Vietnam War ramped up, the DCAA’s “Flying Squad” would fly Huey helicopters to forward bases in the jungle to check up on work done by contractors.

By the end of the 1980s DCAA had more than 6,000 staff and today, with headquarters in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, it has some 300 offices and sub-offices around the world.

In the last 45 years, DCAA’s oversight of contract dollars has expanded more than four-fold (adjusted for inflation) to 501 billion dollars in proposed or claimed contractor costs that required 30,352 audits in 2008.

Not surprisingly the agency staff has struggled to keep up with demand, and as far back as the 1980s, it had a six to seven year backlog to complete audits. This lag had a major impact on payments to military contractors, which were typically paid just 85 percent of costs on delivery of services, with the remaining 15 percent paid out several years later – only if the auditors were satisfied.

Mad Metrics Meltdown

DCAA found an opportunity to change this record of inefficiency in 1993 when Vice-President Al Gore was appointed to head up a commission to “re- invent government” to “work better, cost less, and get results Americans care about.” Under the Gore mandate, DCAA Director Bill Reed, ordered sweeping changes in how the agency conducted audits.

The first step was telling auditors to catch up as soon as possible. A then senior DCAA auditor told IPS how that order was implemented: “We basically closed out outstanding audits of procurement dollars by looking the other way.”

Next, Reed instructed his staff to focus on performance “metrics.”

“To put it bluntly; cheaper, faster, better,” former DCAA director April Stephenson would recall later. Multiple layers of supervision and management were created to ensure that staff completed even the most complex of audits in less than 30 days. But tracking time under the new “Defense Management Information System” often took longer than the actual sped-up audit, defeating the whole purpose of making the system work better.

“Mad Metrics Meltdown!” wrote a former senior auditor at DCAA to the Government Executive magazine website comment section. “The application of engineering and factory floor measurements to professional activity is a lazy, risk-aversive, anti-intellectual crutch of poor management.”

Firing the Director

In September 2008, DCAA Director April Stephenson announced what appeared to be radical changes: The agency would scrap 18 of the 19 metrics and shut down Webmetrics, a staff performance management software program.

A new set of 11 new “standards” which included eight measurable “metrics” was announced. Stephenson appointed Karen K. Cash, DCAA’s assistant director for operations, to follow up on staff complaints which had been invited via an anonymous website.

Last November, the Pentagon decided that Stephenson wasn’t the right person to overhaul the agency. She was re-assigned and Patrick Fitzgerald, the former director of the U.S. Army Audit Agency, took over.

DCAA Slows Down

During fiscal 2008, the average time to complete a “contractor pricing review” was 28 days. Today the same job takes 72 days. “Some of our audits take longer because we are doing a more comprehensive job,” Fitzgerald told Government Executive magazine in July. “If there are other factors that are causing us to take longer, we need to do a deep dive on those and try to figure out how mitigate or to alleviate them.”

As a result DCAA says it will no longer be able to keep up with the 2008 metrics – 30,000 audits covering more than 500 billion dollars in proposed or claimed contractor costs. To catch up on the missed audits, like the one for MEP, Fitzgerald says that DCAA has hired 500 new auditors and will add 1,000 more in the next four years.

“We are also working to prioritize audit workload and make sure that high- risk audits are identified and completed in a timely manner,” a Pentagon spokesperson told IPS, noting that the agency was currently working to create a new strategic plan, and will re-assess the new performance measures introduced in 2008.

*This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch – www.corpwatch.org

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 30 2010 (IPS)

President Barack Obama will try this week to underline his progress in extricating the United States from the morass his predecessor’s “global war on terror” in the Greater Middle East.

Tuesday evening’s prime-time television address marking the withdrawal of all U.S. “combat” troops from Iraq, as well as the following day’s formal launch here of direct talks between Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, will be hailed by the administration as key advances in restoring some stability to the world’s most volatile region.

But, as Obama himself will admit, the country remains deeply mired in Middle East conflicts – from the eastern Mediterranean to flood-ravaged Pakistan. The long-sought light at the end of the tunnel remains at most a very distant glimmer.

Indeed, the fact that Washington remains bogged down in Middle East and South Asia quagmires is becoming increasingly frustrating to many in the administration and within the larger foreign-policy establishment.

They believe Washington needs to focus much more on China, with which relations have in recent months become distinctly more fractious over a number of issues – ranging from its chronic bilateral trade surplus, to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan to its more assertive territorial claims and ambitions in nearby waters.

As ‘Financial Times’ writer Geoff Dyer wrote recently, “Over the last decade or so, China has stolen a march on the U.S. in Asia. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be a strategic gift for Beijing.”

The fact that Washington has reduced its troop deployment in Iraq from a high of 165,000 a couple of years ago to the 50,000 who remain today will not only permit Obama to claim compliance with a key campaign promise, but, more importantly, to also relieve pressure on what virtually all analysts agree is a military force that was badly “overstretched” during the “war on terror.”

If all goes according to plan, the remaining troops will be withdrawn over the next 17 months, although most experts believe Baghdad, depending on the composition of the government and the its army’s effectiveness and confidence, will likely request some continued U.S. military presence – in a training capacity at least – for some years after.

That assumes, however, that all will go according to plan. The fact that the Iraqis have so far been unable to put together a government more than five months after national elections – the focus of a sudden trip by Vice President Joseph Biden to Baghdad Monday – has stoked fears that the “national reconciliation” that was supposed to be achieved by Gen. David Petraeus’ vaunted “Surge” tactics in 2007 and 2008 has in fact not taken place, and that both ethnic and sectarian tensions that brought the country to the bring of all-out civil war remain to be resolved.

U.S. military officials, who note that the remaining troops will still be prepared to engage in combat operations if requested by the Iraqis, are themselves warning that violence is likely to increase. In just the last week al Qaeda in Mesopotamia pulled off more than a dozen co-ordinated attacks across the country, killing more than 50 people.

The group also now appears to have launched an intensive recruitment drive among increasingly disaffected Sunni “Awakening” groups that played a key role in ensuring the yet-to-be-fully-tested “success” of Petraeus’ Surge, according to a recent account in Britain’s ‘Guardian’ newspaper.

“Extensive research on intercommunal civil wars – wars like Iraq’s … – finds a dangerous propensity toward recidivism,” warned Kenneth Pollack, an expert and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst who supported the 2003 invasion in the ‘Washington Post’ last week. “…[T]he fear, anger, greed and desire for revenge that helped propel Iraq into civil war in the first place remain just beneath the surface.”

If those forces gain momentum, and the Iraqi security forces fail to restrain them, Obama, of course, will be confronted with very difficult – and politically costly – options: to delay the withdrawal and risk becoming mired in renewed civil conflict; or to continue disengagement and risk “losing” Iraq, as Republicans will almost surely charge.

With respect to the other major Middle East-related event this week – the commencement of direct talks between Netanyahu and Abbas aimed at reaching agreement within one year – scepticism about its prospects is running significantly higher than hope.

Obama, backed by both Biden and Petraeus among others in administration and the military, has long believed that any tangible progress in making peace between Israel and the Palestinians will pay dividends in overcoming the immense damage inflicted by Bush’s war on terror on Washington’s overall strategic position – especially vis-à-vis Iran and its regional allies – throughout the Arab world and beyond.

Even his predecessor, George W. Bush, appeared to embrace that conclusion in the last year of his term when he launched his Annapolis conference that brought Abbas together with then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and a host of Arab and European leaders who set as a deadline for agreement on a two- state solution as the end of Bush’s term.

The initiative, however, was derailed as a result of the political weakness of both Abbas and Olmert, the three-week Gaza War, and the efforts of neo- conservative spoilers in the White House to sabotage the talks.

While neo-conservatives have been expelled from the executive branch, most analysts believe the situation for progress today is no more ripe for major progress than two years ago.

Abbas remains as weak as ever; Netanyahu, whose politics and government are significantly more rightwing than Olmert’s, has ruled out a number of solutions – such as dividing Jerusalem – that are seen as minimal conditions for the agreement of Palestinians and key Arab states which, other than major U.S. aid recipients Egypt and Jordan, are avoiding this week’s summit.

Finally, the administration seems, at least until after the mid-term elections in November, unwilling to aggressively press its own “bridging proposals,” let alone a comprehensive peace plan.

The most realistic hope is that Netanyahu will quietly agree to maintain a ten- month moratorium on new settlement construction on the West Bank beyond its 26 Sep. expiration date and restrain new building in East Jerusalem in order to keep the talks alive.

But that alone falls far short of the kind of breakthrough needed to substantially improve Washington’s strategic position in the region as desired by the administration and the Pentagon. Indeed, some commentators are dismissing the new round of talks as “déjà vu.”

Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan – where Washington will soon have a record 100,000 troops deployed – does not appear to have improved, as the Taliban spreads its forces into regions previously considered secure, and new reports of corruption by the government of President Hamid Karzai surface virtually daily.

And the massive flooding in nuclear-armed Pakistan, which has displaced more than 20 million people and is believed to have caused at least seven billion dollars in damages to infrastructure and agriculture – more than Washington had planned to provide the country in aid over the next five years – has dashed whatever U.S. hopes remained that its army will focus on counter-insurgency operations along the Afghan border, particularly in North Waziristan.

If anything, according to reports from the region, the Taliban on both sides of the frontier are likely to emerge stronger from Pakistan’s worst-ever natural disaster.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jul 22 2010 (IPS)

Thursday’s announcement in Jakarta that Washington will resume training for the Indonesian military’s controversial Special Forces unit (Kopassus) has been denounced by human rights groups and two key lawmakers here.

The announcement – which lifts a ban on co-operation with Kopassus dating back to 1999 – was made by visiting Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, who has continued efforts launched by the administration of President George W. Bush to restore full bilateral military ties between the two nations.

“I was pleased to be able to tell the president that as a result of Indonesian military reforms over the past decade, the ongoing professionalisation of the TNI [the Indonesian Armed Forces], and recent actions by the Ministry of Defence to address human rights issues, the United States will begin a gradual, limited programme of security co-operation activities with the Indonesian Army Special Forces,” Gates told reporters after meeting with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

“I noted to the president that these initial steps will take place within the limits of U.S. law and do not signal any lessening of the importance we place on human rights and accountability,” he went on. “What’s more, our ability to expand upon these initial steps will depend upon continued implementation of reforms within Kopassus and TNI as a whole.”

That caveat, however, did not appease rights groups that have long regarded Kopassus, including some of their highest-ranking officers, as responsible for some of the most notorious mass killings, assassinations, disappearances, and other serious abuses committed in Southeast Asia’s most populous nation – notably in the former East Timor, Papua, and Aceh, over the past 20 years.

“Amnesty International is disappointed by the decision that U.S. forces will train the Kopassus unit,” said T. Kumar, the director for international advocacy of the U.S. branch of Amnesty International (AIUSA). “It sends the wrong message in a country where mass and severe human rights violations have taken place in an atmosphere of impunity.”

“The [Barack] Obama administration has just failed a key test,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia director at New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW). “This is not the way to encourage reform with a military that has yet to demonstrate a genuine commitment to accountability for serious human rights abuses.”

“This decision rewards Kopassus for its intransigence over abuses and effectively betrays those in Indonesia who have fought for decades for accountability and justice,” she noted, adding that Jakarta has not only failed to remove the very few Kopassus soldiers who have been convicted of serious rights violations from the military, but has also recently promoted officers linked by credible evidence to past abuses to top Kopassus positions.

The announcement was also denounced as “premature” by the Sen. Russell Feingold, the former chair of the Senate’s Asia subcommittee and as “deeply regret[able]” by Sen. Patrick Leahy, who wrote the law banning U.S. aid and training for any foreign military unit credibly suspected of major abuses.

“Although the Indonesian Ministry of Defense has taken some positive steps, numerous problems remain, including allegations of recent abuses,” Feingold said in a statement. “Further actions are needed before we can be reasonably satisfied that Kopassus, and the Indonesian armed forces more broadly, have become a reformed institution accountable to international human rights standards and the rule of law.”

“The ‘gradual, limited program of security cooperation activities’ described by Secretary Gates should certainly not be seen as wiping the slate clean for Kopassus – that is something that only a full accounting of the past can do,” Feingold added.

Thursday’s announcement constitutes the latest development in what has been a gradual rapprochement between the Pentagon and the TNI.

Washington first began heavily supporting Indonesia’s military in the late 1950’s. Between then and the period that followed the fall of President Soeharto in 1998, the army was seen, especially by the Pentagon, as the one effective – if corrupt and often brutal – national institution in an archipelago that spreads across thousands of kilometres and straddles key sea lanes and shipping “chokepoints”.

After a massacre by Indonesian troops of more than 100 peaceful demonstrators in East Timor in 1991, Congress cut off Indonesia’s access for certain kinds of U.S. military training and “lethal” equipment.

When the TNI, Kopassus, and their local auxiliaries rampaged through East Timor after its electorate voted to secede from Indonesia in 1999, President Bill Clinton severed all remaining ties with the TNI, but then quietly restored contacts the following year. Some 1,400 civilians died in that mayhem for which no soldier has ever been tried and convicted.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, the Bush administration tried to circumvent Congressionally imposed restrictions by providing some assistance, although not to Kopassus, through a counter- terrorism programme.

By highlighting the operations of al Qaeda operatives – responsible for a 2002 bombing in Bali that killed nearly 200 people – in Indonesia, the administration made slow but steady progress in restoring ties over the following years, including lifting the arms embargo.

Amid growing concern about China’s influence and increasing naval strength in the region, however, the Pentagon has pushed hard to restore full military ties with Jakarta, including with Kopassus. But, it has reportedly received some resistance from Indonesia specialists in the State Department and the National Security Council.

The latter, like the rights groups, argued that Kopassus continued to commit serious abuses, especially in Papua, and remained largely unaccountable to civilian authority.

In response to U.S. demands over the last few months, Jakarta shifted at least three Kopassus officers previously convicted by military courts of abuses to other positions within the TNI. In addition, the defence minister told an English-language newspaper that soldiers found by a military tribunal to have committed genocide or crimes against humanity would be tried by a civilian court.

“The U.S. government appears to have considered these steps satisfactory to ensure future accountability…,” HRW complained Thursday, adding that the decision to start training Kopassus now risks undermining the limited progress towards professionalism that the Indonesian military has made thus far.”

Indeed, in April this year, Col. Nugroho Widyo Utomo, who in 1998 reportedly played a key role in creating and arming the militias that later carried out much of the violence in East Timor the following year, was appointed deputy commander of Kopassus.

Pentagon officials told reporters here that initial contacts with Kopassus will be quite limited and that, in any event, the State Department will vet any members of the force before they can receive training.

Leahy said he expected Gates to follow through on his pledge to condition Washington’s co-operation with Kopassus on the implementation of real reforms, including prosecuting “past and future crimes” committed by its members. “I deeply regret that before starting down the road of re- engagement, our country did not obtain and Kopassus did not accept the necessary reforms we have long sought. But a conditional toe in the water is wiser at this stage than diving in.”

“The United States and Indonesia share important interests, and I have sought a way forward that is consistent with our interests and our values. I hope that will become possible,” Leahy said.

But rights activists remain doubtful. “For years, the U.S. provided military training and other assistance to Kopassus, and when the U.S. was most involved, Kopassus crimes were at their worst,” said John Miller, national co- ordinator of the East Timor Action Network (ETAN). “While this assistance improved the Indonesian military’s deadly skills, it did nothing to improve its behaviour.”

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

Excerpt:

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) briefed members of Congress from both political parties numerous times about the agency’s interrogation and detention programmes, several prominent human rights groups said Monday.

The groups – Amnesty International USA, the Centre for Constitutional Rights and the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law – filed a lawsuit in 2007 based on their requests for information about the programme under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The FOIA requests, dating back to 2004, sought records about rendition, secret detention, and “enhanced” interrogation.

The rights groups announced receipt of several new documents in response to their FOIA litigation.

Among other new information, the documents show that while Vice President Dick Cheney’s role in authorising waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques has been public, a newly obtained Feb. 4, 2003, CIA memo documents the role of Counsel for the Office of the Vice President (OVP) in analysing and approving the CIA techniques.

David Addington was counsel to the vice president until he succeeded Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted of perjury in the “outing” of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Libby’s prison sentence was commuted by then President George W. Bush.

The rights groups said that, according to CIA meeting records and the Feb. 4, 2003 memo, it seems that in one of his first acts as chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas “discontinued efforts by previous chair,” Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida, to implement greater oversight of these programmes, “thus abdicating the role of Congress in overseeing the CIA rendition, secret detention, and torture programmes.”

They said there are “significant questions about how clear the CIA was with Congress” – including in then-CIA Director Michael Hayden’s previously classified briefing on Apr. 12, 2007 to the Senate Intelligence Committee – about the timing, nature and results of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, particularly prior to the Aug. 1, 2002 memo prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

It is known that Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding 83 times in 2002. OLC lawyers at the time, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, were the principal drafters of that memo, which has come to be known as “the torture memo”.

Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defence Committee and former chair of Amnesty International USA, told IPS, “In order to finally achieve the transparency and accountability that is so indispensable to learning lessons and avoiding calamitous policy failures like the prior administration’s recourse to torture, the need is clearer than ever for a broad and impartial criminal investigation of all the facts surrounding the torture programme.”

He added, “No lawyer or other official, high or low, should be immune from the investigation and prosecution required by our national interest, domestic law, and the international treaty obligations the country has undertaken under the Convention Against Torture.”

Gitanjali Gutierrez, an attorney at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, said, “Members of Congress must come clean about whether they encouraged or objected to torture during these many secret meetings with CIA officials and we need a complete accounting of Cheney’s counsel, David Addington’s, role in the creation of the torture programme.”

“These new documents show that the CIA may have lied to Congress about the role of interrogation techniques in detainee deaths and key members of Congress abdicated their oversight role. This new information points even more strongly to the need for a full criminal investigation of the torture programme, up the entire chain of command,” Gutierrez said.

In a related development, after years of stonewalling, an official Polish government agency has admitted that airspace and landing facilities in that country were used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to detain, house and transport terrorism suspects.

It was the first time Polish authorities have admitted that their country houses one of the CIA’s so-called “black sites” – part of the agency’s network of secret prisons.

The CIA kidnapped suspected al Qaeda members and transported them to the black site prisons, where they were subjected to so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques as part of the C.I.A.’s programme of “extraordinary rendition.”

Prosecutors in Poland are now investigating the country’s participation in the programme.

The admission from the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency (PANSA) came in response to charges by two rights groups, the Open Society Justice Initiative and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.

PANSA confirmed that it provided the flight logs showing six flights in 2003 by two aircraft. Five of the flights reportedly originated in Kabul and one in Rabat, Morocco. They landed about 100 miles north of Warsaw, at a small airport in a town called Szymany.

It is widely known that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-styled mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was interrogated there in 2003, but neither PANSA nor the CIA would confirm this.

Approximately 100 prisoners were detained in the black site prisons between the program’s inception in 2002 and the transfer of the remaining 14 prisoners to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba in 2006.

Maciej Rodak, vice president of PANSA confirmed to The New York Times that the agency had sent the records to the human-rights groups. He said the agency confirmed information on flight origins, planned destinations and call signs but could not provide passenger lists, which the groups also requested.

“The thing that is quite shocking is that the European investigations requested these specific flight records some four years ago,” said Darian Pavli, an attorney with the Open Society Justice Initiative, a nonprofit human-rights group in New York. “The Poles all these years said they could not locate them, the flights didn’t exist.”

By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas, Dec 11 2009 (IPS)

With a military health care system over-stretched by two ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, more soldiers are deciding to go absent without leave (AWOL) in order to find treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Eric Jasinski enlisted in the military in 2005, and deployed to Iraq in October 2006 as an intelligence analyst with the U.S. Army. He collected intelligence in order to put together strike packets – where air strikes would take place.

Upon his return to the U.S. after his tour, Jasinski was suffering from severe PTSD from what he did and saw in Iraq, remorse and guilt for the work he did that he knows contributed to the loss of life in Iraq.

“What I saw and what I did in Iraq caused my PTSD,” Jasinski, 23-years-old, told IPS during a phone interview, “Also, I went through a divorce – she left right before I deployed – and my grandmother passed away when I was over there, so it was all super rough on me.”

In addition, he lost a friend in Iraq, and another of his friends lost his leg due to a roadside bomb attack.

Upon returning home in December 2007, Jasinski tried to get treatment via the military. He was self-medicating by drinking heavily, and an over- burdened military mental health counsellor sent him to see a civilian doctor, who diagnosed him with severe PTSD.

“I went to get help, but I had an 8 hour wait to see one of five doctors. But after several attempts, finally I got a periodic check up and I told that counsellor what was happening, and he said they’d help me… but I ended up getting a letter that instructed me to go see a civilian doctor, and she diagnosed me with PTSD,” Jasinski explained, “Then, I was taking the medications and they were helping, because I thought I was to get out of the Army in February 2009 when my contract expired.”

As the date approached, a problem arose.

“In late 2008 they stop-lossed me, and that pushed me over the edge,” Jasinski told IPS, “They were going to send me back to Iraq the next month.”

During his pre-deployment processessing “they gave me a 90-day supply of meds to get me over to Iraq, and I saw a counsellor during that period, and I told him “I don’t know what I’m going to do if I go back to Iraq.”

“He asked if I was suicidal,” Jasinski explained, “and I said not right now, I’m not planning on going home and blowing my brains out. He said, ‘well, you’re good to go then.’ And he sent me on my way. I knew at that moment, when they finalised my paperwork for Iraq, that there was no way I could go back with my untreated PTSD. I needed more help.”

When Jasinski went on his short pre-deployment leave break, he went AWOL, where he remained out of service until Dec. 11, when he returned to turn himself in to authorities at Fort Hood, in Killeen, Texas.

“He has heavy duty PTSD and never would have gone AWOL if he’d gotten the help he needed from the military,” James Branum, Jasinski’s civilian lawyer who accompanied him to Fort Hood told IPS. “This case highlights the need of the military to provide better mental health care for its soldiers.”

Branum, who is also co-chair of the Military Law Task Force, added, “Our hope is that his unit won’t court-martial him, but puts him in a warrior transition unit where they will evaluate him to either treat him or give him a medical discharge. He’d be safe there, and eventually, they’d give him a medical discharge because his PTSD symptoms are so severe.”

He’s turning himself in “because he is not a flight risk and wants to take responsibility for what he’s done,” Branum stressed.

“It’s been a year, I want to get on with my life and go to college and become a social worker to help people,” Jasinski said of why he is turning himself in to the military at this time. “I want to get on with life, and I don’t want to hide.”

Kernan Manion is a board-certified psychiatrist, who treated Marines returning from war who suffer from PTSD and other acute mental problems born from their deployments, at Camp Lejeune – the largest Marine base on the East Coast.

While he was engaged in this work, Manion warned his superiors of the extent and complexity of the systemic problems, and he was deeply worried about the possibility of these leading to violence on the base and within surrounding communities.

“If not more Fort Hoods, Camp Liberties, soldier fratricide, spousal homicide, we’ll see it individually in suicides, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, family dysfunction, in formerly fine young men coming back and saying, as I’ve heard so many times, ‘I’m not cut out for society. I can’t stand people. I can’t tolerate commotion. I need to live in the woods,’” Manion explained to IPS. “That’s what we’re going to have. Broken, not contributing, not functional members of society. It infuriates me – what they are doing to these guys, because it’s so ineptly run by a system that values rank and power more than anything else – so we’re stuck throwing money into a fragmented system of inept clinics and the crisis goes on.”

“It’s not just that we’re going to have an immensity of people coming back, but the system itself is thwarting their effective treatment,” Manion explained.

According to the Army, every year from 2006 onwards there has been a record number of reported and confirmed suicides, including in 2009.

There has also been an escalation of soldier-on-soldier violence, as the Nov. 5 shooting spree at Fort Hood by Major Nidal Hassan indicates. In 2008 there was also a record number of suicides for the Marine Corps.

Jasinski’s case is representative of a growing number of soldiers returning from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan who are going AWOL when they are unable to get proper mental health care treatment from the military for their PTSD.

A 2008 Rand Corporation report revealed that at least 300,000 veterans returning from both wars had been diagnosed with severe depression or PTSD.

Jaskinski’s experience with the military has inspired him to offer advice for other soldiers who need PTSD treatment but are not receiving it.

“Do not, do not let a 5-10 minute review by a military doctor determine if you go to Iraq,” he told IPS. “Even if you have to pay out of pocket, go civilian to a doctor… the military mental health sector is so overwhelmed, they won’t take care of you. Go see a civilian, and hopefully that therapist will help you… even then I’m not sure that will help… but you have to take that chance.”

When asked what he feels the military needs to do in order to rectify this problem, he said: “A total overhaul of the mental health sector in the military is needed… we had nine psychiatrists at our centre, and that’s simply not enough staff, they are going to get burned out, after seeing 50 soldiers each in one day. We need an overhaul of the entire system, and more, good psychiatrists, not those just coming for a job, but good, experienced mental health professionals need to be involved.”

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