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Suicide may rise in Gitmo, say lawyers

Monday, May 7th, 2007

Suicide may rise in Gitmo, say lawyers A call for draconian control over the lawyer-detainee interaction has been blasted by lawyers who claim such restrictions will increase suicide at the infamous Guantanamo detention centre in Cuba.

The Justice Department has asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to limit the number of lawyer visits allowed to three after an initial face-to-face meeting, to tighten censorship of mail from attorneys and to give the military more control over what they can discuss with detainees.
Lawyers for detainees believe that if their visits are limited, detainee desperation will deepen and more will try to kill themselves.
On June 10, 2006, two Saudi detainees and one Yemeni was reported to have hanged themselves with sheets.
“Visits by lawyers are one of the few bright spot these men have,” attorney Zachary Katznelson told The Associated Press from Guantanamo, where he is spending two weeks to meet with 18 client detainees.
Many detainees are kept in isolation in small cells with no natural light. With no prison sentence having been pronounced except for Australian Hicks, the detainees do not know when they will get out, if ever.
Many have been there for more than five years.
Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney for several Guantanamo detainees, said: “The level of depression is soaring, I am afraid.”
Attorney Stephen Oleskey, who represents six Algerians, said more suicides are “a real risk” if the court restricts lawyer-client contacts.
“I’ve seen firsthand the mental conditions of my clients deteriorate in isolation,” Oleskey said from Boston. “And I think the impact of further restrictions would be dramatic.”

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Memo leak was to ‘reveal truth’

Monday, May 7th, 2007

A civil servant accused under the Official Secrets Act of leaking a confidential memo wanted to reveal the truth about Iraq, a court has heard. David Keogh, 50, and MP’s researcher Leo O’Connor, 44, are on trial accused of trying to leak a record of a meeting between Tony Blair and George Bush.

The men, both from Northampton, deny making damaging disclosures.

Counsel for Mr Keogh asked jurors if they would “do the courageous thing” if they were placed in his position.

Few details of the “highly sensitive” memo, which is known to have included discussions about military tactics, have been made public.

Its contents are considered so secret that much of the trial is being held behind closed doors, and have not been directly referred to in court by counsel or witnesses.

‘Blackadder script’

The court heard earlier that Mr Keogh gave the memo to political researcher Mr O’Connor at a dining club in Northampton.

It was passed to Northampton South MP Anthony Clarke, who called the police.

Mr Keogh’s barrister Rex Tedd QC had reminded the jury of the context in which he says the actions of the two men should be seen.

The British and Americans had gone to Iraq and taken a “tiger by the tail” but did not know how to safely let go, he said.

He said it was ironic, something that “even the scriptwriters of Blackadder couldn’t come up with” when President Bush described the campaign as “mission accomplished”.

Mr Tedd said Mr Keogh had wanted to seek to reveal the truth of what was happening in Iraq while others were trying to conceal that truth.

He asked the jury whether if they were put in that position where they had some across such a document - whether they would have done the “courageous thing and release it” or “do what you are supposed to do?” which was to hand it in.

‘Fear’

John Farmer, defending Mr O’Connor, said the war in Iraq was “the most controversial foreign affairs involvement of this country since Suez 50 years ago”.

He also said that when Mr O’Connor was given the document he had done “his incompetent but honest best to put matters right”.

Earlier this week Mr O’Connor told the court he had never been “so worried and so fearful” as when he was passed the document.

Mr O’Connor, who worked for anti-war Labour MP Mr Clarke, said he had been approached by Mr Keogh and told about “some quite embarrassing, outlandish statements” in the four-page document.

But he told the jury that he took the claims with a “pinch of salt” and he never intended to send copies of the document to newspapers or MPs.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/northamptonshire/6620835.stm

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Blair’s disastrous war in Iraq has made Britain a more dangerous place

Monday, May 7th, 2007

As he prepares to leave Downing Street, the Prime Minister will this week receive well-deserved plaudits for his decade-long endeavour to bring peace to Northern Ireland. Terrorism on UK streets is transformed from 10 years ago - it is much more deadly, more unpredictable and far harder to prevent. Francis Elliott reports on how the PM’s crusades overseas have made Britain a prime target for Islamist terrorists

The choreography of Tony Blair’s departure from Downing Street will see him fly to Belfast on Tuesday to witness the birth of a new government in Stormont.

With the PM flanked by Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, the resulting photo-opportunity will draw attention to his successful conclusion of the Northern Ireland peace process.

The very next day, however, will come a tacit admission that he leaves Britain more at risk than when he arrived in No 10 a decade ago with the creation of a new slimmed-down Home Office, focused on counter-terrorism.

Mr Blair’s period of office may have coincided with the disarming of republican and some loyalist paramilitaries, but it has also seen hundreds of Britons rallying to al-Qa’ida.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller left her post as director general of the security service (MI5), warning that its agents were watching 1,600 people and monitoring around 30 “active plots”. Almost all are believed to be related to Islamist extremism.

The conclusion of the “fertiliser bomb plot” trial last week exposed how stretched MI5 had become in 2004 as it sought to follow the activities of groups of young radicals.

The so-called Operation Crevice succeeded in foiling a planned attack on the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent but failed to track two of the plot’s peripheral figures.

The consequences of that failure were felt on 7 July 2005 when 52 people were killed and 700 injured by four suicide bombers. Only the 1988 Lockerbie PanAm bomb was deadlier.

Mr Blair is likely to spend a good deal of his political after-life justifying his response to the rise of Islamist extremism both at home and abroad. For some intelligence analysts, however, the verdict is already in.

They detect a dry irony in the fact that the Prime Minister was paying more attention than most to the rise of al-Qa’ida as a global terrorist organisation through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Mr Blair’s allies let it be known that he had spent that summer reading the Koran and was seeking to understand what he saw as a “perversion” of Islamic teaching.

Professor Paul Wilkinson, of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, says that it is “credible” that Mr Blair understood the problem and says that he was effective in his initial response to the New York attacks.

But just as al-Qa’ida was on the “back foot” after the enforced removal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Professor Wilkinson says the invasion of Iraq gifted it a lifeline. “Nobody could credibly argue that [the invasion of] Iraq caused terrorism, but to pretend that it does not exacerbate it was really foolish.”

Crispin Black, a former intelligence officer, says that Mr Blair was warned repeatedly about the consequences for domestic terrorism of the Iraq adventure by the intelligence services and the Foreign Office. “Regardless of what you think about the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war, the question is, when warned, what did Blair do to secure the home front?”

The answer to that question, Mr Black says, is not one that shows the outgoing Prime Minister in a flattering light.

He says that Mr Blair was “badly served” by his security and intelligence services both in the run-up to the Iraq war and over the 7 July bombings, but his “corrupting” influence would cause lasting damage. The dodgy dossier had broken a “covenant of trust”, undermining the credibility of all subsequent intelligence warnings. “Time and again the warnings have been shown to be exaggerated or wrong. The tragedy is we won’t believe them when they are right.”

The exact state of the current threat to Britain is, by its nature, unknowable but Professor Wilkinson is gloomy: “The trends and the emerging trends confirm that this is going to be a difficult problem for a very long time yet.”

Mr Blair’s great mistake, suggest the experts, was to identify the right problem but then fail to apply the correct solution.

Mr Black says that the Prime Minister was right to identify the Israel-Palestine conflict as an “open wound” in which extremism was festering. But in reaching for a military solution to Iraq - which in any case was not a part of the al-Qa’ida equation in 2003 - he handed terrorists a new cause and a training ground. The extent to which British terrorists are being trained under the cover of the Iraq insurgency is unclear, but there is no doubting the terror traffic between the UK and Pakistan. In a recent talk to the Policy Exchange think tank, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, formerly chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), said that the UK was nowhere near disrupting this “transmission belt” between Lahore and London.

Dame Pauline is scathing about Mr Blair’s efforts to win the “hearts and minds” battle that will be needed to turn new generations away from terror. Counter-terrorism , she says, is better framed in terms of a criminal conspiracy than a “war on terror”, which lends participants the dignity of being “soldiers” for their cause. And seeking to engage a “Muslim community” through representative bodies is an approach as outdated as the colonialism of which it smacks.

One enduring legacy of the Blair era will be the massive increase in surveillance and diminution of civil liberties. The unhappy saga of control orders - a device only introduced because detention of terror suspects without trial was ruled unlawful and which was itself then rejected by the law lords - showed how cheaply Mr Blair’s government has handed propaganda victories to Britain’s enemies. He may not have been responsible for Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo but has pushed the law to its very limit, says the former JIC chair.

“The price is internal surveillance to an unprecedented degree… there has not been this degree of penetration of our society by forces hostile to the state since Sir Francis Walsingham was pursuing Catholic plotters in the 16th century,” Dame Pauline says. “We are about at the acceptable limit of restraints on freedom of speech and association, such as the restrictions on demos near Parliament, and the curtailment of habeas corpus.”

A little over a year into his premiership, dissident republicans detonated a car bomb in the middle of the Northern Ireland border town of Omagh with scant warnings. They killed 28 people, including nine children. Tuesday will be a celebration that that threat has cleared. The darkness that followed hard behind will hang heavily over Britain long after Mr Blair has gone.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2516747.ece

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When will American people be told the truth about Iraq?

Monday, May 7th, 2007

Michael Goodwin

Now that President Bush and the Democrats have taken turns grandstanding over his veto of their troop withdrawal bill, it’s time for a bipartisan burst of honesty.

Instead of haggling for political advantage, Bush and members of Congress should both confess that they have not been straight about the future in Iraq.

The president’s promise to “complete the mission” is a triumph of a tired slogan over reality, just as the Dems’ pledge to “end the war” is riddled with loopholes. It’s time to cut the bull and be realistic about where we’re going.

Start with Bush. While he blasted Dems again last Tuesday for demanding the start of troop withdrawal by Oct. 1 as a recipe for chaos, he has quietly accepted a de-facto deadline set by his own commander that is not much different.

Gen. David Petraeus said last week that he would decide in September whether the surge of added troops was working. Implicit in the commitment, which includes a public report to Congress, is that a lack of progress would doom the plan.

While it’s not clear what Plan B is, it is certain the surge must pay dividends to continue past the fall.

“We think that’s the appropriate time to make it,” Petraeus said of his review. “It will be a time at which we will have had our additional forces on the ground for several months, all of them operating in the areas in which we intend to deploy them.” If that isn’t a deadline, I don’t know what it is.

And Petraeus warned he would not be an easy grader. He will scrutinize everything from gains in the Iraqi army to progress on sharing oil revenue.

“Success, in the end, will depend on Iraqi actions,” Petraeus said. “We can provide the Iraqis an opportunity, but they will have to exploit it.”

Yet even if the surge fails, Democrats will not be delivering on their pledge to fully end the war.

Party leaders, and especially the gaggle of senators running for president, have made fanciful promises that sound as though the break would be instant, clean and complete. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), for example, said that, if Bush doesn’t end the war, “As president, I will.”

Ah, that depends on how you define “end.” Clinton, like Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), voted for the withdrawal legislation, which includes four exceptions that could keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq indefinitely.

Under this legislation, troops could remain for purposes of:

• Protecting American diplomatic facilities and American citizens, including members of the U.S. armed forces;

• Serving in roles consistent with customary diplomatic positions;

• Engaging in targeted special actions limited in duration and scope to killing or capturing members of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations with global reach;

• Training and equipping members of the Iraqi security forces.

Those are worthwhile commitments, but they are huge, especially when you add in support personnel. A major in the Marine Reserves, writing in The New York Times, said those functions would need 75,000 U.S. troops.

It’s noteworthy that neither Clinton nor Obama has made a habit of citing their support for such numbers on the campaign trail.

At 75,000 strong, our force would be about half of what we have now, but still a long way from ending the war.

Indeed, the Marine major, Owen West, who has served two tours in Iraq, predicted that the 75,000 would be in Iraq at least until the fall of 2008.

That is when Americans will elect our next president. Surely by then, somebody will be forced to tell us the truth about Iraq.

Michael Goodwin is a columnist for the New York Daily News.

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Bush’s popularity hits new low

Monday, May 7th, 2007

Almost 62 per cent of Americans disapprove

The public approval rating for the US president has hit an all-time low of 28 per cent and nearly two-thirds of Americans think George Bush is “stubborn and unwilling to admit his mistakes”.

The Newsweek poll released on Saturday found Bush’s rating one percentage point lower than his father at the lowest point in his term in office.

Almost 62 per cent of Americans disapprove of Bush’s execution of the Iraq war, while 30 per cent think his actions show he is “willing to take political risks” to do what is right, Newsweek reported.

The last US leader to be as unpopular as Bush was Jimmy Carter who also scored 28 per cent in 1979 in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis.

Bush burden

Bush’s unpopularity may hurt Republican hopes of keeping the White House in 2008.

The poll also suggested that Democratic frontrunners have a promising lead over potential Republican contenders across the board, with Barack Obama, the Illinois senator, recording the best performance so far.

Obama bested Rudolph Giuliani, the Republican frontrunner and former New York mayor, by 50 per cent to 43 per cent among registered voters who responded to the Newsweek poll.

He also topped John McCain, the Arizona senator, by 52 per cent to 39 per cent and defeated Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, by 58 per cent to 29 per cent, the poll indicated.

The other popular Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, who is New York senator, topped Giuliani by 49 per cent to 46 per cent, and beat McCain by 50 per cent to 44 per cent.

She led Romney by 57 per cent to 35 per cent, the poll found.

The poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International on Wednesday and Thursday, interviewed 1,001 adults 18 and older.

It had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/649A503F-E92F-43C8-B255-A59A348D6ECA.htm

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