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Posted April 26, 2010 By Lindsay Kellock

Canada to Resurrect 9-11 "Anti-Terror" Measures

Prime Minister Stephen Harper government's proposal to resurrect two controversional anti-terror measures -- preventive arrests and investigative hearings -- has again drawn fire from from former CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) director, Reid Morden.

Morden describes the measures as unnecessary, potentially dangerous, crossings the line between state security and individual rights, Canada's former spy master charged Saturday. "We should think very carefully before we take that step." (Canada.com)

"The imposition of these two (powers) crosses that line and what's more, it offends the basic premise of the way we have interpreted the law, which is that you're innocent until proven guilty." (Edmonton Journal and Ottawa Citizen)

Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have, "perfectly sufficient powers to do their jobs," said the former director of CSIS. "If they're properly resourced ... they don't need more powers." Canada.com

Federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announced the proposed legislation, the Combating Terrorism Act, Friday, April 19. Canada.com

On February 27, 2007. a government bid to extend these two controversial measures was defeated 159 to 124 in the House of Commons. Canada.com

The initial anti-terror laws were introduced within three months of the 2001 9/11 attacks by the Liberal government of Jean Chretien. Morden expressed his concerns about the legislation in a September 2007 article, The Right Balance, for Policy Options (Options politiques). See irpp.org/po/archive/sep02/morden.pdf)

In the article, he discussed, among other concerns, preventive arrest (arrest and detention without warrant) and investigative judicial hearings (court hearings before a judge, which may be held in secret).

In The Right Balance, Morden wrote "Much has been made about the provisions (in Bill-36, the initial bill) for preventive arrest and investigative hearings ...these two provisions, in an unprecedented way, override fundamental relgious, expressive and associational freedoms that are at the core of the

Posted April 24, 2010 By AP/Ross D. Franklin

Fast Facts on Arizona's Immigration Crack Down

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed today what is now the most punitive and sweeping anti-immigrant state law in the nation. This law's full effects will not be measurable for months to come, but it is already clear that it will be challenged in court because it denies rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. And until the legal issues are settled, the new law will have a detrimental effect on Arizona's economy, as well as city and state budgets.

The law essentially legalizes racial profiling

The law puts communities of color in the crosshairs by requiring state and local government workers to determine if a person is illegally in the United States based on a "reasonable suspicion."

Legal experts maintain that the law will result in racial profiling, as it does not prohibit police officers from relying on race or ethnicity in deciding who to investigate. Of course all Arizonans don't all look alike. Like America, Arizona is a diverse state with multiple generations of U.S. citizens. Three out of every 10 Arizonans are Hispanic, 1 out of 10 is American Indian, and 13 percent are foreign born.

The law undercuts the Constitution and imbues local police with federal authority

Arizona is attempting to grant local police arrest authority for administrative violations of federal immigration law, even though the state police does not even have that authority under federal law.

The measure does not require the local police to have a search warrant or even suspect that some illegal action has occurred.

The law criminalizes the solicitation of work even though courts have previously ruled that the solicitation of work is protected speech under the First Amendment.

The law will harm the state and local economies

The National Employment Law Project pointed out that smaller-scale anti-immigrant ordinances have cost individual localities millions of dollars. The Texas-based Perryman Group calculated that if all unauthorized immigrants were removed from Arizona, the state would lose $26.4 billion in economic activity, $11.7 billion in gross state product, and approximately 140,324 jobs.

The Immigration Policy Center noted that, "with Arizona facing a budget deficit of more than $3 billion," the new law will "further imperil the state's economic future."

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and other local leaders anticipate a drop in new business ventures in the state because of the harsh new law. Phoenix Vice Mayor Michael Nowakowski observed: "We're the laughing stock of the country because of these crazy laws."

The law will be expensive and take cops away from community policing

The Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police firmly opposes the law for fiscal and public safety reasons, noting that fear of government officials will diminish the public's willingness to cooperate with police in criminal investigations and will "negatively affect the ability of law enforcement agencies across the state to fulfill their many responsibilities in a timely manner."

Local taxpayers will bear the heavy costs of lengthy court litigation.

The costs to arrest, detain, process, and transport undocumented immigrants out of Arizona will drain local government treasuries. There were an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants in Arizona as of January 2009, making up 4 percent of the state's population. If the federal government were to handle the entire undocumented population, the cost would be approximately $23,148 per person, based on a recent study by the Center for American Progress.

Arizona and other local and state governments are taking action on immigration because Congress has failed to enact comprehensive immigration reform that restores border security, provides a flexible visa program to meet business and family needs, and deals with the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. This is a federal issue and must be handled by Congress immediately before other states start to follow Arizona's lead.

Posted February 26, 2010 By Chris Marsden

A turning point in Europe

Wednesday's general strike in Greece, involving two million workers in the public and private sectors, marks a turning point in the political situation throughout Europe. It represents the most significant manifestation of a growing movement of resistance to the attempt by Europe's governments and corporations to make workers pay for the economic crisis and the multibillion-euro bailout of the banks.

At the very onset of this new movement of the working class, two fundamental characteristics have emerged: the movement assumes a cross-border and international character, and the workers immediately come up against the bankruptcy of their old trade union and political organizations--all of which are wedded to a nationalist program.

Indeed, austerity measures are being imposed by governments of the official "left" no less than those of the "centre" and "right."

This week saw a succession of strikes and protests throughout Europe:

On Monday, Lufthansa's 4,500 pilots in Germany struck. In France, air traffic controllers struck alongside workers at six French oil refineries. British Airways cabin crew voted by over 80 percent to strike.

On Tuesday, protest rallies took place in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia against the austerity measures of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) government of José Zapatero. Trade unions in the Czech Republic announced that public transport would be halted next week.

A one-day general strike of the public sector is planned for March 4 in Portugal over the extension of a wage freeze as part of measures to cut the deficit from 9.3 percent of gross domestic product to 3 percent by 2013. French pilots have also announced plans to strike later this week.

These strikes and protests are only the initial response by Europe's workers to the offensive being waged against them. The broadest mobilizations have been in those countries where the most savage cuts have been announced.

Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain--the so-called "PIGS"--have been targeted by the banks and financial speculators and ordered by the European Union to drastically slash their budget deficits. This will set a precedent for similar cuts across Europe. But the fact that industrial unrest has spread to Germany, France and the UK indicates the potential development of a truly pan-European movement.

The same underlying tendencies that have given rise to the reemergence of the class struggle in Europe exist in North and South America, Asia and Africa.

Many of the protests and demonstrations were relatively small--a factor utilized by the financial press to demand that the respective governments stand firm in imposing austerity measures. Nevertheless, the more perceptive commentators were clear as to the broader implications of these actions. Writing in the Independent, Sean O'Grady stated that the strikes marked the onset of "Europe's Winter of Discontent." They "promise to be just the start of the greatest demonstration of public unrest seen on the continent since the revolutionary fervour of 1968," he continued.

Commenting on the political impact of austerity measures that will see millions thrown into unemployment and social services gutted in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, he noted, "The democratic strains in nations that had been ruled, well within living memory, by fascist leaders or the military are growing."

The basis for a continent-wide social and political movement is rooted in the common problems faced by workers in a globalised economy dominated by huge international banks and corporations. These organizations, and the financial oligarchy they represent, are demanding unprecedented cuts in social programmes, wages and pensions in order to pay for the trillions of dollars handed over by European governments to the banks. They are speculating against any economy that is seen as debt-heavy and unwilling to carry forward the necessary attacks on the working class, thereby increasing the financial pressure on the targeted governments.

As yet, the objectively international character of the movement developing in Europe finds no political or organizational expression. On the contrary, everywhere it meets with the determined opposition of the trade unions, to the point of outright sabotage.

This week saw the betrayal of many of these initial attempts at resistance by the working class. The German pilots union, Vereinigung Cockpit, called off the strike at Lufthansa on its first day, and the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) called off the strike against the oil giant Total in France. In both cases, the unions capitulated without having won any of the workers' demands. For its part, the Unite union announced yesterday that its members' mandate for strike action against British Airways would be put "on hold" while further negotiations take place.

Those protests and strikes that have gone ahead are, from the standpoint of the unions, designed to let off steam rather than mobilize a political movement against the governments that are imposing austerity measures. The unions portray their respective governments as mere hostages to either the European Union or the speculators, rather than the political representatives of the capitalist class.

The most draconian cuts are being imposed by social democratic governments that came to power as a result of popular hostility to right-wing governments--PASOK in Greece, the PSOE in Spain, and the Socialist Party in Portugal. In every instance, they were elected with the support of the trade union bureaucracies, which have remained their allies as promised reforms have given way to austerity budgets.

The aim of the unions is to regulate social tensions and ensure that they do not pose a threat to big business and the state. A spokesman for the Greek General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE) made this clear when he said that imposition of PASOK's planned austerity measures would be "tragic because it will provoke social unrest and clashes."

Ireland is cited by global financiers as the model to be emulated for imposing cuts in wages and services of between 10 and 15 percent. The ability of the Fianna Fail government to do so is entirely dependent on the Irish unions, which called off strikes against the budget that had involved hundreds of thousands of workers.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions is limiting action against the government to a public sector work-to-rule. Its leader, Jack O'Connor, declared, "There will be those who will represent us as endeavouring to reverse the budget and undermine the democratically elected government. I want to state emphatically that agreement can be reached."

Whatever the intentions of the trade union bureaucracy, anger over the cuts being dictated by the banks and corporations will continue to grow. Their efforts to police this opposition, to stifle and betray it, will only lead to the development of a mass movement that must, of necessity, take the form of a political rebellion against the trade unions and the governments they defend.

There is no national solution to the crisis facing workers in Greece, Spain, Portugal or anywhere else. They are being thrust into a common struggle against globally organised capital. The fundamental question facing the entire European working class is the adoption of a socialist and internationalist program as the basis for a new political leadership and new mass organizations to wage the class struggle in opposition to the nationalist and pro-capitalist organisations of the official labour movement.

Posted February 23, 2010 By David Walsh

The Austin airplane suicide and the political crisis in the US

The suicide of software engineer Andrew Joseph Stack, who last Thursday flew his small airplane into the seven-story building in Austin, Texas that houses the local offices of the Internal Revenue Service, was both shocking and tragic. Stack perished, as did an IRS employee, and numerous others were injured.

Stack's action has generated a volume of commentary in the media, as well as widespread popular reaction. The media response is predictably shallow and misleading. Defensively, the various pundits dismiss Stack as a "lunatic," a "terrorist," and "anti-government," and the lengthy statement he left behind as "hate-filled," and a mere "rant."

His action was deeply disoriented and misguided, and resulted in the death of an innocent government worker, 68-year-old Vernon Hunter, the father of six. It remains a fact, however, that Stack's anger and murderous frustration clearly speak to a much wider social reality.

The outrage against the government and against the rich that Stack expresses in his statement is shared by far more people than the political establishment cares to admit, probably even to itself. That is no doubt why media commentators in the aftermath of the incident hastened to insist that Stack was simply a criminal, and nothing more, and why the government quickly took down his Internet posting.

The destructiveness of his action does not alter the fact that Stack was a victim of a foul and reactionary political climate, enforced by every official institution of American society, that is indifferent and hostile to the needs and aspirations of the vast majority of the population and utterly subservient to the interests of a rapacious financial elite.

Stack's commentary is not a right-wing screed. He is not another Timothy McVeighâ??the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber. The latter's misanthropic, racist and fascistic conceptions were shaped during a period in which both political parties attempted, with some successâ??due above all to the complicity of the AFL-CIO unionsâ??to pit sections of the middle class and workers against the very poor, the "welfare cheats," and so on, as the government carried out an assault on the social safety net.

What Stack's statement reveals is that he, a self-employed engineer, identified himselfâ??in however confused a fashionâ??with the working population and recognized a common enemy in the capitalist state and the giant corporations. His frustration over the absence of any avenue within official society to redress his grievances reflects the feelings of many others.

In his statement, while recognizing "blacks and poor immigrants" as fellow victims, Stack rages against big business and its political mouthpieces in Washington. He denounces, for example, the "handful of thugs and plunderers [who] can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it's time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hoursâ?¦"

He refers to the criminality of "the drug and insurance companies" and notes that "this country's leaders don't see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies."

Stack repeatedly refers to awakening from illusions about the nature of American democracy. He notes at one point, "this is where I learned that there are two â??interpretations' for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us." He comments that one of his painful encounters with the Internal Revenue Service (the US tax agency), "made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie."

Stack refers to his time as a student, living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in the 1970s, when his next-door neighbor was the elderly widow of a retired steelworker. "Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on." As he notes, the woman was surviving financially by eating cat food.

The engineer points to the recession in California in the early 1990s and "all of the young families who lost their homes" on "street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to â??shore up' their windfall." And, further, to the dot-com bust and the 9/11 attacks, after which "the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars â?¦ as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY!"

Stack darkly jests that the financial powers-that-be learned a lesson from the Crash of 1929, when "wealthy bankers and businessmen jump[ed] out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything â?¦ [T]hey now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn't have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it's â??business-as-usual.' Now when the wealthy f__k up, the poor get to die for the mistakes â?¦"

He concludes with a reference to the Communist Manifesto: "The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed."

Several issues stand out. Stack's bitter reference to "presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies" would lead one to conclude that Stack voted for or otherwise supported the candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008. Although he doesn't say so, one would also assume that he, like many, many others, had illusions that an Obama administration would place restraints on what he calls "the wealthy sows at the government trough."

In its own fashion, Stack's tragically misguided action says something about a popular mood characterized by increasing disappointment and disillusionment with the new administration.

One might put it another way, making use of a historical analogy: Is it likely that an individual in his situation would make such comments and take such mad action in the face of a government seen to be carrying out measures genuinely in the interests of the broad mass of the population? Would such a confused, violent public protest, for example, have been likely to occur in early April 1934, 13 months after the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal policies, aimed at rescuing American capitalism, nonetheless held out some prospect of relief from the worst effects of the Great Depression?

In its own way, Stack's statement and action make clear that wide layers of the US population now take for granted that, all the campaign promises and hype notwithstanding, nothing has changed for them under Obama. The government, he says, making no distinction between Republicans and Democrats, Bush and Obama, is "full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws."

Stack's action also represents an indictment of the so-called labor movement in the US, and, at the same time, a serious warning. The embittered engineer quite correctly notes the complicity of the "corrupt" unions in the immiseration of the American population.

Individuals like Stack, with complete legitimacy, have no reason to look to the AFL-CIO officialdom and their local representatives, a venal crowd of well-heeled parasites, for any way out of the present crisis. The absence of a genuine labor movement conducting mass struggles against unemployment, wage-cutting and attacks on social programs was no doubt a factor in leading him to the futile belief that the only answer to his economic distress was an individual one.

The radicalization of that section of the population to which Stack belongs is not an insignificant development. It is a serious error, as Leon Trotsky pointed out in the 1930s in regard to the political situation in France, to imagine that the middle classes by their nature "do not like extremes." The small businessman, he noted, "prefers order so long as business is going well and so long as he hopes that tomorrow it will go better. But when this hope is lost, he is easily enraged and is ready to give himself over to the most extreme measures."

Trotsky noted that in periods of great crisis, "the despairing petty bourgeois" understands "that one cannot forgo the use of force." He might have been speaking of Stack, who writes: "Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn't so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer."

Although anti-social and even homicidal attacks are relatively frequent in the US, they still represent a statistically insignificant response to the present situation. Masses of people will respond to their growing economic plight, not with individual acts of despair, but by drawing political conclusions and taking political action.

The continued subordination of the working population to the Democratic Party, with the complicity of the trade unions, is the most dangerous factor in contemporary American political life. It creates the risk that masses of "despairing petty bourgeois," seeing no help coming from the "labor movement" and the official "left" in the Democratic Party, will be driven into the arms of extreme right-wing forces. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

The Austin episode underscores the urgency of a political break by working people in the US from the Democrats and the establishment of an independent, international socialist movement that can win to its side all the suffering and exploited in the American population, in political unity with the working class around the world.

Posted February 17, 2010 By Stephen M. Walt

I don't mean to say I told you so, but...

Probably the most controversial claim in my work with John Mearsheimer on the Israel lobby is our argument that it played a key role in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Even some readers who were generally sympathetic to our overall position found that claim hard to accept, and some left-wing critics accused us of letting Bush and Cheney off the hook or of ignoring the importance of other interests, especially oil. Of course, Israel's defenders in the lobby took issue even more strenuously, usually by mischaracterizing our arguments and ignoring most (if not all) of the evidence we presented.

So I hope readers will forgive me if I indulge today in a bit of self-promotion, or more precisely, self-defense. This week, yet another piece of evidence surfaced that suggests we were right all along (HT to Mehdi Hasan at the New Statesman and J. Glatzer at Mondoweiss). In his testimony to the Iraq war commission in the U.K., former Prime Minister Tony Blair offered the following account of his discussions with Bush in Crawford, Texas in April 2002. Blair reveals that concerns about Israel were part of the equation and that Israel officials were involved in those discussions.

Take it away, Tony:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this."

Notice that Blair is not saying that Israel dreamed up the idea of attacking Iraq or that Bush was bent on war solely to benefit Israel or even to appease the Israel lobby here at home. But Blair is acknowledging that concerns about Israel were part of the equation, and that the Israeli government was being actively consulted in the planning for the war.

Blair's comments fit neatly with the argument we make about the lobby and Iraq. Specifically, Professor Mearsheimer and I made it clear in our article and especially in our book that the idea of invading Iraq originated in the United States with the neoconservatives, and not with the Israeli government. But as the neoconservative pundit Max Boot once put it, steadfast support for Israel is "a key tenet of neoconservatism." Prominent neo-conservatives occupied important positions in the Bush administration, and in the aftermath of 9/11, they played a major role in persuading Bush and Cheney to back a war against Iraq, which they had been advocating since the late 1990s. We also pointed out that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other Israeli officials were initially skeptical of this scheme, because they wanted the U.S. to focus on Iran, not Iraq. However, they became enthusiastic supporters of the idea of invading Iraq once the Bush administration made it clear to them that Iraq was just the first step in a broader campaign of "regional transformation" that would eventually include Iran.

At that point top Israeli leaders from across the political spectrum became cheerleaders for the invasion, and they played a prominent role in helping to sell the war here in the United States. Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington, DC in April 2002 and spoke in the U.S. Senate, telling his audience "the urgent need to topple Saddam is paramount," and that the campaign "deserves the unconditional support of all sane governments." (It sure sounds like he was well aware of the discussions in Crawford, doesn't it?) In May, foreign minister Shimon Peres said on CNN that "Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as bin Laden," and that the United States "cannot sit and wait." A month later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post recommending that the Bush administration "should, first of all, focus on Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein."

This chorus continued through the summer and fall, with Barak and Netanyahu writing additional op-eds in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, each calling for military action to topple Saddam. Netanyahu's piece was titled "The Case for Toppling Saddam" and said that "nothing less than dismantling his regime will do." Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's official spokesman, Ra'anan Gissen, offered similar statements during this period as well, and Sharon himself told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee in August 2002 that Iraq was "the greatest danger facing Israel." According to an Aug. 16 article by Aluf Benn in Ha'aretz, Sharon reportedly told the Bush administration that putting off an attack would "only give [Saddam] more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of WMD." Foreign Minister Peres reiterated his own warnings as well, and told reporters in September 2002 that "the campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must." (For sources, see pp. 233-38).

If that's not enough evidence of where Israel's leaders were in the run-up to the war, consider that former President Bill Clinton told an audience at an Aspen Institute meeting in 2006 that "every Israeli politician I knew" (and he knows a lot of them) believed that Saddam Hussein was so great a threat that he should be removed even if he did not have WMD. Nor is this testimony at all surprising, given that we are talking about the leader who had fired Scud missiles into Israel during the first Gulf War in 1991 and had been giving money to the families of suicide bombers. If the Bush administration was bent on taking him out and then turning its gun-sights on Syria and Iran, one can easily understand why Israelis would welcome it.

Now, what about key groups in the lobby itself? If the neoconservatives deserve the blame for dreaming up the idea of invading Iraq, key groups and individuals in the lobby played an important role in selling it on Capitol Hill and to the public at large. AIPAC head Howard Kohr told the New York Sun in January 2003 that one of the organization's "success stories" over the previous year was "quietly lobbying Congress" to approve the resolution authorizing the use of force, a fact confirmed by journalists such as Nathan Guttman of the Forward, Michelle Goldberg of Salon.com, John B. Judis of the New Republic, and even Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker (see p. 242). Pundits at pro-Israel think tanks like the Brookings Institutions's Saban Center were openly backing war by the fall of 2002, with Martin Indyk, the head of the center, and Kenneth Pollack, its director of research, playing especially prominent roles.

Moreover, in this same period both the Jewish Council on Public Affairs and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations voted to endorse the use of force "as a last resort." Mortimer Zuckerman, a well-connected businessman and publisher who was then the chairman of the Conference of Presidents, was especially convinced about the futility of U.N. inspections and the need to topple Saddam, and wrote several editorials making that case in his magazine (U.S. News and World Report).

Still skeptical? Consider the following passage from an article by Matthew Berger of the Jewish Telegraph Agency, published just after President Bush's September 2002 appearance at the United Nations, where he threatened military action if Iraq did not comply with U.N. resolutions:

Despite their caution and without specifying a formal policy, Jewish leaders predominantly expressed support for Bush's words at the United Nations.

They said he detailed a strong case that Saddam has consistently ignored U.N. resolutions, that he was seeking to obtain weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam has shown a propensity towards using them.

"Iraq is the single most important threat right now to world peace and to our safety," said Dr. Mandell Ganchrow, executive vice president of the Orthodox Religious Zionists of America. He described Saddam as a "maniac" who "has proven that he will gas his own people."

"The fanaticism that exists throughout the Middle East is best addressed by first dealing with Iraq," agreed Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Reform movement's Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

Many American Jewish leaders expressed the fear that Saddam has not been quiet for the past decade because of a loss of will, but because he has been using the time to garner weapons for an eventual attack on U.S. interests and allies.

"Do we have to wait until a target is hit, and the world says, 'Ah, yes, he did have weapons of mass destruction,'" asked David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee."

Not to be outdone, the editor of Jewish Week, Gary Rosenblatt, wrote an editorial in mid-December 2002 saying that "Washington's imminent war on Saddam Hussein is . . . an opportunity to rid the world of a dangerous tyrant who present a particularly horrific threat Israel." He went on to say "the Torah instructs that when you enemy seeks to kill you kill him first. Self-defense is not permitted; it is commanded." Even the relatively liberal Rabbi David Saperstein of the Union of Reform Judaism's Religious Action Center told journalist Michelle Goldberg that "the Jewish community would want to see a forceful resolution to the threat that Saddam Hussein poses." "Forceful resolution" means war, and Saperstein also offered comparisons to the Bosnian conflict and the Nazi era to reinforce his call for military action.

Finally, consider the following passage from an editorial in the Jewish newspaper Forward, published in 2004:

As President Bush attempted to sell the war .. in Iraq, America's most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Some groups went even further, arguing that that the removal of the Iraqi leaders would represent a significant step toward bringing peace to the Middle East and winning America's war on terrorism"

The editorial also noted that "concern for Israel's safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups."

The Forward, it is worth noting, is well-connected and has a well-deserved reputation for probity in its reporting on the American Jewish community. It is hard to see how its editors could be mistaken about such an important issue or why they would lie about it. And they never issued a retraction. We can therefore assume that the writers of this editorial knew what they were talking about: key groups in the lobby supported the war. Reasonable people can disagree about how important their influence was, of course, but at a minimum these groups reinforced the Bush administration's resolve and made it less likely that other politicians or commentators would conduct a serious debate about the wisdom of the invasion.

Finally, it bears reiterating that I am talking about key groups and individuals in the Israel lobby, and not about the American Jewish community in toto. Indeed, my co-author and I have repeatedly pointed to surveys showing that American Jews were less supportive of the decision to invade Iraq than the American population as a whole, and we have emphasized that it would be a cardinal error (as well as dangerous) to try to "blame the Jews" for the war. Rather, blame should be reserved for Bush and Cheney (who made the ultimate decision for war), for the neoconservatives who dreamed up this foolish idea, and for the various groups and individuals -- including those in the lobby -- who helped sell it.

Nor am I suggesting that these individuals advocated this course because they thought it would be good for Israel but bad for the United States. Rather, they unwisely believed it would be good for both countries. And as we all know, they were tragically wrong.

That misconception helps us understand why the Israelis and their American friends who promoted the Iraq war didn't do a better job of covering their tracks and obscuring their enthusiasm for the endeavor. I suspect it is because they genuinely believed that the war would be easy and would bring great benefits for both Israel and the United States. If the war was a smashing success, then they would reap the credit and no one would spend that much time probing the war's origins. And even if someone did, its proponents would be hailed as strategic geniuses who had conceived and planned a stunning victory. Once the war went south, however, and numerous people began to probe how this disaster came about, an extensive dust-kicking operation to veil the role of Israel and the lobby was set in motion.

This campaign won't work, however, because too many people already know that Israel and the lobby were cheerleaders for the war and with the passage of time, more and more evidence of their influence on the decision for war will leak out. The situation is analogous to what happened with the events surrounding the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964. The Johnson administration could dissemble and cover its tracks for a few years, but eventually the real story got out, as will happen with Iraq. Indeed, Blair's testimony is evidence of that process at work.

For sure, many Israelis and their friends in the United States will continue to maintain that the Sharon government actually tried to stop the march to war and that groups in the lobby - including AIPAC -- stayed on the sideline and did not push for war. But these post hoc fairy tales will be increasingly hard to sell to the American people, not only because there is a growing body of evidence which directly contradicts them (see pp. 261-262) , but also because the internet and the blogosphere is allowing the word to spread. Thankfully, we no longer have to rely on the mainstream media to get the story straight.

Finally, let's not forget that while the Iraq war has been a disaster for the United States, it has also been very bad for Israel, not just because its principal patron has been stuck in a quagmire in Iraq, but also because the biggest winner from the war was Iran, which is the country that Israel fears most. All of this shows that despite the lobby's openly-stated commitment to promoting policies that it thinks will benefit Israel, it did not work out that way with the Iraq war. Nor is it working out that way with its unyielding support of Israel's self-destructive drive to colonize the Occupied Territories, a process that is turning Israel into an apartheid state. And the same warning applies to its efforts to keep all options-including the use of force -- "on the table" vis-à-vis Iran.

Given all the problems that the lobby's prescriptions have produced in recent years, you'd think U.S. leaders would have learned to ignore its advice. But there's little sign of that so far, which means that these past errors are likely to be repeated. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Posted February 17, 2010 By Tom Eley

New York Times history lesson on civilian control of the military: Why now?

On Monday the New York Times ran a column on the historical origins of civilian control of the military.

Contributing author John R. Miller-a fellow at the conservative Discovery Institute-attributed it to a speech George Washington, then commanding the American armies in the Revolutionary War, gave in 1783 to officers disgruntled over lack of pay. Reading a letter from a Congressman to 500 near-mutinous officers gathered in Newburgh, New York, Washington put on spectacles and said, "Gentlemen, you must pardon me, for I have grown not only gray but blind in the service of my country." The officers were moved, and a military revolt against the young government was averted, according to Miller.

Why did the Times run a column on the subject now? For whom was this history lesson intended?

For most of US history, the principle of military subordination to elected government has been accepted without comment-except in the two instances where its assertion was the most controversial: Abraham Lincoln's sacking of General George McClellan in the Civil War, and Harry Truman's dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.

Especially noteworthy are the column's opening and closing passages, which clearly refer to the present. "Civilian control of the military is a cherished principle in American government," Miller writes. "It was President Obama who decided to increase our involvement in Afghanistan, and it is Congress that will decide whether to appropriate the money to carry out his decision. It is the president and Congress, not the military, that will decide whether our laws should be changed to allow gays and lesbians to serve in our armed forces. The military advises, but the civilian leadership decides."

Having told the story of Washington at Newburgh, Miller begins his last paragraph with a stark warning: "But powerful armies often make their own rules, and many nations have succumbed to military control despite strong constitutions."

The Times' decision to run this comment must be seen in light of the growing power of the military-intelligence apparatus and its increasingly open role in US political life. This power has grown immeasurably since 1961, when President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the threat to democracy posed by the "military-industrial complex" whose "total influence," even then, was "felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government."

Evidence of the growing power and impunity of the military and spy agencies abounds:

- January 27 Congressional testimony from State Department Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy implied that the Flight 253 bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, boarded his Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with the complicity of one or more US intelligence agencies. It has also been revealed that US spy agencies had Abdulmutallab's name, knowledge that an attack organized in Yemen was likely to take place on December 25, and warnings from British intelligence and even the young man's own father.

No one in any US spy agency has been held accountable for what, according to the official version of events, is an inexplicable breakdown of the most expensive and expansive intelligence system in the world; Kennedy's revelations have been subjected to a media blackout. A more plausible explanation is that powerful elements inside the state thought an attack, failed or otherwise, might be used to destabilize the US government. ["Why the media silence on the Flight 253 bombing hearings?"]

-In the months leading up to his announced surge in Afghanistan, sources within the US military close to generals Stanley McChrystal, US commander in Afghanistan, and David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command, maintained a steady stream of leaks in a frankly acknowledged bid to shift US policy on Afghanistan. McChrystal openly campaigned for an expansion of forces close to what Obama eventually ordered-a campaign supported by prominent members of the Republican Party.

- Last year, after the court-ordered release of Bush Justice Department memos that created a pseudolegal rationale for torture of "terror suspects" prompted widespread calls for investigations, former Vice President Dick Cheney mounted a public attack on the Obama administration. Since then, intelligence agencies and the military have, through press leaks and statements from allied political figures like Cheney, mounted a full-throated defense of torture and other antidemocratic aspects of the "war on terror."

- In July 2009, it came to light that House and Senate intelligence committees were kept in the dark for eight years about a "secret counter-terrorism program" overseen by Cheney. Obama's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, Leon Panetta, only learned of the program months after taking control of the CIA. The Los Angeles Times reported that the program "went beyond the widely publicized warrantless wiretapping program...encompassing additional secretive activities that created â??unprecedented' spying powers."

- On April 27, 2009, one of two Air Force One planes-the Boeing 747s used by the US president-flew at low altitude over New York City escorted by fighter jets. Officials absurdly claimed the operation was necessary to get a picture of Air Force One against the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty. The flight, which provoked panic in Manhattan, took place without the knowledge of Obama or New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. ["What happened in the skies over New York City?"]

- After his inauguration, Obama left largely untouched the US military command and high-ranking personnel in the main spy agencies, while promoting generals to top civilian positions and maintaining Bush's defense Secretary, Robert Gates, in the same position. Done in the name of "continuity," these personnel decisions illustrated Obama's contempt for the popular hostility to the Bush administration's war policies that underlay his election.

- In September 2007 it was revealed that a nuclear-armed B-52 bomber had flown over the US without authorization.

- After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington D.C., Cheney initiated and headed a program called "Continuity of Government" that created a secret government in an "undisclosed, secure location," where he subsequently spent much of his time. The shadow government was drawn entirely from the executive branch, the military, and spy agencies. Elected members of Congress were not included and were unaware of its creation. Whether or not the shadow government has been disbanded is unclear.

- There remains no credible explanation for the 9/11 attacks. As in the Flight 253 bomb plot, not a single member of the US intelligence agencies ostensibly responsible for protecting the American people has been held accountable for what is, if the official version of events is accepted, the greatest domestic security failure in US history-an event seized upon to launch the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and unprecedented attacks on basic democratic rights.

- In the disputed 2000 presidential election, which the Supreme Court handed to George W. Bush by ordering a halt to ballot counting in Florida, Al Gore conceded defeat amid fears of opposition from the military, which the Republican Party openly courted during the struggle over election results. A source close to Gore said he "got very stuck on the notion that if he became president it was not in the national interest that he have a relationship characterized by his mistrust of the military."

Commenting on these and similar comments attributed to Gore, the World Socialist Web Site noted "they amount to the acceptance of a military veto over the outcome of a national election and the occupant of the White House. The subordination of the military to civilian rule is a cardinal principle of the US Constitution. The fact that this cornerstone of democracy has become so eroded is a stark indication of the decay of bourgeois democratic institutions in the US." ["New York Times documents military role in theft of 2000 election"]

This list, which could be much longer, is the context in which the Times' history lesson on civilian control of the military appears.

In fact, Monday's column is the newspaper's second reference in recent weeks to fears of the dangers posed to civilian rule by the military and intelligence agencies.

The first was more oblique. A January 23 article, "Gates Sees Fallout From Troubled Ties With Pakistan," covered a recent trip to Pakistan by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and concluded with the following line: "His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching â??Seven Days in May,' the Cold War-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States."

Given the growing assertiveness and impunity of the security apparatus, it seems unlikely that the decision to disclose this piece of information was gratuitous.

Author recommends:

"Seven Days in May, 2009"

Posted February 14, 2010 By Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick

Under Obama, more targeted killings than captures in counterterrorism efforts

When a window of opportunity opened to strike the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa last September, U.S. Special Operations forces prepared several options. They could obliterate his vehicle with an airstrike as he drove through southern Somalia. Or they could fire from helicopters that could land at the scene to confirm the kill. Or they could try to take him alive.

The White House authorized the second option. On the morning of Sept. 14, helicopters flying from a U.S. ship off the Somali coast blew up a car carrying Saleh Ali Nabhan. While several hovered overhead, one set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of the remains for DNA verification. Moments later, the helicopters were headed back to the ship.

The strike was considered a major success, according to senior administration and military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified operation and other sensitive matters. But the opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever.

The Nabhan decision was one of a number of similar choices the administration has faced over the past year as President Obama has escalated U.S. attacks on the leadership of al-Qaeda and its allies around the globe. The result has been dozens of targeted killings and no reports of high-value detentions.

Although senior administration officials say that no policy determination has been made to emphasize kills over captures, several factors appear to have tipped the balance in that direction. The Obama administration has authorized such attacks more frequently than the George W. Bush administration did in its final years, including in countries where U.S. ground operations are officially unwelcome or especially dangerous. Improvements in electronic surveillance and precision targeting have made killing from a distance much more of a sure thing. At the same time, options for where to keep U.S. captives have dwindled.

Republican critics, already scornful of limits placed on interrogation of the suspect in the Christmas Day bombing attempt, charge that the administration has been too reluctant to risk an international incident or a domestic lawsuit to capture senior terrorism figures alive and imprison them.

"Over a year after taking office, the administration has still failed to answer the hard questions about what to do if we have the opportunity to capture and detain a terrorist overseas, which has made our terror-fighters reluctant to capture and left our allies confused," Sen. Christopher S. Bond (Mo.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Friday. "If given a choice between killing or capturing, we would probably kill."

Some military and intelligence officials, citing what they see as a new bias toward kills, questioned whether valuable intelligence is being lost in the process. "We wanted to take a prisoner," a senior military officer said of the Nabhan operation. "It was not a decision that we made."

Even during the Bush administration, "there was an inclination to 'just shoot the bastard,' " said a former intelligence official briefed on current operations. "But now there's an even greater proclivity for doing it that way. . . . We need to have the capability to snatch when the situation calls for it."

Lack of detention policy

One problem identified by those within and outside the government is the question of where to take captives apprehended outside established war zones and cooperating countries. "We've been trying to decide this for over a year," the senior military officer said. "When you don't have a detention policy or a set of facilities," he said, operational decisions become more difficult.

The administration has pledged to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Congress has resisted moving any of the about 190 detainees remaining there, let alone terrorism suspects who have been recently captured, to this country. All of the CIA's former "black site" prisons have been shut down, and a U.S. official involved in operations planning confirmed that the agency has no terrorism suspects in its custody. Although the CIA retains the right to briefly retain terrorism suspects, any detainees would be quickly transferred to a military prison or an allied government with jurisdiction over the case, the official said.

Military officials emphasized that terrorism suspects continue to be captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in Iraq, where counterterrorism operations must be approved in advance by its government and conducted with Iraqi forces in the lead, all prisoners must be turned over to Baghdad.

In Afghanistan, the massive U.S.-run prison at the Bagram air base is scheduled to be relinquished to the Afghan government by the end of the year. Its 750 prisoners include about 30 foreigners, some of them captured in other countries and brought there. But recent legal decisions, and Afghan government restrictions, have largely eliminated that option.

"In some cases," the senior military official said, captives in Afghanistan have been taken to "other facilities" maintained by Special Operations forces. Such detentions, even on a temporary basis, have become more difficult because of legal and human rights concerns, he said.

Cooperation overseas

Outside the established war zones, senior administration and military officials said, how an operation is conducted and whether its goal is killing or capturing depend on where it is taking place and which U.S. agency is involved. American personnel have worked closely on counterterrorism missions with local forces in Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere, with those countries in the lead.

Al-Qaeda and Taliban havens in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the border are considered part of the Afghanistan war theater. The Pakistani government tacitly permits CIA-operated unmanned aircraft to target terrorist sites and militants up to 50 miles inside the country. Under an executive order first signed by Bush and continued in force under Obama, the CIA does not have to seek higher administration authority before striking.

But while U.S. Special Forces work closely with the CIA on the Afghan side of the border, any ground operation in Pakistan would require specific White House approval, which so far has not been granted. In addition to the difficulty such a mission would pose amid a hostile population in rugged terrain, the Pakistani government has drawn a red line against allowing U.S. boots on the ground, and the risk of sparking an anti-American backlash is seen as too great.

Beyond Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, potentially lethal operations must be approved by Obama or his designee, which can include the CIA director and the defense secretary. In Yemen, stepped-up military and intelligence cooperation with the country's government, including the use of U.S. aircraft and munitions for raids against a list of targets suspected of involvement with terrorist groups, was approved by Obama late last year, and at least two lethal attacks have taken place in coordination with Yemeni ground forces. Any captives belong to Yemen.

The Somalia calculus

Somalia poses unique problems. In the vast majority of the country, there is no functioning government to approve or coordinate operations, or to take custody of captives. Under the Bush administration, the military conducted several White House-approved air operations against alleged senior terrorist figures fleeing south after the 2006 U.S.-backed ouster of the Islamic government there. But while military teams made quick forays over the border to the targeted sites, finding and identifying bodies proved difficult.

Nabhan, a 30-year-old Kenyan, had long been a prime U.S. target. A senior official in the al-Shabab militia fighting to overthrow the U.S.-supported transition government in Somalia and impose strict Islamic law, he was said to be the chief link between the main al-Qaeda organization and its East African allies. Wanted by the FBI in connection with the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, he was also accused in the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned resort in Kenya and an attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner that year.

After tracking him for a while, the Special Operations Command thought it had established a sufficient pattern of activity to target him and had the time to plan for it. Several alternatives, including capture, were developed and assessed under military procedures for missions outside recognized war theaters.

Planners were asked for more details on the proposed force to be used, intelligence proving the target's location and the level of verification, and operational details -- including, in the case of capture, where Nabhan would be taken. Planned under U.S. Central Command, the operation was turned over to the U.S. Africa Command for implementation.

On the political side, the National Security Council received detailed versions of each proposed course of action. At that level, the senior administration official said, "there is an evaluation making sure you are able to prosecute the mission successfully . . . and minimize the dangers and risks."

The Somalia calculus, several officials said, included weighing the likelihood that U.S. troops on the ground for any amount of time in the militia-controlled south would be particularly vulnerable to attack. Looming large, they said, was the memory of the last time a U.S. combat helicopter was on the ground in lawless Somalia, the 1993 Black Hawk debacle that resulted in the deaths of 18 soldiers.

"There are certain upsides and certain downsides to certain paths," the administration official said. "The safety and security of U.S. military personnel is always something the president keeps at the highest level of his calculus."

Posted February 10, 2010 By Glenn Greenwald

On the Claimed "War Exception" to the Constitution

Last week, I wrote about a revelation buried in a Washington Post article by Dana Priest which described how the Obama administration has adopted the Bush policy of targeting selected American citizens for assassination if they are deemed (by the Executive Branch) to be Terrorists. As The Washington Times' Eli Lake reports, Adm. Dennis Blair was asked about this program at a Congressional hearing yesterday and he acknowledged its existence: The U.S. intelligence community policy on killing American citizens who have joined al Qaeda requires first obtaining high-level government approval, a senior official disclosed to Congress on Wednesday. Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said in each case a decision to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen must get special permission. . . .

He also said there are criteria that must be met to authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen that include "whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved."

Although Blair emphasized that it requires "special permission" before an American citizen can be placed on the assassination list, consider from whom that "permission" is obtained: the President, or someone else under his authority within the Executive Branch. There are no outside checks or limits at all on how these "factors" are weighed. In last week's post, I wrote about all the reasons why it's so dangerous -- as well as both legally and Consitutionally dubious -- to allow the President to kill American citizens not on an active battlefield during combat, but while they are sleeping, sitting with their families in their home, walking on the street, etc. That's basically giving the President the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens without any charges or trial. Who could possibly support that?

But even if you're someone who does want the President to have the power to order American citizens killed without a trial by decreeing that they are Terrorists (and it's worth remembering that if you advocate that power, it's going to be vested in all Presidents, not just the ones who are as Nice, Good, Kind-Hearted and Trustworthy as Barack Obama), shouldn't there at least be some judicial approval required? Do we really want the President to be able to make this decision unilaterally and without outside checks? Remember when many Democrats were horrified (or at least when they purported to be) at the idea that Bush was merely eavesdropping on American citizens without judicial approval? Shouldn't we be at least as concerned about the President's being able to assassinate Americans without judicial oversight? That seems much more Draconian to me.

It would be perverse in the extreme, but wouldn't it be preferable to at least require the President to demonstrate to a court that probable cause exists to warrant the assassination of an American citizen before the President should be allowed to order it? That would basically mean that courts would issue "assassination warrants" or "murder warrants" -- a repugnant idea given that they're tantamount to imposing the death sentence without a trial -- but isn't that minimal safeguard preferable to allowing the President unchecked authority to do it on his own, the very power he has now claimed for himself? And if the Fifth Amendment's explicit guarantee -- that one shall not be deprived of life without due process -- does not prohibit the U.S. Government from assassinating you without any process, what exactly does it prohibit? Noting Scott Brown's campaign to deny accused Terrorists access to lawyers and a real trial, Adam Serwer wrote:

This is the new normal for Republicans: You can be denied rights not through due process of law but merely based on the nature of the crime you are suspected of committing.

That's absolutely true, but that also perfectly describes this assassination program -- as well as a whole host of other now-Democratic policies, from indefinite detention to denial of civilian trials.

* * * * *

The severe dangers of vesting assassination powers in the President are so glaring that even GOP Rep. Pete Hoekstra is able to see them (at least he is now that there's a Democratic President). At yesterday's hearing, Hoekstra asked Adm. Blair about the threat that the President might order Americans killed due to their Constitutionally protected political speech rather than because they were actually engaged in Terrorism. This concern is not an abstract one. The current controversy has been triggered by the Obama administration's attempt to kill U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. But al-Awlaki has not been accused (let alone convicted) of trying to attack Americans. Instead, he's accused of being a so-called "radical cleric" who supports Al Qaeda and now provides "encouragement" to others to engage in attacks -- a charge al-Awlaki's family vehemently denies (al-Awlaki himself is in hiding due to fear that his own Government will assassinate him).

The question of where First Amendment-protected radical advocacy ends and criminality begins is exactly the sort of question with which courts have long grappled. In the 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed a criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who -- surrounded by hooded indivduals holding weapons -- gave a speech threatening "revengeance" against any government official who "continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race." The Court held that the First Amendment protects advocacy of violence and revolution, and that the State is barred from punishing citizens for the expression of such views. The Brandenburg Court pointed to a long history of precedent protecting the First Amendment rights of Communists to call for revolution -- even violent revolution -- inside the U.S., and explained that the Government can punish someone for violent actions but not for speech that merely advocates or justifies violence (emphasis added):

As we [395 U.S. 444, 448] said in Noto v. United States, 367 U.S. 290, 297 -298 (1961), "the mere abstract teaching . . . of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action." See also Herndon v. Lowry, 301 U.S. 242, 259 -261 (1937); Bond v. Floyd, 385 U.S. 116, 134 (1966). A statute which fails to draw this distinction impermissibly intrudes upon the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. It sweeps within its condemnation speech which our Constitution has immunized from governmental control.

From all appearances, al-Awlaki seems to believe that violence by Muslims against the U.S. is justified in retaliation for the violence the U.S. has long brought (and continues to bring) to the Muslim world. But as an American citizen, he has the absolute Constitutional right to express those views and not be punished for them (let alone killed) no matter where he is in the world; it's far from clear that he has transgressed the advocacy line into violent action. Obviously, there are those who justify such assassination powers on the ground that radical Islam is a grave threat, but that is what is always said to justify Constitutional abridgements (it was obviously said of Communists and war critics during World War I). Indeed, in light of episodes like the Timothy McVeigh bombing and the various attacks on abortion clinics, shouldn't those who want the President to be able to assassinate American "radical clerics" without a trial also support the President's targeting of Americans who advocate extremism or violence from a far right or extremist Christian perspective? What's the principle that allows one but not the other?

In response to these concerns, Admiral Blair said yesterday: "We don't target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans or has resulted in it." But the U.S. Government -- like all governments -- has a long history of viewing "free speech" as a violent threat or even Terrorism. That's why this is exactly the type of question that is typically -- and is intended to be -- resolved by courts, according the citizen due process, not by the President acting alone. That's especially true if the death penalty is to be imposed.

But Obama's presidential assassination policy completely short-circuits that process. It literally makes Barack Obama the judge, jury and executioner even of American citizens. Beyond its specific application, it is yet another step -- a rather major one -- towards abandoning our basic system of checks and balances in the name of Terrorism and War.

* * * * *

That last point is the most important one here. Atrios wrote the other day that a central prong in the Washington consensus is that "all it takes to nullify the constitution is to call someone a terraist." That's absolutely true, but a close corollary is that merely uttering the word "war" justifies the same thing. That's particularly dangerous given that, by all accounts, this is a so-called "war" that will not end for a generation, if ever. To justify the abridgment or even suspension of the Constitution on the ground of "war" is to advocate serious alterations to our Constitutional framework that are more or less permanent. Several points about that "war" excuse:

First, there's no "war exception" in the Constitution. Even with real wars -- i.e., those involving combat between opposing armies -- the Constitution actually continues to constrain what government officials can do, most stringently as it concerns U.S. citizens. Second, strictly speaking, we're not really "at war," as Congress has merely authorized the use of military force but has not formally or Constitutionally declared war.

Even the Bush administration conceded that this is a vital difference when it comes to legal rights. In 2006, the Bush DOJ insisted that the wartime provision of FISA -- allowing the Government to eavesdrop for up to 15 days without a warrant -- didn't apply because Congress only enacted an AUMF, not a declaration of war:

The Bush DOJ went on to explain that declarations of war trigger a whole variety of legal effects (such as terminating diplomatic relations and abrogating or suspending treaty obligations) which AUMFs do not trigger (see p. 27). To authorize military force is not to declare war. Finally, the U.S. is fighting numerous undeclared wars, including ones involving military action: given that our "War on Drugs" continues to rage, should the U.S. Government be able to target accused "drug kingpins" for assassination without a trial, the way we attempted to do in Afghanistan? After all, Terrorists blow up airplanes but Drug Kingpins kill our kids!!! The mindset that cheers for unlimited Presidential powers in the name of "war" invariably leads to exactly these sorts of expansions.

Far beyond the specific injustices of assassinating Americans without trials, the real significance, the real danger, is that we continue to be frightened into radically altering our system of government. In Slate yesterday, Dahlia Lithwick encapsulated this problem perfectly; her whole article should be read, but this excerpt is superb:

America has slid back again into its own special brand of terrorism-derangement syndrome. Each time this condition recurs, it presents with more acute and puzzling symptoms. . . .

Moreover, each time Republicans go to their terrorism crazy-place, they go just a little bit farther than they did the last time, so that things that made us feel safe last year make us feel vulnerable today. . . . In short, what was once tough on terror is now soft on terror. And each time the Republicans move their own crazy-place goal posts, the Obama administration moves right along with them. . . .

We're terrified when a terror attack happens, and we're also terrified when it's thwarted. We're terrified when we give terrorists trials, and we're terrified when we warehouse them at Guantanamo without trials. If a terrorist cooperates without being tortured we complain about how much more he would have cooperated if he hadn't been read his rights. No matter how tough we've been on terror, we will never feel safe enough to ask for fewer safeguards. . . .

But here's the paradox: It's not a terrorist's time bomb that's ticking. It's us. Since 9/11, we have become ever more willing to suspend basic protections and more contemptuous of American traditions and institutions. The failed Christmas bombing and its political aftermath have revealed that the terrorists have changed very little in the eight-plus years since the World Trade Center fell. What's changing -- what's slowly ticking its way down to zero -- is our own certainty that we can never be safe enough and our own confidence in the rule of law.

This descent has certainly not reversed itself -- it has not really even slowed -- with the election of a President who repeatedly vowed to reject this mentality. Just consider what Al Gore said in his truly excellent 2006 speech decrying the "Constitutional crisis" under the Bush presidency:

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution?

If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?

If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

Here we are, almost four years later with a new party in power, and the President's top intelligence official announces -- without any real controversy -- that the President claims the power to assassinate American citizens with no charges, no trials, no judicial oversight of any kind. The claimed power isn't "inherent" -- it's based on alleged Congressional approval -- but it's safeguard-free and due-process-free just the same. As Gore asked of less severe policies in 2006, if the President can do that, "then what can't he do?" As long as we stay petrified of the Terrorists and wholly submissive whenever the word "war" is uttered, the answer will continue to be: "nothing." We'll have Presidents now and then who are marginally more restrained than others -- as the current President is marginally more restrained than the prior one -- but what Lithwick calls our "willingness to suspend basic protections and become more contemptuous of American traditions and institutions" will continue unabated.

Posted February 10, 2010 by Paul Craig Roberts

The U.S. is Now a Police State

Americans have been losing the protection of law for years. In the 21st century the loss of legal protections accelerated with the Bush administration's "war on terror," which continues under the Obama administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and U.S. civil liberties.

The Bush regime was determined to vitiate habeas corpus in order to hold people indefinitely without bringing charges. The regime had acquired hundreds of prisoners by paying a bounty for "terrorists." Afghan warlords and thugs responded to the financial incentive by grabbing unprotected people and selling them to the Americans.

The Bush regime needed to hold the prisoners without charges because it had no evidence against the people and did not want to admit that the U.S. government had stupidly paid warlords and thugs to kidnap innocent people. In addition, the Bush regime needed "terrorists" prisoners in order to prove that there was a terrorist threat.

As there was no evidence against the "detainees" (most have been released without charges after years of detention and abuse), the U.S. government needed a way around U.S. and international laws against torture in order that the government could produce evidence via self-incrimination. The Bush regime found inhumane and totalitarian-minded lawyers and put them to work at the U.S. Department of Justice (sic) to invent arguments that the Bush regime did not need to obey the law.

The Bush regime created a new classification for its detainees that it used to justify denying legal protection and due process to the detainees. As the detainees were not U.S. citizens and were demonized by the regime as "the 760 most dangerous men on earth," there was little public outcry over the regime's unconstitutional and inhumane actions.

As our Founding Fathers and a long list of scholars warned, once civil liberties are breached, they are breached for all. Soon U.S. citizens were being held indefinitely in violation of their habeas corpus rights. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui an American citizen of Pakistani origin might have been the first.

Dr. Siddiqui, a scientist educated at MIT and Brandeis University, was seized in Pakistan for no known reason, sent to Afghanistan, and was held secretly for five years in the U.S. military's notorious Bagram prison in Afghanistan. Her three young children were with her at the time she was abducted, one an eight-month old baby. She has no idea what has become of her two youngest children. Her oldest child, 7 years old, was also incarcerated in Bagram and subjected to similar abuse and horrors.

Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related offense. A British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was being tortured, disclosed her presence. An embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while a captive, she grabbed a U.S. soldier's rifle and fired two shots attempting to shoot him. The charge apparently originated as a U.S. soldier's excuse for shooting Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach resulting in her near death.

On February 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted murder. The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no bullet holes. Just an accusation.

Wikipedia has this to say about the trial: "The trial took an unusual turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints taken from the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the U.S. interrogators, did not match hers."

An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for being a Muslim. This is the kind of "justice" that always results when the state hypes fear and demonizes a group.

The people who should have been on trial are the people who abducted her, disappeared her young children, shipped her across international borders, violated her civil liberties, tortured her apparently for the fun of it, raped her, and attempted to murder her with two gunshots to her stomach. Instead, the victim was put on trial and convicted.

This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state. And this victim is an American citizen.

Anyone can be next. Indeed, on February 3 Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was now "defined policy" that the U.S. government can murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government's judgment that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat.

This shows how far the police state has advanced. A presidential appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee of Congress that the executive branch has decided that it can murder American citizens abroad if it thinks they are a threat.

I can hear readers saying the government might as well kill Americans abroad as it kills them at home--Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Black Panthers.

Yes, the U.S. government has murdered its citizens, but Dennis Blair's "defined policy" is a bold new development. The government, of course, denies that it intended to kill the Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver's wife and child, or the Black Panthers. The government says that Waco was a terrible tragedy, an unintended result brought on by the Branch Davidians themselves. The government says that Ruby Ridge was Randy Weaver's fault for not appearing in court on a day that had been miscommunicated to him, The Black Panthers, the government says, were dangerous criminals who insisted on a shoot-out.

In no previous death of a U.S. citizen by the hands of the U.S. government has the government claimed the right to kill Americans without arrest, trial, and conviction of a capital crime.

In contrast, Dennis Blair has told the U.S. Congress that the executive branch has assumed the right to murder Americans who it deems a "threat."

What defines "threat"? Who will make the decision? What it means is that the government will murder whomever it chooses.

There is no more complete or compelling evidence of a police state than the government announcing that it will murder its own citizens if it views them as a "threat."

Ironic, isn't it, that "the war on terror" to make us safe ends in a police state with the government declaring the right to murder American citizens who it regards as a threat.

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Posted February 9, 2010 by Patrick J. Buchanan

Will Obama Play the War Card?

Republicans already counting the seats they will pick up this fall should keep in mind Obama has a big card yet to play.

Should the president declare he has gone the last mile for a negotiated end to Iran's nuclear program and impose the "crippling" sanctions he promised in 2008, America would be on an escalator to confrontation that could lead straight to war.

And should war come, that would be the end of GOP dreams of adding three-dozen seats in the House and half a dozen in the Senate.

Harry Reid is surely aware a U.S. clash with Iran, with him at the president's side, could assure his re-election. Last week, Reid whistled through the Senate, by voice vote, a bill to put us on that escalator.

Senate bill 2799 would punish any company exporting gasoline to Iran. Though swimming in oil, Iran has a limited refining capacity and must import 40 percent of the gas to operate its cars and trucks and heat its homes.

And cutting off a country's oil or gas is a proven path to war.

In 1941, the United States froze Japan's assets, denying her the funds to pay for the U.S. oil on which she relied, forcing Tokyo either to retreat from her empire or seize the only oil in reach, in the Dutch East Indies.

The only force able to interfere with a Japanese drive into the East Indies? The U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1967 threatened to close the Straits of Tiran between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba to ships going to the Israeli port of Elath. That would have cut off 95 percent of Israel's oil.

Israel response: a pre-emptive war that destroyed Egypt's air force and put Israeli troops at Sharm el-Sheikh on the Straits of Tiran.

Were Reid and colleagues seeking to strengthen Obama's negotiating hand?

The opposite is true. The Senate is trying to force Obama's hand, box him in, restrict his freedom of action, by making him impose sanctions that would cut off the negotiating track and put us on a track to war - a war to deny Iran weapons that the U.S. Intelligence community said in December 2007 Iran gave up trying to acquire in 2003.

Sound familiar?

Republican leader Mitch McConnell has made clear the Senate is seizing control of the Iran portfolio. "If the Obama administration will not take action against this regime, then Congress must."

U.S. interests would seem to dictate supporting those elements in Iran who wish to be rid of the regime and re-engage the West. But if that is our goal, the Senate bill, and a House version that passed 412 to 12, seem almost diabolically perverse.

For a cutoff in gas would hammer Iran's middle class. The Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia on their motorbikes would get all they need. Thus the leaders of the Green Movement who have stood up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah oppose sanctions that inflict suffering on their own people.

Cutting off gas to Iran would cause many deaths. And the families of the sick, the old, the weak, the women and the children who die are unlikely to feel gratitude toward those who killed them.

And despite the hysteria about Iran's imminent testing of a bomb, the U.S. intelligence community still has not changed its finding that Tehran is not seeking a bomb.

The low-enriched uranium at Natanz, enough for one test, has neither been moved nor enriched to weapons grade. Ahmadinejad this week offered to take the West's deal and trade it for fuel for its reactor. Iran's known nuclear facilities are under U.N. watch. The number of centrifuges operating at Natanz has fallen below 4,000. There is speculation they are breaking down or have been sabotaged.

And if Iran is hell-bent on a bomb, why has Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair not revised the 2007 finding and given us the hard evidence?

U.S. anti-missile ships are moving into the Gulf. Anti-missile batteries are being deployed on the Arab shore. Yet, Gen. David Petraeus warned yesterday that a strike on Iran could stir nationalist sentiment behind the regime.

Nevertheless, the war drums have again begun to beat.

Daniel Pipes in a National Review Online piece featured by the Jerusalem Post - "How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran" - urges Obama to make a "dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue" by ordering the U.S. military to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

Citing six polls, Pipes says Americans support an attack today and will "presumably rally around the flag" when the bombs fall.

Will Obama cynically yield to temptation, play the war card and make "conservatives swoon," in Pipes' phrase, to save himself and his party? We shall see.

Posted February 9, 2010 By Anand Gopal

Obama's Secret Prisons

One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town's bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost's dust-doused streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.

But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat, handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn't know when he would be freed.

Sometime in the last few years, Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan's rugged heartland began to lose faith in the American project. Many of them can point to the precise moment of this transformation, and it usually took place in the dead of the night, when most of the country was fast asleep. In the secretive U.S. detentions process, suspects are usually nabbed in the darkness and then sent to one of a number of detention areas on military bases, often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families.

This process has become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan than coalition airstrikes. The night raids and detentions, little known or understood outside of these Pashtun villages, are slowly turning Afghans against the very forces they greeted as liberators just a few years ago.

One Dark Night in November

It was the 19th of November 2009, at 3:15 am. A loud blast awoke the villagers of a leafy neighborhood outside Ghazni city, a town of ancient provenance in the country's south. A team of U.S. soldiers burst through the front gate of the home of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture. Qarar was in Kabul at the time, but his relatives were home, four of whom were sleeping in the family's one-room guesthouse. One of them, Hamidullah, who sold carrots at the local bazaar, ran towards the door of the guesthouse. He was immediately shot, but managed to crawl back inside, leaving a trail of blood behind him. Then Azim, a baker, darted towards his injured cousin. He, too, was shot and crumpled to the floor. The fallen men cried out to the two relatives remaining in the room, but they -- both children -- refused to move, glued to their beds in silent horror.

The foreign soldiers, most of them tattooed and bearded, then went on to the main compound. They threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates, and forced open closets. Finally, they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee. Rahman was responsible for converting Microsoft Windows from English to the local Pashto language so that government offices could use the software. He had spent time in Kuwait, and the Afghan translator accompanying the soldiers said they were acting on a tip that Rahman was a member of al-Qaeda.

They took the barefoot Rahman and a cousin of his to a helicopter some distance away and transported them to a small American base in a neighboring province for interrogation. After two days, U.S. forces released Rahman's cousin. But Rahman has not been seen or heard from since.

"We've called his phone, but it doesn't answer," says his cousin Qarar, the spokesman for the agriculture minister. Using his powerful connections, Qarar enlisted local police, parliamentarians, the governor, and even the agriculture minister himself in the search for his cousin, but they turned up nothing. Government officials who independently investigated the scene in the aftermath of the raid and corroborated the claims of the family also pressed for an answer as to why two of Qarar's family members were killed. American forces issued a statement saying that the dead were "enemy militants [that] demonstrated hostile intent."

Weeks after the raid, the family remains bitter. "Everyone in the area knew we were a family that worked for the government," Qarar says. "Rahman couldn't even leave the city because if the Taliban caught him in the countryside they would have killed him."

Beyond the question of Rahman's guilt or innocence, however, it's how he was taken that has left such a residue of hate and anger among his family. "Did they have to kill my cousins? Did they have to destroy our house?" Qarar asks. "They knew where Rahman worked. Couldn't they have at least tried to come with a warrant in the daytime? We would have forced Rahman to comply."

"I used to go on TV and argue that people should support this government and the foreigners," he adds. "But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so? I don't care if I get fired for saying it, but that's the truth."

The Dogs of War

Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one among a series of prisons on U.S. military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance. They are small holding areas, often just a clutch of cells divided by plywood, and are mainly used for prisoner interrogation.

In the early years of the war, these were but way stations for those en route to Bagram prison, a facility with a notorious reputation for abusive behavior. As a spotlight of international attention fell on Bagram in recent years, wardens there cleaned up their act and the mistreatment of prisoners began to shift to the little-noticed Field Detention Sites.

Of the 24 former detainees interviewed for this story, 17 claim to have been abused at or en route to these sites. Doctors, government officials, and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, a body tasked with investigating abuse claims, corroborate 12 of these claims.

One of these former detainees is Noor Agha Sher Khan, who used to be a police officer in Gardez, a mud-caked town in the eastern part of the country. According to Sher Khan, U.S. forces detained him in a night raid in 2003 and brought him to a Field Detention Site at a nearby U.S. base. "They interrogated me the whole night," he recalls, "but I had nothing to tell them." Sher Khan worked for a police commander whom U.S. forces had detained on suspicion of having ties to the insurgency. He had occasionally acted as a driver for this commander, which made him suspicious in American eyes.

The interrogators blindfolded him, taped his mouth shut, and chained him to the ceiling, he alleges. Occasionally they unleashed a dog, which repeatedly bit him. At one point, they removed the blindfold and forced him to kneel on a long wooden bar. "They tied my hands to a pulley [above] and pushed me back and forth as the bar rolled across my shins. I screamed and screamed." They then pushed him to the ground and forced him to swallow 12 bottles worth of water. "Two people held my mouth open and they poured water down my throat until my stomach was full and I became unconscious. It was as if someone had inflated me." he says. After he was roused from his torpor, he vomited the water uncontrollably.

This continued for a number of days; sometimes he was hung upside down from the ceiling, and other times blindfolded for extended periods. Eventually, he was sent on to Bagram where the torture ceased. Four months later, he was quietly released, with a letter of apology from U.S. authorities for wrongfully imprisoning him.

An investigation of Sher Khan's case by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and an independent doctor found that he had wounds consistent with the abusive treatment he alleges. U.S. forces have declined to comment on the specifics of his case, but a spokesman said that some soldiers involved in detentions in this part of the country had been given unspecified "administrative punishments." He added that "all detainees are treated humanely," except for isolated cases.

The Disappeared

Some of those taken to the Field Detention Sites never make it to Bagram, but instead are simply released after authorities deem them to be innocuous. Even then, some allege abuse. Such was the case with Hajji Ehsanullah, snatched one winter night in 2008 from his home in the southern province of Zabul. He was taken to a detention site in Khost Province, some 200 miles away. He returned home 13 days later, his skin scarred by dog bites and with memory difficulties that, according to his doctor, resulted from a blow to the head. U.S. forces had dropped him off at a gas station in Khost after three days of interrogation. It took him ten more days to find his way home.

Others taken to these sites never end up in Bagram for an entirely different reason. In the hardscrabble villages of the Pashtun south, where rumors grow more abundantly than the most bountiful crop, locals whisper tales of people who were captured and executed. Most have no evidence. But occasionally, a body turns up. Such was the case at a detention site on an American military base in Helmand province, where in 2003 a U.S. military coroner wrote in the autopsy report of a detainee who died in U.S. custody (later made available through the Freedom of Information Act): "Death caused by the multiple blunt force injuries to the lower torso and legs complicated by rhabdomyolysis (release of toxic byproducts into the system due to destruction of muscle). Manner of death is homicide."

In the dust-swept province of Khost one day this past December, U.S. forces launched a night raid on the village of Motai, killing six people and capturing nine, according to nearly a dozen local government authorities and witnesses. Two days later, the bodies of two of those detained -- plastic cuffs binding their hands -- were found more than a mile from the largest U.S. base in the area. A U.S. military spokesman denies any involvement in the deaths and declines to comment on the details of the raid. Local Afghan officials and tribal elders, however, steadfastly maintain that the two were killed while in U.S. custody. American authorities released four other villagers in subsequent days. The fate of the three remaining captives is unknown.

The matter might be cleared up if the U.S. military were less secretive about its detention process. But secrecy has been the order of the day. The nine Field Detention Sites are enveloped in a blanket of official secrecy, but at least the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations are aware of them. There may, however, be others whose existences on the scores of military bases that dot the country have not been disclosed. One example, according to former detainees, is the detention facility at Rish Khor, an Afghan army base that sits atop a mountain overlooking the capital, Kabul.

One night last year, U.S. forces raided Zaiwalat, a tiny village that fits snugly into the mountains of Wardak Province, a few dozen miles west of Kabul, and netted nine locals. They brought the captives to Rish Khor and interrogated them for three days. "They kept us in a container," recalls Rehmatullah Muhammad, one of the nine. "It was made of steel. We were handcuffed for three days continuously. We barely slept those days." The plain-clothed interrogators accused Rehmatullah and the others of giving food and shelter to the Taliban. The suspects were then sent on to Bagram and released after four months. (A number of former detainees said they were interrogated by plainclothed officials, but they did not know if these officials belonged to the military, the CIA, or private contractors.)

Afghan human rights campaigners worry that U.S. forces may be using secret detention sites like Rish Khor to carry out interrogations away from prying eyes. The U.S. military, however, denies even having knowledge of the facility.

The Black Jail

Much less secret is the final stop for most captives: the Bagram Internment Facility. These days ominously dubbed "Obama's Guantanamo," Bagram nonetheless offers the best conditions for captives during the entire detention process.

Its modern life as a prison began in 2002, when small numbers of detainees from throughout Asia were incarcerated there on the first leg of an odyssey that would eventually bring them to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the years since, however, it has become the main destination for those caught within Afghanistan as part of the growing war there. By 2009, the inmate population had swelled to more than 700. Housed in a windowless old Soviet hangar, the prison consists of two rows of serried cage-like cells bathed continuously in white light. Guards walk along a platform that runs across the mesh-tops of the pens, an easy position from which to supervise the prisoners below.

Regular, even infamous, abuse in the style of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison marked Bagram's early years. Abdullah Mujahed, for example, was apprehended in the village of Kar Marchi in the eastern province of Paktia in 2003. Mujahed was a Tajik militia commander who had led an armed uprising against the Taliban in their waning days, but U.S. forces accused him of having ties to the insurgency. "In Bagram, we were handcuffed, blindfolded, and had our feet chained for days," he recalls. "They didn't allow us to sleep at all for 13 days and nights." A guard would strike his legs every time he dozed off. Daily, he could hear the screams of tortured inmates and the unmistakable sound of shackles dragging across the floor.

Then, one day, a team of soldiers dragged him to an aircraft, but refused to tell him where he was going. Eventually he landed at another prison, where the air felt thick and wet. As he walked through the row of cages, inmates began to shout, "This is Guantanamo! You are in Guantanamo!" He would learn there that he was accused of leading the Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (which in reality was led by another person who had the same name and who died in 2006). The U.S. eventually released him and returned him to Afghanistan.

Former Bagram detainees allege that they were regularly beaten, subjected to blaring music 24 hours a day, prevented from sleeping, stripped naked, and forced to assume what interrogators term "stress positions." The nadir came in late 2002 when interrogators beat two inmates to death.

The U.S. Special Forces also run a second, secret prison somewhere on Bagram Air Base that the Red Cross still does not have access to. Used primarily for interrogations, it is so feared by prisoners that they have dubbed it the "Black Jail."

One day two years ago, U.S. forces came to get Noor Muhammad, outside of the town of Kajaki in the southern province of Helmand. Muhammad, a physician, was running a clinic that served all comers -- including the Taliban. The soldiers raided his clinic and his home, killing five people (including two patients) and detaining both his father and him. The next day, villagers found the handcuffed corpse of Muhammad's father, apparently dead from a gunshot.

The soldiers took Muhammad to the Black Jail. "It was a tiny, narrow corridor, with lots of cells on both sides and a big steel gate and bright lights. We didn't know when it was night and when it was day." He was held in a concrete, windowless room, in complete solitary confinement. Soldiers regularly dragged him by his neck, and refused him food and water. They accused him of providing medical care to the insurgents, to which he replied, "I am a doctor. It's my duty to provide care to every human being who comes to my clinic, whether they are Taliban or from the government."

Eventually, Muhammad was released, but he has since closed his clinic and left his home village. "I am scared of the Americans and the Taliban," he says. "I'm happy my father is dead, so he doesn't have to experience this hell."

Afraid of the Dark

Unlike the Black Jail, U.S. officials have, in the last two years, moved to reform the main prison at Bagram. Torture there has stopped, and American prison officials now boast that the typical inmate gains 15 pounds while in custody. Sometime in the early months of this year, officials plan to open a dazzling new prison -- that will eventually replace Bagram -- with huge, airy cells, the latest medical equipment, and rooms for vocational training. The Bagram prison itself will be handed over to the Afghans in the coming year, although the rest of the detention process will remain in U.S. hands.

But human rights advocates say that concerns about the detention process still remain. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that inmates at Guantanamo cannot be stripped of their right to habeas corpus, but stopped short of making the same argument for Bagram. (U.S. officials say that Bagram is in the midst of a war zone and therefore U.S. domestic civil rights legislation does not apply.) Unlike Guantanamo, inmates there do not have access to a lawyer. Most say they have no idea why they have been detained. Inmates do now appear before a review panel every six months, which is intended to reassess their detention, but their ability to ask questions about their situation is limited. "I was only allowed to answer yes or no and not explain anything at my hearing," says Rehmatullah Muhammad.

Nonetheless, the improvement in Bagram's conditions begs the question: Can the U.S. fight a cleaner war? This is what Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal promised this summer: fewer civilian casualties, fewer of the feared house raids, and a more transparent detention process.

The American troops that operate under NATO command have begun to enforce stricter rules of engagement: they may now officially hold detainees for only 96 hours before transferring them to the Afghan authorities or freeing them, and Afghan forces must take the lead in house searches. American soldiers, when questioned, bristle at these restrictions -- and have ways of circumventing them. "Sometimes we detain people, then, when the 96 hours are up, we transfer them to the Afghans," says one U.S. Marine, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They rough them up a bit for us and then send them back to us for another 96 hours. This keeps going until we get what we want."

A simpler way of dancing around the rules is to call in the U.S. Special Operations Forces -- the Navy SEALS, Green Berets, and others -- which are not under NATO command and so are not bound by the stricter rules of engagement. These elite troops are behind most of the night raids and detentions in the search for "high-value suspects." U.S. military officials say in interviews that the new restrictions have not affected the number of raids and detentions at all. The actual change, however, is more subtle: the detention process has shifted almost entirely to areas and actors that can best avoid public scrutiny: Special Operations Forces and small field prisons.

The shift signals a deeper reality of war, American soldiers say: you can't fight guerrillas without invasive raids and detentions, any more than you could fight them without bullets. Through the eyes of a U.S. soldier, Afghanistan is a scary place. The men are bearded and turbaned. They pray incessantly. In most of the country, women are barred from leaving the house. Many Afghans own a Kalashnikov. "You can't trust anyone," says Rodrigo Arias, a Marine based in the northeastern province of Kunar. "I've nearly been killed in ambushes but the villagers don't tell us anything. But they usually know something."

An officer who has worked in the Field Detention Sites says that it takes dozens of raids to turn up a useful suspect. "Sometimes you've got to bust down doors. Sometimes you've got to twist arms. You have to cast a wide net, but when you get the right person it makes all the difference."

For Arias, it's a matter of survival. "I want to go home in one piece. If that means rounding people up, then round them up." To question this, he says, is to question whether the war itself is worth fighting. "That's not my job. The people in Washington can figure that out."

If night raids and detentions are an unavoidable part of modern counterinsurgency warfare, then so is the resentment they breed. "We were all happy when the Americans first came. We thought they would bring peace and stability," says former detainee Rehmatullah. "But now most people in my village want them to leave." A year after Rehmatullah was released, his nephew was taken. Two months later, some other villagers were grabbed.

It has become a predictable pattern: Taliban forces ambush American convoys as they pass through the village, and then retreat into the thick fruit orchards that cover the area. The Americans then return at night to pick up suspects. In the last two years, 16 people have been taken and 10 killed in night raids in this single village of about 300, according to villagers. In the same period, they say, the insurgents killed one local and did not take anyone hostage.

The people of this village therefore have begun to fear the night raids more than the Taliban. There are now nights when Rehmatullah's children hear the distant thrum of a helicopter and rush into his room. He consoles them, but admits he needs solace himself. "I know I should be too old for it," he says, "but this war has made me afraid of the dark."

Anand Gopal has reported in Afghanistan for the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. His dispatches can be read at anandgopal.com. He is currently working on a book about the Afghan war. This piece appears in print in the latest issue of the Nation magazine. To catch him in an audio interview with TomDispatch's Timothy MacBain discussing how he got this story, click here.

Copyright 2010 Anand Gopal

Posted February 9, 2010 By German-foreign-Policy.com

The End of Sovereignty

The European Union has submitted to German demands, imposing unprecedented cuts in the Greek national budget, resulting in a large loss of jobs, cuts in wages and high increases in taxes. This was caused by Berlin's apprehension that Greece's budget deficit could lead to a serious crisis and burden the Euro. Business circles are even speculating about an end to the European monetary union. The Greek government must now report to Brussels every two - three months and show evidence it has made drastic cuts in its state expenditures. Berlin rejects financial aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that it often imposes on non-European countries. This aid would be linked to conditions on the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. The demand that Athens take drastic austerity measures does not stop Berlin from pressuring Greece to buy expensive warplanes. In Athens, the German foreign minister insisted, at the beginning of the week, that they acquire Eurofighter jets (made in Halbergmoos, Germany). Berlin's austerity dictate is very controversial. A Nobel Prize laureate in economics accuses the German government of "deficit fetishism" and predicts that the measures will peter out with no effect.

The Dictate

The European Union imposed unprecedented austerity measures on Greece's national budget. As the EU Commission announced in Brussels yesterday, by 2012, Athens must reduce its budgetary deficit from 12.7% of its gross domestic product (GDP) to 2.8%. The "Euro Stability Pact" adopted in 1997 at the insistence of Germany, provides for a maximum deficit of 3%. Several EU countries are in violation, including Germany, whose deficit could reach 6% this year. Greece will now become the first country to be forced to reduce its national budget. Its government must report to Brussels every two - three months with evidence that the dictated austerity measures are being applied. These include especially the scaling back of government employment, cutting wages and raising taxes - all excessively. The U.S.-based financial research company High Frequency Economics predicts a possible rise in Greece's jobless rate to 16%, from its current 9.3%.[1]

The Export Steamroller

In fact the Greek explosion in debts is due not only to the global economic crisis, but is also an expression of a continuous shift in economic relations. According to articles in the business press, there has been the development of "significant economic dichotomies" between the countries in the Euro Zone over the past few years. Whereas in the southern European countries, particularly in Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain - also designated as the "PIGS countries" - larger portions of corporate revenues have been spent on salary raises, Germany had been practicing a policy of rigorous wage depression to create advantages for its companies.[2] One commentary explains that because the German "army of wage labor accepts a low-level growth in wages, the export steamroller is again bowling over its European rivals."[3] Before the Euro was introduced, it had been possible to resist the deflation of domestic currency. But "in a common monetary realm there is no defense against sinking unit labor costs and advancements in productivity." This is why the current accounts of the "PIGS countries" have slipped "deep in the red."[4] Because Germany, with its export revenues, can still offset the lack of defense possibilities in other economic sectors, it is "the winner and beneficiary of the common monetary system."[5]

The Euro

But this is exactly why some experts judge the Euro to be endangered. The economic differences within the Euro zone countries foster divergence in their economic political interests. This not only leads to serious contradictions between Germany and France (german-foreign-policy.com reported [6]), but the entire monetary union "is at risk of becoming ungovernable and the Euro endangered" warns a monetary expert at the University of Bonn.[7] "A common monetary system cannot function, if the economic chasm between the countries forced into the system becomes too wide" writes the German business press,[8] while proposing that, to save the Euro, which is so beneficial to Germany, the "PIGS countries" should be ordered to make dramatic cuts in their government spending, as the EU Commission is now imposing on Greece. The current dictate of the EU Commission is, as a matter of fact, a submission to the demands of the German Bundesbank and chancellor, who had insisted on these sorts of measures back in December 2009.[9]

The Armament Industry

It is noteworthy that Berlin is opposing financial aid for Athens in spite of the dramatic austerity measures, while, at the same time, demanding that Greece buys expensive German armament. Deliberations for solving the Greek financial problems through credits from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were abruptly rejected by the German government. An IMF credit is linked to conditions and would entail restrictions on the work of the European Central Bank in Frankfort. This is something the German government usually expects from third countries but does not itself want to bear. At the same time, Berlin is pushing Athens to buy Eurofighters that are produced by an arms corporation with headquarters in Hallbergmoos (Bavaria). German efforts to sell the expensive fighter planes to customers abroad and increase the profits of the core European armament industry led to heavy controversy last year (german-foreign-policy.com reported [10]). During his visit to Athens, at the beginning of the week, the German foreign minister demanded that Greece opt for the Eurofighter in spite of its financial difficulties.[11]

Not only Greece

Business circles are warning that sanctions against Greece could serve as a precedent for similar measures against for example Portugal and Spain. "The peripheral countries of the Euro zone, such as Greece, Italy, Portugal or Spain, have large problems with budget deficits, but also with their competitiveness," a prominent economist recently declared. Indeed, Berlin's low wage policy affects not only Greece.[12] In the meantime Portugal was also forced to introduce austerity measures.

Fetishists

The laureate of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, is strongly criticizing the austerity dictate being imposed by Berlin. Berlin and Brussels' imposition of these measures, in complete disregard of the intentions of the democratically elected government in Athens, could - according to Stiglitz - considerably retard growth, reduce tax revenues and raise the budget deficit. The economist explains that similar programs have not worked in East Asia and threaten to also fail in Ireland. "There are some people in the EU who believe in deficit fetishism and get a certain comfort from talking tough," concludes Stiglitz, obviously alluding to the EU hegemonic power - Germany.[13]

[1] Greece's Austerity Sparks a Warning; The Wall Street Journal 02.02.2010
[2] Euroland abgebrannt; WirtschaftsWoche 18.01.2010
[3] Der wahre Teuro; WirtschaftsWoche 18.01.2010
[4] Euroland abgebrannt; WirtschaftsWoche 18.01.2010
[5] Der wahre Teuro; WirtschaftsWoche 18.01.2010
[6] see also Zweite Liga and In the Advantage
[7] Euroland abgebrannt; WirtschaftsWoche 18.01.2010
[8] Der wahre Teuro; WirtschaftsWoche 18.01.2010
[9] see also The End of Sovereignty
[10] see also Die Eurofighter-Mafia
[11] Westerwelle vertraut Griechenland; Deutsche Welle 02.02.2010
[12] EU übernimmt Kontrolle über Griechenlands Finanzen; Spiegel Online 03.02.2010
[13] Greece's Austerity Sparks a Warning; The Wall Street Journal 02.02.2010

Posted February 5, 2010 By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Fear Rules in the U.S.

The power of irrational fear in the US is extraordinary. It ranks up there with the Israel Lobby, the military/security complex, and the financial gangsters. Indeed, fear might be the most powerful force in America.

Americans are at ease with their country's aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, which has resulted in a million dead Muslim civilians and several million refugees, because the US government has filled Americans with fear of terrorists. "We have to kill them over there before they come over here."

Fearful of American citizens, the US government is building concentration camps, apparently all over the country. According to news reports, a $385 million US government contract was given by the Bush/Cheney Regime to Cheney's company, Halliburton, to build "detention centers" in the US. The corporate media never explained for whom the detention centers are intended.

Most Americans dismiss such reports. "It can't happen here." However, in northeastern Florida, not far from Tallahassee, I have seen what might be one of these camps. There is a building inside a huge open area fenced with razor wire. There is no one there and no signs. The facility appears new and unused and does not look like an abandoned prisoner work camp.

What is it for?

Who spent all that money for what?

There are Americans who are so terrified of their lives being taken by terrorists that they are hoping the US government will use nuclear weapons to destroy "the Muslim enemy." The justifications concocted for the use of nuclear bombs against Japanese civilian populations have had their effect. There are millions of Americans who wish "their" government would kill everyone that "their" government has demonized.

When I tell these people that they will die of old age without ever seeing a terrorist, they think I am insane. Don't I know that terrorists are everywhere in America? That's why we have airport security and homeland security. That's why the government is justified in breaking the law to spy on citizens without warrants. That's why the government is justified to torture people in violation of US law and the Geneva Conventions. If we don't torture them, American cities will go up in mushroom clouds. Dick Cheney tells us this every week.

Terrorists are everywhere. "They hate us for our freedom and democracy." When I tell America's alarmed citizens that the US has as many stolen elections as any country and that our civil liberties have been eroded by "the war on terror" they lump me into the terrorist category. They automatically conflate factual truth with anti-Americanism.

The same mentality prevails with regard to domestic crime. Most Americans, including, unfortunately, juries, assume that if the police make a case against a person and a prosecutor prosecutes it, the defendant is guilty. Most Americans are incapable of believing that police or a prosecutor would frame an innocent person for career or bureaucratic reasons or out of pure meanness.

Yet, it happens all the time. Indeed, it is routine.

Frame-ups are so routine that 96 per cent of the criminally accused will not risk a "jury of their peers," preferring to negotiate a plea bargain agreement with the prosecutor. The jury of their peers are a brainwashed lot, fearful of crime, which they have never experienced but hear about all the time. Criminals are everywhere, doing their evil deeds.

The US has a much higher percentage of its population in prison than "authoritarian" countries, such as China, a one-party state. An intelligent population might wonder how a "freedom and democracy" country could have incarceration rates far higher than a dictatorship, but Americans fail this test. The more people that are put in prison, the safer Americans feel.

Lawrence Stratton and I describe frame-up techniques in The Tyranny of Good Intentions. Police and prosecutors even frame the guilty, as it is easier than convicting them on the evidence.

One case that has been before us for years, but is resolutely neglected by the corporate media, whose function is to scare the people, is that of Troy Davis.

Troy Davis was convicted of killing a police officer. The only evidence connecting him to the crime is the testimony of "witnesses," the vast majority of whom have withdrawn their testimony. The witnesses say they testified falsely against Troy Davis because of police intimidation and coercion.

One would think that this would lead to a new hearing and trial. But not in America. The Republican judicial nazis have created the concept of "finality." Even if the evidence shows that a wrongfully convicted person is innocent, finality requires that we execute him. If the convicted person is executed, we can assume he was guilty, because America has a pure justice system and never punishes the innocent. Everyone in prison and everyone executed is guilty. Otherwise, they wouldn't be in prison or executed.

It is all very simple if you are an American. America is pure, but other countries, except for our allies, are barbaric.

The same goes for our wars. Everyone we kill, whether they are passengers on Serbian commuter trains or attending weddings, funerals, or children playing soccer in Iraq, is a terrorist, or we would not have killed them. So was the little girl who was raped by our terrorist-fighting troops and then murdered, brutally, along with her family.

America only kills terrorists. If we kill you, you are a terrorist.

Americans are the salt of the earth. They never do any wrong. Only those other people do. Not the Israelis, of course.

And police, prosecutors, and juries never make mistakes. Everyone accused is guilty.

Fear has made every American a suspect, eroded our rights, and compromised our humanity.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Posted January 25, 2010 By qbit

Ex-IBM Employee reveals TV Abandoned Analog Band to Make Room for RFID

According to a former 31-year IBM employee, the highly-publicized, mandatory switch from analog to digital television is mainly being done to free up analog frequencies and make room for scanners used to read implantable RFID microchips and track people and products throughout the world.

So while the American people, especially those in Texas and other busy border states, have been inundated lately with news reports advising them to hurry and get their expensive passports, "enhanced driver's licenses," passport cards and other "chipped" or otherwise trackable identification devices that they are being forced to own, this digital television/RFID connection has been hidden, according to Patrick Redmond.

Redmond, a Canadian, held a variety of jobs at IBM before retiring, including working in the company's Toronto lab from 1992 to 2007, then in sales support. He has given talks, written a book and produced a DVD on the aggressive, growing use of passive, semi-passive and active RFID chips (Radio Frequency Identification Devices) implanted in new clothing, in items such as Gillette Fusion blades, and in countless other products that become one's personal belongings. These RFID chips, many of which are as small, or smaller, than the tip of a sharp pencil, also are embedded in all new U.S. passports, some medical cards, a growing number of credit and debit cards and so on. More than two billion of them were sold in 2007.

Whether active, semi-passive or passive, these "transponder chips," as they're sometimes called, can be accessed or activated with "readers" that can pick up the unique signal given off by each chip and glean information from it on the identity and whereabouts of the product or person, depending on design and circumstances, as Redmond explained in a little-publicized lecture in Canada last year. AFP just obtained a DVD of his talk.

Noted "Spychips" expert, author and radio host Katherine Albrecht told AMERICAN FREE PRESS that while she's not totally sure whether there is a rock-solid RFID-DTV link, "The purpose of the switch [to digital] was to free up bandwidth. It's a pretty wide band, so freeing that up creates a huge swath of frequencies."

As is generally known, the active chips have an internal power source and antenna; these particular chips emit a constant signal. "This allows the tag to send signals back to the reader, so if I have a RFID chip on me and it has a battery, I can just send a signal to a reader wherever it is," Redmond stated in the recent lecture, given to the Catholic patriot group known as the Pilgrims of Saint Michael, which also is known for advocating social credit, a dramatic monetary reform plan to end the practice of national governments bringing money into existence by borrowing it, with interest, from private central banks. The group's publication The Michael Journal advocates having national governments create their own money interest-free. It also covers the RFID issue.

"The increased use of RFID chips is going to require the increased use of the UBF [UHF] spectrum," Redmond said, hitting on his essential point that TV is going digital for a much different reason than the average person assumes, "They are going to stop using the [UHF] and VHF frequencies in 2009. Everything is going to go digital (in the U.S.). Canada is going to do the same thing."

Explaining the unsettling crux of the matter, he continued: "The reason they are doing this is that the [UHF-VHF] analog frequencies are being used for the chips. They do not want to overload the chips with television signals, so the chips' signals are going to be taking those [analog] frequencies. They plan to sell the frequencies to private companies and other groups who will use them to monitor the chips."

Albrecht responded to that quote only by saying that it sounds plausible, since she knows some chips will indeed operate in the UHF-VHF ranges.

"Well over a million pets have been chipped," Redmond said, adding that all 31,000 police officers in London have in some manner been chipped as well, much to the consternation of some who want that morning donut without being tracked. London also can link a RFID chip in a public transportation pass with the customer's name. "Where is John Smith? Oh, he is on subway car 32," Redmond said.

He added that chips for following automobile drivers ? while the concept is being fought by several states in the U.S. which do not want nationalized, trackable driver's licenses (Real ID ) ? is apparently a slam dunk in Canada, where license plates have quietly been chipped. Such identification tags can contain work history, education, religion, ethnicity, reproductive history and much more.

Farm animals are increasingly being chipped; furthermore, "Some 800 hospitals in the U.S. are now chipping their patients; you can turn it down, but it's available," he said, adding: "Four hospitals in Puerto Rico have put them in the arms of Alzheimer's patients, and it only costs about $200 per person."

VeriChip, a major chip maker (the devices sometimes also are called Spychips) describes its product on its website: "About twice the length of a grain of rice, the device is typically implanted above the triceps area of an individual's right arm. Once scanned at the proper frequency, the VeriChip responds with a unique 16 digit number which could be then linked with information about the user held on a database for identity verification, medical records access and other uses. The insertion procedure is performed under local anesthetic in a physician's office and once inserted, is invisible to the naked eye. As an implanted device used for identification by a third party, it has generated controversy and debate."

The circles will keep widening, Redmond predicts. Chipping children "to be able to protect them," Redmond said, "is being promoted in the media." After that, he believes it will come to: chip the military, chip welfare cheats, chip criminals, chip workers who are goofing off, chip pensioners ? and then chip everyone else under whatever rationale is cited by government and highly-protected corporations that stand to make billions of dollars from this technology. Meanwhile, the concept is marketed by a corporate media that, far from being a watchdog of the surveillance state, is part of it, much like the media give free publicity to human vaccination programs without critical analysis on possible dangers and side effects of the vaccines.

"That's the first time I have heard of it," a Federal Communications Commission official claimed, when AFP asked him about the RFID-DTV issue on June 2. Preferring anonymity, he added: "I am not at all aware of that being a cause (of going to DTV)."

"Nigel Gilbert of the Royal Academy of Engineering said that by 2011 you should be able to go on Google and find out where someone is at anytime from chips on clothing, in cars, in cellphones and inside many people themselves," Redmond also said.

Posted January 18, 2010 By Scott Horton

The Guantánamo "Suicides": A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

1. "Asymmetrical Warfare"

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to "restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great." Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo Naval Base "shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order." Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners there are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama's young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously-and may even have continued-a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths "suicides." In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. "I believe this was not an act of desperation," he said, "but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners' families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners' deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report-a reconstruction of the events-was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell's eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

Al-Zahrani, according to the report, was discovered first, at 12:39 a.m., and taken by several Alpha Block guards to the camp's detention medical clinic. No doctors could be found there, nor the phone number for one, so a clinic staffer dialed 911. During this time, other guards discovered Al-Utaybi. Still others discovered Al-Salami a few minutes later. Although rigor mortis had already set in-indicating that the men had been dead for at least two hours-the NCIS report claims that an unnamed medical officer attempted to resuscitate one of the men, and, in attempting to pry open his jaw, broke his teeth.

The fact that at least two of the prisoners also had cloth masks affixed to their faces, presumably to prevent the expulsion of the rags from their mouths, went unremarked by the NCIS, as did the fact that standard operating procedure at Camp Delta required the Navy guards on duty after midnight to "conduct a visual search" of each cell and detainee every ten minutes. The report claimed that the prisoners had hung sheets or blankets to hide their activities and shaped more sheets and pillows to look like bodies sleeping in their beds, but it did not explain where they were able to acquire so much fabric beyond their tightly controlled allotment, or why the Navy guards would allow such an obvious and immediately observable deviation from permitted behavior. Nor did the report explain how the dead men managed to hang undetected for more than two hours or why the Navy guards on duty, having for whatever reason so grievously failed in their duties, were never disciplined.

A separate report, the result of an "informal investigation" initiated by Admiral Harris, found that standard operating procedures were violated that night but concluded that disciplinary action was not warranted because of the "generally permissive environment" of the cell block and the numerous "concessions" that had been made with regard to the prisoners' comfort, which "concessions" had resulted in a "general confusion by the guard and the JDG staff over many of the rules that applied to the guard force's handling of the detainees." According to Harris, even had standard operating procedures been followed, "it is possible that the detainees could have successfully committed suicide anyway."

This is the official story, adopted by NCIS and Guantánamo command and reiterated by the Justice Department in formal pleadings, by the Defense Department in briefings and press releases, and by the State Department. Now four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, including a decorated non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as sergeant of the guard the night of June 9?10, have furnished an account dramatically at odds with the NCIS report-a report for which they were neither interviewed nor approached.

All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners' deaths. Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper's Magazine that strongly suggests that the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths. The guards' accounts also reveal the existence of a previously unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred.

2. "Camp No"

The soldiers of the Maryland-based 629th Military Intelligence Battalion arrived at Guantánamo Naval Base in March 2006, assigned to provide security to Camp America, the sector of the base containing the five individual prison compounds that house the prisoners. Camp Delta was at the time the largest of these compounds, and within its walls were four smaller camps, numbered 1 through 4, which in turn were divided into cell blocks. Life at Camp America, as at all prisons, was and remains rigorously routinized for both prisoners and their jailers. Navy guards patrol the cell blocks and Army personnel control the exterior areas of the camp. All observed incidents must be logged. For the Army guards who man the towers and "sally ports" (access points), knowing who enters and leaves the camp, and exactly when, is the essence of their mission.

One of the new guards who arrived that March was Joe Hickman, then a sergeant. Hickman grew up in Baltimore and joined the Marines in 1983, at the age of nineteen. When I interviewed him in January at his home in Wisconsin, he told me he had been inspired to enlist by Ronald Reagan, "the greatest president we've ever had." He worked in a military intelligence unit and was eventually tapped for Reagan's Presidential Guard detail, an assignment reserved for model soldiers. When his four years were up, Hickman returned home, where he worked a series of security jobs-prison transport, executive protection, and eventually private investigations. After September 11 he decided to re-enlist, at thirty-seven, this time in the Army National Guard.

Hickman deployed to Guantánamo with his friend Specialist Tony Davila, who grew up outside Washington, D.C., and who had himself been a private investigator. When they arrived at Camp Delta, Davila told me, soldiers from the California National Guard unit they were relieving introduced him to some of the curiosities of the base. The most noteworthy of these was an unnamed and officially unacknowledged compound nestled out of sight between two plateaus about a mile north of Camp Delta, just outside Camp America's perimeter. One day, while on foot patrol, Hickman and Davila came across the compound. It looked like other camps within Camp America, Davila said, only it had no guard towers and it was surrounded with concertina wire. They saw no activity, but Hickman guessed the place could house as many as eighty prisoners. One part of the compound, he said, had the same appearance as the interrogation centers at other prison camps.

The compound was not visible from the main road, and the access road was chained off. The Guardsman who told Davila about the compound had said, "This place does not exist," and Hickman, who was frequently put in charge of security for all of Camp America, was not briefed about the site. Nevertheless, Davila said, other soldiers-many of whom were required to patrol the outside perimeter of Camp America-had seen the compound, and many speculated about its purpose. One theory was that it was being used by some of the non-uniformed government personnel who frequently showed up in the camps and were widely thought to be CIA agents.

A friend of Hickman's had nicknamed the compound "Camp No," the idea being that anyone who asked if it existed would be told, "No, it doesn't." He and Davila made a point of stopping by whenever they had the chance; once, Hickman said, he heard a "series of screams" from within the compound.

Hickman and his men also discovered that there were odd exceptions to their duties. Army guards were charged with searching and logging every vehicle that passed into and out of Camp Delta. "When John McCain came to the camp, he had to be logged in." However, Hickman was instructed to make no record whatsoever of the movements of one vehicle in particular-a white van, dubbed the "paddy wagon," that Navy guards used to transport heavily manacled prisoners, one at a time, into and out of Camp Delta. The van had no rear windows and contained a dog cage large enough to hold a single prisoner. Navy drivers, Hickman came to understand, would let the guards know they had a prisoner in the van by saying they were "delivering a pizza."

The paddy wagon was used to transport prisoners to medical facilities and to meetings with their lawyers. But as Hickman monitored the paddy wagon's movements from the guard tower at Camp Delta, he frequently saw it follow an unexpected route. When the van reached the first intersection, instead of heading right-toward the other camps or toward one of the buildings where prisoners could meet with their lawyers-it made a left. In that direction, past the perimeter checkpoint known as ACP Roosevelt, there were only two destinations. One was a beach where soldiers went to swim. The other was Camp No.

3. "Lit up"

The night the prisoners died, Hickman was on duty as sergeant of the guard for Camp America's exterior security force. When his twelve-hour shift began, at 6 p.m., he climbed the ladder to Tower 1, which stood twenty feet above Sally Port 1, the main entrance to Camp Delta. From there he had an excellent view of the camp, and much of the exterior perimeter as well. Later he would make his rounds.

Shortly after his shift began, Hickman noticed that someone had parked the paddy wagon near Camp 1, which houses Alpha Block. A moment later, two Navy guards emerged from Camp 1, escorting a prisoner. They put the prisoner into the back of the van and then left the camp through Sally Port 1, just below Hickman. He was under standing orders not to search the paddy wagon, so he just watched it as it headed east. He assumed the guards and their charge were bound for one of the other prison camps southeast of Camp Delta. But when the van reached the first intersection, instead of making a right, toward the other camps, it made the left, toward ACP Roosevelt and Camp No.

Twenty minutes later-about the amount of time needed for the trip to Camp No and back-the paddy wagon returned. This time Hickman paid closer attention. He couldn't see the Navy guards' faces, but from body size and uniform they appeared to be the same men.

The guards walked into Camp 1 and soon emerged with another prisoner. They departed Camp America, again in the direction of Camp No. Twenty minutes later, the van returned. Hickman, his curiosity piqued by the unusual flurry of activity and guessing that the guards might make another excursion, left Tower 1 and drove the three quarters of a mile to ACP Roosevelt to see exactly where the paddy wagon was headed. Shortly thereafter, the van passed through the checkpoint for the third time and then went another hundred yards, whereupon it turned toward Camp No, eliminating any question in Hickman's mind about where it was going. All three prisoners would have reached their destination before 8 p.m.

Hickman says he saw nothing more of note until about 11:30 p.m, when he had returned to his preferred vantage at Tower 1. As he watched, the paddy wagon returned to Camp Delta. This time, however, the Navy guards did not get out of the van to enter Camp 1. Instead, they backed the vehicle up to the entrance of the medical clinic, as if to unload something.

At approximately 11:45 p.m.-nearly an hour before the NCIS claims the first body was discovered-Army Specialist Christopher Penvose, preparing for a midnight shift in Tower 1, was approached by a senior Navy NCO. Penvose told me that the NCO-who, following standard operating procedures, wore no name tag-appeared to be extremely agitated. He instructed Penvose to go immediately to the Camp Delta chow hall, identify a female senior petty officer who would be dining there, and relay to her a specific code word. Penvose did as he was instructed. The officer leapt up from her seat and immediately ran out of the chow hall.

Another thirty minutes passed. Then, as Hickman and Penvose both recall, Camp Delta suddenly "lit up"-stadium-style flood lights were turned on, and the camp became the scene of frenzied activity, filling with personnel in and out of uniform. Hickman headed to the clinic, which appeared to be the center of activity, to learn the reason for the commotion. He asked a distraught medical corpsman what had happened. She said three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic. Hickman recalled her saying that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised. Davila told me he spoke to Navy guards who said the men had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.

Hickman was concerned that such a serious incident could have occurred in Camp 1 on his watch. He asked his tower guards what they had seen. Penvose, from his position at Tower 1, had an unobstructed view of the walkway between Camp 1 and the medical clinic-the path by which any prisoners who died at Camp 1 would be delivered to the clinic. Penvose told Hickman, and later confirmed to me, that he saw no prisoners being moved from Camp 1 to the clinic. In Tower 4 (it should be noted that Army and Navy guard-tower designations differ), another Army specialist, David Caroll, was forty-five yards from Alpha Block, the cell block within Camp 1 that had housed the three dead men. He also had an unobstructed view of the alleyway that connected the cell block itself to the clinic. He likewise reported to Hickman, and confirmed to me, that he had seen no prisoners transferred to the clinic that night, dead or alive.

4. "He Could Not Cry out"

The fate of a fourth prisoner, a forty-two-year-old Saudi Arabian named Shaker Aamer, may be related to that of the three prisoners who died on June 9. Aamer is married to a British woman and was in the process of becoming a British subject when he was captured in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in 2001. United States authorities insist that he carried a gun and served Osama bin Laden as an interpreter. Aamer denies this. At Guantánamo, Aamer's fluency in English soon allowed him to play an important role in camp politics. According to both Aamer's attorney and press accounts furnished by Army Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the Camp America commander, Aamer cooperated closely with Bumgarner in efforts to bring a 2005 hunger strike to an end. He persuaded several prisoners to break their strike for a while, but the settlement collapsed and soon afterward Aamer was sent to solitary confinement. Then, on the night the prisoners from Alpha Block died, Aamer says he himself was the victim of an act of striking brutality.

He described the events in detail to his lawyer, Zachary Katznelson, who was permitted to speak to him several weeks later. Katznelson recorded every detail of Aamer's account and filed an affidavit with the federal district court in Washington, setting it out:

On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.

The treatment Aamer describes is noteworthy because it produces excruciating pain without leaving lasting marks. Still, the fact that Aamer had his airway cut off and a mask put over his face "so he could not cry out" is alarming. This is the same technique that appears to have been used on the three deceased prisoners.

The United Kingdom has pressed aggressively for the return of British subjects and persons of interest. Every individual requested by the British has been turned over, with one exception: Shaker Aamer. In denying this request, U.S. authorities have cited unelaborated "security" concerns. There is no suggestion that the Americans intend to charge him before a military commission, or in a federal criminal court, and, indeed, they have no meaningful evidence linking him to any crime. American authorities may be concerned that Aamer, if released, could provide evidence against them in criminal investigations. This evidence would include what he experienced on June 9, 2006, and during his 2002 detention in Afghanistan at Bagram Airfield, where he was subjected to a procedure in which his head was smashed repeatedly against a wall. This torture technique, called "walling" in CIA documents, was expressly approved at a later date by the Department of Justice.

5. "You All Know"

By dawn, the news had circulated through Camp America that three prisoners had committed suicide by swallowing rags. Colonel Bumgarner called a meeting of the guards, and at 7:00 a.m. at least fifty soldiers and sailors gathered at Camp America's open-air theater.

Bumgarner was known as an eccentric commander. Hickman marveled, for instance, at the colonel's insistence that his staff line up and salute him, to music selections that included Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the reggae hit "Bad Boys," as he entered the command center. This morning, however, Hickman thought Bumgarner seemed unusually nervous and clipped.

According to independent interviews with soldiers who witnessed the speech, Bumgarner told his audience that "you all know" three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death. This was a surprise to no one-even servicemen who had not worked the night before had heard about the rags. But then Bumgarner told those assembled that the media would report something different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored. The meeting lasted no more than twenty minutes. (Bumgarner has not responded to requests for comment.)

That evening, Bumgarner's boss, Admiral Harris, read a statement to reporters:

An alert, professional guard noticed something out of the ordinary in the cell of one of the detainees. The guard's response was swift and professional to secure the area and check on the status of the detainee. When it was apparent that the detainee had hung himself, the guard force and medical teams reacted quickly to attempt to save the detainee's life. The detainee was unresponsive and not breathing. [The] guard force began to check on the health and welfare of other detainees. Two detainees in their cells had also hung themselves.

After praising the guards and the medics, Harris-in a notable departure from traditional military decorum-launched his attack on the men who had died on his watch. "They have no regard for human life," Harris said, "neither ours nor their own." A Pentagon press release issued soon after described the dead men, who had been accused of no crime, as Al Qaeda or Taliban operatives. Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Gordon, the Pentagon's chief press officer, went still further, telling the Guardian's David Rose, "These guys were fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg." The Pentagon was not the only U.S. government agency to participate in the assault. Colleen Graffy, a deputy assistant secretary of state, told the BBC that "taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good P.R. move."

The same day the three prisoners died, Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly completed a reporting trip to the naval base, where, according to his account on The O'Reilly Factor, the Joint Army Navy Task Force "granted the Factor near total access to the prison." Although the Pentagon began turning away reporters after news of the deaths had emerged, two reporters from the Charlotte Observer, Michael Gordon and photographer Todd Sumlin, had arrived that morning to work on a profile of Bumgarner, and the colonel invited them to shadow him as he dealt with the crisis. A Pentagon spokesman later told the Observer it had been expecting a "puff piece," which is why, according to the Observer, "Bumgarner and his superiors on the base" had given them permission to remain.

Bumgarner quickly returned to his theatrical ways. As Gordon reported in the June 13, 2006, issue of the Observer, the colonel seemed to enjoy putting on a show. "Right now, we are at ground zero," Bumgarner told his officer staff during a June 12 meeting. Referring to the naval base's prisoners, he said, "There is not a trustworthy son of a bitch in the entire bunch." In the same article, Gordon also noted what he had learned about the deaths. The suicides had occurred "in three cells on the same block," he reported. The prisoners had "hanged themselves with strips of knotted cloth taken from clothing and sheets," after shaping their pillows and blankets to look like sleeping bodies. "And Bumgarner said," Gordon reported, "each had a ball of cloth in their mouth either for choking or muffling their voices."

Something about Bumgarner's Observer interview seemed to have set off an alarm far up the chain of command. No sooner was Gordon's story in print than Bumgarner was called to Admiral Harris's office. As Bumgarner would tell Gordon in a follow-up profile three months later, Harris was holding up a copy of the Observer: "This," said the admiral to Bumgarner, "could get me relieved." (Harris did not respond to requests for comment.) That same day, an investigation was launched to determine whether classified information had been leaked from Guantánamo. Bumgarner was suspended.

Less than a week after the appearance of the Observer stories, Davila and Hickman each heard separately from friends in the Navy and in the military police that FBI agents had raided the colonel's quarters. The MPs understood from their FBI contacts that there was concern over the possibility that Bumgarner had taken home some classified materials and was planning to share them with the media or to use them in writing a book.

On June 27, two weeks later, Gordon's Observer colleague Scott Dodd reported: "A brigadier general determined that ?unclassified sensitive information' was revealed to the public in the days after the June 10 suicides." Harris, according to the article, had already ordered "appropriate administrative action." Bumgarner soon left Guantánamo for a new post in Missouri. He now serves as an ROTC instructor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Bumgarner's comments appear to be at odds with the official Pentagon narrative on only one point: that the deaths had involved cloth being stuffed into the prisoners' mouths. The involvement of the FBI suggested that more was at issue.

6. "An Unmistakable Message"

On June 10, NCIS investigators began interviewing the Navy guards in charge of Alpha Block, but after the Pentagon committed itself to the suicide narrative, they appear to have stopped. On June 14, the interviews resumed, and the NCIS informed at least six Navy guards that they were suspected of making false statements or failing to obey direct orders. No disciplinary action ever followed.

The investigators conducted interviews with guards, medics, prisoners, and officers. As the Seton Hall researchers note, however, nothing in the NCIS report suggests that the investigators secured or reviewed the duty roster, the prisoner-transfer book, the pass-on book, the records of phone and radio communications, or footage from the camera that continuously monitored activity in the hallways, all of which could have helped them authoritatively reconstruct the events of that evening.

The NCIS did, however, move swiftly to seize every piece of paper possessed by every single prisoner in Camp America, some 1,065 pounds of material, much of it privileged attorney-client correspondence. Several weeks later, authorities sought an after-the-fact justification. The Justice Department-bolstered by sworn statements from Admiral Harris and from Carol Kisthardt, the special agent in charge of the NCIS investigation-claimed in a U.S. district court that the seizure was appropriate because there had been a conspiracy among the prisoners to commit suicide. Justice further claimed that investigators had found suicide notes and argued that the attorney-client materials were being used to pass communications among the prisoners.

David Remes, a lawyer who opposed the Justice Department's efforts, explained the practical effect of the government's maneuvers. The seizure, he said, "sent an unmistakable message to the prisoners that they could not expect their communications with their lawyers to remain confidential. The Justice Department defended the massive breach of the attorney-client privilege on the account of the deaths on June 9 and the asserted need to investigate them."

If the "suicides" were a form of warfare between the prisoners and the Bush Administration, as Admiral Harris charged, it was the latter that quickly turned the war to its advantage.

7. "Yasser Couldn't Even Make a Sandwich!"

When I asked Talal Al-Zahrani what he thought had happened to his son, he was direct. "They snatched my seventeen-year-old son for a bounty payment," he said. "They took him to Guantánamo and held him prisoner for five years. They tortured him. Then they killed him and returned him to me in a box, cut up."

Al-Zahrani was a brigadier general in the Saudi police. He dismissed the Pentagon's claims, as well as the investigation that supported them. Yasser, he said, was a young man who loved to play soccer and didn't care for politics. The Pentagon claimed that Yasser's frontline battle experience came from his having been a cook in a Taliban camp. Al-Zahrani said that this was preposterous: "A cook? Yasser couldn't even make a sandwich!"

"Yasser wasn't guilty of anything." Al-Zahrani said. "He knew that. He firmly believed he would be heading home soon. Why would he commit suicide?" The evidence supports this argument. Hyperbolic U.S. government statements at the time of Yasser Al-Zahrani's death masked the fact that his case had been reviewed and that he was, in fact, on a list of prisoners to be sent home. I had shown Al-Zahrani the letter that the government says was Yasser's suicide note and asked him whether he recognized his son's handwriting. He had never seen the note before, he answered, and no U.S. official had ever asked him about it. After studying the note carefully, he said, "This is a forgery."

Also returned to Saudi Arabia was the body of Mani Al-Utaybi. Orphaned in youth, Mani grew up in his uncle's home in the small town of Dawadmi. I spoke to one of the many cousins who shared that home, Faris Al-Utaybi. Mani, said Faris, had gone to Baluchistan-a rural, tribal area that straddles Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan-to do humanitarian work, and someone there had sold him to the Americans for $5,000. He said that Mani was a peaceful man who would harm no one. Indeed, U.S. authorities had decided to release Al-Utaybi and return him to Saudi Arabia. When he died, he was just a few weeks shy of his transfer.

Salah Al-Salami was seized in March 2002, when Pakistani authorities raided a residence in Karachi believed to have been used as a safe house by Abu Zubaydah and took into custody all who were living there at the time. A Yemeni, Al-Salami had quit his job and moved to Pakistan with only $400 in his pocket. The U.S. suspicions against him rested almost entirely on the fact that he had taken lodgings, with other students, in a boarding house that terrorists might at one point have used. There was no direct evidence linking him either to Al Qaeda or to the Taliban. On August 22, 2008, the Washington Post quoted from a previously secret review of his case: "There is no credible information to suggest [Al-Salami] received terrorist related training or is a member of the Al Qaeda network." All that stood in the way of Al-Salami's release from Guantánamo were difficult diplomatic relations between the United States and Yemen.

8. "The Removal of the Neck Organs"

Military pathologists connected with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology arranged immediate autopsies of the three dead prisoners, without securing the permission of the men's families. The identities and findings of the pathologists remain shrouded in extraordinary secrecy, but the timing of the autopsies suggests that medical personnel stationed at Guantánamo may have undertaken the procedure without waiting for the arrival of an experienced medical examiner from the United States. Each of the heavily redacted autopsy reports states unequivocally that "the manner of death is suicide" and, more specifically, that the prisoner died of "hanging." Each of the reports describes ligatures that were found wrapped around the prisoner's neck, as well as circumferential dried abrasion furrows imprinted with the very fine weave pattern of the ligature fabric and forming an inverted "V" on the back of the head. This condition, the anonymous pathologists state, is consistent with that of a hanging victim.

The pathologists place the time of death "at least a couple of hours" before the bodies were discovered, which would be sometime before 10:30 p.m. on June 9. Additionally, the autopsy of Al-Salami states that his hyoid bone was broken, a phenomenon usually associated with manual strangulation, not hanging.

The report asserts that the hyoid was broken "during the removal of the neck organs." An odd admission, given that these are the very body parts-the larynx, the hyoid bone, and the thyroid cartilage-that would have been essential to determining whether death occurred from hanging, from strangulation, or from choking. These parts remained missing when the men's families finally received their bodies.

All the families requested independent autopsies. The Saudi prisoners were examined by Saeed Al-Ghamdy, a pathologist based in Saudi Arabia. Al-Salami, from Yemen, was inspected by Patrice Mangin, a pathologist based in Switzerland. Both pathologists noted the removal of the structure that would have been the natural focus of the autopsy: the throat. Both pathologists contacted the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, requesting the missing body parts and more information about the previous autopsies. The institute did not respond to their requests or queries. (It also did not respond to a series of calls I placed requesting information and comment.)

When Al-Zahrani viewed his son's corpse, he saw evidence of a homicide. "There was a major blow to the head on the right side," he said. "There was evidence of torture on the upper torso, and on the palms of his hand. There were needle marks on his right arm and on his left arm." None of these details are noted in the U.S. autopsy report. "I am a law enforcement professional," Al-Zahrani said. "I know what to look for when examining a body."

Mangin, for his part, expressed particular concern about Al-Salami's mouth and throat, where he saw "a blunt trauma carried out against the oral region." The U.S. autopsy report mentions an effort at resuscitation, but this, in Mangin's view, did not explain the severity of the injuries. He also noted that some of the marks on the neck were not those he would normally associate with hanging.

9. "I Know Some Things You Don't"

Sergeant Joe Hickman's tour of duty, which ended in March 2007, was distinguished: he was selected as Guantánamo's "NCO of the Quarter" and was given a commendation medal. When he returned to the United States, he was promoted to staff sergeant and worked in Maryland as an Army recruiter before settling eventually in Wisconsin. But he could not forget what he had seen at Guantánamo. When Barack Obama became president, Hickman decided to act. "I thought that with a new administration and new ideas I could actually come forward, " he said. "It was haunting me."

Hickman had seen a 2006 report from Seton Hall University Law School dealing with the deaths of the three prisoners, and he followed their subsequent work. After Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, he called Mark Denbeaux, the professor who had led the Seton Hall team. "I learned something from your report," he said, "but I know some things you don't."

Within two days, Hickman was in Newark, meeting with Denbeaux. Also at the meeting was Denbeaux's son and sometime co-editor Josh, a private attorney. Josh Denbeaux agreed to represent Hickman, who was concerned that he could go to prison if he disobeyed Colonel Bumgarner's order not to speak out, even if that order was itself illegal. Hickman did not want to speak to the press. On the other hand, he felt that "silence was just wrong."

The two lawyers quickly made arrangements for Hickman to speak instead with authorities in Washington, D.C. On February 2, they had meetings on Capitol Hill and with the Department of Justice. The meeting with Justice was an odd one. The father-and-son legal team were met by Rita Glavin, the acting head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division; John Morton, who was soon to become an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security; and Steven Fagell, counselor to the head of the Criminal Division. Fagell had been, along with the new attorney general, Eric Holder, a partner at the elite Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, and was widely viewed as "Holder's eyes" in the Criminal Division.

For more than an hour, the two lawyers described what Hickman had seen: the existence of Camp No, the transportation of the three prisoners, the van's arrival at the medical clinic, the lack of evidence that any bodies had ever been removed from Alpha Block, and so on. The officials listened intently and asked many questions. The Denbeauxes said they could provide a list of witnesses who would corroborate every aspect of their account. At the end of the meeting, Mark Denbeaux recalled, the officials specifically thanked the lawyers for not speaking to reporters first and for "doing it the right way."

Two days later, another Justice Department official, Teresa McHenry, head of the Criminal Division's Domestic Security Section, called Mark Denbeaux and said that she was heading up an investigation and wanted to meet directly with his client. She went to New Jersey to do so. Hickman then reviewed the basic facts and furnished McHenry with the promised list of corroborating witnesses and details on how they could be contacted.

The Denbeauxes did not hear from anyone at the Justice Department for at least two months. Then, in April, an FBI agent called to say she did not have the list of contacts. She asked if this document could be provided again. It was. Shortly thereafter, Fagell a Justice official [see update] and two FBI agents interviewed Davila, who had left the Army, in Columbia, South Carolina. Fagell asked Davila if he was prepared to travel to Guantánamo to identify the locations of various sites. He said he was. "It seemed like they were interested," Davila told me. "Then I never heard from them again."

Several more months passed, and Hickman and his lawyers became increasingly concerned that nothing was going to happen. On October 27, 2009, they resumed dealings with Congress that they had initiated on February 2 and then broken off at the Justice Department's request; they were also in contact with ABC News. Two days later, Teresa McHenry called Mark Denbeaux and asked whether he had gone to Congress and ABC News about the matter. "I said that I had," Denbeaux told me. He asked her, "Was there anything wrong with that?" McHenry then suggested that the investigation was finished. Denbeaux reminded her that she had yet to interview some of the corroborating witnesses. "There are a few small things to do," Denbeaux says McHenry answered, "then it will be finished."

Specialist Christopher Penvose told me that on October 30, the day following the conversation between Mark Denbeaux and Teresa McHenry, McHenry an official [see update] showed up at Penvose's home in south Baltimore with some FBI agents. She had a "few questions," she told him. Investigators working with her soon contacted two other witnesses.

On November 2, 2009, McHenry called Mark Denbeaux to tell him that the Justice Department's investigation was being closed. "It was a strange conversation," Denbeaux recalled. McHenry explained that "the gist of Sergeant Hickman's information could not be confirmed." But when Denbeaux asked what that "gist" actually was, McHenry declined to say. She just reiterated that Hickman's conclusions "appeared" to be unsupported. Denbeaux asked what conclusions exactly were unsupported. McHenry refused to say.

10. "They Accomplished Nothing"

One of the most intriguing aspects of this case concerns the use of Camp No. Under George W. Bush, the CIA created an archipelago of secret detention centers that spanned the globe, and authorities at these sites deployed an array of Justice Department?sanctioned torture techniques-including waterboarding, which often entails inserting cloth into the subject's mouth-on prisoners they deemed to be involved in terrorism. The presence of a black site at Guantánamo has long been a subject of speculation among lawyers and human-rights activists, and the experience of Sergeant Hickman and other Guantánamo guards compels us to ask whether the three prisoners who died on June 9 were being interrogated by the CIA, and whether their deaths resulted from the grueling techniques the Justice Department had approved for the agency's use-or from other tortures lacking that sanction.

Complicating these questions is the fact that Camp No might have been controlled by another authority, the Joint Special Operations Command, which Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had hoped to transform into a Pentagon version of the CIA. Under Rumsfeld's direction, JSOC began to take on many tasks traditionally handled by the CIA, including the housing and interrogation of prisoners at black sites around the world. The Pentagon recently acknowledged the existence of one such JSOC black site, located at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, and other suspected sites, such as Camp Nama in Baghdad, have been carefully documented by human-rights researchers.

In a Senate Armed Services Committee report on torture released last year, the sections about Guantánamo were significantly redacted. The position and circumstances of these deletions point to a significant JSOC interrogation program at the base. (It should be noted that Obama's order last year to close other secret detention camps was narrowly worded to apply only to the CIA.)

Regardless of whether Camp No belonged to the CIA or JSOC, the Justice Department has plenty of its own secrets to protect. The department would seem to have been involved in the cover-up from the first days, when FBI agents stormed Colonel Bumgarner's quarters. This was unusual for two reasons. When Pentagon officials engage in a leak investigation, they generally use military investigators. They rarely turn to the FBI, because they cannot control the actions of a civilian agency. Moreover, when the FBI does open an investigation, it nearly always does so with great discretion. The Bumgarner investigation was widely telegraphed, though, and seemed intended to send a message to the military personnel at Camp Delta: Talk about what happened at your own risk. All of which suggests it was not the Pentagon so much as the White House that hoped to suppress the truth.

In the weeks following the 2006 deaths, the Justice Department decided to use the suicide narrative as leverage against the Guantánamo prisoners and their troublesome lawyers, who were pressing the government to justify its long-term imprisonment of their clients. After the NCIS seized thousands of pages of privileged communications, the Justice Department went to court to defend the action. It argued that such steps were warranted by the extraordinary facts surrounding the June 9 "suicides." U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson gave the Justice Department a sympathetic hearing, and he ruled in its favor, but he also noted a curious aspect of the government's presentation: its "citations supporting the fact of the suicides" were all drawn from media accounts. Why had the Justice Department lawyers who argued the case gone to such lengths to avoid making any statement under oath about the suicides? Did they do so in order to deceive the court? If so, they could face disciplinary proceedings or disbarment.

The Justice Department also faces questions about its larger role in creating the circumstances that led to the use of so-called enhanced interrogation and restraint techniques at Guantánamo and elsewhere. In 2006, the use of a gagging restraint had already been connected to the death on January 9, 2004, of an Iraqi prisoner, Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Jameel, in the custody of the Army Special Forces. And the bodies of the three men who died at Guantánamo showed signs of torture, including hemorrhages, needle marks, and significant bruising. The removal of their throats made it difficult to determine whether they were already dead when their bodies were suspended by a noose. The Justice Department itself had been deeply involved in the process of approving and setting the conditions for the use of torture techniques, issuing a long series of memoranda that CIA agents and others could use to defend themselves against any subsequent criminal prosecution.

Teresa McHenry, the investigator charged with accounting for the deaths of the three men at Guantánamo, has firsthand knowledge of the Justice Department's role in auditing such techniques, having served at the Justice Department under Bush and having participated in the preparation of at least one of those memos. As a former war-crimes prosecutor, McHenry knows full well that government officials who attempt to cover up crimes perpetrated against prisoners in wartime face prosecution under the doctrine of command responsibility. (McHenry declined to clarify the role she played in drafting the memos.)

As retired Rear Admiral John Hutson, the former judge advocate general of the Navy, told me, "Filing false reports and making false statements is bad enough, but if a homicide occurs and officials up the chain of command attempt to cover it up, they face serious criminal liability. They may even be viewed as accessories after the fact in the original crime." With command authority comes command responsibility, he said. "If the heart of the military is obeying orders down the chain of command, then its soul is accountability up the chain. You can't demand the former without the latter."

The Justice Department thus faced a dilemma; it could do the politically convenient thing, which was to find no justification for a thorough investigation, leave the NCIS conclusions in place, and hope that the public and the news media would obey the Obama Administration's dictum to "look forward, not backward"; or it could pursue a course of action that would implicate the Bush Justice Department in a cover-up of possible homicides.

Nearly 200 men remain imprisoned at Guantánamo. In June 2009, six months after Barack Obama took office, one of them, a thirty-one-year-old Yemeni named Muhammed Abdallah Salih, was found dead in his cell. The exact circumstances of his death, like those of the deaths of the three men from Alpha Block, remain uncertain. Those charged with accounting for what happened-the prison command, the civilian and military investigative agencies, the Justice Department, and ultimately the attorney general himself-all face a choice between the rule of law and the expedience of political silence. Thus far, their choice has been unanimous.

Not everyone who is involved in this matter views it from a political perspective, of course. General Al-Zahrani grieves for his son, but at the end of a lengthy interview he paused and his thoughts turned elsewhere. "The truth is what matters," he said. "They practiced every form of torture on my son and on many others as well. What was the result? What facts did they find? They found nothing. They learned nothing. They accomplished nothing."

Posted January 25, 2010 By Nat Hentoff

George W. Obama: After his first year, Obama shows his true face

Before President Obama, it was grimly accurate to write, as I often did in the Voice, that George W. Bush came into the presidency with no discernible background in constitutional civil liberties or any acquaintance with the Constitution itself. Accordingly, he turned the "war on terror" over to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld-ardent believers that the Constitution presents grave obstacles in a time of global jihad.

But now, Bush's successor-who actually taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago-is continuing much of the Bush-Cheney parallel government and, in some cases, is going much further in disregarding our laws and the international treaties we've signed.

On January 22, 2009, the apostle of "change we can believe in" proclaimed: "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of my presidency." But four months into his first year in command, Obama instructed his attorney general, Eric Holder, to present in a case, Jewel v. National Security Agency, a claim of presidential "sovereign immunity" that not even Dick Cheney had the arrant chutzpah to propose.

Five customers of AT&T had tried to go to court and charge that the government's omnipresent spy, the NSA, had been given by AT&T private information from their phone bills and e-mails. In a first, the Obama administration countered-says Kevin Bankston of Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing these citizens stripped of their privacy-that "the U.S. can never be sued for spying that violated federal surveillance statutes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or the Wiretap Act."

It is one thing, as the Bush regime did, to spy on us without going to court for a warrant, but to maintain that the executive branch can never even be charged with wholly disregarding our rule of law is, as a number of lawyers said, "breathtaking."

On the other hand, to his credit, Obama's very first executive orders in January included the ending of the CIA "renditions"-kidnapping terrorism suspects off the streets in Europe and elsewhere and sending them for interrogation to countries known to torture prisoners. However, in August, the administration admitted that the CIA would continue to send such manacled suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation.

Why send them to a foreign prison if they're not going to be tortured to extract information for the CIA? Oh, the U.S. would get "guarantees" from these nations that the prisoners would not be tortured. That's the same old cozening song that Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush used to sing robotically.

President Obama also solemnly pledged to have "the most open administration in American history." Nonetheless, his Justice Department lawyers have already invoked "state secrets" to prevent cases brought by victims of the CIA renditions from being heard.

In February, in a lawsuit brought by five graduates of CIA "black sites" before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, one of the judges, visibly surprised at hearing the new "change" president invoking "state secrets," asked the government lawyer, Douglas Letter, "The change in administration has no bearing on this?"

The answer: "No, your honor." This demand for closing this case before it can be heard had, he said, been "thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration, [and] these are authorized positions."

Said the torture graduates' ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner: "Much is at stake in this case. If the CIA's overboard secrecy claims prevail, torture victims will be denied their say in court solely on the basis of an affidavit submitted by their torturers."

Barack Obama a torturer? Not exactly. In this particular case, the torture policy had been set by George W. Bush. President Obama is just agreeing with his predecessor. Does that make Obama complicit in these acts of torture? You decide.

What is clear, beyond a doubt-and not only in "rendition" cases, but in other Obama validations of what Dick Cheney called the necessary "dark side" of the previous administration-has been stated by Jameel Jaffer. Head of the ACLU's National Security Project, he is the co-author of the definitive evidence of the Bush-Cheney war crimes that Obama is shielding, Administration of Torture (Columbia University Press).

After the obedient Holder rang the "state secrets" closing bell in the San Francisco case, Jaffer described the link between the Bush and Obama presidencies: "The Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture, but the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity."

It's become an Obama trademark: reversing a vigorous position he had previously taken, as when he signed into law the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendments Act that, as a senator, he had vowed to filibuster as a protest against their destruction of the Fourth Amendment. And now he's done it again. His government is free to spy on us at will.

For another example of the many Obamas, the shifting president had supported the release of photographs of Bush-era soldier abuses of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York had approved the publication of these "intensive interrogations.") But Obama changed his mind, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates flat-out censored the photos. Not surprisingly, the Roberts Supreme Court agreed with Gates and Obama and overruled the Second Circuit.

In a December 5 editorial, The New York Times helped explain why Obama-who doesn't want to "look backward" at Bush cruelties-changed his mind: "The photos are of direct relevance to the ongoing national debate about accountability for the Bush-era abuses. No doubt their release would help drive home the cruelty of stress positions, mock executions, hooding, and other 'enhanced interrogation techniques' used against detainees and make it harder for officials to assert that improper conduct was aberrational than the predictable result of policies set at high levels."

Barack Obama may well go down in history as the President of Impunity for Bush, Cheney, and, in time, himself, for continuing the CIA "renditions."

But he will also be long remembered as the President of Permanent Detention. At the Supreme Court in 1987, in U.S. v. Salerno, Justice Thurgood Marshall, strenuously dissenting, warned: "Throughout the world today there are men, women, and children interned indefinitely, awaiting trials which may never come or which may be a mockery of the word, because their governments believe them to be 'dangerous.' Our Constitution . . . can shelter us forever against the dangers of such unchecked power."

Not forever. The Obama government is working to assure that its purchase of the supermax prison, the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois, will be the permanent forced residence of certain Guantánamo terrorism suspects who can't be tried in our regular courtrooms because-gasp-they have been tortured, preventing the admission of "incriminating" statements they have made or-"state secrets" again!-a due process trial "would compromise sensitive sources and methods."

Like torture.

I increasingly wonder whose Constitution Barack Obama was teaching at the University of Chicago. China's? North Korea's? Robert Mugabe's? Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer, whose byline I never miss on the Internet, asks: "What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people?"

You may not be surprised to learn that my next book-to be published by Cato Institute, where I'm now a senior fellow-will be titled, Is This America?

I often disagree with ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero-though I'm almost always in synch with his lawyers in the field-but Romero is right about Obama creating "Gitmo North": "While the Obama administration inherited the Guantánamo debacle, this current move is its own affirmative adoption of those policies. It is unimaginable that the Obama administration is using the same justification as the Bush administration used to undercut centuries of legal jurisprudence and the principle of innocent until proved guilty and the right to confront one's accusers. . . . The Obama administration's announcement contradicts everything the president has said about the need for America to return to leading with its values. American values do not contemplate disregarding our Constitution and skirting the criminal justice system."

If Dick Cheney were a gentleman, instead of continuing to criticize this president, he would congratulate him on his faithful allegiance to many signature policies of the Bush-Cheney transformation of America.

But never let it be said that President Obama is neglecting the patriotic education of America's young. On December 13, Clint Boulton reported on eweek.com, "The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Berkeley's Samuelson Clinic have sued the Department of Justice and five other government organizations (including the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) for cloaking their policies for using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks to investigate citizens in criminal and other matters. [The plaintiffs] want to know exactly how, and what kinds of information, the feds are accessing from users' social networking profiles."

Maybe Dick Cheney can ask Barack to confirm him as a friend on Facebook.

Charlie Savage, the Times ace reporter of constitutional violations, chillingly shows how Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin got to the core of the consequences of our "yes, we can" president by predicting that "Mr. Obama's ratifications of the basic outlines of the surveillance and detention policies he inherited would reverberate for generations. By bestowing bipartisan acceptance on them," Mr. Balkin said, "Mr. Obama is consolidating them as entrenched features of government."

Do Congressional Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi give a damn about this historic legacy of the Obama administration that they cluelessly help to nurture by providing lockstep Democratic majorities for?

Do you give a damn?

Posted January 14, 2010 By Stephen Zunes

Yemen: Latest U.S. Battleground

The United States may be on the verge of involvement in yet another counterinsurgency war which, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, may make a bad situation even worse. The attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight by a Nigerian apparently planned in Yemen, the alleged ties between the perpetrator of the Ft. Hood massacre to a radical Yemeni cleric, and an ongoing U.S.-backed Yemeni military offensive against al-Qaeda have all focused U.S. attention on that country.

Yemen has almost as large a population as Saudi Arabia, yet lacks much in the way of natural resources. What little oil they have is rapidly being depleted. Indeed, it's one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per-capita income of less than $600 per year. More than 40 percent of the population is unemployed and the economic situation has worsened for most Yemenis, as a result of a U.S.-backed structural adjustment program imposed by the International Monetary Fund.

The county is desperate for assistance in sustainable economic development. The vast majority of U.S. aid, however, has been military. The limited economic assistance made available has been of dubious effectiveness and has largely gone through corrupt government channels.

Al-Qaeda's Rise

The United States has long been concerned about the presence of al-Qaeda operatives within Yemen's porous borders, particularly since the recent unification of the Yemeni and Saudi branches of the terrorist network. Thousands of Yemenis participated in the U.S.-supported anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan during the 1980s, becoming radicalized by the experience and developing links with Osama bin Laden, a Saudi whose father comes from a Yemeni family. Various clan and tribal loyalties to bin Laden's family have led to some support within Yemen for the exiled al-Qaeda leader, even among those who do not necessarily support his reactionary interpretation of Islam or his terrorist tactics. Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have served as migrant laborers in neighboring Saudi Arabia. There, exposure to the hardline Wahhabi interpretation of Islam dominant in that country combined with widespread repression and discrimination has led to further radicalization.

In October 2000, al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the U.S. Navy ship Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors. This led to increased cooperation between U.S. and Yemeni military and intelligence, including a series of U.S. missile attacks against suspected al-Qaeda operatives.

Currently, hardcore al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen - many of whom are foreigners - probably number no more than 200. But they are joined by roughly 2,000 battle-hardened Yemeni militants who have served time in Iraq fighting U.S. occupation forces. The swelling of al-Qaeda's ranks by veterans of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Iraqi insurgency has led to the rise of a substantially larger and more extreme generation of fighters, who have ended the uneasy truce between Islamic militants and the Yemeni government.

Opponents of the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq correctly predicted that the inevitable insurgency would create a new generation of radical jihadists, comparable to the one that emerged following the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the Bush administration and its congressional supporters - including then-senators Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton - believed that a U.S. takeover of Iraq was more important than avoiding the risk of creating of a hotbed of anti-American terrorism. Ironically, President Obama is relying on Biden and Clinton - as well as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, another supporter of the U.S. invasion and occupation - to help us get out of this mess they helped create.

Not a Failed State

Yemen is one of the most complex societies in the world, and any kind of overreaction by the United States - particularly one that includes a strong military component - could be disastrous. Bringing in U.S. forces or increasing the number of U.S. missile strikes would likely strengthen the size and radicalization of extremist elements. Instead of recognizing the strong and longstanding Yemeni tradition of respecting tribal autonomy, U.S. officials appear to be misinterpreting this lack of central government control as evidence of a "failed state." The U.S. approach has been to impose central control by force, through a large-scale counterinsurgency strategy.

Such a military response could result in an ever-wider insurgency, however. Indeed, such overreach by the government is what largely prompted the Houthi rebellion in the northern part of the country, led by adherents of the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam. The United States has backed a brutal crackdown by Yemeni and Saudi forces in the Houthi region, largely accepting exaggerated claims of Iranian support for the rebellion. There is also a renewal of secessionist activity in the formerly independent south. These twin threats are largely responsible for the delay in the Yemeni government's response to the growing al-Qaeda presence in their country.

With the United States threatening more direct military intervention in Yemen to root out al-Qaeda, the Yemeni government's crackdown may be less a matter of hoping for something in return for its cooperation than a fear of what may happen if it does not. The Yemeni government is in a difficult bind, however. If it doesn't break up the terrorist cells, the likely U.S. military intervention would probably result in a greatly expanded armed resistance. If the government casts too wide a net, however, it risks tribal rebellion and other civil unrest for what will be seen as unjustifiable repression at the behest of a Western power. Either way, it would likely increase support for extremist elements, which both the U.S. and Yemeni governments want destroyed.

For this reason, most Western experts on Yemen agree that increased U.S. intervention carries serious risks. This would not only result in a widespread armed backlash within Yemen. Such military intervention by the United States in yet another Islamic country in the name of "anti-terrorism" would likely strengthen Islamist militants elsewhere as well.

Cold War Pawn

As with previous U.S. military interventions, most Americans have little understanding of the targeted country or its history.

Yemen was divided for most of the 20th century. South Yemen, which received its independence from Great Britain in 1967 after years of armed anti-colonial resistance, resulted from a merger between the British colony of Aden and the British protectorate of South Arabia. Declaring itself the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, it became the Arab world's only Marxist-Leninist state and developed close ties with the Soviet Union. As many as 300,000 South Yemenis fled to the north in the years following independence.

North Yemen, independent since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, became embroiled in a bloody civil war during the 1960s between Saudi-backed royalist forces and Egyptian-backed republican forces. The republican forces eventually triumphed, though political instability, military coups, assassinations, and periodic armed uprisings continued.

In both countries, ancient tribal and modern ideological divisions have made control of these disparate armed forces virtually impossible. Major segments of the national armies would periodically disintegrate, with soldiers bringing their weapons home with them. Lawlessness and chaos have been common for decades, with tribes regularly shifting loyalties in both their internal feuds and their alliances with their governments. Many tribes have been in a permanent state of war for years, and almost every male adolescent and adult routinely carries a rifle.

In 1979, in one of the more absurd episodes of the Cold War, a minor upsurge in fighting along the former border led to a major U.S. military mobilization in response to what the Carter administration called a Soviet-sponsored act of international aggression. In March of that year, South Yemeni forces, in support of some North Yemeni guerrillas, shelled some North Yemeni government positions. In response, Carter ordered the aircraft carrier Constellation and a flotilla of warships to the Arabian Sea as a show of force. Bypassing congressional approval, the administration rushed nearly $499 million worth of modern weaponry to North Yemen, including 64 M-60 tanks, 70 armored personnel carriers, and 12 F-5E aircraft. Included were an estimated 400 American advisers and 80 Taiwanese pilots for the sophisticated warplanes that no Yemeni knew how to fly.

This gross overreaction to a local conflict led to widespread international criticism. Indeed, the Soviets were apparently unaware of the border clashes and the fighting died down within a couple of weeks. Development groups were particularly critical of this U.S. attempt to send such expensive high-tech weaponry to a country with some of the highest rates of infant mortality, chronic disease, and illiteracy in the world.

The communist regime in South Yemen collapsed in the 1980s, when rival factions of the Politburo and Central Committee killed each other and their supporters by the thousands. With the southern leadership decimated, the two countries merged in May 1990. The newly united country's democratic constitution gave Yemen one of the most genuinely representative governments in the region.

Later in 1990, when serving as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, Yemen voted against the U.S.-led effort to authorize the use of force against Iraq to drive its occupation forces from Kuwait. A U.S. representative was overheard declaring to the Yemeni ambassador, "That was the most expensive 'no' vote you ever cast." The United States immediately withdrew $70 million in foreign aid to Yemen while dramatically increasing aid to neighboring dictatorships that supported the U.S.-led war effort. Over the next several years, apparently upset with the dangerous precedent of a democratic Arab neighbor, the U.S.-backed regime in Saudi Arabia engaged in a series of attacks against Yemen along its disputed border.

Renewed Violence and Repression

In 1994, ideological and regional clan-based rivalries led to a brief civil war, with the south temporarily seceding and the government mobilizing some of the jihadist veterans of the Afghan war to fight the leftist rebellion.

After crushing the southern secessionists, the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh became increasingly authoritarian. U.S. support resumed and aid increased. Unlike most U.S. allies in the region, direct elections for the president and parliament have continued, but they have hardly been free or fair. Saleh officially received an unlikely 94 percent of the vote in the 1999 election. And in the most recently election, in 2006, government and police were openly pushing for Saleh's re-election amid widespread allegations of voter intimidation, ballot-rigging, vote-buying, and registration fraud. Just two days before the vote, Saleh announced the arrest on "terrorism" charges a campaign official of his leading opponent. Since that time, human rights abuses and political repression - including unprecedented attacks on independent media - have increased dramatically.

Obama was elected president as the candidate who promised change, including a shift away from the foreign policy that had led to such disastrous policies in Iraq and elsewhere. In Yemen, his administration appears to be pursuing the same short-sighted tactics as its predecessors: support of a repressive and autocratic regime, pursuit of military solutions to complex social and political conflicts, and reliance on failed counterinsurgency doctrines.

Al-Qaeda in Yemen represents a genuine threat. However, any military action should be Yemeni-led and targeted only at the most dangerous terrorist cells. We must also press the Yemeni government to become more democratic and less corrupt, in order to gain the support needed to suppress dangerous armed elements. In the long term, the United States should significantly increase desperately needed development aid for the poorest rural communities that have served as havens for radical Islamists. Such a strategy would be far more effective than drone attacks, arms transfers, and counterinsurgency.

Posted January 14, 2010 By Henry Samuel

US authorites divert Air France flight carrying 'no-fly' journalist to Mexico

UK Telegraph: Published: 11:35PM BST 24 Apr 2009

American authorities reportedly refused an Air France flight from Paris to Mexico entry into US airspace because a left-wing journalist writing a book on the CIA was on board.

Hernando Calvo Ospina, who works for Le Monde Diplomatique and has written on revolutionary movements in Cuba and Colombia , figured on the US authorities' "no-fly list".

Air France said the April 18 flight was forced to divert to the French Caribbean island of Martinique before continuing its journey and that it might ask the US Transportation Security Administration for compensation.

A spokesman for Mr Ospina's French publisher, Le Temps des Cerises, said: "Hernando, who was heading to Nicaragua to research a report, thus found out that he is on a 'no-fly list' that bans a number of people from flying to or even over the United States." Some 50,000 people are said to be on the list set up under George W. Bush, the former US president.

The publisher accused the Central Intelligence Agency of being behind Mr Ospina's blacklisting, pointing out that the journalist was currently researching a book about the spy agency. "It shows to what degree its paranoia (has reached)," it said.

Air France said that as the flight was not due to stop in a US airport, it had not sent US authorities the passenger manifest. However, it sent one to Mexico, which apparently sent the list on. The crew were informed of the ban as they approached US airspace.

Mr Ospina, who has written several books and contributes to Le Monde Diplomatique, the left-wing French political monthly, said that he was informed of the order to divert the flight by its co-pilot.

"I was speechless and my first reaction was to ask, 'Do you think I'm a terrorist?'," he said. "He replied 'no' and said that was why he told me about it, adding that it was extraordinary and the first time it had happened on an Air France plane."

Maurice Lemoine, editor in chief of Le Monde diplomatique, said: "Hernando Calvo Ospina is a Colombian political exile in France who writes a lot denouncing the government of (President) Alvaro Uribe and the role of the United States in Latin America, and as a journalist has had occasion to interview top members of the Farc (leftist guerillas in Colombia). That seems enough for him to be considered a terrorist."

Since the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, American officials have maintained a secret "terrorist watch list" of individuals forbidden to fly into or out of the US because they are thought to pose a security threat.

Critics claim that, instead of simply targeting known extremists who pose a potential danger in the "war against terror", it has been abusively extended to peaceful critics of US policy. People with similar names to suspected militants have also been listed.

Posted January 12, 2010 By Robert Verkaik

UK troops 'executed Iraqi grandmother'

Allegations that a 62-year-old Iraqi grandmother was tortured and executed by British soldiers after her family home was raided three years ago are being investigated by the Royal Military Police.

The Army's involvement in the death and abuse of Sabiha Khudur Talib is one of the most serious charges to be made against Britain during its six-year occupation of southern Iraq.

UK government ministers are to be given previously unseen police reports from a Basra crime unit which conclude that Mrs Talib's body was dumped on a roadside in a British body bag in November 2006. There was a bullet hole in her abdomen and her face had injuries consistent with torture, police reported.

An investigation led by Lieutenant Haidar Yashaa Salman from Al-Qibla police station of the Al-Hussein Police Directorate found: "At 11 o'clock, we were informed by the police operation room of the finding of a dumped body, so went to the site and found out that the body belonged to the victim Sabiha Khudur Talib, who was arrested by the British forces on 14-15 November 2006 ... I saw the body in a brown dish- dash [one-piece tunic], bare feet and hands with marks of handcuffs. I saw traces of torture on the body of the victim. I saw a non-penetrated bullet entry in the abdomen."

The Ministry of Defence confirmed that Sabiha Khudur Talib was shot by British soldiers from the Princess of Wales' Royal Regiment in 2006 but deny that she was murdered or tortured. The case is now being investigated by the Royal Military Police (RMP).

An MoD spokesman said that she had been caught in crossfire during the raid and died later in a military hospital.

But statements from her family, who were at home during the raid, claim that after the shooting they saw Mrs Talib being led away alive by British soldiers.

The MoD was unable to say yesterday which hospital she was treated at or to whom her body was handed.

The results of the Iraqi police investigation, seen by The Independent, were sent to Ghazi Dawoud Salman, an Iraqi judge, and to the Basra prosecution office.

Lawyers for Mrs Talib's family are preparing a legal action in the High Court in London against the MoD. They say the house was raided in the early hours of 15 November 2006, and that the family thought their home was being attacked by criminals. Mrs Talib's son, Karim Gatii Karim Al-Maliki, fired a Kalashnikov rifle into a ceiling to ward off intruders. But the family claim that the soldiers began firing into the house for 20 minutes, killing Mr Al-Maliki.

According to the eyewitness accounts, Mr Al-Maliki's brother and mother were arrested by the soldiers.

In his witness statement, Mr Al-Maliki's brother, Raad Gatii Karim Al-Maliki, 26, gives his account of the shooting: "My mother grabbed hold of me and pulled me into a corner where she cuddled me close. As the shots seemed to come from all angles into the room and we were both very exposed it was a miracle we were not shot. I did not dare move and recall that my mother began to pray."

He adds: "After what seemed like 20 minutes the firing stopped and British soldiers entered the house. One soldier pointed a laser beam at me and I immediately threw up my hands so he did not shoot me. A soldier grabbed me by my collar, lifted me up and threw me face down on to the floor. The soldiers had flashlights with them and at this point I saw my brother Karim sitting against the wall. He was still and I saw his blood all around. It was obvious he was dead."

Says Mr Al-Maliki: "My mother began shouting and pleading with the soldiers and she was calling out mine and Karim's names. Although the calls pained me at least I knew that she was alive."

Later he describes the soldiers leading his mother out of the house: "As I was kneeling on the ground I heard my mother shouting for me and Karim. I looked up and saw my mother being led roughly a couple of metres in front of me by four or five soldiers. I shouted to her. I could see my mother was trying to hold a blanket around her legs. I could see her body and I could see no signs of injury. I could not believe they were treating my old mother in this way."

Mr Al-Maliki says the soldiers led his mother to a military vehicle: "I was very worried about her, but could see she was at least uninjured. I then saw a soldier hit her on her back with a rifle butt. The soldiers pulled the blanket off her legs, wrapped this around her and shoved her into the vehicle. I had a clear view of this from where I was kneeling."

The next time the family saw Mrs Talib was when the police told them they had found a body on the Al-Zubayr highway.

Lawyers for the family last night demanded a full inquiry into what happened to Mrs Talib. Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, told The Independent: "The possibility that British forces in 2006 could have tortured and executed an innocent elderly woman should shock the nation. Such an allegation must be immediately independently investigated as a possible murder.

"How she came to be dumped in a British body bag by the side of a road having allegedly been abducted by British soldiers requires the most anxious scrutiny. No stone should be left unturned by the Government in an effort to establish the evidence in this case."

The Ministry of Defence said the allegations would be investigated. "A post-incident report from 1st Battalion the Princess of Wales' Royal Regiment describes an incident on 15 November 2006. Soldiers from the unit were conducting an arrest operation when an Iraqi national, Karim Gatii Karim, opened fire on them," said a spokesman. "One British soldier was wounded and Karim Gatii Karim was shot dead.

"Mr Karim's mother, Sabiha Khudur Talib, was regrettably wounded in the crossfire and, despite attempts to save her, she sadly died of her wounds. She was not tortured by British forces and her body was not dumped by the roadside, it was returned to Iraqi authorities. The Royal Military Police will be investigating allegations made by Mr Karim's brother and attempting to ascertain where Sabiha Khudur Talib was treated and by whom she was pronounced dead."

The case is one of 47 fresh claims of abuse and torture being investigated by the MoD.

Posted January 12, 2010 by The Times od London

Western troops accused of executing 10 Afghan civilians, including children

The Times December 31, 2009

American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead.

Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed.

Western military sources said that the dead were all part of an Afghan terrorist cell responsible for manufacturing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have claimed the lives of countless soldiers and civilians.

"This was a joint operation that was conducted against an IED cell that Afghan and US officials had been developing information against for some time," said a senior Nato insider. But he admitted that "the facts about what actually went down are in dispute".

The allegations of civilian casualties led to protests in Kabul and Jalalabad, with children as young as 10 chanting "Death to America" and demanding that foreign forces should leave Afghanistan at once.

President Karzai sent a team of investigators to Narang district, in eastern Kunar province, after reports of a massacre first surfaced on Monday.

"The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead," a statement on President Karzai's website said.

Assadullah Wafa, who led the investigation, said that US soldiers flew to Kunar from Kabul, suggesting that they were part of a special forces unit.

"At around 1 am, three nights ago, some American troops with helicopters left Kabul and landed around 2km away from the village," he told The Times. "The troops walked from the helicopters to the houses and, according to my investigation, they gathered all the students from two rooms, into one room, and opened fire." Mr Wafa, a former governor of Helmand province, met President Karzai to discuss his findings yesterday. "I spoke to the local headmaster," he said. "It's impossible they were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent. I condemn this attack."

In a telephone interview last night, the headmaster said that the victims were asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived. "Seven students were in one room," said Rahman Jan Ehsas. "A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.

"First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That's why his wife wasn't killed."

A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and five were handcuffed before they were shot. "I saw their school books covered in blood," he said.

The investigation found that eight of the victims were aged from 11 to 17. The guest was a shepherd boy, 12, called Samar Gul, the headmaster said. He said that six of the students were at high school and two were at primary school. He said that all the students were his nephews. In Jalalabad, protesters set alight a US flag and an effigy of President Obama after chanting "Death to Obama" and "Death to foreign forces". In Kabul, protesters held up banners showing photographs of dead children alongside placards demanding "Foreign troops leave Afghanistan" and "Stop killing us".

Hekmatullah, 10, a protester, said: "We're sick of Americans bombing us." Samiullah Miakhel, 60, a protester. said: "The Americans are just all the time killing civilians."

Nato's International Security Assistance Force said that there was "no direct evidence to substantiate" Mr Wafa's claims that unarmed civilians were harmed in what it described as a "joint coalition and Afghan security force" operation.

"As the joint assault force entered the village they came under fire from several buildings and in returning fire killed nine individuals," he said.

* Eight Americans were killed in an attack in eastern Afghanistan yesterday (Jerome Starkey writes). Nato's International Security Assistance Force said that the dead were not uniformed soldiers. Afghan sources said that they were civilians killed in a suicide attack on a compound in Khost province. The US Embassy in Kabul said: "Eight Americans have been killed in an attack on RC-East," referring to the military region of eastern Afghanistan that includes 14 provinces.

Posted January 8, 2010 by Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff, Newsweek

"Obama's Enforcer"

The president's patience with Iran has worn thin. That's where Stuart Levey-rhymes with 'heavy'-comes in.

Stuart Levey is the last person to put you in mind of Tony Soprano. Slight and good-natured, he pooh-poohs the notion that what he does for a living is a kind of genteel arm-twisting-intended to, um, persuade international banks and businesses it would be bad for them to be seen dealing with rogue states like Iran and North Korea. Yet Levey's effectiveness at these backroom tactics-his quiet visits to scores of global banks in recent years, mainly in an effort to choke off Iran's financial air supply-is the biggest reason why he was the most senior Bush administration official, after Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to be retained by Barack Obama. Though he's been mostly silent for the first year of Obama's presidency and his name is hardly known to the American public, Levey is feared and hated in Tehran, where "all the officials know how to pronounce his name right," says a European diplomat who follows Iranian affairs for his government. (It rhymes with "heavy.")

In fact, Levey's reappointment as undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence in February provoked bitter protests from Iran, whose finance minister at one point denounced him as "one of the U.S. government's Zionist deputies." Through back channels, Tehran passed word that it viewed the move as inconsistent with Obama's public pledge to pursue a friendlier approach, according to a source directly familiar with the protest who asked not to be identified because of diplomatic sensitivities. Levey himself was surprised to get the call telling him that the pro-engagement president wanted him to stay on-and he hesitated before accepting.

Until now, Obama has kept Levey in his back pocket. But the president has concluded that his offer of an "outstretched hand" to Iran will not, on its own, produce the results he needs. Even as he received the Nobel Peace Prize last week, Obama was fast approaching his informal year-end deadline for seeing "progress" in talks to shut down Iran's nuclear program. Tehran has by all accounts refused to cooperate. After a moment of promise in early October, when Iran pledged to ship much of its uranium abroad, Tehran has reneged on almost every tentative deal. Worse, since Iran admitted to building a secret uranium-enrichment facility near the religious city of Qum, it has brazenly pledged to build 10 more. "There is nothing happening," says one senior European diplomat who would not discuss the talks on the record. "Zero. Zero. Zero."

As a result, barring a last-minute concession by Iran, the president is now firmly committed to imposing tougher sanctions, says a senior administration official who would discuss internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. "It's important for Obama that the United States do exactly what it says it's going to do," the official told NEWSWEEK. "We said at the end of the year we would turn to sanctions" if diplomacy didn't produce results. That time has come, the official says. "Nobody is going to say to the United States, 'You're just like the Bush administration.' We tried the engagement route."

So Stuart Levey's moment on the world stage has arrived once again. The White House has approved an aggressive plan to squeeze Iran's economy, and Levey will be at the center of it, the senior administration official says. One key target will be the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the force that has largely taken control of the country and its economy. Since the election in June, the hated IRGC has become notorious for harassing and killing pro-democracy protesters. But the Guards have also bought a controlling interest in the Telecommunication Company of Iran-an $8 billion deal that potentially enables it to tighten its grip over the country's telephone and Internet systems. The IRGC has expanded its reach into Iran's financial and energy industries as well-both the subjects of an intensive investigation by Levey's office. "The IRGC is taking over larger swaths of the Iranian economy, pushing out other businesses and getting preferential treatment in terms of no-bid contracts-thereby being potentially resented by the rest of the population in Iran," Levey said in an interview.

While the Revolutionary Guards pretend to be the incorruptible shield of the Islamic Revolution, individual commanders are believed to be wealthy private investors, especially in neighboring countries like Dubai. "What will cause the Guards their demise is their corruption," an Iranian intelligence official told NEWSWEEK on condition that his name not be used. "For the past 20 years, they've been allowed by the Supreme Leader and consecutive governments to make money in a shadowy world." The West's new approach, Levey indicated, is to focus on the IRGC as "the face of repression," thereby supporting democracy activists in Iran without arousing Iranian national pride over their nuclear program.

The plan is for Levey's office to publicly identify "dozens" of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps front companies and then pressure suppliers and trading partners to cut off ties-or risk being sanctioned by the U.S. government, says the senior administration official. "There will be a big effort by Stuart to work with like-minded countries to target IRGC front companies," the official says. "We know which ones [the IRGC] are affiliated with and we know which ones they control." Levey says he wants to make the foreign firms understand that "if they're dealing with Iran it's nearly impossible to protect themselves from being entangled in that country's illicit conduct."

Legal authorities are already in place: U.N. Security Council resolutions currently identify top IRGC commanders as violators of international law; also, in the fall of 2007, the Bush administration designated the IRGC as a weapons proliferator and its super-elite Quds Force as a terrorist group. What's new is that U.S. and European officials have accumulated a lot more intelligence in recent years about the Guards' business activities-including which IRGC officials have investments and where.

Obama will have at least some international support for tougher measures. The European Union, which during the Bush years seemed reluctant to take aggressive steps, has more recently been demanding a shift in tactics. Last week the EU foreign ministers issued a joint statement calling for new sanctions in the U.N. Security Council. And Congress, in a rare display of bipartisanship, is soon expected to approve a Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act. The law will prohibit any foreign companies that help ship sensitive technologies or refined petroleum to Iran from doing business in the United States (though it may allow Obama to waive the sanctions at his discretion).

Foreign companies doing business in Iran are already coming under pressure. Among them is Reliance, the giant Indian energy and petrochemicals firm that for years has been supplying refined gasoline to Iran. In early 2008, under pressure from Levey, two giant French banks-BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole-cut off letters of credit for Reliance's Iran deals. Then late last year an Arizona State University law professor and former State Department nuclear-nonproliferation official, Orde Kittrie, discovered that Reliance had benefited from two U.S. Export-Import Bank loan guarantees totaling $900 million. Members of Congress-led by Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman of California and Republican Mark Kirk of Illinois-demanded that the Ex-Im Bank cut off U.S. taxpayer assistance. After consulting with its high-priced Washington lobbying firm, BGR, Reliance quietly passed the word to members of Congress: it was halting all sales to Iran and would insist that its trading partners do the same. "We are not selling gasoline to Iran either directly or through third parties," Reliance said in a statement to NEWSWEEK. "To this end, we include a destination-restriction clause in our contracts to prevent sales to Iran."

Another new point of Iranian vulnerability is debt-plagued Dubai. In recent decades, Iranian interests have plowed some $250 billion into Dubai, much of it believed to be from Revolutionary Guard-controlled front companies. Now neighboring Abu Dhabi, which is less friendly to Iranian interests (on the coffee table in his Treasury office, Levey has placed a pictorial promo from Abu Dhabi), may underwrite some of Dubai's defaulting loans, possibly in exchange for more economic control. If so, that could help to squeeze out the IRGC.

Levey's strategy dates back to 2006, when the United States was getting little support for multilateral U.N. sanctions. The Bush administration was scrambling for new ways to get tough with Iran and North Korea. Inspired in part by the way the U.S. government once pressured Swiss and German banks over Holocaust assets-such efforts "laid the groundwork," he says-Levey proposed to then-secretary of state Condi Rice that Washington mobilize the private sector around the world. "He thinks out of the box," says former boss John Cassidy, a white-collar criminal lawyer who hired Levey, a Harvard summa cum laude, straight out of law school.

So Levey began flying around the globe and-as he describes his job-visiting corporate offices to inform executives about "the risks of doing business with Iran" or North Korea. No threats are made; Levey's former deputy assistant secretary, Matthew Levitt, says most banks typically realize on their own they don't want to be tainted by such activities. Still, some foreign firms perceive an implied U.S. threat: if you bank with the Iranians, you may suddenly find it tough opening up that branch or doing mergers and acquisitions in the world's biggest economy. Banks are chronically nervous about the risks to their reputations, and Levey will also remind them they don't want newspapers like The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times to uncover that they've been doing business with rogues. Whereas traditional sanctions target entire countries, Levey's approach focuses on illicit and deceptive conduct by certain parties and is "more about disabling their ability to do business," he says. "Normal commerce becomes incredibly difficult. Banks won't write letters of credit. Insurance companies won't insure shipments. Shipping companies won't take cargo."

Even advocates of tougher sanctions acknowledge there are huge obstacles to making such an approach work. If global oil firms publicly forswear trading with Iran, for example, they may well continue to do so indirectly-by selling gasoline, for example, to an Arab Gulf firm that acts as a middleman and in turn sells to Tehran. "These guys have decades of doing end runs around sanctions," says Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative advocacy group that is promoting tougher measures. Representative Sherman concedes that none of the tougher sanctions being talked about by the Obama administration is likely to have any immediate impact on the Iranian regime. "We're asking them to give up their firstborn," he says, referring to Iran's nuclear program, "and we're threatening them with the possibility of paying an increase in their ATM fees."

Levey himself acknowledges that there is a debate inside the administration about how pressure tactics will affect Iran; even reformist candidates like defeated presidential contender Mir Hossain Mousavi came out recently against the proposed deal for Iran to ship uranium outside the country for processing. Another key question is whether Russia, China, and other major Iranian trading partners can be persuaded to help squeeze Iran. Moscow has shown more willingness to get tough, while China remains reluctant to disturb its energy trade. Still, Obama's yearlong campaign of engagement with Iran may pay dividends by creating a deeper consensus against Iran than has ever existed.

In the end, Levey's reemergence is further evidence that Obama's differences with his predecessor on national security are not, perhaps, as stark as they seem. Standing by the door of his spacious Treasury Department office-the same one he had under George W. Bush-Levey proudly points to two framed photographs he keeps on a table. In one, he is seen smiling with Bush, then-Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, and then-White House chief of staff Josh Bolten. In the photo propped up next to it, Levey is being introduced to President Obama as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Larry Summers look on grinning. The only thing the two pictures share in common is Stuart Levey.

Posted January 8, 2010 by Grant F. Smith

From Irgun to AIPAC: Israel Lobby's US Treasury Dept. Follies Hurt America

According to the Jerusalem Post, the US Department of Treasury's new Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) unit is going after the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines. TFI targeted the company and 18 affiliates for their alleged effort to "facilitate the transport of cargo for UN Designated proliferators.? TFI further charges it ?falsifies documents and uses deceptive schemes to shroud its involvement in illicit commerce." Later in the same article, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) trumpets this as yet another victory in its drive to confront the Islamic Republic of Iran: "AIPAC strongly supports these steps which are part of a coordinated effort by the United States and the international community to ratchet up the pressure on Iran and convince it to suspend its illicit nuclear activities. These steps send an important signal that America continues to lead the effort to confront and stop Iran's nuclear pursuit." But is America actually in the driver's seat of this destabilizing brinksmanship? History suggests that it is not.

AIPAC and its associated think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), were instrumental in lobbying the president for the creation of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence unit early in 2004. The Israel lobby also vetted Stuart Levey who President Bush approved to lead the new unit. TFI claims to be "safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats." However its actions?and more important, inactions?reveal it to be a sharp-edged tool forged principally to serve the Israel lobby.

TFI has taken no actions to undercut one nexus of money laundering in the Middle East unveiled in 2005 by Israeli prosecutor Talia Sasson and exposed by USA Today. Even mainstream print outlets such as Reuters continue to wonder aloud why US tax exemptions are offered for illegal overseas activities. Although Stuart Levey has made multiple official visits to Jerusalem to liaise with Israeli government officials, when formally asked under a Freedom of Information Act request to reveal how TFI was tackling the reported $50-$60 billion laundered from the US through Israel and into illegal West Bank settlements, TFI politely demurred. (PDF) TFI claims that Levey's US-taxpayer-funded missions to Israel must be kept secret from the American public in order to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act, which ironically is an anti-money-laundering law.[i] This is not to say that TFI is a black box to everyone. Invited guests and members of WINEP have received many intimate briefings from TFI officials and consultants?possibly more than the entire US Congress.

TFI's highly selective, largely secret pursuits should surprise no one. This is not the first time Israel lobbyists have bent an agency toward counterproductive foreign policy initiatives with the approval of a sitting president. During WWII, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. became infatuated with the efforts of Peter H. Bergson (aka Hillel Kook, born in Lithuania, 1915-2001) toward the formation of a "Jewish Army" in the Middle East. Bergson's "Committee for a Jewish Army" circulated an early plan to the US Congress calling for financing an army of 100,000 Jews in Palestine to fight Nazis and "fifth columnists" of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. In reality, Bergson was leading an American front organization for Menachem Begin's Irgun Z'vai Leumi organization. Irgun also lobbied Nazi Germany for a Jewish Army, as well as a formal alliance between 1940 and 1941 while Hitler appeared to have the upper hand in Europe.[ii]

Morgenthau strongly identified with Bergson's later rescue efforts to save Jews from Nazi barbarity by finding refugee havens in Western host countries. Morgenthau sought to remove displaced person policy from the jurisdiction of the US State Department by commissioning his own department assistants, Josiah Dubois, John Pehle, and Randolph Paul, to compile a report on rescue opportunities and failures, which he presented to President Roosevelt on January 16, 1944. It roundly castigated the State Department and recommended that Roosevelt "remove the hands of men who are indifferent, callous and perhaps even hostile." He also threatened to launch a public relations attack on the State Department as a bastion of anti-Semitism. It was a charge, he said, that "will require little more in the way of proof for this suspicion to explode into a nasty scandal."[iii]

Roosevelt, not wishing to face such a scandal in an election year, issued Executive Order 9417 establishing the War Refugee Board (WRB). He named Morgenthau, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and War Secretary Henry Stimson to head the board. John W. Pehle, who as assistant treasury secretary had spent much of his time working to produce evidence of State Department procrastination on refugee efforts, became director of the WRB. Josiah Dubois affirmed that the work of Bergson was effective in "generating an atmosphere conducive to its formation-we were seeking the same goals." Earlier, Pehl had ordered that Bergson be allowed to utilize State Department cables to communicate with Irgun leader Vladimir Jabotinsky and facilitate his movements to Turkey.[iv] The WRB was authorized to establish refugee absorption centers in neutral countries, a worthy effort that was unable to lead by example. By late July of 1944, the WRB was only able to secure infrastructure for 1,000 refugees at Fort Ontario in Lake Oswego, New York. This number was unimpressive to other countries being lobbied to absorb refugees, and the entire effort was largely a failure. But it was more than just a failure to rescue innocent victims of the Holocaust or a diversion of wartime assets?with no referendum on the matter or act of Congress, Morgenthau had allied a key US government agency to terrorists.

Before Bergson began receiving support from Treasury, Irgun had plenty of blood on its hands. Vladimir Jabotinsky was a major figure in the World Zionist Organization and put together a force of 5,000 soldiers as the organization's contribution to the British conquest of Palestine during WWI. In 1920, he organized the Haganah, the precursor to the Israeli Army, and held a position in the WZO World Executive for his leadership role. The Haganah worked jointly with the British to quell the uprising as their "settlement police." He resigned to build his own far-right-wing Zionist-Revisionist World Union in 1925, which opposed World Zionist Organization president Chaim Weizmann's vision. Jabotinsky's was to "revise" the British decision to separate Trans-Jordan from territory allotted to become the "Jewish National Home" after WWI in the Balfour declaration. Jabotinsky also wanted to "revise" the British decision to disband the Jewish legion. His views evolved over time toward supporting the absolute necessity of violent armed displacement of Arabs in Palestine. This was frankly encapsulated in his 1923 "Iron Wall" manifesto:

There can be no kind of discussion of a voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs-Any native people-view their country as their national home. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner-Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible-colonization can therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population?an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy toward the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

Jabotinsky established his paramilitary Betar youth group in 1923 in Palestine and other countries. Menachem Begin joined in 1929 in Poland, rising to head the national unit that became Betar's largest branch.

Arab Palestinians, sensing their own eventual displacement, had begun revolting against Jewish immigration in 1936. A Revisionist paramilitary split from the Haganah in 1931 and was placed under the command of Jabotinsky in December of 1936. Although they were originally committed to "self restraint," by November the Irgun forces were actively engaging in terrorism, including the use of milk-can bombs that would be famously deployed a decade later against the British in the King David Hotel attack. Early in September of 1936, 13 Arabs were killed, supposedly in retaliation for the death of three Jews. Several Irgunists were determined to act on their own, but the Irgun Command headed them off by organizing a wave of operations, beginning on November 14, that resulted in 10 dead and numerous wounded. The Irgun's campaign of attacks on purely civilian targets reached its high point in the summer of 1938. On July 6, a bomb in a milk can went off in the Arab market in Haifa, leaving 21 dead and 52 injured. On July 15, an electric mine in David Street in the old city of Jerusalem killed 10 and wounded 30. On July 25, another bomb in the Haifa market left 35 dead and 70 wounded. On July 26, a bomb in Jaffa's market killed 24 and injured 35. [v] Historian Paul Johnson claims that Israel owes its existence largely due to the timely deployment of such terrorist attacks.[vi] Still, in these days long predating the so-called "war on terror" the architect of many of these bloodbaths had no problem entering the US.

In America Irgun leader Jabotinsky roamed freely for a short time. On August 2, 1940, he was examined by a doctor who suspected that he had heart trouble. Jabotinsky then made his way to a Betar camp in Greene County in the Catskill Mountains, 130 miles from New York. After reviewing an honor guard, he collapsed and died. Although Irgun has long since left the building, AIPAC's men may now kill off the remaining international credibility of an already severely debilitated US Treasury Department.

Treasury gasped this week as it bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the tune of billions in committed taxpayer funds. International financial institutions holding US-mortgage-backed and Treasury securities forced the Treasury to intervene in order to avert a global financial catastrophe. Such sovereign economic interests are now returning to the forefront of international relations and displacing blind acquiescence to preemptive bellicosity. Looking back, it is painfully obvious that the United States should have accepted the comprehensive "Grand Bargain" tendered by Iranian moderates in 2003. Iran's $753-billion-dollar economy would be a highly productive trading partner for the United States?Iran's competitive advantages in energy are well matched with the US?s high-tech, engineering service and machinery exports. Instead, we have AIPAC continually disrupting trade flows against the broader American interest.

AIPAC has a history of directing US trade policy against the interests of American producers and workers. In 1984, the FBI found AIPAC in possession of purloined secret International Trade Commission documents that US government officials solicited from private industry in order to negotiate a favorable bilateral free trade agreement with Israel. AIPAC promptly used this stolen information against the American worker?the subsequent FTA has yielded a $63 billion net US trade deficit with Israel between 1989 and 2007.

The grinding march toward a pointless war with Iran, like Morgenthau's dalliances with the Irgun, is not really about America's own best interests. It's not that Stuart Levey doesn't know how Israeli extremism can endanger the United States. Levey's Fulbright-grant-funded undergraduate thesis was all about Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born rabbi who founded the Israeli group Kach. Kahane Chai (Kach) currently occupies slot number 20 on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. While the buttoned-down Levey is certainly not an extremist of Kahane's or Jabotinsky's violent mold, his AIPAC-sponsored financial warfare is clearly extreme. Levey and his supporters are threatening US trading partners, banks, multinational corporations, independent shippers, small trade related businesses and the international shipping system. The only beneficiary of the action is Israel?a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and longtime owner of its own nuclear weapons?an arsenal financed and created, in large part, by precisely the kinds of "deceptive schemes" and "illicit commerce" toward which TFI consciously turns a blind eye. In contrast, Iran signed the NPT, is under active International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring, and is not enriching uranium to levels sufficient for nuclear weapons production.

Like the rigged 1984 Free Trade Agreement, AIPAC's Treasury Department actions will create more hard times for American workers. As never before, America's economy could benefit from any expansion in export jobs boosted by new market access. Trade with Iran and the rest of the Middle East is based on real comparative advantages. US workers, many facing home foreclosures due to junk mortgages, will be the unknowing victims of the latest US Treasury gambit. Like the Morgenthau scheme, the Israel lobby's latest venture is likely to fail as the international system routes around the new trade impediments. The world largely ignored Morgenthau?s and the men from Irgun's attempts to "lead by example" to save displaced persons of Europe. Levey's far less worthy cause, fighting for Israeli regional nuclear hegemony through damaging trade edicts, may also be similarly ignored. Countries suffering from the fallout of their investments in US junk mortgages are unlikely to buy into more junk policies and junk wars crafted by the Israel lobby.

Grant F. Smith is the author of the new book, America's Defense Line: The Justice Department's Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government. He currently serves as director of research at the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington (IRmep), D.C.

Posted January 3, 2010 By Idaho Observer

The corporation prefers prison slave labor

The corporation prefers prison slave labor

"I know my rights!" many non-represented Americans have oft stated over the years when they believe government agents have overstepped their authority. "I know my client's rights!" say the attorneys of private corporations and the corporate state as the judge instructs the jury to enter a verdict of "guilty." One of the most alarming trends in America is the growth of the prison labor industry. On the surface it would seem that Americans are a nation of bad apples that keep filling our prisons up-if you were to accept government explanations for the steady increase of criminal convictions that result in prison sentences. But a closer look at the profit motive that drives every corporation shows that prisons are actively marketing their labor pools-the able bodies they manage to place behind bars.

compiled by The Idaho Observer

The first rule of investigation is "follow the money." This rule especially applies when investigating the activities of corporations because motivations other than money, such as emotions, may compel certain behaviors in people, corporations have only one motive: Profit.

Several researchers concur that the money trail with corporate government begins the moment an order, such as a traffic ticket, a bond or a sentence is entered into the system. At that moment, a dollar value is attached to that person based upon the speculative amount of money the individual represents in the system. A bond is written. That bond is then sold on the open market through brokerage firms such as Merrill Lynch-which reportedly has the contract to sell city, county, state and federal prisoner bonds.

According to Lynne Schmaltz in her article "Profiteering off the prisoners," a monetary value is placed on the alleged crime and then "factored the way banks factor their money."

Schmaltz used the figure of $4 million for a certain felony. The city/county/state/federal government from where the alleged crime originated then multiplies it by 10. The bond then goes out on the open market, with the prisoner's name and SSN attached to it, for $40 million. An investor may offer to pay a percentage of the $40 million with a promissory note to pay the full amount. When the promissory note reaches a bank, the bank multiplies the amount again by 200 or 300 percent and sells the note as a bank security.

Since the mid-90s, the nation has been on a prison and jail-building spree. Billions of dollars are flowing from county, state and federal coffers into jail and prison construction projects to meet the projected demand for beds so prison slave laborers can get needed rest for the next day of work.

California, for example, has built 21 new prisons in the last 20 years; 10 more are now under construction and five more are to be completed in the next decade.

"For those of you who wonder why the U.S. has more people in prison per capita than any other nation on earth, you'll begin to understand how we can have a weakening economy and still fund wars overseas. It's all based on prisoners," Schmaltz explained.

13th Amendment slave labor

It is no secret that major corporations hire impoverished third-world populations to make goods for importation into the U.S. It has also been exposed how China and other nations allow corporations to use prison laborers for production of goods intended for the global marketplace. A few years ago this was a point of frustration for American politicians who were "feeling the pain" of their constituent workers who were finding it impossible to maintain their standard of living and compete with third-world slave labor.

Times have changed. "Outsourcing" has become an accepted fact of contemporary economics and millions of both blue and white collar jobs are simply being performed by third-world laborers.

Prison labor offers domestic relief to corporations which prefer to keep the work here at home. Where regular, tax-paying American workers demand high wages, health benefits and unemployment insurance and have demonstrated a historic tendency to organize, unionize and go on strike, prisoners will either work for whatever wage they decide to pay them or they can sit in their cell.

UCLA sociology student Michael Schwartz recently observed that the use of prison labor in the U.S. is legal per the 13th Amendment. He appears to be correct. The 13th Amendment of the Constitution states, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States."

Big business

The U.S. has become the most imprisoned nation in world history with 2.2 million people serving at least one year in a state or federal institution. China, which boasts of having one of the world's most notoriously intolerant government, holds 500,000 fewer prisoners than the U.S. with four times the population.

The U.S. has also seen a three-fold increase in prison population since 1980.

This is big business.

The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is one of the fastest growing companies in America. It contracts with governments to run existing prisons like businesses and is also using public and private capital to build private prisons which are contracted to receive prisoners after conviction and sentencing. It even has a transport division to move prisoners from place to place.

CCA stock is traded on the open market and the Paine-Webber Group investment firm is reportedly the majority stockholder. Those individuals who use Paine-Webber stock brokerage services may be vested in the nation's for-profit slave-labor prison system.

It is also reported that companies such as WalMart, Exxon, General Motors, Ford, Chevrolet, Texaco, Hewlett-Packard, Verizon, and UPS have stock in CCA.

Paradigm shift

What if the equation were as simple as: Man commits crime, is charged with said crime, indicted for said crime, is convicted by a jury of his peers for having committed said crime, is sentenced and incarcerated for said crime?

The taxpayer pays for keeping the man in prison until he "has paid his debt to society." Since it would benefit society for the man to become a productive member of it upon his release (as opposed to being more likely to reoffend), society would prefer incarceration to have rehabilitative avenues available to inmates who could achieve early release on good behavior.

However, the equation is more complicated now: Man is charged with a crime, a dollar value is placed on his crime, a bond is issued in his name, marketability of bond depends upon his conviction and sentencing, he is convicted and sentenced, is worth more as a prison laborer than at home providing for family, is refused parole, is kept in prison as a slave laborer producing products for the marketplace at slave wages and forced to work under substandard conditions, is reinforced in his hatred for authority, is prepared for release by being conditioned to reoffend.

The former scenario, the proper way to deal with crime and punishment in a free society, is fair to taxpayers and creates a desire among all but the most incorrigible criminals to pay their debts and get on with their life.

The latter scenario, the one in place now, promotes convictions (guilt or innocence is not a consideration), promotes the ordering of long prison sentences, inhibits rehabilitative measures and ensures the likelihood an inmate will be kept as long as possible and that released inmates will return to the slave labor pool as convicted reoffenders.

Competing on the open market

According to the Wall Street Journal, as of 1999, the clothing and apparel industry alone had lost 8,000 jobs to the federal prison labor system.

At The IO we have received letters from inmates all over the nation who are forced (through various pressure schemes) to work to help pay their fines and other forms of retribution. Their pay scale ranges from 20 cents an hour to $1.45 an hour.

Prison laborers are not just making license plates any more. Below is a partial list of items being produced in prison-at or below the cost of third world slave labor:

clothing
shoes
furniture
aircraft parts
eyewear
circuit boards

These products are produced under contract for major companies such as Chevron, IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, Victoria's Secret and Boeing.

Schwartz stated that, "Federal prisons operate under the trade name Unicor and use their prisoners to make everything from lawn furniture to congressional desks. Their web site proudly displays 'where the government shops first.'"

As prison populations grow, so too will the numbers of prison slave laborers available for work. The volume and spectrum of products produced for the open market by prisoners at slave wages will certainly increase as well.

This prison labor problem did not just pop up all of a sudden. The following quote from an October, 2004 report from the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) entitled "Prison Labor: U.S. style fascism" is from 1994.

According to the PLP, Oregon State Rep. Kevin Mannix , soliciting Nike, a Beaverton, Oregon-based corporation, to take a closer look at "hiring" a certain group of Oregonians to make Nike products. Citing his belief that Nike subcontractors pay their Indonesian workers the equivalent to $1.20 per day, Mannix said, "We propose that [Nike] take a look at their labor costs. We could offer prison inmate labor right here in Oregon."

The hiring of prison labor out to commercial enterprisers has become so commonplace that state corrections departments are buying ads in trade publications to promote the attributes of their prison labor pools. Schwartz quoted the following: "Are you experiencing high employee turnover? Worried about the cost of employee benefits? Getting hit by overseas competition? Having trouble motivating your work force? Thinking about expansion space? Then the Washington State Department of Corrections Private Sector Partnerships is for you."

PLP also reported that prisoners are working nine-hour days at Soledad Sate Prison in Monterey, California, making blue work shirts at 45 cents an hour. The shirts are "...exported for sale in Asia. Even with transportation costs, they can undersell Asian sweatshops," PLP observed.

Prison labor is also being contracted for telemarketing, construction, firefighting, brush clearing and product packaging.

The self-perpetuating prison population problem

As early as the 70s, stiff prison sentences were being handed down to persons convicted of simple drug possession and President Ronald Reagan signed the mandatory minimum 10-year sentence for federal drug possession convictions in the mid-80s.

The nation's non-violent prisoner population began to explode.

Mandatory minimum sentences for the full spectrum of violent and non-violent crimes began passing in many states during the 90s. Mandatory minimums, which promote prosecutors' "stacking" charges and compelling "plea-bargains," effectively removing judicial discretion from the sentencing phase of a criminal proceeding. Mandatory minimums have dramatically boosted the numbers of non-violent offender convictions that result in prison sentences.

Department of Justice data from 1998 showed that 52.7 percent of state inmates; 73.7 percent of jail inmates and 87.6 percent of federal inmates were non-violent offenders.

The corporation does not care what type of crime resulted in conviction so long as the inmate is capable of putting in a day's work. As of 1998, the non-violent prison population in America crossed the 1,000,000 mark-a population greater than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska.

The future

With some wry humor, it has been estimated that, if present trends continue, the entire nation will be incarcerated by about 2056. At that time, the government will merely have to declare America a prison nation, prevent Americans from entering Canada or Mexico, stop issuing passports and plane tickets and increase Coast Guard shoreline patrols to guarantee corporations access to some 300,000,000 slave laborers.

The comments above may seem like sarcasm, but the truth of 2056 is already more apparent than most realize.

All Americans who work in America, pay their bills, buy products and try to provide a decent home life and educational opportunities for their families are already half enslaved: The average American pays out 53 percent of his earnings in taxes for the privilege of supporting the (dys)functions of government.

The maze of direct and indirect tax structures are levied to support the legions of government agents and agencies who regulate our ability to function in the free market, inhibit our ability to travel and communicate and monitor our every financial transaction.

Most of us have no choice but to inadvertently or unknowingly break several laws between the moment we get up in the morning and the moment we drop off to sleep at night. That being said, in the eyes of the state and the corporations who intend to exploit our energies, we are a nation of criminals who haven't yet been caught and sentenced for crimes associated with breathing freely without first asking permission.

And what is the philosophical foundation for the land of the free being transformed into a prison nation?

There isn't one. There is no philosophy, there is no foundation; it's only profit-profit generated by little men and women hiding behind paper fictions chartered by governments and constructed in such a way that they can reap the worldly benefits of profit without incurring the temporal liabilities associated with enslaving and exploiting an entire nation.

The corporation and America's future generations

Last January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that one in six American children are being diagnosed as learning disabled or otherwise behaviorally or neurologically impaired. Cathy Trost of the Washington Post recently quoted a qualified source as stating that the rate has increased to one in three.

"It's so common for a child to be diagnosed with a learning disability, developmental delay or behavioral disorder these days - as many as one in three kids are, say some experts - that the culture has undergone a major shift, from hiding the condition to obsessing about it. I don't know a family personally who has three kids that one of them hasn't been diagnosed with a learning disability or ADD," said Clinical Psychologist William Stixrud.

We know the cause-prenatal and postnatal exposure to mercury and other toxins. But there is no money in prevention. There are, however, billions of dollars to be made in therapy and a lifetime of assisted care for milions of permanently damaged children who will never be able to live alone or maintain gainful employment. So, corporations, with regulatory help from the government, intend to continue damaging our children to pay dividends to their stockholders.

Posted December 31, 2009 By John Pilger

Welcome to Orwell's World 2010

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. ?Who controls the past', ran the Party slogan, ?controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'."

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions and diffuse enemies". He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over [Osama] bin Laden". In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, reported Pakistan's military regime, and were ignored. Even Obama's mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an American military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure America's control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama's most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda's attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, General James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer than 100" al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power". The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace".

Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McCrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries is a model for those "disorderly regions" of the world still beyond Oceania's reach. This is a known as COIN, or counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, aid organisations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbecks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media reported this as "peace", and American academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into "target areas" controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous for their barbarism is irrelevant. "We can live with that," a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in a "stable" Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian crisis" and so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam where the CIA's "strategic hamlet program" was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Viet Cong -- the Americans' catch-all term for the resistance, similar to "Taliban".

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic-cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance ? these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

"It was curious," wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same, everywhere, all over the world ? people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who ? were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."

Posted December 30, 2009 By Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff

INSIDE THE MILITARY MEDIA INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: IMPACTS ON MOVEMENTS FOR PEACE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Among the most important corporate media censored news stories of the past decade, one must be that over one million people have died because of the United States military invasion and occupation of Iraq. This, of course, does not include the number of deaths from the first Gulf War nor the ensuing sanctions placed upon the country of Iraq that, combined, caused close to an additional one million Iraqi deaths. In the Iraq War, which began in March of 2003, over a million people have died violently primarily from US bombings and neighborhood patrols. These were deaths in excess of the normal civilian death rate under the prior government. Among US military leaders and policy elites, the issue of counting the dead was dismissed before the Iraqi invasion even began. In an interview with reporters in late March of 2002 US General Tommy Franks stated, "You know we don't do body counts."[i] Fortunately, for those concerned about humanitarian costs of war and empire, others do.

In a January 2008 report, the British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB) reported that, "survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003. We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000."[ii]

The ORB report came on the heels of two earlier studies conducted by Dr. Les Roberts and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and published in the Lancet medical journal. The first study done from January 1, 2002 to March 18, 2003 confirmed civilian deaths at that time at over 100,000. The second study published in October 2006 documented over 650,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the start of the US invasion and confirmed that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths. Over half the deaths were directly attributable to US forces. The now estimated 1.2 million dead six years into the war/occupation, included children, parents, grandparents, cab drivers, clerics and schoolteachers. All manner of ordinary Iraqis have died because the United States decided to invade their country under false pretences of undiscovered weapons of mass destruction and in violation of international law. An additional four to five million Iraqi refugees have fled their homes The magnitude of these million-plus deaths and creation of such a vast refugee crisis is undeniable. The continuing occupation by US forces has guaranteed a monthly mass death rate of thousands of people a carnage that ranks among the most heinous mass killings in world history. More tons of bombs have been dropped in Iraq than in all of World War II.[iii] Six years later the casualties continue but the story, barely reported from the start, has vanished.

The American people face a serious moral dilemma. Murder and war crimes have been conducted in their name. Yet most Americans have no idea of the magnitude of deaths and tend to believe that they number in the thousands and are primarily Iraqis killing Iraqis. Corporate mainstream media are in large part to blame. The question then becomes how can this mass ignorance and corporate media deception exist in the United States and what impact does this have on peace and social justice movements in the country?[iv]

Truth Emergency and Media Reform

In the United States today, the rift between reality and reporting has peaked. There is no longer a mere credibility gap, but rather a literalTruth Emergency in which the most important information affecting people is concealed from view. Many Americans, relying on the mainstream corporate media, have serious difficulty accessing the truth while still believing that the information they receive is the reality. A Truth Emergency reflects cumulative failures of the fourth estate to act as a truly free press. This truth emergency is seen in inadequate coverage of fraudulent elections, pseudo 9/11 investigations, illegal preemptive wars, torture camps, doctored intelligence, and domestic surveillance. Reliable information on these issues is systematically missing in corporate media outlets, where the vast majority of the American people continue to turn for news and information.

Consider these items of noteworthy conditions. US workers have been faced with a thirty-five year decline in real wages while the top few percent enjoy unparalleled wealth with strikingly low tax burdens. US schools, particularly in the west, are more segregated now than half a century ago. The US has the highest infant mortality rate among industrialized nations, is falling behind in scientific research and education, leads the world as a debtor nation, and is seriously lacking in healthcare quality and coverage, which results in the deaths of 18,000 people a year. America has entered another Gilded Age. Someone should alert the media.[v]

The Free Press or Media Reform Movement is a national effort to address mainstream media failures and the government policies that sanction them. During the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR) in Minneapolis, Project Censored interns and faculty conducted a survey, completed by 376 randomly selected NCMR attendees out of the 3,500 people registered for the conference. This survey was designed to gauge participants' views on the state of the corporate news media and the effectiveness of the media reform movement. The survey also sought to determine the level of belief in a truth emergency, a systematic hiding of critical information in the US. Not surprisingly, for a sample of independent media reform activists, majorities in the 90% plus range agreed on most criticisms of mainstream media, that corporate media failed to keep the American people informed on important issues facing the nation and that a truth emergency does indeed exist in the US. Regarding the reasons, 87% of the participants believed that a military-industrial-media complex exists in the US for the promotion of the US military domination of the world and most agreed with research conclusions by Project Censored, and others, that a continuing powerful global dominance group inside the US government, the US media, and the national policy structure is responsible. What was clear from our survey is that media democracy activists strongly support not only aggressive reform efforts and policy changes but also the continuing development of independent, grassroots media as part of an overall media democracy movement.

While most progressive media activists do not believe in some omnipotent conspiracy, an overwhelming portion of NCMR participants do believe the leadership class in the US is dominated by a neo-conservative group of some several hundred people who share a goal of asserting US military power worldwide. This Global Dominance Group (GDM) continues under both Republican and Democratic rule. In cooperation with major military contractors, the corporate media, and conservative foundations, the GDM has become a powerful long-term force in military unilateralism and US political processes.

The Global Dominance Group and Information Control

A long thread of sociological research documents the existence of a dominant ruling class in the US, which sets policy and determines national political priorities. C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 book The Power Elite, documented how World War II solidified a trinity of power in the US that comprised corporate, military and government elites in a centralized power structure working in unison through "higher circles" of contact and agreement.[vi] This power has grown through the Cold War and, after 9/11, the Global War on Terror.

At present, the global dominance agenda includes penetration into the boardrooms of the corporate media in the US. Only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Four of the top 10 media corporations share board director positions with the major defense contractors including:

William Kennard: New York Times, Carlyle Group

Douglas Warner III, GE (NBC), Bechtel

John Bryson: Disney (ABC), Boeing

Alwyn Lewis: Disney (ABC), Halliburton

Douglas McCorkindale: Gannett, Lockheed-Martin.

Given an interlocked media network of connections with defense and other economic sectors, big media in the United States effectively represent the interests of corporate America. Media critic and historian Norman Solomon described the close financial and social links between the boards of large media-related corporations and Washington's foreign-policy establishment: "One way or another, a military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media."[vii] The Homeland Security Act Title II Section 201(d)(5) provides an example of the interlocked military-industrial-media complex. This Act specifically asks the directorate to "develop a comprehensive plan for securing the key resources and critical infrastructure of the United States including information technology and telecommunications systems (including satellites) emergency preparedness communications systems."

The media elite, a key component of the Higher Circle Policy Elite in the US, are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the controllers of news and information content, and the decision makers regarding media resources. Their goal is to create symbiotic global news distribution in a deliberate attempt to control the news and information available to society. The two most prominent methods used to accomplish this task are censorship and propaganda.

Sometimes the sensationalist and narrow media coverage of news is blamed upon the need to meet a low level of public taste and thereby capture the eyes of a sufficient market to lure advertisers and to make a profit. But another goal of cornering the marketplace on what news and views will be aired is also prominent. Billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times. The losses in supporting conservative media are part of a strategy of ideological control. They also buy bulk quantities of ultra-conservative books bringing them to the top of the NY Times bestseller list and then give away copies to "subscribers" to their websites and publications. They fund conservative "think tanks" like Heritage and Cato with hundreds of millions of dollars a year. All this buys them respectability and a megaphone. Even though William Kristol's publication, the Standard, is a money-loser, his association with it has often gotten him on TV talk shows and a column with The New York Times. Sponsorships of groups like Grover Norquist's anti-tax "Americans for Tax Reform" regularly get people like him front-and-center in any debate on taxation in the United States. This has contributed to extensive tax cuts for the wealthy and the most unfair tax laws of any industrialized country ? all found acceptable by a public relying upon sound-bites about the dangers of ?big government.' Hence media corporation officials and others in the health care, energy and weapons industries remain wealthier than ordinary people can imagine. Their expenditures for molding opinion are better understood as investments in a conservative public ideology[viii]

Modern Media Censorship and Propaganda

A broader definition of contemporary censorship needs to include any interference, deliberate or not, with the free flow of vital news information to the public. Modern censorship can be seen as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story ? or piece of a news story ? based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions). or threats to reduce future access to governmental and corporate sources of news. Following are a few examples of censorship and propaganda.

1. Omitted or Undercovered Stories- The failure of the corporate media to cover human consequences, like one million , mostly civilian deaths of Iraqis, reduces public response to the wars being conducted by the US. Even when activists do mobilize, the media coverage of anti-war demonstrations has been negligible and denigrating from the start. When journalists of the so-called free press ignore the anti-war movement, they serve the interests of their masters in the military media industrial complex.[ix]

Further, the corporate mainstream press continues to ignore the human cost of the US war in Iraq with America's own veterans. Veteran care, wounded rates, mental disabilities, VA claims, first hand accounts of soldier experiences, and pictures of dead or limbless soldiers are rare. One of the most important stories missed by the corporate press concerned the Winter Soldier Congressional hearings in Washington, D.C. The hearings, with eyewitness testimony of US soldiers relating their experiences on the battlefield and beyond, were only covered by a scant number of major media, and then only in passing. In contrast to the virtual corporate media blackout concerning American soldiers' views of the war, the independent, listener sponsored, community Pacifica Radio network covered the hearings at length.[x]

A common theme among the most censored stories over the past few years has been the systemic erosion of human rights and civil liberties in both the US and the world at large. The corporate media has ignored the fact that habeas corpus can now be suspended for anyone by order of the President. With the approval of Congress, the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006, signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, allows for the suspension of habeas corpus for US citizens and non-citizens alike. While media, including a lead editorial in The New York Times October 19, 2006, have offered false comfort that American citizens will not be the victims, the Act is quite clear that ?any person' can be targeted.[xi]

Additionally, under the code-name Operation FALCON (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally), federally coordinated mass arrests have been occurring since April 2005 and netted over 54,000 arrests, a majority of whom were not violent criminals as was initially suggested. This unprecedented move of arresting tens of thousands of "fugitives" is the largest dragnet style operation in the nation's history. The raids, coordinated by the Justice Department and Homeland Security, directly involved over 960 agencies (state, local and federal) and mark the first time in US history that all domestic police agencies have been put under the direct control of the federal government.[xii]

All these events are significant in a democratic society that claims to cherish individual rights and due process of law. To have them occur is a tragedy. To have a "free" press not report them or pretend these issues do not matter to the populace is the foundation of censorship today.

2. Repetition of Slogans and Sound Bites- The corporate media in the US present themselves as unbiased and accurate. The New York Times motto of "all the news that's fit to print" is a clear example, as is CNN's authoritative "most trusted name in news" and Fox's mantra of "fair and balanced." The slogans are examples of what linguist George Lakoff has referred to as framing. Through constant repetition, the metaphors and symbols that pervade our media turn into unquestioned beliefs. Terms like "liberal media," "welfare cheaters," "war on terror," illegal aliens," "tax burden," "support our troops," are all distorted images serving to conceal a transfer of wealth from people needing a safety net to corporations seeking profitable markets and military expansion.

3. Embedded Journalism- The media are increasingly dependent on governmental and corporate sources of news. Maintenance of continuous news shows requires a constant feed and an ever-entertaining supply of stimulating events and breaking news bites. The 24-hour news shows on MSNBC, Fox and CNN maintain constant contact with the White House, Pentagon, and public relations companies representing both government and private corporations.

By the time of the Gulf War in 1991, retired colonels, generals and admirals had become mainstays in network TV studios during wartime. Language such as "collateral damage" and "smart bombs" flowed effortlessly between journalists and military men, who shared perspectives on the occasionally mentioned but more rarely seen civilians killed by U.S. firepower. This clearly foreshadowed the structure of "embedded" reporting in the second Iraq War, where mainstream corporate journalists literally lived with the troops and had to submit all reports for military review.[xiii] A related militarization of news studies by Diane Farsetta at the Center for Media Democracy documented a related introduction of bias. These investigations showed Pentagon propaganda penetration on mainstream corporate news in the guise of retired Generals as "experts" or pundits who turned out to be nothing more than paid shills for government war policy.[xiv]

The problem then becomes more complex. What happens to a society that begins to believe such lies as truth? The run up to the 2003 war in Iraq concerning weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) is a case in point. It illustrates the power of propaganda in creating not only public support for an ill-begotten war, but also reduces the possibility of a peace movement, even when fueled by the truth, to stop a war based on falsehoods. The current war in Iraq was the most globally protested war in recorded history. This did nothing to stop it and has done little to end it even under a Democratic president who promised such on the campaign trail. The candidate of "hope and change," with peace groups in tow, has proven to be dependent upon the same interests in foreign policy that got the US into war in the first place.[xv]

The Progressive Press

Where the left progressive press may have covered some of the Winter Soldier issues, most did not cover the major story of Iraqi deaths. InManufacturing Consent, Wharton School of Business Professor of Political Economy Edward Herman and MIT Institute Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky claim that because media are firmly embedded in the market system, they reflect the class values and concerns of their owners and advertisers. The corporate media maintain a class bias through five systemic filters: concentrated private ownership; a strict bottom-line profit orientation; over-reliance on governmental and corporate sources for news; a primary tendency to avoid offending the powerful; and an almost religious worship of the market economy. These filters limit what will become news in society and set parameters on acceptable coverage of daily events.[xvi]

The danger of these filters is that they make subtle and indirect censorship more difficult to combat. Owners and managers share class identity with the powerful and are motivated economically to please advertisers and viewers. Social backgrounds influence their conceptions of what is "newsworthy," and their views and values seem only "common sense." Journalists and editors are not immune to the influence of owners and managers. Reporters want to see their stories approved for print or broadcast, and editors come to know the limits of their freedom to diverge from the "common sense" worldview of owners and managers. The self-discipline that this structure induces in journalists and editors comes to seem only "common sense" to them as well. Self-discipline becomes self-censorship?independence is restricted, the filtering process hidden, denied, or rationalized away.

Project Censored's analysis on the top ten progressive left publications and websites coverage of key post-9/11 issues found considerable limitations on reporting of specific stories. The evidence supports the Chomsky and Herman understanding that the media barrage may in fact contribute to the news story selection process inside the left liberal media as well.[xvii] Even the left progressive media showed limited coverage of the human costs of the 9/11 wars.

The figure reported in summer, 2007 documenting a million dead did appear in progressive websites and radio including After Downing Street, Huffington Post, CounterPunch, Alternet, Democracy Now! and the Nation, but several took months to get to it. This lack of timely reporting on such a critical story on the humanitarian crisis of the US occupation by the alternative press in America does not bode well for a strong, public, peace movement. The US is in dire need of a media democracy movement to address truth emergency concerns.

In response, the Truth Emergency Movement, held its first national strategy summit in Santa Cruz, California Jan. 25-27, 2008. Organizers gathered key media constituencies to devise coherent decentralized models for distribution of suppressed news, synergistic truth-telling, and collaborative strategies to disclose, legitimize and popularize deeper historical narratives on power and inequality in the US. In sum, this truth movement is seeking to discover in this moment of Constitutional crisis, ecological peril, and widening war, ways in which top investigative journalists, whistleblowers, and independent media activists can transform how Americans perceive and defend their world. We learn from grassroots actions in the US but also from experiences of other countries. This requires us to transcend the stereotypes of other countries hammered by the corporate media. It is not by chance that two Latin American nations, both targets of US efforts to remove their popular leaders by force, have been vilified by mainstream media. Both Cuba and Venezuela, however, have been experiments in local democratic participation in which voices of communities weigh heavily upon social policy.

International Models of Media Democracy in Action: Venezuela

Democracy from the bottom is evolving as a ten-year social revolution in Venezuela. Led by President Hugo Chavez, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) gained over 1½ million voters in the November, 2008 elections. "It was a wonderful victory," said Professor Carmen Carrero with the communications studies department of the Bolivarian University in Caracas. "We won 81 percent of the city mayor positions and seventeen of twenty-three of the state governors," Carrero reported.

The Bolivarian University is housed in the former oil ministry building and now serves 8,000 students throughout Venezuela. The University (Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela) is symbolic of the democratic socialist changes occurring throughout the country. Before the election of Hugo Chavez as president in 1998, college attendance was primarily for the rich in Venezuela. Today over one million, eight hundred thousand students attend college, three times the rate ten years ago. "Our university was established to resist domination and imperialism," reported Principal (president) Marlene Yadira Cordova in an interview November 10, 2008, "We are a university where we have a vision of life that the oppressed people have a place on this planet." The enthusiasm for learning and serious-thoughtful questions asked by students was certainly representative of a belief in the potential of positive social change for human betterment. The University offers a fully staffed free healthcare clinic, zero tuition, and basic no-cost food for students in the cafeteria, all paid for by the oil revenues now being democratically shared by the people.

Bottom up democracy in Venezuela starts with the 25,000 community councils elected in every neighborhood in the country. "We establish the priority needs of our area," reported community council spokesperson Carmon Aponte, with the neighborhood council in the barrio Bombilla area of western Caracas. Aponte works with Patare Community TV and radio station and is one of thirty-four locally controlled community television stations and four hundred radio stations now in the barrios throughout Venezuela. Community radio, TV and newspapers are the voice of the people, where they describe the viewers/listeners as the "users" of media instead of the passive audiences.[xviii]

Democratic socialism has meant healthcare, jobs, food, and security, in neighborhoods where in many cases nothing but poverty existed ten years ago. With unemployment down to a US level, sharing the wealth has taken real meaning in Venezuela. Despite a 50 percent increase in the price of food last year, local Mercals offer government subsidized cooking oil, corn meal, meat, and powdered milk at 30-50 percent off market price. Additionally, there are now 3,500 local communal banks with a $1.6 billion dollar budget offering neighborhood-based micro-financing loans for home improvements, small businesses, and personal emergencies.

"We have moved from a time of disdain [pre-revolution?when the upper classes saw working people as less than human] to a time of adjustment," proclaimed Ecuador's minister of Culture, Gallo Mora Witt at the opening ceremonies of the Fourth International Book Fair in Caracas, November, 2007. Venezuela's Minister of Culture, Hector Soto added, "We try not to leave anyone out. . . before the revolution the elites published only 60-80 books a year, we will publish 1,200 Venezuelan authors this year?the book will never stop being the important tool for cultural feelings." In fact, some twenty-five million books?classics by Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes along with Cindy Sheehan's Letter to George Bush?were published in 2008 and are being distributed to the community councils nationwide. The theme of the International Book Fair was books as cultural support to the construction of the Bolivarian revolution and building socialism for the 21st century.

In Venezuela the corporate media are still owned by the elites. The five major TV networks, and nine of ten of the major newspapers maintain a continuing media effort to undermine Chavez and the socialist revolution. But despite the corporate media and $20 million annual support to the anti-Chavez opposition institutions from USAID and National Endowment for Democracy, two-thirds of the people in Venezuela continue to support President Hugo Chavez and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. The democracies of South America are realizing that the neo-liberal formulas for capitalism are not working and that new forms of resource allocation are necessary for human betterment. It is a learning process for all involved and certainly a democratic effort from the bottom up.

International Models of Media Democracy in Action: Cuba

"You cannot kill truth by murdering journalists," said Tubal Páez, president of the Journalist Union of Cuba. In May of 2008, One hundred and fifty Cuban and South American journalists, ambassadors, politicians, and foreign guests gathered at the Jose Marti International Journalist Institute to honor the 50th anniversary of the death of Carlos Bastidas Arguello ?the last journalist killed in Cuba. Carlos Bastidas was 23 years old when he was assassinated by Fulgencia Batista's secret police after having visited Fidel Castro's forces in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Edmundo Bastidas, Carlos' brother, told about how a river of change flowed from the Maestra (teacher) mountains, symbolized by his brother's efforts to help secure a new future for Cuba.

The celebration in Havana was held in honor of World Press Freedom Day, which is observed every year in May. The UN first declared this day in 1993 to honor journalists who lost their lives reporting the news and to defend media freedom worldwide.

Cuban journalists share a common sense of a continuing counter-revolutionary threat by US financed Cuban-Americans living in Miami. This is not an entirely unwarranted feeling in that many hundreds of terrorist actions against Cuba have occurred with US backing over the past fifty years. In addition to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, these attacks include the blowing up of a Cuban airlines plane in 1976 killing seventy-three people, the starting in 1981 of an epidemic of dengue fever that killed 158 people, and several hotel bombings in the 1990s, one of which resulted in the death of an Italian tourist.

In the context of this external threat, Cuban journalists quietly acknowledge that some self-censorship will undoubtedly occur regarding news stories that could be used by the "enemy" against the Cuban people. Nonetheless, Cuban journalists strongly value freedom of the press and there was no evidence of overt government control. Ricardo Alarcon, President of the National Assembly Cuba allows CNN, AP and Chicago Tribune to maintain offices in Cuba, noted that the US refuses to allow Cuban journalists to work in the United States.[xix]

Cuban journalists complain that the US corporate media is biased and refuses to cover the positive aspects of socialism in Cuba. Unknown to most Americans are the facts that Cuba is the number one country in percentage of organic foods produced in the world, has an impressive health care system with a lower infant mortality rate than the US, trains doctor from all over the world, and has enjoyed a 43% increase in GDP between 2005 and 2008.

Neither Cuba nor Venezuela are utopian societies. Developing countries subject to continuing pressure by the US may be cautious and suspicious of provocateurs that would incite violence or provoke US military intervention. But in these countries, the ability of local media expressing voices of local communities is something from which media reformers can learn.

Grassroots Antidotes to Corporate Media Propaganda

Tens of thousands of Americans engaged in various social justice issues constantly witness how corporate media marginalize, denigrate, or simply ignore their concerns. Activist groups working on issues like 9/11 Truth, election fraud, impeachment in the Bush era, war propaganda, civil liberties abridgements, torture, the Wall Street meltdown, and corporate-caused environmental crises have been systematically excluded from mainstream news and the national conversation leading to a genuine Truth Emergency in the country as a whole.

Now, however, a growing number of activists are finally saying "enough!" and joining forces to address this truth emergency by developing new journalistic systems and practices of their own. They are working to reveal the common corporate denominators behind the diverse crises we face and to develop networks of trustworthy news sources that tell people what is really going on. These activists know we need a journalism that moves beyond inquiries into particular crimes and atrocities, and exposes wider patterns of corruption, propaganda and illicit political control by a military and corporate elite. Recent efforts at national media reform through micro-power community radio? similar to the 400 people's radio stations in Venezuela? and campaign finance changes, that would mandate access for all candidates on national media, have been strongly resisted by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). NAB, considered one of the most powerful corporate lobby groups in Washington, works hard to protect over $200 billion dollars of annual advertising and the several hundred million dollars political candidates spend in each election cycle.

The Truth Emergency movement now recognizes that corporate media's political power and failure to meet its First Amendment obligation to keep the public informed leaves a huge task. Citizens must mobilize resources to redevelop news and information systems from the bottom up. Citizen journalists can expand distribution of news via small independent newspapers, local magazines, independent radio, and cable access TV. Using the internet, the public can interconnect with like-minded grassroots news organizations to share important stories. These changes are already in progress.

Becoming the Media: Media Freedom International and Project Censored

In response to Truth Emergency conference, the Media Freedom Foundation and Project Censored launched an effort to both become a repository of independent news and information as well as a producer of content in what are called Validated Independent News stories vetted by college and university professors and students around the world. As corporate media continue their entertainment agenda and the PR industry?working for governments and corporations?increasingly dominates news content, there exists a socio-cultural opening to transform how the public receives and actually participates in the validation and creation of their own news.

Corporate media are increasingly irrelevant to working people and to democracy. People need to tell their own news stories from real experiences and perspectives, as an alternative to the hierarchically imposed and "official" top-down narrative. What better project in support of media democracy than for universities and colleges worldwide to support truth telling and validate news stories and independent news sources.

Only 5% of college students under 30 read a daily newspaper. Most get their news from corporate television and increasingly on the internet. One of the biggest problems with independent media sources on the internet is a perception of inconsistent reliability. The public is often suspicious of the truthfulness and accuracy of news postings from non-corporate media sources. Over the past ten years, in hundreds of presentations all over the US, Project Censored staff has frequently been asked, "what are the best sources for news and whom can we trust?"

The goal of this effort is to encourage young people to use independent media as their primary sources of news and information and to learn about trustworthy news sources through the Media Freedom International News Research Affiliate Program. By the end of 2008, there were over thirty affiliate colleges and universities with plans to expand that participation several fold this next year. Through these institutions, validated independent news stories can be researched by students and scholars, then written, produced and disseminated via the web. In addition, on any given day at the Media Freedom Foundation website, one can view enough independent news stories from RSS feeds to fill nearly fifty written pages, more than even the largest US newspapers. An informed electorate cannot remain passive consumers of corporate news. As aforementioned activist David Mathison suggested in his how-to manual, Be the Media, where he argues and instructs not only about how to build community media but how to build community through media.[xx]

Part of building community is in developing awareness about the type of world we want to participate in creating, and developing strategies for achieving change. New forms of media that promote widespread responsibility for both creating and disseminating information do not remove the need for people to protest, to demonstrate, to march, to boycott and to demand entry into corporate board rooms. Rather it assures that voices can be heard and, as shown in Howard Rheingold's Smartmobbing Democracy,[xxi] the power of new Internet communication technologies can be harnessed to mobilize more effectively. Contrasted with previous more limited technologies, Rheingold points out that now, "[m]obile and deskbound media such as blogs, listserves and social networking sites allow for many-to-many communication." Technology has helped level the playing field by creating a virtual sphere where people can exchange ideas and instigate activism. Grassroots, bottom-up, peer-to-peer efforts have increased in influence and effectiveness due to the speed and breadth of new communication technologies. We are currently experiencing a potential for collective activism on a scale never before seen.

The continued expansion of independent internet news sources allows for the mass political awareness of key issues and truth emergencies in the world. The involvement of university and college professors and their students in validating news stories will be an important component of reliability verification of these sources. As we learn who we can trust in the independent news world, we will be in a stronger position for the continued development and expansion of democratic social movement/anti-war efforts in the future.

It is up to the people to unite and oppose the common oppressors manifested in a militarist and unresponsive government along with their corporate media courtiers and PR propagandists. Only then, when the public forms and controls its own information resources, will it be armed with the power that knowledge gives to move beyond the media induced mindsets that limit change to modest reform. Grassroots media providing voice to those who would challenge elite domination are our best hope to create a truly vibrant democratic society that promises as well as delivers liberty, peace, and economic justice to all.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and President of the Media Freedom Foundation and recent past director of Project Censored.

Mickey Huff is an Associate Professor of History and Social Science at Diablo Valley College and serves on the executive committeeof the Media Freedom Foundation and is recent past associate director of Project Censored.

Media Freedom website include:

Daily News at: http://mediafreedom.pnn.com/5174-independent-news-sources

Validated News & Research at: http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/

Daily Censored Blog at: http://dailycensored.com/

Project Censored: http://www.projectcensored.org/

[i] US General Tommy Franks, quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle, March 23, 2002, onlinehttp://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2002/020323-attack01.htm.

[ii] Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, Censored 2009, (New York: Seven Stories, Press, 2008), 19-25. This story is the number one censored story of the year at Project Censored for this year, archived online http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-over-one-million-iraqi-deaths-caused-by-us-occupation/ and for the earlier casualty numbers see http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-polya070207.htm.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Various theories exist on the problem of the subject, from historian Rick Shenkman's Just How Stupid Are We to historian and cultural critic Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, but few examine its affects on the peace community. For more on the issue of American historical amnesia, see Gore Vidal on Democracy Now! at http://www.democracynow.org/2004/5/21/gore_vidal_on_the_united_states , also, In These Times online at http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3099/the_united_states_of_amnesia/ and for a broader academic look at the issue of how Americans have become arguably the least informed, most entertained people in the modern world, see the now classic work from the late New York University media scholar Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, (New York: Viking Adult, 1985). This article hopes to shine more light on the impact of all of the aforementioned on the peace movement in general and what can be done about it. For another view of this written earlier, at the outset of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, see Felix Kolb and Alicia Swords, "Do Peace Movements Matter?" Commondreams.org, May 12, 2003, online at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0512-08.htm.

[vi] C. Wright Mills. The Power Elite, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, reissue). Also, continuing with this theme in terms of democratic communications theory/policy and the ideas of an open society, see the work of Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society, published in1962, and The Theory of Communicative Action, from 1981, as well as Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1945.

[vii] Norman Soloman, "The Military-Industrial-Media Complex

Why war is covered from the warriors' perspective," Extra! July/August 2005, published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), on the FAIR website at http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2627.

[viii] Cenk Uygur, "Conservative Media vs Progressive Media" Posted on The Daily Kos blog, July 1, 2009. )

[ix] Linda Milazzo, "Corporate Media Turned Out for Jena, but Not for Anti-War. Here's Why." Atlantic Free Press, September 23, 2007, online at http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/2473-corporate-media-turned-out-for-jena-but-not-for-anti-war-heres-why.html.

[x] For more on the Winter Soldiers, see Censored 2009, chapter 1, story 9, pp. 58-62 and online http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/9-iraq-and-afghanistan-vets-testify/ and chapter 12, pp.297-319. See the KPFA radio and Corp Watch website for the coverage athttp://www.warcomeshome.org/wintersoldier2008.

[xi] Peter Phillips, Censored 2008, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 35-44. Online http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-no-habeas-corpus-for-any-person/ and http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-bush-moves-toward-martial-law/.

[xii] See Censored 2008, chapter 1, story 6, 55-59. Also online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/6-operation-falcon-raids/.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Diane Farsetta, Center for Media Democracy, studies on Pentagon propaganda online at http://www.prwatch.org/pentagonpundits and http://www.prwatch.org/node/8180.

[xiv] Norman Soloman, "The Military-Industrial-Media Complex:

Why war is covered from the warriors' perspective," Extra! July/August 2005, published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), on the FAIR website at http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2627.

[xv] For several excellent studies of US Iraq War propaganda, see PR Watch's John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, (New York: Tarcher Penguin, 2003), and their follow up Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq, (New York: Penguin, 2006), and the exhaustive work by Anthony R. DiMaggio, Mass Media, Mass Propaganda: Examining American News in the "War on Terror," (UK: Lexington Books, 2008). Additionally, forthcoming in fall 2009, just reviewed by the authors, is Robert P. Abele, The Anatomy of a Deception: A Reconstruction and Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq, (Baltimore: University Press of America, 2009).

For reports on the continuation of war policy under President Barack Obama, see Center for Media Democracy's John Stauber, "How Obama Took Over the Peace Movement" online http://www.prwatch.org/node/8297, and Peter Phillips, "Barack Obama Administration Continues US Military Dominance" online http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/http-wwwprojectcensoredorg-articles-story-barack-obama-administration-c/.

[xvi] Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, 2002). For an introduction of the Propaganda Model, see chapter 1, or see a retrospective by Edward Herman online http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/20031209.htm.

[xvii] Peter Phillips, Censored 2008, see chapter 7, "Left Progressive Media Inside the Propaganda Model," 233-251. Online at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/left-progressive-media-inside-the-propaganda-model/.

[xviii] Co-author Peter Phillips interviewed Carmon Aponte while visiting the Patare Community TV and radio station in a trip to Venezuela for a book fair in 2008. The station was one of thirty-four locally controlled community television stations and four hundred radio stations now in the barrios throughout Venezuela.

[xix] Co-author Peter Phillips attended the major journalism conference in Cuba in 2008. About his experiences there, Phillips remarked, "During my five days in Havana, I met with dozens of journalists, communication studies faculty and students, union representatives and politicians. The underlying theme of my visit was to determine the state of media freedom in Cuba and to build a better understanding between media democracy activists in the US and those in Cuba."

Phillips continued, "I toured the two main radio stations in Havana, Radio Rebelde and Radio Havana. Both have Internet access to multiple global news sources including CNN, Reuters, Associated Press and BBC with several newscasters pulling stories for public broadcast. Over 90 municipalities in Cuba have their own locally run radio stations, and journalists report local news from every province."

"During the course of several hours in each station I (Phillips) was interviewed on the air about media consolidation and censorship in the US and was able to ask journalists about censorship in Cuba as well. Of the dozens I interviewed all said that they have complete freedom to write or broadcast any stories they choose. This was a far cry from the Stalinist media system so often depicted by US interests."

[xx] For more details see the Project Censored website at http://projectcensored.org/, for independent media feeds see Media Freedom Foundation at http://mediafreedom.pnn.com/5174-independent-news-sources, and for more on the Project Censored International Affiliates Program, see http://projectcensored.org/project-censored-international-affilates-program and http://mediafreedominternational.org. For more on how to become the media, see David Mathison's work online http://bethemedia.com. For more on Smart Mobs, see Howard Rheingold's work onlinehttp://www.smartmobs.com/book/.

[xxi] Howard Rheingold, "Smartmobbing Democracy," in Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age," ed. Allison Fine, Micah L. Sifry, Andrew Rasiej and Josh Levy. Retrieved from The Personal Democracy Press Website:http://rebooting.personaldemocracy.com/node/5484.

*The co-authors would like to express sincere appreciation for editing assistance provided by Rebecca Norlander and Ellen Gaddy.

Posted December 28, 2009 By Anthony G. Martin

U.S. placed under international police-state

In the dead of night on December 17, 2009, President Barack Hussein Obama placed the United States of America under the authority of the international police organization known as INTERPOL, granting the organization full immunity to operate within the United States.

According to Threatswatch:

Last Thursday, December 17, 2009, The White House released an Executive Order "Amending Executive Order 12425." It grants INTERPOL (International Criminal Police Organization) a new level of full diplomatic immunity afforded to foreign embassies and select other "International Organizations" as set forth in the United States International Organizations Immunities Act of 1945.

By removing language from President Reagan's 1983 Executive Order 12425, this international law enforcement body now operates - now operates - on American soil beyond the reach of our own top law enforcement arm, the FBI, and is immune from Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

What, exactly does this mean? It means that INTERPOL now has the full authority to conduct investigations and other law enforcement activities on U.S. soil, with full immunity from U.S. laws such as the Freedom of Information Act and with complete independence from oversight from the FBI.

In short, a global law enforcement entity now has full law-enforcement authority in the U.S. without any check on its power afforded by U.S. law and U.S. law enforcement agencies.

A bit of background is in order here, and Hot Air provides it:

During his presidency, Ronald Reagan granted the global police agency Interpol the status of diplomatic personnel in order to engage more constructively on international law enforcement. In Executive Order 12425, Reagan made two exceptions to that status. The first had to do with taxation, but the second was to make sure that Interpol had the same accountability for its actions as American law enforcement ? namely, they had to produce records when demanded by courts and could not have immunity for their actions.

Barack Obama unexpectedly revoked those exceptions in a change to EO 12425 last (week)...

Thus, Interpol now can conduct its operations on U.S. soil with ZERO accountability to anyone in this country.

And you beginning to understand now just what the 'end game' is on the part of those who are currently running the U.S. Government?

Let's go a step further in fleshing out exactly what this means in practical terms. It gets ugly...and scary. Again, from ThreatsWatch:

Section 2c of the United States International Organizations Immunities Act is the crucial piece.

Property and assets of international organizations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, unless such immunity be expressly waived, and from confiscation. The archives of international organizations shall be inviolable. (Emphasis added.)

Inviolable archives means INTERPOL records are beyond US citizens' Freedom of Information Act requests and from American legal or investigative discovery ("unless such immunity be expressly waived.")

Property and assets being immune from search and confiscation means precisely that. Wherever they may be in the United States. This could conceivably include human assets - Americans arrested on our soil by INTERPOL officers.

Why would INTERPOL be arresting American citizens on our own soil, without oversight from our own law enforcement agencies? And remember, citizens who are thusly arrested would have no legal authority to demand full documentation from the International Police concerning the charges brought against them.

Andy McCarthy at National Review asks these crucial, sobering questions of the secretive Obama order:

Why would we elevate an international police force above American law? Why would we immunize an international police force from the limitations that constrain the FBI and other American law-enforcement agencies? Why is it suddenly necessary to have, within the Justice Department, a repository for stashing government files which, therefore, will be beyond the ability of Congress, American law-enforcement, the media, and the American people to scrutinize?

At least one answer to these questions is very clear. A coup is underway in the United States of America, the goal of which is to establish complete, unquestioned authority over the citizens--a 'fundamental change' to the United States where citizens have no legal recourse against an authoritarian central government.

Posted December 28, 2009 By ERIC SCHMITT and ROBERT F. WORTH

U.S. Widens Terror War to Yemen, a Qaeda Bastion

In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen.

A year ago, the Central Intelligence Agency sent several of its top field operatives with counterterrorism experience to the country, according a former top agency official. At the same time, some of the most secretive Special Operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counterterrorism tactics, senior military officers said.

The Pentagon is spending more than $70 million over the next 18 months, and using teams of Special Forces, to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels.

As American investigators sought to corroborate the claims of a 23-year-old Nigerian man that Qaeda leaders in Yemen had trained and equipped him to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines jet on Christmas Day, the plot casts a spotlight on the Obama administration's complicated relationship with Yemen.

The country has long been a refuge for jihadists, in part because Yemen's government welcomed returning Islamist fighters who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The Yemen port of Aden was the site of the audacious bombing of the American destroyer Cole in October 2000 by Qaeda militants, which killed 17 sailors.

But Qaeda militants have made much more focused efforts to build a base in Yemen in recent years, drawing recruits from throughout the region and mounting attacks more frequently on foreign embassies and other targets. The White House is seeking to nurture enduring ties with the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and prod him to combat the local Qaeda affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, even as his impoverished country grapples with seemingly intractable internal turmoil.

With fears also growing of a resurgent Islamist extremism in nearby Somalia and East Africa, administration officials and American lawmakers said Yemen could become Al Qaeda's next operational and training hub, rivaling the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where the organization's top leaders operate.

"Yemen now becomes one of the centers of that fight," said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who visited the country in August. "We have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence," he said on "Fox News Sunday."

American and Yemeni officials said that a pivotal point in the relationship was reached in late summer after separate secret visits to Yemen by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American regional commander, and John O. Brennan, President Obama's counterterrorism adviser.

President Saleh agreed to expanded overt and covert assistance in response to growing pressure from the United States and Yemen's neighbors, notably Saudi Arabia, from which many Qaeda operatives had fled to Yemen, as well as a rising threat against the country's political inner circle, the officials said.

"Yemen's security problems won't just stay in Yemen," said Christopher Boucek, who studies Yemen as an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "They're regional problems and they affect Western interests."

Al Qaeda's profile in Yemen rose sharply a year ago, when a former Guantánamo Bay detainee from Saudi Arabia, Said Ali al-Shihri, fled to Yemen to join Al Qaeda and appeared in a video posted online. Several other former Guantánamo detainees have also joined the group.

Yemen's remote areas are notoriously lawless, but the country's chaos has worsened in the past two years, as the government struggles with an armed rebellion in the northwest and a rising secessionist movement in the south. Yemen is running out of oil, and the government's dwindling finances have affected its ability to strike at Al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, there have been increasing Yemeni ties to plots against the United States. A Muslim man charged in the June 1 killing of a soldier at a recruiting center in a mall in Little Rock, Ark., had traveled to Yemen, prompting a review by the F.B.I. of other domestic extremists who had visited the country.

A radical cleric in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, has been linked to numerous terrorism suspects, including Nidal Malik Hasan, the American Army major who faces murder charges in the shooting deaths of 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November.

In the latest issue of Sada al-Malahim, the Internet magazine of the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, the group's leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, urged his followers to use small bombs "in airports in the western crusade countries that participated in the war against Muslims; or on their planes, or in their residential complexes or their subways.

Yemen escalated its campaign against Al Qaeda with major airstrikes on Dec. 17 and last Thursday that killed more than 60 militants.

American officials have been coy about the role of the United States in the strikes, saying that they have provided intelligence and "firepower" for the efforts.

Yemen's foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, said Sunday that Yemeni military cooperation with the United States and Saudi Arabia had increased in recent months as fresh intelligence confirmed Al Qaeda's greater assertiveness in the country.

"There was intelligence that they were targeting the British Embassy and a number of government institutions as well as private schools," Mr. Qirbi said in a telephone interview. "The second reason is that they have become more vocal, trying to show that they can undertake terrorist activities in an open fashion. So the government had to respond to that."

The recent airstrikes were planned for two or three months, Mr. Qirbi said, but could not take place until there was fresh intelligence about the location of the Qaeda operatives who were the targets.

He called that intelligence ? which included information provided by the United States ? "the most important element" in the successful strike on the Qaeda members.

Mr. Qirbi added that although the United States provided Yemen with military hardware, the airstrikes were carried out by the Yemeni military alone.

Although the most important intelligence came from the United States and Saudi Arabia, other countries in the region have increased their financial assistance in recent months to help Yemen, said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "There was a fear inside and outside Yemen that Al Qaeda was taking new ground, establishing training centers, making some parts of Yemen no-go areas," Mr. Alani said. The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait in particular provided assistance, he said, because "they feel that sooner or later they will become targets too."

In the past year, Al Qaeda has killed six intelligence officers in the provinces where it is based, part of an unmistakable campaign by the group to secure its sanctuary there, Mr. Alani said. The intelligence officers were trying to gather information on the group, and to disrupt its growing links with local tribes ? a significant part of its strategy, Mr. Alani added.

The airstrikes of the past two weeks have been successful but have come at a price, Yemeni officials said. "They have been hit hard, but they have not yet been disabled," said one high-ranking Yemeni official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic issues involved. "The problem is that the involvement of the United States creates sympathy for Al Qaeda. The cooperation is necessary ? but there is no doubt that it has an effect for the common man. He sympathizes with Al Qaeda."

As if to reaffirm that message, Al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate released a statement to Internet sites on Sunday that put strong emphasis on the American role in the recent raids, deriding the Yemeni government for claiming responsibility

Posted December 25, 2009 By Nathan Guttman

U.S.-Israeli Arms Cooperation Quietly Growing

Leaders in Washington and Jerusalem have publicly locked horns over the issue of West Bank settlements. And Israeli public opinion has largely viewed America's new administration as unfriendly. But behind the scenes, strategic security relations between the two countries are flourishing.

Israeli officials have been singing the praises of President Obama for his willingness to address their defense concerns and for actions taken by his administration to bolster Israel's qualitative military edge - an edge eroded, according to Israel, during the final year of the George W. Bush presidency.

Among the new initiatives taken by the administration, the Forward has learned, are adjustments in a massive arms deal the Bush administration made with Arab Gulf states in response to Israeli concerns. There have also been upgrades in U.S.-Israeli military cooperation on missile defense. And a deal is expected next year that will see one of the United States' most advanced fighter jets go to Israel with some of America's most sensitive new technology.

Amid the cacophony of U.S.-Israel clashes on the diplomatic front, public attention given to this intensified strategic cooperation has been scant. But in a rare public comment in October, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren praised the Obama administration's response to complaints about lost ground during the close of the Bush years as "warm and immediate."

"We came to the Obama administration and said, 'Listen, we have a problem here,'" Oren, told a gathering of the National Jewish Democratic Council. "The administration's reaction was immediate: we are going to address this issue, we are going to make sure that we maintain your QME [qualitative military edge]."

The warmth seems to stand in contrast to public opinion in Israel, which, according to a recent survey, is highly critical of Obama, seeing him as weak and naive. Bush is perceived as having been a much stronger ally.

But when the new administration settled in, it faced entreaties from Jerusalem to redress what Israeli officials saw as an erosion on the strategic side during the last stage of Bush's tenure.

The Israelis cited Arab progress in replacing old Soviet weapons with new Western arms, and advances in the operational technology of weapons that has made Israel's investment in human skills less significant.

But Jerusalem's concerns, well-informed Israeli sources say, were also stoked by a massive $20 billion arms deal that the United States signed with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states during the Bush administration's last year. In its attempt to counter Iran's military buildup and nuclear ambitions, the former administration approved an arms contract that included upgrades of the Gulf countries' air and naval capabilities, as well as advanced missile defense systems and modern satellite-guided bombs.

Israel, which sees Iran as its prime enemy in the region, initially accepted the Bush strategists' rationale for the huge arms transfer. Jerusalem voiced only mild concern regarding some of the specifics, mainly the supply of precision bombs.

But in recent months, Israeli defense officials visiting Washington stepped up complaints about the Saudi deal. To the newly installed Obama administration officials, the Israelis argued that the usage and deployment of these arms breached earlier understandings and could tilt the military balance against Israel.

These complaints were met with what one Israeli diplomat called a "receptiveness" that was demonstrated in the new administration's willingness to adjust the arms deployments to mitigate Israel's concerns.

A former senior security official in the Bush administration said Bush's guidance to all levels was to maintain Israel's qualitative military edge. The ex-official, who would speak only on background, added that the arms sales to Gulf countries were done in light of the Arab world's anxiety over Iran's ambitions. "We saw it as a positive for all sides," he said, adding Israel had no complaints against it "on the strategic level."

According to Steve Rosen, a former lobbyist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who is now a private consultant, the Obama administration, and especially the Pentagon, is now more open to supplying Israel with cutting-edge technology in an attempt to ensure Israel's confidence and possibly steer Jerusalem away from the idea of attacking Iran. "In an effort to give Israel a larger margin of safety, the U.S. is releasing technology that under other circumstances would have been seen as more sensitive," he said.

The United States and Israel have also recently launched a new consultative mechanism for discussing and addressing issues relating to Israel's qualitative military edge. This new process, involving key officials from the Pentagon and State Department on the American side and Israel's Foreign and Defense ministries, is currently being applied to several outstanding Israeli concerns. Israeli defense officials and pro-Israel activists characterize this as a significant development in strategic consultations between the two countries.

America's commitment to maintaining Israel's qualitative military edge was codified directly into U.S. law via 2008 legislation backed by AIPAC. This legislation requires the president to report to Congress periodically on actions taken by the administration to ensure Israel's advantage. A spokeswoman for the House Foreign Affairs Committee told the Forward that the White House provided its first report to Congress this past summer. The report was classified, and no information regarding its content has been released.

Long before the 2008 law, the Reagan administration promised that America would ensure Israel's military advantage over its neighbors. And succeeding presidents have maintained this commitment. The commitment defined Israel's strategic advantage as the difference between Israel's military capabilities compared with each one of its Arab adversaries or with the combination of all adversaries.

"Originally, it was Israel's way to overcome its numeric inferiority," said Guy Ben-Ari, deputy director of the defense-industrial initiatives group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He explained that the notion has been held up by both sides, despite the fact that Israel's main military challenges - confronting terrorism and Iran's nuclear threat - are not issues determined by the size of its military. The Israelis stressed that what happened during the close of Bush's tenure was an erosion of Israeli's military edge, not a breach of the Reagan era commitment.

Beyond correcting the perceived imbalance that developed under Bush, Israeli officials have also praised the Obama administration for increasing cooperation about missile defense. A November joint American-Israeli exercise, codenamed Juniper Cobra, was the largest and most extensive missile defense dry run ever held, and involved 1,400 American servicemen simulating responses to a possible attack against Israel. "The size and the high profile [of the exercise] are a signal from the administration about its commitment to Israel's security," an Israeli diplomat said.

Another deal that is highly anticipated in Israel is the expected sale of the advanced F-35 fighter jets to Israel's air force. The Pentagon has offered Israel a unique version of the radar-evading future aircraft for supply in 2015. A deal is expected to be signed early next year.

Still, Israeli officials and American lobbyists stressed that not all outstanding issues have been resolved. Supporters of Israel are now pushing for the administration and Congress to limit American arms sales to Lebanon because of the re-emergence of Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon on Israel's northern border, and the failure of the central government in Beirut to disarm the group. Pro-Israel lobbyists cite their concern that American weapons might fall into the hands of Hezbollah, which is backed by Israel's avowed enemy, Iran.

Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com

Posted November 24, 2009 By Marjorie Cohn

Lynne Stewart: Casualty of the "War on Terror"

In a decision that reflects the post-911 terrorism hysteria, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed prominent civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart's convictions and remanded her case to district court Judge John G. Koeltl to reconsider her sentence. The appellate panel directed Koeltl to remand Stewart to custody and the 70-year-old woman is now in prison.

Stewart was convicted of conspiracy to provide and conceal material support to the conspiracy to murder persons in a foreign country (18 U.S.C. sec. 2339A and 18 U.S.C. sec. 2), conspiring to provide and conceal such support (18 U.S.C. sec. 371), and knowingly and willfully making false statements (18 U.S.C. sec. 1001). The majority opinion states that Stewart was convicted "principally with respect to [her] violations of those measures by which [she] had agreed to abide," namely, Special Administrative Measures (SAMs).

The SAMs were placed on Stewart's client, Sheikh Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for terrorism-related crimes. They restrict his ability to communicate with persons outside of the prison. Stewart and Abdel Rahman's other attorneys, Ramsey Clark and Abdeen Jabara, signed statements saying they wouldn't forward mail from Abdel Rahman to a third person or use their communications with Abdel Rahman to pass messages between him and third persons, including the media. Stewart violated her agreement to abide by the SAMs. Clark and Jabara allegedly did as well. Lawyers who violate SAMs expect to suffer administrative consequences, such as being denied visiting privileges. Yet Stewart was indicted for federal crimes. Clark and Jabara were not.

Judge Koeltl presided over the nine-month trial. Stewart was precluded from arguing that a prosecution for conspiring to commit a conspiracy (an inchoate offense) raises serious dangers. Koeltl sentenced Stewart to 28 months. The maximum sentence under the federal sentencing Guidelines is 30 years but the Supreme Court held in United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005) that the guidelines are advisory, not mandatory.

Koeltl concluded that the terrorism enhancement, "while correct under the guidelines, would result in an unreasonable result." He cited "the somewhat atypical nature of Stewart's case" and "the lack of evidence that any victim was harmed as a result of the charged offense." The result of the terrorism enhancement, according to Koeltl, was "dramatically unreasonable in [her] case" because it "overstate[d] the seriousness of [her] past conduct and the likelihood that [she would] repeat the offense."

Stewart, Koeltl concluded, "has no criminal history and yet is placed in the highest criminal history category [under the terrorism enhancement] equal to that of repeat felony offenders for the most serious offenses including murder and drug trafficking." Koeltl found that Stewart's opportunity to repeat "the crimes to which she had been convicted will be nil" because she "will lose her license to practice law" ["itself a punishment"] and "will be forever separated from any contact with Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman."

Koeltl viewed Stewart's personal characteristics as "extraordinary" and determined that they "argue[d] strongly in favor of a substantial downward variance" from the guidelines. He described her as a dedicated public servant who had, throughout her career, "represented the poor, the disadvantaged and the unpopular, often as a Court-appointed attorney," thereby providing a "service not only to her clients but to the nation."

Koeltl also considered that Stewart had suffered from cancer ? undergoing surgery and radiation therapy ? and found a significant chance of recurrence. At age 67, Koeltl observed, prison would be "particularly difficult" for Stewart.

Although the appellate majority stated that the district court judge is "in the best position to make an individual determination about the "history and characteristics' of a particular defendant, and to adjust the individualized sentence accordingly," the panel second-guessed Koeltl by ordering that he reconsider Stewart's sentence. Specifically, the panel directed Koeltl to consider whether Stewart committed perjury at trial by testifying "that she understood that there was a bubble built into the SAMs whereby the attorneys could issue press releases containing Abdel Rahman's statements as part of their representation of him." The panel also directed Koeltl to consider Stewart's possibly perjured testimony about "her purported lack of knowledge" of Taha, a leader of the Islamic Group, who had solicited a statement from Abdel Rahman opposing the continuation of a ceasefire between the Islamic Group and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's government.

In fact, Koeltl noted there was "evidence to indicate that [Stewart's] statements were false statements." But he concluded it was "unnecessary to reach [the question] whether the defendant knowingly gave false testimony with the intent to obstruct the proceedings" because (1) the Guidelines calculation already provided for the statutory maximum, and (2) a non-Guidelines sentence was, in Koeltl's estimation, "reasonable and most consistent with the factors set forth in Section 3553(a)." Thus, Koeltl did consider whether Stewart committed perjury in his initial sentencing decision. Michael Tigar, Stewart's trial counsel, told me he is "convinced that there is ample independent corroboration for Lynne's version of events."

Judge Calabresi, who joined the majority panel decision, noted in his separate opinion that Koeltl was "a judge of extraordinary ability [with] a well-earned reputation for exceptional judgment." Calabresi wrote that "for us ? who have not been involved in the case and do not know all the backs and forths, . . . to second guess the district court's judgment seems to me be precisely what both the Supreme Court and our court sitting en banc . . . have said we should not do."

According to Tigar, Koeltl's sentence decision was "well-argued." Tigar said, "For any court of appeals judge to write in a hostile vein about [Koeltl's] decision is an arrogation to the appellate court of a power that the rules of procedure and long legal tradition vest in trial judges. In addition," he added, "the sentence reflected the reality of this case, a reality that seems to have escaped the court of appeals panel."

Calabresi thought it "not . . . entirely irrelevant" that Stewart was the only lawyer criminally charged even though two others also violated the SAMs. Noting that "while prosecutorial discretion may be salutary in a wide variety of cases," Calabresi wrote, "when left entirely without any controls it will concentrate too much power in a single set of government actors, and they, moreover, may on occasion be subject to political pressure." Calabresi observed that the district court's exercise of its sentencing discretion "may provide the only effective way to control and diminish unjustified disparities."

Judge Walker, concurring and dissenting, wrote separately that Stewart's sentence was "breathtakingly low" and "extraordinarily lenient." He would go further than the majority and vacate Stewart's sentence as "substantively unreasonable."

Both Calabresi and the majority thought it significant that all of the acts for which Stewart was convicted occurred before the September 11, 2001 attacks. Calabresi would "take judicial notice of their timing," and "recognize that our attitudes about her conduct have inevitably been influenced by the tragedy of that day." Notably, he added: "We must be careful then in judging Stewart based on lessons that we learned only after her ? very serious ? crimes were committed." Stewart was indicted in 2002 and convicted in 2005.

"Lynne's representation of the sheik was in the best traditions of advocacy," Tigar said. "She was brought into the case by Ramsey Clark, and her actions on behalf of her client never went farther than Ramsey had already gone. The government's conduct towards her when the SAMs issue first erupted validated that belief."

The clear message of the 125-page majority appellate panel opinion is that attorneys who zealously represent their clients in the post-9/11 era beware. This result will undoubtedly chill the willingness of criminal defense attorneys to handle terrorism cases. Moreover, the Court of Appeals fortuitously released its opinion just as Attorney General Eric Holder announced his intent to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court for his alleged role in the 9/11 attacks.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and immediate past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law and co-author of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent. Her anthology, The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse, will be published in 2010 by NYU Press. See www.marjoriecohn.com.

Posted 9/25/2009 by RANDY DOTINGA

The Legal Avenger

On the legal front, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have few bigger enemies than Marjorie Cohn, a professor at San Diego's Thomas Jefferson School of Law.

Cohn, president of the liberal National Lawyers Guild, is a leading voice demanding that members of the Bush Administration be prosecuted for war crimes. She also condemns the Afghanistan and Iraq wars as illegal under international law, which she says the United States. It's a debate that hinges on whether the wars were launched in self defense.

In a new book, "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent," she and a co-author write about members of the military who have resisted service in the current two wars on legal grounds. She's also written a book about the Bush Administration called "Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law."

So far, Cohn's opinions aren't gaining much traction in Washington D.C., although the Obama Administration is slowly making strides toward some torture prosecutions.

So Cohn fights on. In an interview, she talked about the responsibility of soldiers to disobey wrongful orders, the prosecution of government lawyers and the country's ability to withstand the distraction of putting a former president and vice president on trial.

What are your biggest recent successes on the war-crimes front?
I have testified as an expert witness in courts martial and military hearings for servicemembers who have refused orders to go to Iraq and Afghanistan. They have argued that those wars are illegal. My testimony has corroborated those beliefs by citing the U.N. charter, which is part of U.S. law, which says one country cannot invade another country unless it's in self defense or the U.N. Security Council agrees. And neither of those wars is lawful under the U.N. charter. Under our law, there's a duty to obey lawful orders, but there's also a duty to disobey unlawful orders. The order to deploy to an unlawful war is an unlawful order. My testimony has corroborated the reasonableness of the belief of some service members that it would be illegal for them to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. We've had some success with that testimony.

How so?
In one case, the servicemember was given no time in custody. In another case, he was separated from the military under very favorable conditions. I also testified in front of Congress last year on the Bush Administration's policy of torture and abuse, and that testimony has been useful in the move to bring to justice the people who set the policies and the lawyers who wrote the torture memos to justify the policies.

Can someone be prosecuted for merely having a legal opinion?
They would be prosecuted for advising the president on how he can break the law and get away with it. There were lawyers who were prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity after World War II advising Hitler on how to deport people to secret camps "legally" and get away with it.

What do you think should happen to the lawyers in this case?
They should be investigated and prosecuted under U.S. statutes.

Should they go to prison?
If convicted, yes, they should go to prison.

How far up would you extend the prosecutions for war crimes?
All the way up the chain of command to the commander in chief.

So you would have Bush and Cheney prosecuted?
Absolutely. And there's tremendous evidence to support prosecutions for torture, which is a war crime, and for leading us into an illegal war under false pretenses which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

When you look at these issues, is it purely from a legal perspective or do you also think about how trials like these might affect the nation?
Both. My legal training makes it very clear to me that they have broken laws, and we are a nation of laws. The Constitution requires the president to faithfully execute the laws. It's also clear to me that if we don't bring people who have committed these high crimes to justice, then future administrations will think they can get away with war crimes. People in other countries will hate us even more because we let our leaders get away with murder and torture.

What do you think will be the negative consequences if Bush and Cheney are prosecuted?
Will the country be torn apart, and does that worry you? The Republicans will oppose it. The country is divided on many issues; it's divided on health care and the war in Afghanistan. The fact that some people, especially Republicans, might be upset if members of the Bush Administration are brought to justice should not prevent the president and attorney general from doing the right thing.

What about the issue of distraction?
A trial would be all the country would think about for months or years when there are other issues out there. There are all kinds of distractions. We are capable as a country of taking care of business in many different areas at the same time. That's a red herring.

What do you think President Obama should do now regarding the wars abroad?
He should pull out and use diplomacy and foreign aid and more peaceful means of resolving problems than escalating the military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

Is there anything that will change the tide in your favor?
What could change the tide is a strong and vigorous anti-war movement. We don't have that now. We did during Vietnam, and one of the reasons was that we had a draft, and college students protested.

What is your vision of humanity?
Some people look at war and conflict and think that humans fight, this is inevitable. Then there are the peace activists who say we can work things out through diplomacy instead of violence. I'm not a pacifist. There are times when people have to act in self defense. But the United States government has not been acting in self defense.

Most problems between countries and within countries can be handled with peaceful means. Violence and fighting is a last resort. But unfortunately, the U.S. has used it as a first resort too often.

Posted 9/05/2009 by Carrie Johnson

Court Allows Lawsuit Against Ashcroft

A Muslim man who was detained for weeks as a material witness in a terrorism case can sue former attorney general John D. Ashcroft, a federal appeals court in California ruled Friday as it rejected a bid for absolute legal immunity by the onetime Cabinet official.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit gave a green light to the case filed by Abdullah al-Kidd, a U.S. citizen who was taken into custody at a ticket counter at Washington Dulles International Airport in 2003, while he was on his way to Saudi Arabia to study Islamic law and Arabic.

At the heart of the lawsuit is a strategy launched by the Justice Department and the FBI after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Ashcroft, the attorney general at the time, asserted that authorities would take "suspected terrorists off the street" and engage in "aggressive detention of lawbreakers and material witnesses" to disrupt possible al-Qaeda plots. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III cited al-Kidd's detention in testimony to Congress about the bureau's success in protecting national security.

Al-Kidd and his attorneys argued that Ashcroft knew or should have known that the material witness statute was being used in a sweeping and abusive manner. Ashcroft, who is being defended by the Justice Department, maintained that the case should be dismissed because he had no personal involvement in al-Kidd's detention. He also argued that as the nation's chief law enforcement officer at the time, he enjoyed broad protection from lawsuits.

But Judges Milan D. Smith Jr. and David R. Thompson disagreed, writing that Ashcroft was not entitled to absolute legal immunity and that authorities had detained al-Kidd in part to conduct an investigation of his activities, without probable cause. Judge Carlos T. Bea wrote a partial dissent. All three judges were appointed by Republican presidents.

Al-Kidd, a Muslim convert who had been a standout running back on the University of Idaho football team, was confined in a high-security cell lit 24 hours a day, according to the opinion. He was strip-searched and transported, in shackles, across three states for 16 days before a court ordered his release. Authorities could not offer evidence of criminal wrongdoing by al-Kidd, and he never testified in a court proceeding.

For more than 15 months after his release, al-Kidd was forced to live with his parents-in-law in Nevada, curtail his travel and report to a probation officer. Al-Kidd lost his job with a government contractor after being denied a security clearance. Since his arrest, he has separated from his wife, suffered emotional trauma and been unable to hold a steady job, the judges wrote.

At the time, authorities said they wanted al-Kidd to testify in connection with a visa fraud case against Sami Omar al-Hussayen. Al-Hussayen ultimately was acquitted of charges that he provided material support to terrorists. Other charges against him were dismissed after a jury failed to reach agreement.

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller declined to comment on the al-Kidd ruling. A spokesman for Ashcroft said, "We will review the decision."

Earlier this year, a district court judge in California allowed a detainee's lawsuit against former Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo to go forward. The suit accused Woo of violating the detainee's constitutional rights by drafting memos that blessed harsh interrogation tactics. The case is being appealed.

The Supreme Court in May rejected a case by another detainee, Javaid Iqbal, who was part of a large-scale roundup of Muslim men on immigration charges throughout the United States after the Sept. 11. attacks. Iqbal had tried to sue Ashcroft and Mueller, alleging discrimination on the basis of race and religion, but the high court ruled that he could not produce sufficient evidence tying the government officials to the actions.

Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project, said the al-Kidd ruling is "an enormous decision" that could help advocates finally understand how many Muslims were rounded up using material witness warrants.

The court's majority opinion comes as senior officials in the Obama administration and Congress debate whether terrorism suspects can be subject to preventive detentions, without criminal charges, as a national security strategy.

The opinion bemoaned that some "confidently assert that the government has the power to arrest and detain or restrict American citizens for months on end, in sometimes primitive conditions . . . because the government wishes to investigate them for possible wrongdoing or to prevent them from having contact with others in the outside world. We find this to be repugnant."

Posted 8/26/2009 by Joby Warrick, Peter Finn and Julie Tate

CIA Releases Its Instructions For Breaking a Detainee's Will

As the session begins, the detainee stands naked, except for a hood covering his head. Guards shackle his arms and legs, then slip a small collar around his neck. The collar will be used later; according to CIA guidelines for interrogations, it will serve as a handle for slamming the detainee's head against a wall.

After removing the hood, the interrogator opens with a slap across the face -- to get the detainee's attention -- followed by other slaps, the guidelines state. Next comes the head-slamming, or "walling," which can be tried once "to make a point," or repeated again and again.

"Twenty or thirty times consecutively" is permissible, the guidelines say, "if the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question." And if that fails, there are far harsher techniques to be tried.

Five years after the CIA's secret detention program came to light, much is known about the spy agency's decision to use harsh techniques, including waterboarding, to pry information from alleged al-Qaeda leaders. Now, with the release late Monday of guidelines for interrogating high-value detainees, the agency has provided -- in its own words -- the first detailed description of the step-by-step procedures used to systematically crush a detainee's will to resist by eliciting stress, exhaustion and fear.

The guidelines, along with thousands of pages from other newly released documents, also show how the CIA gradually imposed limits on the program and eliminated some of the most controversial practices after the agency's medical advisers protested.

Still, by Dec. 30, 2004, the date of the CIA memo that outlines the guidelines to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, agency interrogators had grown adept at using sleep deprivation, stress positions and sometimes multiple methods to create a "state of learned helplessness and dependence."

"Certain interrogation techniques place the detainee in more physical and psychological stress and, therefore, are considered more effective tools," according to the memo, released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Amnesty International USA and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The CIA on Tuesday declined to comment on the memo, which was written by an agency lawyer whose name was redacted from the document. But agency spokesman George Little noted that the interrogation program operated under guidelines approved by top legal officials of the Bush administration's Justice Department.

"This program, which always constituted a fraction of the CIA's counterterrorism efforts, is over," Little said. "The agency is, as always, focused on protecting the nation today and into the future."

CIA officials also have noted that harsh techniques were reserved for a small group of top-level terrorism suspects believed to be knowledgeable about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Agency officials believe the methods prevented future attacks.

Medical Concerns

As outlined in the memo, the agency's psychological assault on a detainee would begin immediately after his arrest. With blindfolds and earmuffs, he would be "deprived of sight and sound" during the flight to the CIA's secret prison. He would have no human interaction, except during a medical checkup.

In the initial days of detention, an assessment interview would determine whether the captive would cooperate willingly by providing "information on actionable threats." If no such leads were volunteered, a coercive phase would begin.

The detainee would be ushered into a world of constant bright light and high-volume "white noise" at levels up to 79 decibels, about the same volume as a passing freight train. He would be shorn, shaved, stripped of his clothes, fed a mostly liquid diet and forced to stay awake for up to 180 hours.

"Establishing this baseline state is important to demonstrate to the [detainee] that he has no control," the memo states.

Interrogations at CIA prisons occurred in special cells outfitted on one side with a plywood wall, to prevent severe head injuries. According to the agency's interrogation plan, the nude, hooded detainee would be placed against the wall and shackled. Then the questioning would begin.

"The interrogators remove the [detainee's] hood and explain the situation to him, tell him that the interrogators will do what it takes to get important information," the document states.

If there was no response, the interrogator would use an "insult slap" to immediately "correct the detainee or provide a consequence to a detainee's response." If there was still no response, the interrogator could use an "abdominal slap" or grab the captive by his face, the memo states.

Each failure would be met with increasingly harsher tactics. After slamming a detainee's head against the plywood barrier multiple times, the interrogator could douse him with water; deprive him of toilet facilities and force him to wear a soiled diaper; or make him stand or kneel for long periods while shackled in a painful position. The captive could also be forced into a wooden box for up to 18 hours at a stretch.

Such techniques raised concerns among some agency officials, particularly members of a medical advisory group known as the Office of Medical Services (OMS). When the interrogation program began, the group "was neither consulted nor involved in the initial analysis of the risk and benefits" of enhanced interrogation techniques, according to a 2004 report by the CIA's inspector general.

According to the report, the OMS did not issue formal medical guidelines until April 2003, after the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Over time, however, as the interrogation program was refined and strict guidelines were imposed on the use of certain techniques, the OMS began to play an increasingly pivotal role.

A 2005 Justice Department memo repeatedly referred to December 2004 OMS guidelines in assessing the application of coercive techniques, noting that the "OMS has, in fact, prohibited the use of certain techniques in the interrogation of certain detainees."

The medical office appears to have been deeply skeptical of the use of waterboarding, a simulated-drowning technique that was suspended by 2004. OMS personnel told the inspector general that "the reported sophistication" of the preliminary review of waterboarding was "exaggerated," and it said the power of the technique was "appreciably overstated."

The OMS also raised serious concerns about the medical dangers of waterboarding.

"Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness," the OMS warned, according to the 2005 Justice Department memo.

Modifying the Program

Such warnings, combined with congressional concerns about the CIA's secret prisons, gradually led the agency to modify the program. The menu of enhanced interrogation techniques was reduced from about a dozen to six, according to a Justice Department memo. Gone were nudity, walling, water-dousing, stress positions, cramped confinement in boxes and waterboarding. The proposed six techniques to be kept were dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, the facial hold, the attention grasp, the abdominal slap and the insult slap.

The CIA said those techniques were "the minimum necessary to maintain an effective program."

By the summer of 2006, the number of detainees in CIA prisons had dropped below 20, including 14 high-value detainees who were transferred to the secret Camp 7 at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Still, as late as 2006, many of the basic conditions remained, according to a Justice Department memo dated Aug. 31, 2006.

The facilities were constantly illuminated, and the agency used closed-circuit surveillance to monitor the prisoners at all times, suggesting that hidden cameras were placed inside cells.

"The detainee is isolated from most human contact, confined to his cell for much of each day, under constant surveillance, and is never permitted a moment to rest in the darkness and privacy that most people seek during sleep," the memo said.

But, to combat mental problems, each detainee was given quarterly psychological examinations "to assess how well he is adapting to his confinement," the memo said. Detainees also had regular access to gym equipment and physical exercise.

"The CIA also counteracts the psychological effects of isolation by providing detainees with a wide variety of books, puzzles, paper and 'safe' writing utensils, chess and checker sets, a personal journal, and access to DVD and VCR videotapes," the document said.

Detainees were even allowed to grow back their hair and beards, which were shaved when they arrived.

"The CIA provides detainees with the option of shaving other parts of their bodies in recognition of specific Islamic practices," according to the 2006 memo.

Posted 8/26/2009 by SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations

Two 17-watt fluorescent-tube bulbs - no more, no less - illuminated each cell, 24 hours a day. White noise played constantly but was never to exceed 79 decibels. A prisoner could be doused with 41-degree water but for only 20 minutes at a stretch.

The Central Intelligence Agency's secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy.

The first news reports this week about hundreds of pages of newly released documents on the C.I.A. program focused on aberrations in the field: threats of execution by handgun or assault by power drill; a prisoner lifted off the ground by his arms, which were tied behind his back; another detainee repeatedly knocked out with pressure applied to the carotid artery.

But the strong impression that emerges from the documents, many with long passages blacked out for secrecy, is by no means one of gung-ho operatives running wild. It is a portrait of overwhelming control exercised from C.I.A. headquarters and the Department of Justice - control Bush administration officials say was intended to ensure that the program was safe and legal.

Managers, doctors and lawyers not only set the program's parameters but dictated every facet of a detainee's daily routine, monitoring interrogations on an hour-by-hour basis. From their Washington offices, they obsessed over the smallest details: the number of calories a prisoner consumed daily (1,500); the number of hours he could be kept in a box (eight hours for the large box, two hours for the small one); the proper time when his enforced nudity should be ended and his clothes returned.

The detainee "finds himself in the complete control of Americans; the procedures he is subjected to are precise, quiet and almost clinical, " noted one document.

The records suggest one quandary prosecutors face as they begin a review of the C.I.A. program, part of the larger inquiry into abuse cases ordered Monday by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Any prosecution that focuses narrowly on low-level interrogators who on a few occasions broke the rules may appear unfair, since most of the brutal treatment was authorized from the White House on down.

"The documents underscore how closely supervised the program was by officials in Washington," said Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose Freedom of Information Act lawsuit forced disclosure of the records. "Any investigation that began and ended with the so-called rogue interrogators would be completely inadequate."

A 2004 background paper the C.I.A. sent to the Justice Department gives the fullest account to date of the oversight of every step that followed the capture of a man suspected of being a top member of Al Qaeda - an HVD, in agency parlance, for high-value detainee.

Brought to the "black site" in diapers, the paper says, the prisoner's head and face were shaved, he was stripped and photographed and sleep deprivation and a diet limited to Ensure Plus, a dietary drink, began.

"The interrogators' objective," the background paper says, "is to transition the HVD to a point where he is participating in a predictable, reliable and sustainable manner." The policy was to use the "least coercive measure" to achieve the goal. The harsh treatment began with the "attention slap," and for three prisoners of the nearly 100 who passed through the program, the endpoint was waterboarding.

Waterboarding might be an excruciating procedure with deep roots in the history of torture, but for the C.I.A.'s Office of Medical Services, recordkeeping for each session of near-drowning was critical. "In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented," said medical guidelines prepared for the interrogators in December 2004.

The required records, the medical supervisors said, included "how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment."

When the doctors gauged what a drenching in a cold cell might do to a prisoner, they did their research, consulting a textbook entitled "Wilderness Medicine," in particular Chapter 6 on "accidental hypothermia," as well as a Canadian government pamphlet, "Survival in Cold Waters," according to footnotes.

Lawyers at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, likewise, were immersed in the details of investigations.

A week before he completed the first major legal opinion that authorized the use of physical pressure, John C. Yoo, the national security specialist in the counsel's office, was faxed a six-page C.I.A. "psychological assessment" of the first man the brutal methods would be used on, Abu Zubaydah. "Subject is a highly self-directed individual who prizes his independence," the assessment said.

In 2004, when Daniel B. Levin, then the acting assistant attorney general in the counsel's office, sent a letter to the C.I.A. reauthorizing waterboarding, he dictated the terms: no more than two sessions of two hours each, per day, with both a doctor and a psychologist in attendance. In 2007, Steven G. Bradbury, then in charge of the office, wrote a two-page letter simply to extend the authorization for use of a particular technique - its name is redacted - for an extra day, until "1700 E.S.T., November 8, 2007."

Tom Parker, policy director for counterterrorism and human rights at Amnesty International USA, said the documents were "chilling."

"They show how deeply rooted this new culture of mistreatment became," he said.

But defenders of the program say the tight rules show the government's attempt to keep the program within the law. "Elaborate care went into figuring out the precise gradations of coercion," said David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. "Yes, it's jarring. But it shows how both the lawyers and the nonlawyers tried to do the right thing."

As leaks about the program led to public accusations of torture, court rulings and Congressional action, the paperwork flowing between nervous C.I.A. and Justice officials steadily grew.

In June 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners who were members of Al Qaeda were entitled to the Geneva Conventions' protections against humiliating and degrading treatment, and "outrages on personal dignity." John A. Rizzo, the C.I.A.'s top lawyer, asked the Justice Department whether treatment at the agency's secret prisons passed that test.

Mr. Bradbury of the Office of Legal Counsel wrote a 14-page response, assuring the agency that none of the conditions - the blindfolding and shackling, the involuntary shaving and the white noise - violated the Geneva Conventions' standards.

"These are not conditions that humans strive for," Mr. Bradbury wrote. "But they do reflect the realities of detention, realities that the Geneva Conventions accommodate, where persons will have to sacrifice some measure of privacy and liberty while under detention."

Soon the assurances were no longer necessary. Worries about the legality of the C.I.A. program had reached the highest levels of the Bush administration. Two weeks after Mr. Bradbury sent his letter, President George W. Bush emptied the prisons, ordering the C.I.A.'s remaining 14 prisoners transferred to the American military's detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Posted 7/11/2009 by Eric Sirotkin

Skeletons in the Closet: On Truth and Reconciliation at Home

"Bush started the warrantless wiretapping program under the authority of asecret court in 2006...." Headlines once again point out what many of ussuspected - that the surveillance program went much deeper and covered muchmore than "terrorism." When will we stand up and shout "Basta" (enough)?"Secret courts" and massive wiretapping of not just overseas calls, butdomestic groups and individuals. (Read the full report on the program atwww.fsa.org.) Is anyone concerned yet? It is important to look forward, butaccountability and future deterrence mandates more than closing sadchapters.

It will take great efforts to dig out the scope and level of intrusion, but a full inquiry is necessary to lay a new course and assure us that suchactions are and remain ancient history. As NLG human rights Attorney ThomCincotta recently blogged (Just after his entry "no grunting at the urinalplease") "Obama threatens to veto Congress if it compels federal inspectorsgeneral to share the details of their investigation into Bush's massive illegal surveillance program (which likely continues to this day). Time totake a stand for the Rule of Law over the Police State."

All this has led to thinking about the Bush skeletons that remain deeplyburied. Throughout those dark years we were distracted by two illegal overtwars. Yet, what was done behind the scenes? Does it make you crave theReagan days of covert contras and quiet secret government plans? TheseNeo-cons made their predecessors' global exploits look timid by openlythumbing their noses at the Geneva Convention, U.S. Treaties (known in thelaw as "the supreme law of the land"), the constitution and FISA. But ifthey were publicly locking people away without lawyers or due process whatwere they doing more covertly? Clearly "targeted killings," as the Israelisare fond of calling them, (an illegal practice under international law) waspracticed extensively in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, so why notassassinations and covert undermining of regimes and policies around theplanet?

Why did progressive Senator Paul Wellstone's plane go down in October of2002? Or what role did the government play in turning their back on threatsprior to September 11th? Am I being overly paranoid? Have I suddenly becomea whacked out conspiracy theorist with Mel Gibson's blazing eyes? Sadly, Idon't think so. I imagine myself a rather regular guy. A peacemaker, yes,but one who rejoices in his new grandson's giggles and still cheers for thewinless Detroit Lions and other hometown favorites. Politically an Obamasupporter from the get-go who still believes in hope and change.

So I have been wondering - why would such a "transparent" leaning guy andbrilliant strategist like Obama not want to open up the past to scrutiny?The answer may lie not in cover-up as much as in the fear of openingAmerica's Pandoras' box of transgressions. I've seen our new president takecontroversial steps to "move us forward," such as choosing to make thebridge-building speech on relations with the Muslim world in Cairo, ratherthan release more Abu Ghraib photos. Therefore his stance on the crimes ofthe Bush administration and his "look ahead " strategy is more than likelybecause the s-storm of stuff waiting to flood out will likely consume ournational dialogue and shatter the last remnants of our internationalcredibility. Has he peeked in and seen so many skeletons that he too - "theleader of the free world" - feels overwhelmed and shell-shocked?

As much as it hurts, it is time for Obama to lead by opening the graves anddusting off the bones. Its what the Truth Commission is doing in Koreaagainst great opposition from those who want to preserve the illusions ofthe past. Yet, even in Korea, where the staggering amounts of mass gravesstill haunt those working with the Commission, they know that without truth,there can never be reconciliation and peace.

Here at home Congressman John Conyers and Cohen's House Bill HR 104 is aneffort to not only have a 911 type commission for the issues surroundingtorture, but to look at the abuses of power by the Executive branch andpropose ways to curb it. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD-rSOUsmwQ).The truth must be known and those responsible must be brought before thepublic to be held accountable. Lets not wait, as in Korea, more than 55years to dig up the bones.

Write your local congressman and ask them to support the bill and drop anote to john.conyers@mail.house.gov or call him at 202-225-5126 and let him know you support the effort.Write your comments and express your desire for true transparency towww.whitehouse.gov

Posted 7/3/2009 by Jason Leopold

Eager to Tap Iraq's Vast Oil Reserves, Industry Execs Suggested Invasion

Two years before the invasion of Iraq, reports suggested invading to end Saddam Hussein's control of the oil.

Two years before the invasion of Iraq, oil executives and foreign policy advisers told the Bush administration that the United States would remain "a prisoner of its energy dilemma" as long as Saddam Hussein was in power.

That April 2001 report, "Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century," was prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the US Council on Foreign Relations at the request of then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

In retrospect, it appears that the report helped focus administration thinking on why it made geopolitical sense to oust Hussein, whose country sat on the world's second largest oil reserves.

"Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East," the report said.

"Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. Therefore the US should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments."

The advisory committee that helped prepare the report included Luis Giusti, a Shell Corp. non-executive director; John Manzoni, regional president of British Petroleum; and David O'Reilly, chief executive of ChevronTexaco.

James Baker, the namesake for the public policy institute, was a prominent oil industry lawyer who also served as secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, and was counsel to the Bush/Cheney campaign during the Florida recount in 2000.

Ken Lay, then-chairman of the energy trading Enron Corp., also made recommendations that were included in the Baker report.

At the time of the report, Cheney was leading an energy task force made up of powerful industry executives who assisted him in drafting a comprehensive "National Energy Policy" for President George W. Bush.

A Focus on Oil

It was believed then that Cheney's secretive task force was focusing on ways to reduce environmental regulations and fend off the Kyoto protocol on global warming.

But Bush's first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, later described a White House interest in invading Iraq and controlling its vast oil reserves, dating back to the first days of the Bush presidency.

In Ron Suskind's 2004 book, "The Price of Loyalty," O'Neill said an invasion of Iraq was on the agenda at the first National Security Council. There was even a map for a post-war occupation, marking out how Iraq's oil fields would be carved up.

Even at that early date, the message from Bush was "find a way to do this," according to O'Neill, a critic of the Iraq invasion who was forced out of his job in December 2002.

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer later made another discovery: a secret NSC document dated February 3, 2001 - only two weeks after Bush took office - instructing NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney's task force, which was "melding" two previously unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states" and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." [The New Yorker, February 16, 2004]

By March 2001, Cheney's task force had prepared a set of documents with a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and a list titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," according to information released in July 2003 under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

A Commerce Department spokesman issued a brief statement when those documents were released stating that Cheney's energy task force "evaluated regions of the world that are vital to global energy supply."

There has long been speculation that a key reason why Cheney fought so hard to keep his task force documents secret was that they may have included information about the administration's plans toward Iraq.

"Conspiracy Theory"

However, both before and after the invasion, much of the US political press treated the notion that oil was a motive for invading Iraq in March 2003 as a laughable conspiracy theory.

Generally, business news outlets were much more frank about the real-politick importance of Iraq's oil fields.

For instance, Ray Rodon, a former executive at Halliburton, the oil-service giant that Cheney once headed, said he was dispatched to Iraq in October 2002 to assess the country's oil infrastructure and map out plans for operating Iraq's oil industry, according to an April 14, 2003 story in Fortune magazine.

"From behind the obsidian mirrors of his wraparound sunglasses, Ray Rodon surveys the vast desert landscape of southern Iraq's Rumailah oilfield," Fortune's story said. "A project manager with Halliburton's engineering and construction division, Kellogg Brown & Root, Rodon has spent months preparing for the daunting task of repairing Iraq's oil industry."

"Working first at headquarters in Houston and then out of a hotel room in Kuwait City, he has studied the intricacies of the Iraqi national oil company, even reviewing the firm's organizational charts so that Halliburton and the Army can ascertain which Iraqis are reliable technocrats and which are Saddam loyalists."

At about the same time as Rodon's trip to Iraq - October 2002 - Oil and Gas International, an industry publication, reported that the State Department and the Pentagon had put together pre-war planning groups that focused heavily on protecting Iraq's oil infrastructure.

The next month, November 2002, the Department of Defense recommended that the Army Corps of Engineers award a contract to Kellogg, Brown & Root to extinguish Iraqi oil well fires.

The contract also called for "assessing the condition of oil-related infrastructure; cleaning up oil spills or other environmental damage at oil facilities; engineering design and repair or reconstruction of damaged infrastructure; assisting in making facilities operational; distribution of petroleum products; and assisting the Iraqis in resuming Iraqi oil company operations."

In January 2003, as President Bush was presenting the looming war with Iraq as necessary to protect Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported that oil industry executives met with Cheney's staff to plan the post-war revival of Iraq's oil industry.

"Facing a possible war with Iraq, US oil companies are starting to prepare for the day when they may get a chance to work in one of the world's most oil-rich countries," the Journal reported on January 16, 2003.

"Executives of US oil companies are conferring with officials from the White House, the Department of Defense and the State Department to figure out how best to jump-start Iraq's oil industry following a war, industry officials say.

"The Bush administration is eager to secure Iraq's oil fields and rehabilitate them, industry officials say. They say Mr. Cheney's staff hosted an informational meeting with industry executives in October [2002], with ExxonMobil Corp., ChevronTexaco Corp., ConocoPhillips and Halliburton among the companies represented.

"Both the Bush administration and the companies say such a meeting never took place. Since then, industry officials say, the Bush administration has sought input, formally and informally, from executives and industry experts on how best to overhaul Iraq's oil sector."

Guarding the Oil Ministry

Despite the Bush administration's denials about oil as a motivation for war, the Bush administration's focus on Iraqi oil was firmly set.

On April 5, 2003, Reuters reported that the State Department's "Future of Iraq" project headed by Thomas Warrick, special adviser to the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, held its fourth meeting of the oil and energy-working group.

Documents obtained by Reuters showed that "a clear consensus among expert opinion favoring production-sharing agreements to attract the major oil companies."

"That is likely to thrill oil companies harboring hopes of lucrative contracts to develop Iraqi oil reserves," the news agency reported. "Short-term rehabilitation of southern Iraqi oil fields already is under way, with oil well fires being extinguished by US contractor Kellogg Brown and Root ...

"Long-term contracts are expected to see US companies ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips compete with Anglo-Dutch Shell, Britain's BP, TotalFinaElf of France, Russia's LUKOIL and Chinese state companies."

After US troops captured Baghdad in April 2003, they were ordered to protect the Oil Ministry even as looters ransacked priceless antiquities from Iraq's national museums and stole explosives from unguarded military arsenals.

Unacceptable Options

In April 2001, the report laid out a series of unacceptable options, including helping Iraq under Saddam Hussein extract more oil by easing embargoes that were meant to hem Hussein in.

"The US could consider reducing restrictions on oil investment inside Iraq," the report said. But if Hussein's "access to oil revenues was to be increased by adjustments in oil sanctions, Saddam Hussein could be a greater security threat to U.S. allies in the region if weapons of mass destruction, sanctions, weapons regimes and the coalition against him are not strengthened."

Iraq is a "key swing producer turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest," the report said, adding that there was even a "possibility that Saddam Hussein may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time" in order to drive up prices.

"Under this scenario, the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma, suffering on a recurring basis from the negative consequences of sporadic energy shortages," the report said. "These consequences can include recession, social dislocation of the poorest Americans, and at the extremes, a need for military intervention."

The report recommended Cheney move swiftly to integrate energy and national security policy as a means to stop "manipulations of markets by any state" and suggested that his task force include "representation from the Department of Defense."

"Unless the United States assumes a leadership role in the formation of new rules of the game," the report said, "US firms, US consumers and the US government [will be left] in a weaker position."

Two years after the Baker report, the United States - along with Great Britain and other allies - invaded Iraq. Now, more than six years later, the US oil industry finally appears to be in a strong position relative to Iraq's oil riches.

However, the price that has been paid by American troops, Iraqi civilians and the US taxpayers has been enormous.

Posted 6/4/2009 by Josh Meyer

Senator calls for 'truth commission' to probe Bush-era interrogations

The partisan clash over controversial Bush administration interrogation methods intensified Wednesday at a Senate hearing, with the chairman saying a "truth commission" is all but inevitable.

A Republican colleague, however, suggested that Democrats were exploiting the controversy for political gain.

The Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, the first by Congress on the Bush administration's use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, also revealed some new details about how the harsh tactics were authorized and used.

Ali Soufan, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent and interrogator, testified that President George W. Bush and Justice Department lawyers were wrong when they said that waterboarding and other tactics used on one suspect provided key pieces of intelligence about Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Testifying from behind a screen to protect his identity, Soufan said the techniques, touted by the Bush administration as perhaps its most effective weapon against terrorism, were actually slow, ineffective and unreliable.

He said that he and a CIA agent gleaned much, if not all, of the crucial information from suspected Al Qaeda chieftain Abu Zubaydah before the coercive techniques were initiated, including information on the key role of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in the Sept. 11 attacks and the plot by alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla.

Soufan, now a private security consultant, also said that outside contractors working for the CIA were the ones who used the coercive tactics, and that he and the CIA official working with him protested. The use of harsher methods by the contractors backfired, Soufan said, prompting Zubaydah to stop talking.

"I totally disagree with the assertion that there was a conflict between FBI and CIA. They were 100% supportive," Soufan said of the on-site CIA officials. "The chief psychologist objected to these techniques and left the location even before I did."

Asked whether Bush's public comments in 2006 about the effectiveness of the "enhanced" techniques were accurate, Soufan said, "My impression is that the president was told a half-truth."

Another witness, Philip D. Zelikow, who was a legal advisor to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, provided new details about what he said were his efforts to aggressively protest the use of the techniques in meetings in the White House situation room and elsewhere.

In each case, he said, he was routinely blocked by more senior administration officials and ordered to destroy a lengthy legal memo in which he outlined his concerns about the "unsound, even unreasonable" legal justifications for the tactics.

Zelikow, now a history professor at the University of Virginia, called the interrogation campaign "an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment to extract information." It was, he added, "a mistake, perhaps a disastrous one" that should be investigated so the country can learn from it.

Other witnesses at the hearing also called for such an inquiry, as did several Democratic senators led by Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the subcommittee chairman and a former top federal prosecutor.

Whitehouse vowed more hearings on the legality of the interrogations, in tandem with the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating whether the techniques worked and how they were used.

Whitehouse said mounting evidence suggests that administration officials used twisted legal interpretations to authorize the tactics. He also said he was concerned about information provided by Zelikow and others, suggesting that administration officials beat back internal opposition that was much stronger than has been disclosed.

"We were told that waterboarding was determined to be legal but were not told how badly the law was ignored, bastardized and manipulated by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel; nor were we told how furiously government and military lawyers rejected the defective OLC opinions," Whitehouse said.

He said that, as a member of both the judiciary and intelligence committees, he intended to investigate the role played by private CIA contractors in the interrogations.

"We were told we couldn't second-guess the brave CIA officers who did this, and now we hear that the program was led by private contractors with a profit motive and no real interrogation experience," Whitehouse said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a lawyer in the Air Force Reserve, challenged Soufan and other witnesses to prove that the coercive interrogation techniques did not provide important information about Al Qaeda.

He suggested that hearings on the tactics and their legal foundations were "a political stunt" by the Democrats, and that their efforts to gather details of the classified program would dangerously undermine national security.

Some administration officials "made mistakes out of fear," and the government should learn from those mistakes but not prosecute or even investigate anyone for their role in them, Graham said.

After the hearing, Graham continued to protest the growing chorus of Democratic calls for investigations, noting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D- San Francisco) reportedly was briefed on at least some aspects of the classified program years ago.

"Should we have Nancy Pelosi here?" Graham asked. "Where does it end?"

Posted 6/4/2009 by Jeremy Scahill

UN Human Rights Council Blasts US for Killing Civilians, Drone Attacks and Using Mercenaries

The UN Human Rights Council has issued a report blasting the US for killing civilians, violating human rights and creating a "zone of impunity" for unaccountable private contractors to fight its wars. The UN group also criticized the US use of drones to attack Pakistan. The report, released this week was authored by Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

"First, the government has failed to track and make public the number of civilian casualties, or the conditions under which deaths occurred," he said. 'second, the military justice system fails to provide ordinary people, including U.S. citizens and families of Iraqi and Afghan victims, basic information on the status of investigations into civilian casualties or prosecutions resulting therefrom."

Alston called on the US to establish a national commission to investigate the killing of civilians and for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to criminally investigate government officials accused of crimes.

"The government has failed to effectively investigate and punish lower-ranking soldiers for such deaths, and has not held senior officers responsible," Alston said. "Worse, it has effectively created a zone of impunity for private contractors and civilian intelligence agents by only rarely investigating and prosecuting them."

On the issue of drone attacks, Alston said, "Targeted killings carried out by drone attacks on the territory of other states are increasingly common and remain deeply troubling? The U.S. government should disclose the legal basis for such killings and identify any safeguards designed to reduce collateral civilian casualties and ensure that the government has targeted the correct person."

According to Reuters:

U.S. diplomat Lawrence Richter objected to Alston's remarks, saying the U.N. investigator did not have the mandate to cover military and intelligence operations related to armed conflict.

Richter told the Human Rights Council that the United States has an extensive legal framework to respond to unlawful killings and is doing all it can to provide information about the deaths that occur in its armed conflicts.

Alston, who is an Australian law professor, visited the United States last year, before Obama became president

Posted 5/6/2009 by John Byrne

US interrogators killed dozens

United States interrogators killed nearly four dozen detainees during or after their interrogations, according a report published by a human rights researcher based on a Human Rights First report and followup investigations.

In all, 98 detainees have died while in US hands. Thirty-four homicides have been identified, with at least eight detainees - and as many as 12 - having been tortured to death, according to a 2006 Human Rights First report that underwrites the researcher's posting. The causes of 48 more deaths remain uncertain.

The researcher, John Sifton, worked for five years for Human Rights Watch. In a posting Tuesday, he documents myriad cases of detainees who died at the hands of their US interrogators. Some of the instances he cites are graphic.

Most of those taken captive were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. They include at least one Afghani soldier, Jamal Naseer, who was mistakenly arrested in 2004. "Those arrested with Naseer later said that during interrogations U.S. personnel punched and kicked them, hung them upside down, and hit them with sticks or cables," Sifton writes. 'some said they were doused with cold water and forced to lie in the snow. Nasser collapsed about two weeks after the arrest, complaining of stomach pain, probably an internal hemorrhage."

Another Afghan killing occurred in 2002. Mohammad Sayari was killed by four U.S. servicemembers after being detained for allegedly "following their movements." A Pentagon document obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2005 said that the Defense Department found a captain and three sergeants had "murdered" Sayari, but the section dealing with the department's probe was redacted.

Perhaps the most macabre case occurred in Iraq, which was documented in a Human Rights First report in 2006.

"Nagem Sadoon Hatab, a 52-year-old Iraqi, was killed while in U.S. custody at a holding camp close to Nasiriyah," the group wrote. "Although a U.S. Army medical examiner found that Hatab had died of strangulation, the evidence that would have been required to secure accountability for his death - Hatab's body - was rendered unusable in court. Hatab's internal organs were left exposed on an airport tarmac for hours; in the blistering Baghdad heat, the organs were destroyed; the throat bone that would have supported the Army medical examiner's findings of strangulation was never found."

In another graphic instance, a former Iraqi general was beaten by US forces and suffocated to death. The military officer charged in the death was given just 60 days house arrest.

"Abed Hamed Mowhoush [was] a former Iraqi general beaten over days by U.S. Army, CIA and other non-military forces, stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord, and suffocated to death," Human Rights First writes. "In the recently concluded trial of a low-level military officer charged in Mowhoush's death, the officer received a written reprimand, a fine, and 60 days with his movements limited to his work, home, and church."

Another Iraqi man was killed in a US detention facility on Mosul in 2003.

"U.S. military personnel who examined Kenami when he first arrived at the facility determined that he had no preexisting medical conditions," the rights group writes. "Once in custody, as a disciplinary measure for talking, Kenami was forced to perform extreme amounts of exercise-a technique used across Afghanistan and Iraq. Then his hands were bound behind his back with plastic handcuffs, he was hooded, and forced to lie in an overcrowded cell. Kenami was found dead the morning after his arrest, still bound and hooded. No autopsy was conducted; no official cause of death was determined. After the Abu Ghraib scandal, a review of Kenami's death was launched, and Army reviewers criticized the initial criminal investigation for failing to conduct an autopsy; interview interrogators, medics, or detainees present at the scene of the death; and collect physical evidence. To date, however, the Army has taken no known action in the case."

Death from interrogation is hard to separate from simple detainee death while in US custody. But one particular case stands out that seems to have fallen by the wayside - the murder of CIA "ghost" detainee named Manadel al-Jamadi, who was tortured to death by a CIA team at Abu Ghraib in 2003.

"Pictures of Abu Ghraib guards Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman posing with al-Jamadi's dead body, the so-called Ice Man, were among the most notorious of the Abu Ghraib photographs published in April 2004," Sifton notes. "A CIA officer named Mark Swanner and an interpreter led the team that interrogated al-Jamadi. Nine Navy personnel were also implicated. An autopsy conducted by the U.S. military five days after al-Jamadi's death found that the cause: "blunt force injuries complicated by compromised respiration."

"Reporting by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer and NPR's John McChesney revealed that al-Jamadi was strung up from handcuffs behind his back, a torture tactic sometimes called a 'Palestinian hanging,'" he adds. "After an investigation, the CIA referred the case to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution of the CIA personnel involved, but no charges were ever brought. Prosecutors accused 10 Navy personnel of the crime; nine were given nonjudicial punishments, such as rank reductions and letters of reprimand, and a 10th was acquitted."

Additionally, Sifton notes the CIA may have had some close calls with detainees nearly dying during interrogations: the May 10, 2005, Bush Administration torture memo by Stephen Bradbury notes that doctors were nearby to perform a tracheotomy if during waterboarding the suspect is approaching death.

"Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue of psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness," Bradbury wrote. "An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately, and the integrator should deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water. If this fails to restore normal breathing, aggressive medical intervention is required."

The memo says CIA doctors were on hand with necessary equipment to perform a tracheotomy if necessary during waterboarding sessions: "[W]e are informed that the necessary emergency medical equipment is always present-although not visible to the detainee-during any application of the waterboard."

Posted 5/6/2009 by Marjorie Cohn

Stanford Anti-War Alumni, Students Call for Condi War Crimes Probe

During the Vietnam War, Stanford students succeeded in banning secret military research from campus. Last weekend, 150 activist alumni and present Stanford students targeted Condoleezza Rice for authorizing torture and misleading Americans into the illegal Iraq War.

Veterans of the Stanford anti-Vietnam War movement had gathered for a 40th anniversary reunion during the weekend. The gathering featured panels on foreign policy, the economy, political and social movements, science and technology, media, energy and the environment, and strategies for aging activists.

On Sunday, surrounded by alumni and students, Lenny Siegel and I nailed a petition to the University President's office door. The petition, circulated by Stanford Say No to War, reads:

"We the undersigned students, faculty, staff, alumni, and other concerned members of the Stanford community, believe that high officials of the U.S. Government, including our former Provost, current Political Science Professor, and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow, Condoleezza Rice, should be held accountable for any serious violations of the Law (included ratified treaties, statutes, and/or the U.S. Constitution) through investigation and, if the facts warrant, prosecution, by appropriate legal authorities."

I stated, "By nailing this petition to the door of the President's office, we are telling Stanford that the university should not have war criminals on its faculty. There is prima facie evidence that Rice approved torture and misled the country into the Iraq War. Stanford has an obligation to investigate those charges."

After the petition nailing, I cited the law and evidence of Condoleezza Rice's responsibility for war crimes - including torture - and for selling the illegal Iraq War.

As National Security Advisor, Rice authorized waterboarding in July 2002, according to a newly released report of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Less than two months later, she hyped the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq , saying, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Her ominous warning was part of the Bush administration's campaign to sell the Iraq war, in spite of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency's assurances that Saddam Hussein did not possess nuclear weapons.

A week before the nailing of the petition, Rice made some Nixonian admissions in response to questions from Stanford students during a campus dinner designed to burnish Rice's image on campus.

In October 1968, Stanford anti-war activists had nailed a document to the door of the trustees" office which demanded that Stanford "halt all military and economic projects concerned with Southeast Asia ."

Posted 4/29/2009 by Scott Horton

Prosecution of Bush Six Back On

In a ruling in Madrid today, Judge Baltasar Garzón has announced that an inquiry into the Bush administration's torture policy makers now will proceed into a formal criminal investigation. The ruling came as a jolt following the recommendation of Spanish Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido against proceeding with a criminal inquiry, reported in The Daily Beast on April 16.

Judge Garzón previously initiated and handled investigations involving Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Argentine "Dirty War" strategist Adolfo Scilingo and Guatemalan strongman José Efraín Ríos-Montt, often over the objections of the Spanish attorney general. His case against Pinochet gained international attention when the Chilean general was apprehended in England on a Spanish arrest warrant. Scilingo was extradited to Spain and is now serving a sentence of 30 years for his role in the torture and murder of some thirty persons, several of whom were Spanish citizens.

Garzón's ruling today marks a decision to begin a formal criminal inquiry into the allegations of torture and inhumane treatment he has been collecting for several years now.

Now, Garzón has announced a preliminary criminal inquiry into the Bush administration torture policy, specifying the evidence that a crime had been perpetrated against Spanish subjects, but not yet specifying the specific targets of the investigation. Judge Garzón's decision revealed a deep engagement with documents which had been released in Washington in the last two weeks, particularly a group of memoranda prepared by lawyers in the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) a report of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a memo released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, making it likely that he would focus on the authors of the torture memoranda and other lawyers who worked with them.

The OLC memoranda gave a green light to the use of techniques such as waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, sleep deprivation up to eleven days and confinement in a coffin-like environment with stinging insects in exploitation of a prisoner's phobias with respect to specific prisoners, demonstrating that the lawyers had been deeply engaged in the process of application of torture techniques and not merely giving abstract legal guidance. The Senate Armed Services Committee report provided a detailed chronology of the process of formulation of policy respecting the treatment of prisoners, with a special focus on the introduction of torture techniques. The Senate Intelligence Committee memo detailed the steps leading to issuance of the OLC memos and identified the Justice Department lawyers and others involved in the process Garzón noted, they "reveal what had previously been mere conjecture: namely an authorized and systematic program for the torture and mistreatment of persons denied their freedom without any charge whatsoever and without the rights the law grants any detainee."

Garzon's investigation focuses on charges of conspiracy to introduce and implement a regime of torture at the detention facilities at Guantánamo in Cuba, where five prisoners investigated by Garzón were held. Four of the prisoners have now filed claims with Garzón in which they press charges that they were tortured during their captivity and their claims were validated at least to some extent by a ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court in June 2006 which overturned a conviction on the grounds that it was secured with evidence gathered through torture. The case has been pending since the time of their turnover from U.S. authorities with Judge Garzón, who has attempted to prosecute the five under counter-terrorism statutes.

Garzón is also seeking to have the criminal complaint of a Spanish human rights organization against the Bush Six-six top Bush administration officials-recently reassigned by the chief judge of the Audiencia Nacional to Judge Eloy Velasco, referred back to him for purposes of consolidation with his new preliminary investigation.

The procedural history of the case is somewhat complicated. On March 17, a Spanish human rights organization, the Association for the Dignity of Prisoners (Asociación pro dignidad de los presos y presas de España), filed a criminal complaint asking the court to begin a criminal investigation into the role that six Bush administration lawyers played in the introduction of a torture regime at Guantánamo. The complaint cited Chapter III of Title XXIV of the Spanish Criminal Code, which addresses crimes against prisoners and protected persons during an armed conflict, which implements Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Named as targets were former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, former chief of staff to the vice president David Addington, former general counsel of the Department of Defense William J. Haynes II, former Under-Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, former assistant attorney general and current federal judge Jay Bybee and former deputy assistant attorney general and now professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley John Yoo.

The complaint alleged that they had written legal memoranda approving the introduction of torture techniques at Guantánamo making them key players in a joint criminal enterprise that resulted in the torture of the five Spanish prisoners. The complaint was assigned to Judge Garzón as the investigating magistrate responsible for the case involving the five Spaniards previously held at Guantánamo.

Garzón solicited the opinion of prosecutors about whether the case should proceed.After prosecutors attached to the Audiencia Nacional prepared a 37-page memorandum recommending prosecution, however, Spain's attorney general, Cándido Conde-Pumpido intervened opposing the case. "If you investigate the crime of abuse of prisoners, the people probed have to be those who were materially responsible," the attorney general stated. He denied that lawyers could be help responsible on the basis of legal advice dispensed.

The Spanish attorney general's statement came following intense back channel discussions between the Obama administration and the government of Spanish Prime Minister José Zapatero. When asked about the pending case during an interview with CNN Español, President Barack Obama stated "I"m a strong believer that it's important to look forward and not backwards, and to remind ourselves that we do have very real security threats out there." Obama acknowledged in the course of the interview that his administration had been in discussion with the Zapatero administration about the criminal investigation in Madrid.

Acting on the Spanish attorney general's instructions, the prosecutors advised the court against proceeding with an investigation into the Bush Six. They also stated their view that Judge Garzón should not handle both the torture complaint and the case against the Guantánamo prisoners. Garzón reacted to this request by sending the torture complaint back to the court's administrative judge for random reassignment-as a result of which it went to Judge Velasco. However, Garzón remained in charge of the case against the Guantánamo prisoners. He has in fact been assembling evidence for a criminal case addressing the mistreatment of the detainees for many months.

Garzón's ruling today marks a decision to begin a formal criminal inquiry into the allegations of torture and inhumane treatment he has been collecting for several years now.

Spanish lawyers close to the case tell me that under applicable Spanish law, the Obama administration has the power to bring the proceedings in Spain against former Bush administration officials to a standstill. "All it has to do is launch its own criminal investigation through the Justice Department," said one lawyer working on the case, "that would immediately stop the case in Spain."

Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national security affairs for Harper's Magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.

Posted 4/23/2009 by Marjorie Cohn

Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks I didn't believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury's 2005 memos asserted that "enhanced techniques" on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush's illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to a newly released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That link was never established.

The Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that Condoleezza Rice approved waterboarding on July 17, 2002 'subject to a determination of legality by the OLC." She got it two weeks later from Bybee and John Yoo. Rice, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George Tenet reassured the CIA in spring 2003 that the abusive methods were legal.

Team Bush claimed - and still claims - that it had to use harsh techniques to protect us from the terrorists. They really sought to create evidence to rationalize an illegal, unnecessary, and tragic war.