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U.S. Extends Blackwater Task In Iraq
Friday, September 4th, 2009
The U.S. State Department says a controversial U.S. private security company claimed to have been enlisted in a CIA hunt for al-Qaida members will continue its armed presence and task of shielding U.S. diplomats in Iraq.
Formerly known as Blackwater, Xe Services will retain an aviation service — mainly helicopter escorting of U.S. officials because the company hired to replace it was not yet ready to take over, the Trade Arabia Web site reported Wednesday.
The contract, ending Sept. 3, was the company’s last remaining deal with the U.S. State Department after revelations in June that the CIA enlisted Blackwater for an unknown role in a secret program designed to take out high-value members of al-Qaida.
“We have arranged for a temporary extension of the contract,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters, Trade Arabia reported. It said the decision was taken after the new company, DynCorp, was in need of additional time to prepare for its assignment because of a shortage in equipment.
The spokesman did not elaborate.
Xe’s continued presence in Iraq was bound to spark criticism.
When the Blackwater hit squad plan was reveal by The New York Times, congressional leaders lashed out against the CIA and for not informing them.
In addition, the agency’s director, Leon Panetta, pulled the plug on the program, maintaining that no hit missions had been launched and that no militants had either been located or captured.
About 1,000 Blackwater staff members were used to guard U.S. government personnel in Iraq following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, making it among the largest security companies operating in this country.
In 2004 the company drew scrutiny when four of its employees were killed by an angry mob in Fallujah, then a stronghold for Sunni Arab insurgents.
The bodies were mutilated, fanning a monthlong assault on Fallujah that left 36 U.S. soldiers, 200 insurgents and 600 civilians dead.
Three years later the company’s guards opened fire in the middle of Baghdad, killing 17 civilians. The incident uncorked public outrage with the government in Iraq scrapping Blackwater’s operating license earlier this year.
Bent on shedding its tarnished reputation, the North Carolina-based company renamed its operations it to Xe Services.
Last month a report in The Nation said the U.S. administration extended the company’s contract on July 31, increasing its payment by $20 million and bringing the total paid by the State Department to Xe’s aviation services in Iraq to $187 million.
by OfficialWire NewsDesk
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The Blackwater Targeted Killing Program
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Susan Burke supported the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. But now that Obama is in office, she finds her views diverging widely from his.
Obama is opposed to investigating the excesses of the administration of his predecessor, former President George W. Bush. Burke, an attorney, favors an investigation. Obama has thus far avoided answering the question of whether the U.S. Constitution was violated in Bush’s so-called “war on terror.” Burke wants an investigation to focus on precisely this question. Obama is looking forward, while Burke is looking back.
What Burke sees when she looks into the rearview mirror is indeed ugly. She sees 17 dead, including women and children, lying on Nisoor Square in Baghdad, killed on Sept. 16, 2007, by mercenaries working for Blackwater, a private American security firm. She sees Blackwater employee Andrew Moonen who, after a Christmas party in 2006, drove through Baghdad, heavily armed, and shot a man for no reason. She hears the shot, fired from a Blackwater helicopter, that killed an innocent man on Baghdad’s Wathba Square on Sept. 9, 2007.
But most of all, Burke sees Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder and former owner. In her suit, she refers to him as a “modern-day merchant of death,” and she alleges that the 40-year-old created a “culture of lawlessness and unaccountability” at Blackwater, where the “excessive and unnecessary use of deadly force” was commonplace. In her motion, Burke also accuses Blackwater of war crimes. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, in Alexandria, Virginia, will now decide whether to take on Burke’s civil suit.
Committed In the Name of America
The political world will also have to make some decisions. The first question is whether the U.S. government will make public on Monday the most comprehensive report to date on the treatment of terrorism suspects. That alone would trigger a political hurricane in Washington, says former CIA Director Porter Goss. It would also make it much more difficult for the government to rebuff calls for it to finally investigate all the alleged illegal activity carried out in the fight against terrorism.
It was not until the end of June that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder read the report, which was prepared by the CIA’s inspector general in 2004. But then he spent a full two days in his office in Washington, D.C., studying the document. When he had finished reading it, he apparently stood at the window for a long time, staring out at Constitution Avenue. Horrified over what had been done in the name of America, Holder looked into the possibility of appointing a special prosecutor. Sources in Washington say that he has now achieved his goal, which puts him more squarely in Burke’s camp than Obama’s.
Blackwater characterizes Burke’s accusations as “scandalous and baseless,” and claims that the cases she cites were isolated incidents. According to Blackwater attorneys, “no diplomat under the protection of this service died or even was injured during the entire duration of the contract.”
Symbol of an Era
Prince, who earlier in his career claimed to have “the heart of a warrior,” is intent on preventing the civil suit from going to trial. To that end, he has hired a team of lawyers working for the law firm of Mayer Brown, which also represents 89 companies on Fortune magazine’s list of the top 500 U.S. companies ranked by revenues.
Peter White, the head of the Mayer Brown team, plans to convince the judges in Alexandria this week that the Blackwater case isn’t a case at all. In his written response to Burke’s lawsuit, White argues that any public disclosure of Blackwater’s methods would endanger its personnel in war zones, and her suit should be dismissed.
White also argues that if there is any culpability, it rests with the individuals who committed the acts in question, not the entire company. He points to unsuccessful lawsuits that were filed against US corporations after the Vietnam War, including the case of Vietnamese plaintiffs who tried and failed to sue the U.S. multinational corporation Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of the defoliant Agent Orange. In one respect, the comparison is apt: Blackwater has become a symbol of an entire era, just as Agent Orange was a potent symbol of the Vietnam War.
Outsourcing War
After the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney began using large numbers of private security contractors for the first time. The mercenaries were intended to make up for a lack of manpower, especially in the area of personal security, as well as to perform the dirty work, such as interrogating detainees, thereby leaving U.S. military personnel untainted. Erik Prince’s company turned into an empire practically overnight, collecting more than $1 billion (€700 million) in revenues from U.S. taxpayers. Seventy percent of Blackwater’s contracts with the government were no-bid contracts.
The company’s most important personnel, its fighters, who were known internally as “shooters,” were recruited around the world, including from places like the Philippines and Latin America. In 2007, the company proudly changed its name to Blackwater Worldwide.
The advantage of privatizing the war was obvious for the Bush administration. Blackwater contractors are cheaper than regular U.S. soldiers. When they were killed, their widows received only minor compensation, while the U.S. military pays lifelong survivor benefits. Besides, Blackwater employees died quietly - in other words, they were never part of the official death statistics, which was convenient for the president.
With the end of the Bush administration, Blackwater received fewer contracts and the company changed its name to Xe Services. But its founder’s most determined adversary, Susan Burke, continued her fight.
‘A Christian Crusader’
Burke now plans to call 40 witnesses to testify against Prince. If the court agrees to hear her suit on Friday, eyewitnesses to the various killings will be summoned from Baghdad. In the United States, Burke, who made a name for herself defending detainees subjected to abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, will ask the court to subpoena several former Blackwater employees, including a former executive.
Two affidavits that have been filed in the Alexandria court contain serious allegations against company founder Erik Prince. The men who signed the affidavits, fearing that their lives could be put in danger if their identities were revealed, are identified anonymously as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2.
In his affidavit, John Doe 1, who served in Iraq, writes that he “personally observed multiple incidents of Blackwater personnel intentionally using excessive and unjustified deadly force.”
John Doe 2, who worked for Prince, writes that the former head of Blackwater “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.” He claims that company employees treated the killing of Iraqis as sport.
The Blackwater attorney questions the validity of these witnesses, saying that much of what they claim is based on hearsay. The fact that the witnesses are remaining anonymous, says White, makes it impossible to verify their credibility. He calls the tactics “unfair” and highly prejudicial to defendants.
But the key witnesses’ fear of retaliation is considerable, which also has something to do with the fact that Prince has powerful friends in the government, particularly inside the CIA.
Assassination Teams and Extraordinary Renditions
In addition to working for government departments, Blackwater also worked directly for the intelligence agency, as the new CIA director recently confirmed in a closed-door hearing in the U.S. Congress. And, in a memo Spiegel has obtained, two other former employees describe, for the first time, the details of this covert collaboration.
The two informants are referred to as “Source A” and “Source B” in the internal memo. According to Source B, Blackwater, working on behalf of the CIA, flew terror suspects from Guantanamo to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, where the detainees apparently faced “special treatment” in secret prisons.
The intelligence service commissioned Blackwater and its subsidiaries to transport terror suspects from Guantanamo to interrogations at secret prison camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. The paper identifies aircraft movements and unveils how the flights were disguised. The memo reads: “The CIA hired Blackwater to conduct extraordinary renditions” and “Blackwater flew the rendition targets from Fort Perry and Cuba to Kandahar, Afghanistan.”
‘The CIA Hired Blackwater’
According to the informant, some of the flights were provided by two other companies Prince owned, Presidential Airways and Aviation Worldwide, which were given special clearance in 2003 by the U.S. Defense Department to conduct such flights. Source B even knew the tail numbers of the aircraft that were allegedly involved: N962BW, N964BW and N968BW.
The flights also involved Satelles Solutions, another Prince subsidiary, which operates a training and recruitment camp in the Philippines designed to accommodate about 1,000 soldiers.
According to Source A, Blackwater also helped out the CIA with another controversial activity during the Bush years. In the memo, Source A writes: “The CIA hired Blackwater to conduct targeted killings in Afghanistan.”
In June Leon Panetta, Obama’s new CIA director, told lawmakers in a closed-door hearing on Capitol Hill about a secret program to kill or capture al-Qaeda operatives that was begun eight years ago. The purpose of the so-called assassination program was to recruit and train special forces to assassinate senior al-Qaeda leaders.
Authority to Kill
According to Panetta, Cheney asked the CIA not to disclose the covert program to Congress. The argument that was used at the time was that when combating terrorism, the CIA has the authority to kill without special congressional approval. The program, however, never quite went beyond the training phase, according to CIA testimony before the U.S. Senate.
The memo by the two sources gets more specific. Source A names five people who were allegedly involved in the development of assassination teams, including a man who left Blackwater in mid-2005 and last worked as the head of the Blackwater’s OGA division. The acronym stands for “Other Government Agencies,” which included the connection to the CIA. The other men on the source’s list are a former member of Blackwater’s paratrooper unit, an employee of Blackwater Security Consulting who, according to the memo, was designated as a “hit man” within the unit and Alvin Bernard Krongard, the most senior employee on the list, who the source claims was responsible for assembling the teams. “Krongard set up the teams,” the paper claims.
But the memo does not specify whether agreements were made with individuals or the company itself, or what Krongard’s role was exactly. The latter is particularly difficult to determine, given that Krongard has worked on both sides of the desk. From March 2001 to September 2004, Krongard served as the CIA’s executive director, under then-CIA Director George Tenet. After leaving office, he switched to the private sector, joining Blackwater’s advisory board.
‘We Are Not Inclined to Comment’
Spiegel confronted the company, the CIA and Krongard with the contents of the memo last Wednesday, but they had declined to comment by Friday. A CIA spokesman was unwilling to confirm or deny cooperation with Blackwater with regard to the assassination program or the secret detainee transports. “We do not comment on our contractual relationships,” the spokesman said. He did note, however, that the details of the memo included “mistakes,” although he chose not to elaborate.
Stacy DeLuke, the spokeswoman of Xe Services (as Blackwater is now called), answered in an e-mail: “Due to the sensitive nature of these allegations, we are not inclined to comment at this time.” Krongard’s assistant Cathy Davis said: “I received your e-mail and confirm receipt by Mr. Krongard as well,” but did not respond to questions about Krongard’s role.
The allegations have triggered growing unease on Capitol Hill, where senators want to know more about the covert assassination program. Last Friday, it was also revealed that Blackwater assisted in drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In a letter to fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky urged the secretary of state “not to enter into further contracts with Xe and to immediately review any existing contracts.”
Intellpuke: You can read this article by Spiegel correspondent Gabor Steingart, reporting from Washington, D.C., in context here: www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,644571,00.html
This article was translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.
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Lawyers: Ban Bush from Canada for war crimes
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Canwest News Service
A lawyers’ group has asked the RCMP to bar former U.S. president George W. Bush from entering Canada, citing torture and war crimes committed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In a letter to the RCMP war crimes section and copied to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff and other federal ministers and opposition MPs, the Lawyers Against the War group claims that Bush is “inadmissible to Canada . . . because of overwhelming evidence that he has committed, outside Canada, torture and other offences” as detailed in Canada’s War Crimes Act.
Bush is expected to visit Canada on March 17, to give a speech in Calgary as a guest of the city’s chamber of commerce.
The letter, dated Wednesday, asks the Mounties to “begin an investigation of George W. Bush for aiding, abetting and counselling torture between Nov. 13, 2001, and November 2008 at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and other places.”
It also asks the prime minister, attorney general and ministers of immigration and public safety to ban Bush for heading an administration that “engaged in torture and other war crimes against humanity.”
The group offers to provide evidence of incidents of torture.
This isn’t the first time the group has protested against Bush.
In 2005, a B.C. Supreme Court judge rejected their attempt to put the then-U.S. president on trial for war crimes.
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Ex-Employees Label Blackwater Chief Super-Villian
Friday, August 7th, 2009
Blackwater — I mean, “Xe” — is back in the news, more than six months after the mercenary firm was kicked out of Iraq by the Iraqi government for using “excessive force.” Baghdad gave Blackwater the boot for the company’s apparent role in the killings of 17 civilians in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square on Sept. 16, 2007. In that incident, Blackwater guards reportedly opened fire on a crowd after coming under attack.
According to affidavits filed in federal court on Monday, the company’s founder Erik Prince and his staff were engaged in a fantastic litany of crimes, almost too fantastic to be believed. At the top of the list: Prince and his proteges “murdered, or had murdered, one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities” regarding the Nisoor Square killings. The affidavits, part of a civil lawsuit stemming from Blackwater’s alleged abuses in Iraq, were signed by “John Doe #1″ and “John Doe #2,” both of whom claim to be current or former Blackwater employees. John Doe #2 wrote that he “fear[s] violence against me in retaliation for submitting this declaration.”
The affidavits also allege that Blackwater illegally smuggled weapons into Iraq, sometimes in bags of dog food — an allegation we’ve heard before. More broadly, “Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. … Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game,” according to the statements.The Nation broke the story of the new accusations, calling them “devastating.” Blackwater had re-branded itself as “Xe” earlier this year, in a bid to shed its bad image.
Blackwater’s got loads of legal troubles. Five employees await trial in the U.S. on charges stemming from the Nisoor shootings. The company has also faced accusations from crew members aboard its warship McArthur, which was outfitted to fight pirates but has yet to win a contract. Three McArthur crewmen reported harassment, reprisals and physical abuse at the hands of drunken superiors.
Iraqis, in particular, are adamant that Blackwater face justice. “Iraqis might think at least a little differently of America if the killers are put in prison,” said Iraqis Farid Walid, who was wounded in the Nisoor Square incident.
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Blackwater accused of murder in ‘crusade to eliminate Muslims’
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
A series of allegations including murder, weapons smuggling and the deliberate slaughter of civilians have been levelled against the founder of Blackwater, the security company being investigated for shooting deaths in Iraq. The accusations, including a claim that the company founder Erik Prince either murdered or had killed former employees co-operating with federal investigators, are contained in sworn affidavits lodged at a Virginia court on Monday night. The company was the most prominent of an army of private security companies employed by the Pentagon and State Department to protect military convoys and guard US diplomats in Iraq, The Times reminds.
The accusations against Mr Prince are being made by two former employees, including a former Marine, who have sworn them anonymously as John Doe No 1 and John Doe No 2, because they said they feared for their lives if their identities were revealed.
In one of the statements, John Doe 2, who worked for Blackwater for four years, alleged that Mr Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe” and that his companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life”.
They claimed that Mr Prince and other executives destroyed incriminating videos, e-mails and documents and hid their criminal behaviour from the US State Department.
John Doe 2 claimed in his affidavit that — based on information he said was provided to him by former colleagues — “it appears that Mr Prince and his employees murdered or had murdered one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct”.
The affidavits are part of a motion lodged by lawyers representing 60 Iraqi civilians who are suing Blackwater for alleged crimes. The five civilian suits were consolidated before a judge in northern Virginia. The motion was in response to a request by Blackwater to dismiss the case. Blackwater, which lost its multimillion-dollar State Department contract in May, denies the claims and is contesting the lawsuits. No criminal charges have been filed against Mr Prince.
In a statement released to CNN, the company said that it would respond “to the anonymous unsubstantiated and offensive assertions put forward by the plaintiffs” in a brief to be filed on August 17. It added: “It is obvious that plaintiffs have chosen to slander Mr Prince rather than raise legal arguments or actual facts that will be considered by a court of law. We are happy to engage them there.
“We question the judgment of anyone who relies upon and [reiterates] anonymous declarations.” Five Blackwater guards who pleaded not guilty to manslaughter charges are awaiting trial over a shooting incident in Nisour Square, Baghdad, on September 16, 2007, which left 17 Iraqis dead. A sixth guard pleaded guilty.
The John Doe 2 affidavit alleged that Mr Prince intentionally deployed like-minded men to Iraq “who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades”. It stated that Blackwater employees consistently used racist and derogatory terms. The separate 72-page motion, which cites the affidavits, also accused Blackwater guards of boasting of kills, taking mind-altering drugs, steroids and using child prostitutes. Mr Prince is accused of smuggling illegal weapons into Iraq on his private aircraft. He is accused of allowing his guards to use illegal exploding bullets “to inflict maximum damage on Iraqis”. He is also accused of racketeering and tax evasion. The former Marine alleged that numerous incidents of excessive force were videotaped, watched at the end of the day, and then erased.
FOCUS News Agency
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Ministers call for torture inquiry
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
Parliament’s Joint Human Rights Committee has called for an independent inquiry into allegations that the British Government was complicit in acts of torturing terror suspects.
The cross-party group of MPs and peers examined details of several cases where it was alleged individuals detained as terror suspects were mistreated by Britain’s allies abroad.
Shadow foreign secretary William Hague said: “The Government’s failure to answer growing questions about torture and rendition are damaging the good name of this country.”
He added: “It is particularly disappointing that both the Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary refused to give oral evidence to the committee.
“We agree with the report’s recommendation that the Intelligence and Security Committee should be reformed.”
Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said: “The committee is absolutely right to call on the Government to allow a full, independent inquiry into all aspects of alleged complicity by the UK in torture, ‘rendition’, illegal detention and other human rights abuses.
“Amnesty has been calling for an inquiry for months and the sense we are getting is that the Government is still trying to brush this issue under the carpet.
A Government spokesman said there was no need to hold an independent inquiry and said there were no new allegations in the committee’s report.
He said: “The Government unreservedly condemns the use of torture as a matter of fundamental principle and works hard with its international partners to eradicate this abhorrent practice worldwide.”
Among the cases referred to the committee was that of Salahuddin Amin, a UK-born terrorist convicted in 2007 of planning to attack numerous targets in the UK, including the Bluewater shopping centre. Amin alleged that he was tortured during his detention in Pakistan between 2004 and 2005 and that British intelligence officials interviewed him several times in between periods of torture.
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Guantánamo Bay: the inside story
Saturday, July 25th, 2009
Six months ago this week President Obama, on his second day in office, promised to close the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, and to undo the secretive and coercive detention and interrogation policies of George W. Bush. But has Obama been as good as his word?
I went to Guantánamo last month to see for myself what difference, if any, Obama’s election had made. My trip was surreal from start to end. I was in line for the rotating junket to the island, and had been given a date by a nervous-sounding and very young Lieutenant Cody Starken. I signed papers that committed me to not reporting classified information — on pain of prosecution. Then I got on a tiny aircraft — unmarked on any announcement board — out of Fort Lauderdale airport.
On the aircraft were bland-looking contractors, male and female, who deflected my small talk, and two young staffers from the Centre for Constitutional Rights, the organisation representing the detainees when no one else would touch the work, and which now co-ordinates hundreds of lawyers from across the country doing so: Pardis Kebriaei, a staff lawyer, and Jess Baen, a legal worker, tried to answer all my questions until my military handler determinedly parted us on our arrival. Lawyers are kept in a compound on one side of the military base at Guantánamo, journalists housed on the other side; they may never communicate with or run into one another. As a journalist, a handler sticks within 18in of you at all times, standing outside when you go to the bathroom and near by when you buy personal items at the commissary; your phone calls and e-mail are monitored.
Passport check was followed by our descent over the glittering curve of the sea on to the edge of Cuba, which was studded with lights. A tired, courtly Navy media specialist, MC1 Mapp, whisked me through security checks; I took in the heat, humidity, mosquitoes and languid crowds of Filipino and Jamaican contractors. We stepped into a ferry; then a young, chipper Sergeant Hillegass — in his other life, a 911 dispatcher — met us in a van and drove us to a street of identical townhouses. I was left alone in the house.
My mobile phone could not call out directly, my BlackBerry did not work, there was no internet access for my computer. My press kit had a scene of a lush sunset on the cover, and a speedboat.
Breakfast — with a TV crew from Poland and another from Russia, and our military handlers — was at a lively mess hall that looked like something out of summer camp, except that all the tired, strapping young people were in pressed fatigues. Then two African American soldiers, Petty Officer Bennet, a genial woman in her thirties who wanted to be a graphic designer, and a charming man a bit older, Petty Officer Dwight, took us to our first stop, Camp X-Ray.
As the military handlers made pleasant jokes about the heat, I took in a low-tech vision of Hell. This was the site of the first scenes from Guantánamo, where men sweltered in kennel-like cages. These were the cages themselves: about 50, each about 8ftx12ft, an aisle down the centre for guards to move in, a slab of corrugated iron on top of each cell, and a pipe with a funnel at groin level, in which to urinate; open to the elements; no walls, no true shade. Concrete floors. There had been buckets for defaecation, MC1 Dwight told us; but the prisoners had thrown the faeces at the guards. There was a communal shower, now crumbling — but the prisoners had not liked to shower in groups, naked.
The scene was being reclaimed by nature: vines and brambles were swallowing the wire, twisting around the doors. At 10am the humidity was so intense that sweat was pouring down our faces. The temperature was close to 40C. I went into a cell; grinding heat, drenching humidity, pure exposure to the sun. It was as if you were being cooked in a man-sized convection oven. “Look out!” shouted Petty Officer Dwight. “Banana rats!”
I looked up and shrieked, staggering to my feet: climbing across the wire walls and on to the roof of the cell was a 40lb rodent, with a long wiry tail, the size of a bulldog. Another one scurried along the base of the wall, a baby on its back; a third made itself at home in the undergrowth of the neighbouring cell — big, grotesque creatures with no fear. I imagined what it must have been like to try to sleep in that black heat, these animals slipping in and out of the cages with their great claws and teeth.
Behind the cages was the interrogation hut — a plywood shack painted with a red cross. A one-man cage stood near by. From Human Rights Watch reports and documents in Michael Ratner’s book Guantánamo: What the World Should Know, I knew that this was the notorious isolation cell. Prisoners in a detention camp are so cowed by the sight of the isolation cell and those held in it that they become compliant, since isolation is far more damaging psychologically to many prisoners than anything else.
“This is the isolation cell?” I asked Petty Officer Dwight. “Yes,” he said. Then he advised us that the detainees themselves had requested it. “They asked that other detainees who were disruptive and disturbing them be taken here for a ‘time out’. This was a ‘time-out’ area … if someone was to act up and they needed a ‘time-out’.”
It was the first of many times I would look at PO Dwight — a decent guy whose true passion was hairstyling — and wonder if he believed what he had been trained to say. But he gave this, and other “facts”, with a kind of innocence. He took us into the interrogation rooms. About 25 chairs were stacked in a corner — unusual chairs for a military setting. The seats were padded; the structure itself was made of a bamboo material; and, oddest of all, each of the arms of the chairs curled into an elaborate spiral. I leant in more closely: on each chair’s arms was a clear mark from what appeared to have been several layers of gaffer tape. I looked at the legs of the chairs, where a prisoner’s ankles would be: the same apparent gaffer-tape marks.
I went into the interrogation room. A table, two chairs. Gaffer tape remained in long strips on the plywood walls, not holding anything together, but positioned near by like an office supply; a pile of wadded-up grey gaffer tape remained on the floor.
PO Dwight reminded us of the scenes we had witnessed on TV of prisoners at Camp X-Ray being transported restrained, lying on stretchers — though no one had asked about it; the stretchers were, he said, for the wellbeing of the prisoners; to move them more easily. It was not, he was keen to assure us, that they had been sick, or hurt.
On to lunch at the mess hall. After lunch, we were taken on a bizarre tour of a baking facility, where an exuberant, smiling South Korean woman in a hairnet (“I love food service! I love my job!”) showed off trays of hot, fragrant buns and baklava. We heard for the third or fourth time from our military handlers that they, too, wished that they could have that delicious baklava, but that it was reserved for the prisoners’ discerning palates.
The food-service employee displayed a set table of detainees’ actual meals — meat, rice, sauce, salad, and those tasty buns and pastries. She pressed us to try them: the ground meat was spiced in a “culturally appropriate” Middle Eastern style and was not bad. Then she showed off a dozen fridges filled with fresh produce — strawberries, watermelon, maple syrup.
She politely refused to answer questions about what her role was, or who employed her. Private-sector contractors take care of the manual, building, cleaning and service work: to a casual observer, it is they, and not the military, who run Gauntánamo. Military men and women have, if minimally, to answer reporters’ questions; contractors do not even have to identify themselves. Contractors work in medical facilities; clear journalists’ video; deal with classified material; but they are answerable only to their employers. Their houses are far more luxurious, on the island, than are those of the military.
Military spokespeople must give answers, but the answers are maddeningly evasive. Can detainees get mail from their loved ones? I asked often. What if someone dies of natural causes, who notifies the family? If a loved one calls, can prisoners take the call? What happens to care packages from loved ones? What if a spouse asks to visit? Can I see the letter that tells her that she can’t? I put these questions “in writing” and asked them at least five times up the chain of command, and followed up multiple times on my return. Most of my questions were met — from higher-level “media specialists” such as Lieutenant-Commander Brook DeWalt or Major Haynie — with non-answers. “I don’t know, but I can ask for you.” “That is above my pay grade.”
The detainee handlers and the lawyers for detainees often flatly contradict each other. The handlers and my press kit claim that “Detainees get a call every couple of months” or quarterly, and that “they make phone calls on a regular basis — every few weeks”. But Kebriaei says that her clients can make calls “every six months if they are lucky”. “Detainees get mail all the time,” the handlers claim. “Care packages are destroyed,” says Kebriaei, who described the security-driven destruction of the orthopaedic shoes that her elderly client needed for his swollen feet.
And so, on we went in the afternoon, to Camps 5 and 6 — hulking state-of-the-art maximum-security prison edifices. But with a difference, as a smiling nameless blonde soldier said to us (name tags are stripped from uniforms when soldiers are inside the detention centres — the process is called “sterilising” — and the prisoners themselves are addressed by number, never by name). These soldiers looked as if they had been chosen from the coolest fraternity and sorority on campus. They were unusually physically attractive. Our guide, Lieutenant Fulghum, was a bright, charming Irishman with a twinkle in his eye and killer abs. When he greeted the twentysomething blonde soldier with the phrase, “Honour bound, Ma’am”, it was as good as a wink. (“Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” is the motto). “Honour bound, Lieutenant,” she smiled back.
As we moved down the corridor the weird intimacy of the place — which had, according to many detainees and reports such as Broken Laws, Broken Lives, a study by Physicians for Human Rights, been the scene of so much abuse — hit me.
There in front of me was a shower stall fully fronted with glass, facing into a public central hallway where military men and women passed regularly. It forced male prisoners daily into a state of public nudity, which is illegal according to US and international law.
The guards showed us a demonstration cell: it was spotless. Hooks folded down so that no one could hang himself; there was a toilet in a corner, a plastic wedge of a bed, and high-tech mechanical doors that shut of their own accord. No sun, no sightlines, no natural light. I noted the guards’ use of facemasks. “Facemasks are to help protect soldiers,” our tour guide said. “We do have assaults — spitting, throwing faeces and urine.”
Another diorama was set up in another cell, of “comfort items”. It looked unchanged from photos of Guantánamo that I had seen in the Bush era. Here was a Koran; toiletries; a padded mattress the thickness of a yoga mat, for those who “co-operated”; a thinner mattress, fewer “comforts”, for those who did not.
Opposite this room was yet another cell, which the military handlers were most proud of. “The TV room is a big change,” one of the handlers said. There was a big blue squishy sofa facing a nice big flat-screen TV. We were told that the detainees get to watch TV three hours a day; that their favourite TV show is The Deadliest Catch, about fishing; and that they also love Harry Potter. There was a tray table where prisoners could eat baklava while watching Harry Potter — and there, at the base of the sofa, were leg shackles, bolted to the concrete floor.
At the end of the hall I opened a door. Before me was an unused cell, packed halfway to the ceiling with hundreds of cans of Ensure, the liquid nutrient used in force-feeding. (Jen Nessel, of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, had told me that 24 detainees were being force-fed daily, in restraining chairs, because they were on hunger strike.) Lieutenant Fulghum came to get me, annoyed. “No one is supposed to go this far down the hall,” he snapped. I asked if anybody was on hunger strike. “We are not allowed to say. The medical staff handles that,” Lieutenant Fulghum said.
We were taken outside to Camp 6: there was a modest-sized recreation area surrounded by wire; and there they were, the causal heart of the whole monster. The detainees — Pakistani, Afghan, Iraqi and Yemeni men in their twenties, thirties and forties, wearing white T-shirts and khaki shorts — milled about; one or two threw a basketball out of range. The journalists were moved back down the hallway before they could see us, as if we were on safari. I asked if I could speak to them. My handler smiled. “No way.”
Our handlers took us out of the first structure to the grassy area between the buildings. In the second building, our handlers promised, we would see — since Obama had taken office — art classes; English classes. A library.
Outside, all around us, we saw a facility — one scheduled to be closed by December 2009 — under massive new construction: dozens of labourers were digging, surrounded by the grinding noise of building. A facility that Congress thinks it is discussing the “how” of closing — and that the President has claimed for six months is already slated for closure — was metastasising under our very eyes. When I asked about this I was told that the money had been allocated already and so it would be more expensive to stop construction than to keep it going. Through that open causeway of construction, the detainees in their central cage caught sight of us.
A sharp, sudden roar arose from the knot of men who spotted us. One of the prisoners looked straight at me and, his face twisted with an emotion that I could not read, screamed: “Go! Go!”
“Why are they saying ‘Go?’” I asked.
The handler looked at me. The Muslim men in the cage were being managed by guards who were mostly African American, and who shouted in colloquial English to get their attention: “Yo! 289! Stop that!” “They learn English from the guards,” he explained. “They aren’t saying ‘Go’.”
What they had screamed out to us — across the greatest possible distance — was: “Yo!”
After these camps, our handlers showed us Camp 4, part of Camp Delta, used to house “more compliant” detainees. A dozen prisoners milled about in a bigger central space (“We call this ‘The Patio’ or ‘The Lanai’,” our handler said; the new talking points also refer to communal meals as “feast days”.) This cage, too, was surrounded by mesh and guards.
I asked a guard if he had formed any personal opinions about the men he was guarding. He paused for a moment. “They don’t complain. They are needy,” he said. I asked what he meant. “Emotionally needy,” he said. “It comes out as asking for things all the time — a certain brand of shampoo, extra blankets … it is a kind of dependency.” The guard was suddenly whisked away. We were then taken to a medical bay. In the white-on-white bay was a military nurse — her name removed from her uniform; she refused to identify herself. And a psychologist stood ready to brief us, next to yet another diorama. Before us was a display of Ensure fanned out across a medical tray table. The nurse, a pleasant, pretty white middle-aged woman with a soft hairstyle and a rueful smile, gestured at the display like a car showroom model. She gave us a rundown of how they feed the prisoners who were on hunger strike.
The nurse confirmed that some detainees were on hunger strike and said that they were fed forcibly “when they refuse to take feeding fluids”. But she didn’t call it force-feeding: “We call it ‘enteral feeding’,” she corrected me. “It goes down the nose and into the stomach.The patients are given a variety of flavours,” she said, going back to her infomercial-style presentation and gesturing at the cartons. “Strawberry, French vanilla, butter pecan — they have a choice. Our admiral did this for a week and he gained four pounds,” she said fondly.
I turned to the psychologist, a dark-haired man in his late forties, heavily muscled, with the same featureless area on his chest where name tags ordinarily are. He, too, refused to give me his name when I asked. I asked him what happens if a detainee is depressed. “We will go see them. They can request the Behavioural Health Unit.” He said that they get “talk therapy” if they need it. “I can empathise,” he said. “I see it as being very similar to people who are detained in any correctional facility.”
I pointed out to the man that perhaps his patients were “depressed and anxious” because of what they had suffered in Guantánamo. (It is now well documented that detainees were subjected to “stress positions”, sleep deprivation, waterboarding and extremes of hot and cold. But for those working at Guantánamo, the talking points on torture seem to be that “abuse may or may not have happened, there is no way to know”: A Department of Defence spokesman, Joe Della Vedova, had called the claim that prisoners had been tortured at Guantánamo, “a posture of the defence”; Petty Officer Dwight called it “a matter of opinion”. And Lieutenant-Commander DeWalt called it “an assertion” and “a point of view”.) I would subsequently discover that the day before I met the psychologist and the nurse, a detainee, Muhammad al-Hanashi, had died, in what the Joint Task Force Guantánamo press office reported as an “alleged suicide”. Six weeks later, that death still has not have been investigated by an independent body.
But Andrew Selsky, of Associated Press, interviewed Binyam Mohamed, a former prisoner who knew the young man; Mr Mohamed said that suicide was “totally out of character” for Mr al-Hanashi. He was, according to Mr Mohamed, a positive person who had been elected by the prisoners as their representative. Associated Press reported that on January 17, 2009, Mr alHanashi had been summoned to a meeting with Admiral David Thomas, Commander of JTF Guantánamo, and the head of the Guantánamo guard force; Mr al-Hanashi never returned to his cell, but was taken directly to the psychiatric ward. Elizabeth Gilson, a lawyer for a detainee who was also in the ward, knows more about what happened; but she can’t tell anyone; it is classified.
The JTF Guantánamo press release reporting the death would be terse; the details nonexistent; there would be little follow-up in the media — because there was nothing the Guantánamo press office would release that would give anything to go on. His body would, presumably, go somewhere — but Mr al-Hanashi himself would, during the days I was at Guantánamo, simply disappear.
here was a final stop: another trailer inside the same area as Camp Delta, where the Combat Status Review Board takes place. There were security cameras in the corners of the room covered with towels for, we were told, “classification reasons”. There Captain Dan Bauer, another handsome, dark-haired, pleasant man, explained the combat status review tribunal (CSRT) process. Twenty serious-looking high-ranking military men sat to our right watching his presentation to us. In the room was his desk: and two chairs facing it. I turned on my little Flip camera and started recording. Captain Bauer claimed in his talk that witnesses were brought in from outside“whenever reasonable”. I looked at the base of both chairs. Both chairs had shackles. The process had been “formed”, Captain Bauer explained, “to afford the detainees the opportunity to attend and provide witness statements that were relevant and readily available on behalf of their own defence”. The system, he repeated several times, sorts them into those who are “enemy combatants” and those who are “no longer enemy combatants”.
He explained that “about 520 detainees were designated as enemy combatants, the remaining 40 or so are no longer enemy combatants”. Why, I wondered, was there no category for “never been enemy combatants”? A Russian reporter with us asked if the detainees have access to telephones or the internet, so that they can communicate with people in their country, to get documents and witnesses.“No,” Captain Bauer said. “In that case what would happen is that there was something that — if there was a process by which if they felt made their case, then what the board would do is the Dept of Defence works with the Department of State to contact, er . . . the nations of detainees to try to make arrangements just to get whatever information — er, that they need.” He said that detainees are taken “in the heat of the battlefield” and that there they “put the pieces together”.
I asked if everyone in the room with the detainee was employed by the US Government. Captain Bauer confirmed that.
“As I understand the process,” the Polish reporter said, “it is the detainee alone against the US Government?”
“I don’t understand the question,” Captain Bauer replied.
I asked why there were two different chairs with shackles. Captain Bauer explained that if the detainee had another detainee as his witness, then he would be present. In sources provided by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and the American Civil Liberties Union I had read that prisoners had been abused to provide false confessions implicating other prisoners, in just this setting, and that their “enemy combatant” status had been based on these false confessions. Testimony of witnesses who were not from within the prison system, so not subjected to coercion, was of course crucial for the review to be effective. Have there ever been any, or were any witnesses there, on the island right now?
“I can’t confirm whether there have or not.”
“Would you fly them here?”
“The Department of Defence, the Department of State, work with foreign agencies to make those arrangements.”
“Have they made those arrangements — ever?”
“Ummm … we afford the opportunity. Whether it’s been done or how often it’s been done, I don’t, I don’t know the answer.”
That afternoon we got to Guantánamo’s main street, which was like a main street anywhere in the US — McDonald’s, a Wal-Mart-style store: T-shirts for sale reading “It Don’t Gitmo Better Than This”, “Guantánamo Resort and Spa” and “Guantáanamo, Pearl of the Antilles”. You could get postcards of the banana rats.
Dinner was more salad displays; a pasta fiesta; a make-your-own sundae bar. It was like a food court in a really good mall. I tried to watch the sunset, under the scrutiny of my handler.
t six the next morning we awoke, dressed and convened outside, but — something was wrong. Petty Officers Dwight and Bennet were looking sadly at a flat tyre on the white van in the driveway that was to transport us. I tried my computer in the backyard for the hell of it, and to my surprise found that I got a thin thread of access to the outside world. A friend in Egypt had sent me a bombshell news clipping about Mr al-Hashani’s alleged suicide. While we had been at the medical bay, the Guantánamo press office had been scrambling to word a bland press release. The whole world knew about this death.
Only we, the journalists actually present at the scene, had had no idea. Petty Officers Dwight and Bennet eventually got us on wheels — taking us through the chic, upscale neighbourhoods of the contractors, with their barbecues, playstructures and verandas, through the boxy, hut-like quarters of the enlisted men and women — and back to the site of the military commissions.
There a new set of handlers showed us another sterile portable cell where detainees conferred with their lawyers. I asked our guide if there was lawyer-client privilege, or was the cell under surveillance? “I can’t answer that,” the guide said. (The defence lawyer Wells Dixon said that he always assumed that his conversations with his client were being listened in to.) We were taken in to the state-of-the art “courtroom” itself, where the ill-starred military tribunals meet. It is unbelievably expensive-looking: rows of gleaming wooden tables for the lawyers of the detainees — and seats with shackles at the base for the detainees at the end of each table; a raised dais where the “panel” — about 20 members of the military — sits facing the tables; and a raised platform in the front of the room, where the “judge” sits in the middle and on one side sits the detainee and on the other, the witness for the defence. Two contractors showed me around. One, “Mo”, showed me how you can put a $5 note under a light on a desk and it shows up onscreen behind the judge’s chair much magnified. I looked up: “In God We Trust”, the motto read.
Then he showed me the stop-motion button system on the audio feed that means that a censor can redact any information that comes out that he wishes to cut — so the press in the galley area behind glass at the back of the room, and down in the hangar, will never know what was redacted. The button system is in the same area as the “witness chair”, which seemed odd to me.
I asked if the chair had ever been used.
“Well … no,” he said. Not to his knowledge. Then he showed me again with great pride the live feed that was hooked up directly into the “courtroom” that could “transmit witness testimony into the courtroom from anywhere in the world”.
“Has it ever been used to transmit actual witness testimony?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “But we have the capability.”
At the end of the trip, I asked Deputy Press Officer Major Haynie to respond to the statement that no witnesses had ever been called to the CSRT process. I did not get an answer. Five weeks later I asked the Pentagon spokesman Vedova for a response — no answer — and six weeks later I called Lieutenant-Commander DeWalt to confirm or deny that external witnesses had never been called to the CSRT process.
He said that the 9/11 families were coming down to witness motions at the military tribunals and they would be housed in townhouses or officers’ quarters. I asked if the families of defendants would be allowed to observe the motions as well. “I don’t believe there are defendants’ families on this visit.” I asked him if defendants’ families have ever been brought in. “Not to my knowledge,” he conceded. I asked DeWalt if, in the rebranded military commissions under Obama’s Administration, real witnesses will be flown in from outside the prison system. “It’s a fair question — I’ll get back to you,” he said. So far, he has not done so.
The next morning I was due to depart when word came that the one flight out was cancelled. Instead, I was to fly out on military transport. On the aircraft I chatted with those seated around me. To my right was a military doctor, who acknowledged that he had been flown to the island to attend to the post-mortem of the dead prisoner.
“Will there be an investigation?” I asked.
That was the investigation, he explained. When I later asked Lietenant-Commander DeWalt about the death of Mr al-Hanashi, he said that there was an ongoing investigation, and that he could not give “details of that situation — we are holding off on any speculation — because it would get in the way of investigators doing their job”.
Sitting behind the doctor on the aircraft was a genial young clergyman, Chaplain Mubarak, who turned out to be one of four Muslim chaplains in the Navy. He, too, had been flown in for the death — from Chicago. He had been tasked with “culturally sensitive” treatment of the corpse. He explained that in Islam only another Muslim could wash the dead man’s body. Had he been allowed to give spiritual support to Mr al-Hanashi’s fellow prisoners? No.
I made my way down the aisle to join another lawyer, whom I had met in the waiting room: George Clarke, a corporate lawyer with Miller and Chevalier, a big law firm in Washington. He works pro bono for his clients who are detainees. “I represent two of the 17 Uighurs that are still here. They were all cleared to go — by the Department of Defence, by the courts, by the military . . . innocent guys. But they have been here for seven years.”
To explain why the detainees are not permitted to speak to reporters, Clarke says, the Department of Defence is citing the Geneva Conventions. “Which is kind of interesting because their position has been that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to these guys. If the Geneva Conventions applied they would be able to have a canteen from which to buy things, tobacco that they could have, a right to organise themselves and have a representative.”
“Remember,” Clarke says, “for a lot of these guys, there’s no evidence. The military said that of the 240 guys left here maybe 80 will eventually be ‘tried’ in some form. What about the rest? A lot of these people have been held because they stayed at a guest house or they had some supposed connections or affiliations [with al-Qaeda]. ‘Connections’ are like … someone’s brother was a member. Or allegedly a member. The whole world has a misconception that these guys were picked up on the battlefield. And a whole lot of them were not.
“This country is based on the rule of law,” Clarke continued quietly. “If you truly have no reason to hold someone, you can’t hold them. National security cannot override freedom.
“At the end of the day our freedom is more important. If we lose our freedom — what are we trying to secure?”
What, indeed?
We landed, the lights of Washington now twinkling brightly below us, but the answer still unclear.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article6725411.ece
Have Your Say: Guantánamo Bay: the inside story
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China’s police-state
Saturday, July 18th, 2009
The Chinese regime’s ongoing police-military suppression of unrest in the north-western province of Xinjiang has created international tensions. While the US and other Western powers have largely remained silent, concerned that social and political instability in China could endanger the global economy, Turkey has stepped up its condemnations of China while Islamic extremists have threatened to attack Chinese interests overseas.
Beijing’s deployment of more than 20,000 heavily-armed troops to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, may have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of members of the Uighur minority. So far the official death toll is 192 (mostly Han civilians killed by Uighur rioters), with 1,721 wounded, and 331 shops and 627 vehicles burned. More than 1,400 people have been arrested.
The response of the security forces to any sign of resistance has been ruthless, in order to intimidate any opposition, especially from the working class. On Monday, soldiers shot and killed two Uighurs and wounded a third. While the Chinese authorities claimed that the shooting was necessary to prevent a crime, Zhang Ming, a construction worker at a nearby building site told the Associated Press (AP) that he saw three men with knives and sticks attack a group of paramilitary police officers, who then chased them, beat and shot them.
AP reported: “Photos show one policemen raising his rifle to strike a man. Lying at their feet, the man, who was wearing a blue shirt, had blood on his right leg. Police quickly formed a ring around him and raised their guns skyward towards surrounding buildings as if worried about retaliation. An armoured personnel carrier and paramilitary police arrived, and police waved their guns and shouted for people to get off the streets.”
Yesterday, the local chief prosecutor Hamsi Mamuti declared that new arrest warrants would soon be issued and threatened to “severely punish” the so-called violent elements involved in the protests. This threat of a new wave of arrests, which came after Xinjiang Communist Party secretary Wang Lequan had declared that most suspects had been arrested already, has created a tense atmosphere.
According to the AP report: “The fear of arrest was almost palpable in Uighur neighbourhoods, unlike last week when many agitated residents were eager to talk to foreign journalists… Small groups of paramilitary police gripping assault rifles with bayonets stood on special platforms on busy street corners and sidewalks Thursday in Uighur neighborhoods. They used metal barricades with spikes to block the main road into the biggest Uighur district of Er Dao Qiao.”
Foreign reporters have to wear photo identity cards and are not allowed to photograph the thousands of troops guarding the city. The Internet has not been restored since it was cut during the initial July 5 riots and journalists can still only file reports from the government-run media centre.
Far from resolving the ethnic and social tensions in Xinjiang, Beijing’s heavy-handed methods can only deepen the alienation among the oppressed minorities.
The virtual collective silence of the major Western powers indicates that they approve China’s police-state measures, despite small protests by Uighur groups outside Chinese embassies in Europe, North America and Australia.
Responding to the killing of two Uighurs on Monday, the US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly merely said: “As they [the Chinese authorities] work to restore order, we believe that it’s important that they respect the legal rights of all Chinese citizens.”
Beijing criticised Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday over his comment last week that the Chinese repression was “like genocide”. He even threatened to take China to the UN Security Council over the issue.
Erdogan’s remarks inflamed a wave of anti-Chinese protests on the basis of pan-Turkic nationalism, which views Xinjiang or East Turkestan as an ancestral homeland for the Turks for over 1,500 years. In Istanbul on July 12, about 5,000 people turned out, holding Turkish flags and the flags of the short-lived East Turkestan republic that broke away from China in the 1930s. They called for a boycott of Chinese-made goods, a proposal made by Turkish industry and trade minister Nihat Ergun last week.
Turkey is an important base for exiled Uighur activists. The ideological components of pan-Turkic nationalism reflect the ambitions of the Turkish bourgeoisie to expand its political and economic influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus, especially in the Turkic-speaking states like Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan that were established after the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991.
While the Chinese government had not formally protested against Turkey, the state-controlled media has invoked Turkey’s own record of ruthlessly suppressing Kurdish separatist movements, including its military incursion into northern Iraq in 2007.
China Daily on Tuesday demanded that Erdogan withdraw his genocide remarks as “irresponsible and groundless”. The People’s Daily on July 14 reported that patriotic Internet users, a layer of middle-class nationalists cultivated by the Chinese regime, “feel insulted by Turkish actions and suggested that China should change its attitude towards the Kurdish Workers Party and support their appeal for independence, so as to make Turkey pay a heavy political price”.
The state media’s accusations of “biased and twisted” reporting by Western journalists has also mobilised Chinese patriotic “angry youth” for xenophobic attacks. The web site of the Turkish embassy in China was hacked earlier this week to post a letter warning Turkey not to interfere with China’s internal affairs.
The Turkish-based English daily, Hurriyet, warned on July 10 that Ankara’s support for Uighur nationalists would offend not only China, but its ally, Russia, which shares Beijing’s interests in suppressing separatist insurgencies in Central Asia. “If Turkey were to go beyond calls to respect human rights in the region, and appear to be supporting Uighur separatism, it is clear that this will rebound with China referring to the Kurdish issue and minority rights in this country,” the Hurriyet noted.
The Turkish foreign ministry issued a statement stressing its respect for China’s territorial integrity and denying any intention of interfering in Beijing’s internal affairs. “We expect China to provide the necessary environment of peace and security for Uighurs who constitute a bridge of friendship between China and Turkey,” it said.
Turkey is not in a position to challenge Russian and Chinese influence in the region. Russia and the four Central Asian member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) have publicly supported China’s actions in Xinjiang. Beijing also secured support from the two largest predominantly Muslim countries in Asia—Pakistan and Indonesia—which described its conduct as an “internal affair”.
The most reactionary response came from Algerian-based Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which called for attacks on the 50,000 Chinese workers in the country and Chinese personnel across northwest Africa. Three weeks ago, the group ambushed a convoy of Algerian security forces protecting Chinese engineers, killing 24 Algerians.
AQIM’s statement has been exploited by the Chinese regime to justify its claims that the Xinjiang protests were instigated by “three forces”—extremism, terrorism and separatism—from abroad. The state-run media has been saturated with reports linking the term “terror” to exiled leaders like Rebiya Kadeer in order to justify Beijing’s heavy-handed measures.
While groups like the US Congress-financed World Uighur Congress headed by Rebiya could be instigating protests as a means of pressuring Beijing for concessions, the protests are an expression of pent-up anger over ethnic discrimination, and above all, the deepening social inequality created by the intensifying capitalist exploitation in Xinjiang and other parts of China.
According to a Financial Times article on July 10, the income gap between the Uighur rural poor and Han urban residents in Xinjiang widened from 2.1 times in 1980 to 3.24 times in 2007. Southern Xinjiang, where more than 90 percent are Uighurs, is falling even further behind. The average income gap between the richest northern county and the poorest in the south was 6.28 times in 2005. It is obvious that Beijing’s push for oil and gas in Xinjiang and Central Asia has had little benefit for the Uighur masses, only a tiny Uighur elite connected with the Chinese Communist Party regime.
The Financial Times noted: “Xinjiang’s Blue Book, the government document measuring social and economic progress, warns that social problems give rise to a ‘severe threat’ of separatism and religious radicalism. The Communist party’s response is to speed up the attempt to transform Xinjiang into something more like the rest of China”. That means extending the cheap labour supply for employers in the industrially developed provinces.
The Xinhua news agency reported on July 15 that Xinjiang had exported 1.87 million “surplus agricultural labourers” in 2008—many of them poor nomads and farmers-turned workers in the busy assembly lines of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province. A local manager at Huizhou told the agency that compared to other migrants, Xinjiang workers were “more hardworking and durable, with strong working discipline, very responsible and very stable”.
The Chinese authorities are forcing poor minorities to work as cheap labour for ruthless sweatshop owners. According to the New York Times yesterday, Uighur poor in and around the city of Kashgar were told to join the exodus to the east or face a penalty of up to six months’ income. Abdul, whose 18-year-old sister is being recruited for a factory in Guangzhou, explained: “If asked, most people will go, because no one can afford the penalty.”
At the Hong Kong-owned Early Light Toy Factory in Shaoguang, the introduction of 800 Uighur workers, amid rising local unemployment, led to a brawl in which two Uighurs were bashed to death last month. It was this incident that directly ignited the protests in Urumqi, thousands of kilometres away.
Have Your Say: China’s police-state
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CIA ordered to speed up release of torture report
Friday, July 17th, 2009
On Wednesday, the Federal judge overseeing the American Civil Liberty Union’s Freedom of Information Act request for CIA information pertaining to the destruction of interrogation videotapes ordered CIA to release its 2004 Inspector General report on CIA torture and interrogation not later than August 24.
An earlier decision by the judge had set August 31 as the deadline for release of the IG report, after several earlier postponements.
Marcy Wheeler of the firedoglake blog opined that presiding judge Alvin K. Hellerstein is becoming impatient with the foot-dragging of administration attorneys. In court pleadings, Federal attorneys have argued over the past five months or so that CIA—with an estimated 20,000 employees and global reach—and Department of Justice—with a national presence and over 112,500 employees—just don’t have adequate time or resources to review and declassify the IG report and its supporting documents.
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Private security contractors lack accountability
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
A recent shootout in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar that left 10 people dead is helping to focus attention on the issue of private security companies, and the existing lack of accountability concerning their activities.
The June 29 incident in Kandahar involved security contractors employed by coalition military forces. A group of the contractors attacked a local police station apparently in an attempt to free a colleague who had been taken into custody for supposedly forging documents. In addition to two senior police officers, eight civilians died in the armed confrontation. Hours after the shootout, Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a statement asking the US-led coalition forces to hand over the private security contractors suspected of involvement in the killings. Later, 41 Afghan security contractors were placed under arrest.
Representatives of coalition forces emphasized that no foreign troops and no “foreign nationals” were involved in the incident. A coalition spokesman went on to characterize the attack as “Afghan on Afghan.”
Nevertheless, the attack is prompting heightened scrutiny of the coalition practice of employing de-mobilized local militiamen to provide security. Up to 3,000 former Afghan militia fighters are directly employed by the US military in Operation Enduring Freedom, according to an estimate prepared by Swisspeace, a research outfit focusing on conflict resolution.
In the absence of adequate troop levels and well-trained Afghan forces, international militaries and civilian agencies have used private security firms to protect their personnel and assets since 2001. Given the growing international presence and spiraling insecurity in recent years, the security sector has proven to be highly lucrative. Accordingly, the number of private security companies mushroomed.
Early this year, 39 companies — 21 of them foreign-based — were licensed under regulations issued in 2008. However, loopholes in criminal jurisdiction and accountability allow many security firms to operate in a gray area, seemingly beyond the reach of the Afghan justice system. Some companies, which did not, or could not obtain licenses, reportedly continue to operate with impunity. In some instances, private security contractors employed by foreign militaries or diplomatic missions enjoy immunity.
There are several instances in which security contractors have avoided facing Afghan justice in connection with deadly incidents. For example, on May 5, a shooting in Kabul left one civilian dead and injured two others. The four American Xe (formerly Blackwater) contractors involved left the country after an initial “detention” period, during which the US military carried out its own investigation. The findings of that investigation have not been made public.
Earlier, during an early April visit to Afghanistan to gauge the impact of the private security companies on the Afghan population, a United Nations working group suggested that subcontracting constituted a problem. There are “23,000 people . . . in those [39] companies which are already registered and most of them are not foreigners, most of them are Afghan nationals and they are subject to this problem of improper relations with those who hire them,” the working group’s leader, Alexander Nikitin, said during an April 9 news conference.
Anger among Afghans against private security firms has steadily escalated over the past few years, due to what is seen as unwarranted aggression and thuggish behavior. While incidents involving the use of lethal force usually manage to make their way into the public discourse, the routine harassment and bullying behavior of security contractors, involving contact with Afghan civilians, usually goes undocumented and unreported. For example, private security firms are widely loathed among Afghans for indiscriminately closing roads, setting up private checkpoints, commanding civilian vehicles off the road and frequently using the barrel of a gun to keep Afghans at bay.
While no representative of a private security company would publicly comment, some said privately that they would welcome tighter regulations. Several representatives complained that in the absence of such regulations, their firms end up being tarred with the same brush as the more brutish firms.
The absence of a comprehensive legislative framework is widely seen as one impediment to reform. A bill containing a new set of regulations for private contractors is currently stuck in parliament.
Incidents involving private contractors are expected to increase as more foreign troops arrive in Afghanistan, senior military and UN officials tell EurasiaNet. In his quarterly Afghanistan report issued on June 23, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon predicted an upsurge of violence. “The significant increase in Afghan and international troops fighting the insurgents could also result in an increase in security incidents,” the secretary-general said.
With the increase in violence and the winding down of operations in Iraq, Afghans fear a surge of foreign security contractors will arrive in Afghanistan looking for work. That would be an unwelcome development to Interior Minister Muhammad Hanif Atmar. Following a visit to Kandahar after the June 29 incident, the minister declared that illegal militias were “intolerable” and should be disarmed immediately. This, however, seems easier said than done.
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MoD ‘misled courts over Iraqi deaths investigation’
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
A panel of three judges criticised “disturbing failures” in how the MoD handled applications to withhold evidence, saying that all future requests should treated by the courts “with very considerable caution”.
The Government earlier this week ordered a new inquiry into the deaths of 20 Iraqis following a gun battle near the town of Majar-al-Kabir in 2004. Relatives of the victims claim they were murdered and mutilated at Camp Abu Naji, a British base.
Yesterday Lord Justice Scott Baker and two other judges condemned “truly alarming” errors made by the MoD in its efforts to prevent documents becoming public during an earlier investigation.
A public interest immunity (PII) certificate presented to the courts – in which the MoD claimed that permissible interrogation limits issued to soldiers should be kept secret to protect national security – was factually incorrect because the information was already in the public domain, the judges said.
The MoD compounded its error by failing to inform the courts when the inaccuracy was realised, they added.
“The court was misled into making a number of rulings on a false basis, all of which were wrong and should never have been made,” Lord Justice Scott Baker said.
“The steps that are currently being taken by the MoD, including the prospective detailed review of its PII process in this case, must ensure that false assertions are never again made in a ministerial certificate and schedule.”
An MoD spokesman said the errors were a matter of “deep regret”. He said: “There was absolutely no intention of misleading the Court. There will be a thorough review of what went wrong and measures will be introduced urgently to ensure that this cannot happen again.”
The MoD emphatically denies the original allegations and says that the 20 people who died were killed “on the battlefield”.
Announcing the new inquiry on Monday, Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Secretary, said that there was no evidence of torture or mutilation.
“However, these are serious allegations and we regret that we have failed to provide the court with timely and sufficient disclosure of information to enable them to determine the facts,” he said.
“Given these failings of disclosure, we have suggested to the court that a fresh investigation be undertaken into allegations of the murder of Iraqi detainees.”
Matthew Moore
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Bush admin discouraged probe into afghan killing
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
Bush administration officials discouraged an investigation into a mass killing in Afghanistan, government officials and human rights workers say. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war were killed by forces under Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a warlord who was backed by the United States during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, The New York Times reported Saturday.
An investigation into the killings was requested by the FBI, the State Department, the Red Cross and by human rights groups. They told the Times the Bush administration would not investigate because Dostum was on the CIA payroll. The general also served in the government of President Hamid Karzai, who was supported by the United States.
The Obama administration has not addressed the issue yet, but State Department officials are working to keep Dostum from staying on as military chief of staff to the Afghan president, senior officials told the Times. Dostum was reappointed to the post after a suspension for allegedly threatening a political rival.
He is considered an important ally of Karzai, the Times said. The new US administration has maintained frostier relations with Karzai, whose government is seen as corrupt and unpopular, although Obama has dispatched 21,000 fresh troops to fight a mounting Taliban-led insurgency ahead of August elections, the report said.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, the special US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, have told Karzai they objected to the recent reinstatement of Dostam as military chief of staff, the Times said, citing a senior State Department official.
“We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated,” the official added, hinting the Obama administration is open to an inquiry. Dostam, whose alleged killings may have amounted to the biggest war crime in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, was reinstated to his post last month after being suspended last year for allegedly threatening a political opponent at gunpoint.
But he remains in exile in Turkey. The killings took place in late November 2001, shortly after the invasion that ousted Kabul’s Taliban government.Taliban prisoners captured by Dostam’s forces after a major battle in northeastern Kunduz province were allegedly packed into shipping containers and left to suffocate, or were shot through the container walls, before being buried in mass graves.
Estimates on the number of people killed have ranged from several hundred to several thousand. Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison.
Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan. A recently declassified 2002 State Department intelligence report states that one source, whose identity is redacted, concluded that about 1,500 Taliban prisoners died.
Estimates from other witnesses or human rights groups range from several hundred to several thousand. The report also says that several Afghan witnesses were later tortured or killed. The Pentagon, however, showed little interest in the matter.
In 2002, Physicians for Human Rights asked Defence Department officials to open an investigation and provide security for its forensics team to conduct a more thorough examination of the gravesite.
“We met with blanket denials from the Pentagon,” recalls Jennifer Leaning, a board member with the group. “They said nothing happened.” Pentagon spokesmen have said that the United States Central Command conducted an ‘informal inquiry,’ asking Special Forces personnel members who worked with General Dostum if they knew of a mass killing by his forces. When they said they did not, the inquiry went no further.
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Met to probe torture collusion claims
Friday, July 10th, 2009
The case was referred to police by the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, earlier this year.
A Met spokesman said: “The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) was invited by the Attorney General to investigate allegations surrounding the detention of Binyam Mohamed.
“The papers were reviewed by the MPS and the investigation accepted. A team of detectives, working to Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, has now been selected and vetted to appropriate levels. As a result a criminal investigation has now begun.
“The inquiry team is in close liaison with the Crown Prosecution Service and will regularly consult them as the investigation moves forward.
“Inquiries will be conducted as expeditiously but thoroughly as possible and will follow the evidence to identify whether any offences have occurred.”
Mohamed, 30, a former UK resident, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. He alleges that, during three months of detention, he was tortured by Pakistani agents and interrogated by the FBI and MI5.
He says he was then taken to Morocco after being subject to “extraordinary rendition” by the CIA with the explicit knowledge of the Security Service.
During further torture in Morocco, he says he became aware that his torturers were being fed questions and material from British intelligence agents. Ethiopian-born Mohamed, who lived in London before his arrest, was then taken to Guantanamo Bay, where he stayed for four years before returning to this country on February 23.
Copyright (c) Press Association Ltd
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Bombings Across Iraq as Violence Continues to Soar
Friday, July 10th, 2009
The death toll in a series of bombings today continued to rise, as Iraq faced the deadliest day since its celebration of “National Sovereignty Day” marked the formal pullback of US troops from the nations cities. Nearly 90 Iraqis have been killed in the past 48 hours, and over 250 wounded.
The biggest single incident was the bombing in Tal Afar, in which bombers dressed in police uniforms attacked a residential neighborhood, killing at least 36 and wounding 84 others. Other bombings today hit Sadr City and Kirkuk.
373 civilians were killed in Iraq in June, nearly triple the number killed in the comparatively quiet month of May. Most of the June deaths came in the second half of the month, and those hoping the spate of high profile bombings in late June were an aberration need only look at the last two days to see the violence is enduring.
Despite the rising death toll, US officials continue to maintain that there is significant progress in Iraq’s security situation. It is never explained, however, how the security situation has managed to become so disconnected with the civilian body count.
Jason Ditz
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UN war crimes inquiry on Gaza winds up hearings
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
UN war crimes investigators yesterday wound up four days of public hearings about Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip after taking testimony from both Israelis and Palestinians.
Richard Goldstone, a former chief UN war crimes prosecutor heading the four-person inquiry team, said he expected to submit its report to the UN Human Rights Council next month.
Lieut Col Raymond Lane, chief instructor in the Irish Defence Forces School, reported to the inquiry about weapons used in the conflict. “Through our studies we found no actual proof a Dime round was used,” he said, referring to dense inert metal explosives.
But referring to samples containing heavy metals such as tungsten and cobalt, analysed in a forensics laboratory in Dublin, he added: “I am of the view that some weapons systems used in the conflict definitely had some Dime components.”
White phosphorous could provide cover for troops but also caused burns, he said. “It is horrible stuff.”
Gazan militants had used low-quality rockets, which lack a guidance system and take about 90 seconds to set up and fire, according to Lieut Col Lane. “They are basically fire and forget.”
According to a Palestinian rights group, 1,417 people including 926 civilians were killed during Israel’s December 27th to January 18th offensive in the Hamas-ruled territory of 1.5 million people. Israel lost 10 soldiers and three civilians in the fighting, which it launched with the declared aim of halting cross-border rocket fire by militants. It has estimated 1,166 Palestinians were killed, 295 of them civilians.
The expert team held twin sessions of hearings in Gaza and Geneva, where the UN Human Rights Council is based. – (Reuters)
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