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Reinventing A War Criminal
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News
Britain’s most despised and discredited man ended his 10 year reign June 27 when he stepped down from office transferring his ruling Labor Party’s leadership to successor Gordon Brown. He had no choice because of seething public displeasure over his allying with George Bush’s illegal wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Most Brits oppose them, yet the vast majority of Labor and Conservative MPs, including new prime minister Gordon Brown, supported them early on, now may have second thoughts, but are constrained by close relations with Washington making them reluctant to back down from what they once disingenuously trumpeted as a noble cause.
That’s an open question, however, the London Guardian’s Jonathan Steele posed and answered June 29 if Mr. Brown was listening. Steele’s message to “The new man in No 10″ is “seize the day….break with Bush now….signal a fresh start by taking Britain out of Iraq.” Don’t bet on it. Steele says Brown is a committed “Atlanticist.” He’s likely weighing the proper way to begin engaging his US ally. Steele tells him how, pointing to other loyal NATO members as examples. France and Germany sent no forces to Iraq, and Italy, Spain and the Netherlands withdrew theirs. It caused no rupture in relations with Washington for any of them after some name calling at first. Why not Britain now? Steele stresses how refreshing a policy change at “No 10″ would be “after the subservient Blair years.”
Tony Blair began his tenure May 2, 1997 with a formidable approval rating as high at times as 90% but ended it in the mid-20% range or lower. The same is likely for George Bush already at 26% in the latest Newsweek poll suggesting it’s even lower than that. Immediately post-9/11, he was compared to Lincoln, FDR and Churchill combined. It was laughable then and seems ludicrous now for a hated man barely hanging on and trying to avoid what growing numbers in the country demand - his removal from office by impeachment along with Vice-President Cheney.
The feeling of many in Britain is that by allying with George Bush, Mr. Blair left a legacy of “dashed hopes and big disappointments, of so much promised and so little delivered.” That’s in spite of helping advance the Northern Ireland peace process, begun before he took office, and that leaders in Ireland had lots more to do with than him.
Just hours after standing down, the announcement everyone knew in advance came, surprising no one but angering most. Referring to the so-called Quartet, the BBC reported June 27: “Tony Blair is to become a Middle East envoy working on behalf of the US, Russia, the UN and the EU.” The London Guardian called him “the Quartet’s fifth horseman,” an appointment that “beggars belief.” In his new capacity, he’ll replace former World Bank president James Wolfensohn who resigned last year for lack of progress he never had a chance to achieve in the first place.
Neither will Mr. Blair, nor will he try to, as Alvaro de Soto, former UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and envoy to the Quartet, explained in his leaked End of Mission Report. It noted Wolfensohn was originally to cover the entire peace process, but what emerged for him was a narrowly constricted role. De Soto said he was “highjacked….by US envoys and (Secretary Condoleezza) Rice.” As a result, Wolfensohn stepped down from his job in April, 2006 with “a more jaundiced view of Israel (and US) policies than he had upon entering.”
Based on his sordid war criminal record post-9/11, Tony Blair won’t likely have the qualms that got James Wolfensohn to resign his job. He’s taking it to reinvent himself, but that’s no more likely than convincing carnivores to become vegetarians. He’ll first visit Ramallah in the West Bank, showing up as a Trojan horse fooling no one about what’s behind his slick-tongued hypocrisy.
In its effort to obscure more than enlighten, BBC omitted this explanation and could barely go beyond saying Mr. Blair “faces an uphill task to address Palestinian misgivings over his ties to Israel and the US.” Left out as well were the reasons why. How can a war criminal reinvent himself as a peace envoy to the region he waged war against and have any credibility or hope of achieving anything. Further, how could he do it when his brief is quite opposite public pronouncements about it.
Under the false mantle of peacemaker, he’s Washington’s man and the West’s envoy to Israel. His job is to continue six decades of ethnic cleansing war and repression against defenseless Palestinians, support open conflict doing it if necessary, ally with an illegitimate quisling Fatah government, and outrageously claim he’s there seeking peace.
Tony Blair is a war maker, not a peacemaker. He’s a criminal and, like George Bush and Dick Cheney, should be held accountable for his crimes. He willfully partnered with the Bush administration in its wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq and against the occupied people of Palestine. He joined in cutting off essential aid to the Palestinian people and renounced its democratically elected Hamas government without ever giving it a chance to prove itself. He also supported Israel’s aggressive wars against Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, and, in short, partnered in backing war and avoiding peace. He now has a new title in his new job. His mission is the same. He’ll bring no peace to the Middle East nor does he intend to.
Blair’s appointment sends a clear message to the region. Peace is not on the agenda nor will he help Palestinians get what they want most - an end to 60 years of Israeli repression, discrimination, occupation and colonization; freedom, justice, real peace and security; a sovereign integral independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital; and the guaranteed right affirmed everyone in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his country.” UN Resolution 194 mandated Palestinians that right in 1948 and reaffirmed it in the General Assembly 130 times with near-universal consensus except for Israel, the US and a Pacific Island state or two pathetically going along at times.
From “No 10″ to the Middle East - A Record of Shame
Tony Blair is despised and discredited at home, hated across the world, and the Arab street condemns him. Appointing him peace envoy to the region he warred against is a galling insult to its people, all others of conscience and all humanity. Nonetheless, he has the job and started off on his last day in office June 27 telling his Parliament: “The absolute priority is to try to give effect to what is now the consensus across the international community - that the only way of bringing stability and peace to the Middle East is a two-state solution.”
The London Independent’s veteran Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, summed up the feelings of many in his article dated June 23 titled: “How can Blair possibly be given this job?” He began it saying “I suppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind. I simply could not believe my ears in Beirut (where Fisk is based) when a phone call told me that Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara (where British forces were defeated by the Ottomans in WW I) was going to create ‘Palestine.’ ” Fisk continued calling Blair “vain, deceitful, a proven liar, a trumped up lawyer (with) the blood of thousands of Arab (people) on his hands.”
He’ll not be welcomed or aided with a brief constricting him within vaguely stated areas of Palestinian governance, economics and security rather than letting him take on the entire range of issues causing the Israeli - Palestinian conflict. Unstated is what his real mission is that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert set straight by calling Mr. Blair “A true friend of the State of Israel.” Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni added: “Tony Blair is a very well-appreciated figure in Israel,” and an official Israeli government statement said Blair “will (be) provide(d) with all necessary assistance in order for him to carry out his duties.”
Indeed he will, and it’s to support Israeli interests by denying Palestinians theirs. Governance means by the illegitimate Fatah; economics is funding it with weapons and materials against Hamas as well as propping it up financially; and security is by hard line street enforcement and continued conflict aimed at routing the elected government and installing a quisling one over the entire Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
Tony Blair is the right man for the wrong job and the wrong man for the kind of job he should be sent to do. He has no interest in peace and a long sordid record of contempt for Palestinian rights and justice from his committed one-sided support for Israel. His job is to further the concocted “clash of civilizations” against “heathen Arab terrorists” blaming the victims for crimes he helped commit against them. He feigns helping Palestinians by allying with Fatah’s traitorous Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank while continuing to condemn and marginalize the democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza.
Abbas conspired with Israel and the US going back to Olso or earlier. He partnered with his western-supported paramilitary warlord muscleman, Mohammed Dahlan, for war on Hamas hoping to unseat it violently but failed. He then brazenly dismissed the legitimate Hamas government June 17, appointing an illegitmate “emergency” quisling one in its place. He’s its president and western darling and former World Bank and IMF official Salam Fayyad was made prime minister. Writer and editor Rami Khoury calls it a “government of the imagination.” He also said “Appointing….Blair….is something like appointing Emperor Nero to be the chief fireman of Rome,” and add to that the notion of having the fox look after the henhouse.
He’s mandated to back Fatah in its role as Israel’s enforcer and deny Palestinians any chance for freedom, equity and justice. Tony Blair will go to the region in a limited subservient role for Israel and the US. He’s to play frontman shoring up support for Abbas, Fayyad, and Dahlan, work against the interests of the legitimate Palestinian government and its people, and leave the heavy lifting undermining efforts to Washington and Jerusalem. He’s going in spite of being totally discredited in the region by people who despise him. He did nothing for them nor will he ever, yet this arrogant man claims he’s going to bring real peace to the region.
Fisk refers to “His unique blend of ruthlessness and dishonesty.” The Arab street understands and despises him for it, but his agenda “go(es) down quite well with our local Arab dictators.” Fisk refers to his “slippery use of language….with appeals for restraint on all sides….and moderation” while backing what US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack characterizes as a “well-governed state.” That’s one with hard line street enforcement and what Fisk calls “lots of (tough) ‘terror laws.’ ”
It’s a perfect setup for repressive rule, denying Palestinians all civil and human rights doing it. Blair’s the right frontman - from war criminal to street enforcer in the name of peace he has contempt for. The irony is galling. Applied to him, it’s “Beyond (the kind of) Chutzpah” Middle East expert Norman Finkelstein wrote about in his book by that title. Watch for him later to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his “efforts.” If it gets it, he’ll join the ugly ranks of past war criminal honorees like Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Shimon Perez, Yitzhak Rabin, and Kofi Annan in a pathetic weak-kneed supporting role. Mr. Blair will fit right in.
Back Home in London, It’s Business As Usual Scaring the Public Twice Over
Episode number one:
On his second day in office, new British prime minister Gordon Brown “was thrust into a new terrorism alert” as the New York Times claimed June 29. London police claimed they found two Mercedes Benz cars “filled with (a significant quantity of) gasoline and nails and a number of gas canisters parked close together in an area known for packed night-clubs and late-night bars,” according to the Times. Police also claimed they found and defused an “explosive device” in the area overnight. At once and with no evidence, Al-Queda was named suspect number one, heightened by claims that had these bombs detonated they would have caused great harm. Peter Clark, Britain’s most senior counterterrorism police officer, said “there could have been significant injury or loss of life.”
So what to do? Round up the usual kinds of suspects and pin it on them, Muslim ones, of course. The New York Times reported July 2 “investigations (were) moving (ahead) at breakneck speed, the police expanded their hunt on Sunday (July 1) for the (London and Glasgow) ‘plotters’….the British government called the work of terrorists linked to Al-Queda. Officers raided homes in three cities” bringing the total number apprehended to five (plus three more since). “Police said they had recovered a ‘rich trove’ of evidence” but presented none beyond claiming earlier to have found gasoline, canisters and nails, hardly the makings of a major terror attack.
Front and center Gordon Brown beginning to earn his bona fides saying “As the police and security services have said on so many occasions, we face a serious and continuous threat to our security. (This incident shows) the need for us to be vigilant at all times and the public to be alert at any potential incidents.” Sounding much like George Bush and Tony Blair, he added Britain “will not yield” or be intimidated by a threat from “people who are associated with al-Queda. We will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life.” Counterterrorism expert Sajjan Gohel explained in a telephone interview he didn’t think it was “a coincidence (this happened) the day after” Brown took office replacing Tony Blair. A familiar aroma from it is emerging.
Episode number two:
In case the public missed the June 29 event, it was repeated the following day at Glasgow Airport, Scotland. Here’s how the New York Times reported it: “British officials raised the country’s terrorism threat alert to its highest level on Saturday (June 30) after two men slammed an S.U.V. into entrance doors at Glasgow Airport and turned the vehicle into a potentially lethal fireball” 38 hours after police “uncovered two cars in London ‘rigged to explode’ with gasoline, gas canisters and nails.” For the Times, the claimed presence of these items in the cars constitutes their being “rigged.”
Here’s the BBC version. Notice the important difference: “Blazing car crashes into airport” it headlined and continued saying “A car which was ‘on fire’ has been driven at the main terminal building at Glasgow Airport. Eyewitnesses have described a Jeep Cherokee being driven at speed (undefined) towards the building ‘with flames coming out’ from underneath.” The report continued saying “The car didn’t actually explode. There were a few pops and bangs which presumably was the (burning) petrol.” With no corroborating evidence, the report quoted a “maintenance worker” saying he believed the men “deliberately tried to set the car on fire (and) It looked like they had Molotov cocktails with them.”
Little attention was paid to the fact no evidence of them was found, one of the two men in the car was badly burned (a witness claimed by self-dousing with petrol), in obvious pain, required hospitalization, yet both were taken away in handcuffs. They’re both now being linked, with no corroborating evidence, to the “rigged to explode” cars found in London.
What do we make of these incidents? Do they sound like terror attacks warranting closing down parts of London and Glasgow Airport as well as heightening security alerts across the UK and US? Did they provide the government emergencies committee Cobra justifiable reason to raise the nation’s threat alert to its highest level where it might be put for an impending major terrorist event, invasion or nuclear attack? Or might there be another reason behind it? And is it possible the Glasgow incident was just an unfortunate accident or the work of a disturbed or angry solo perpetrator or two? Also, might normal items like nails, gasoline and canisters found in unattended parked London cars have had nothing to do with mischief? Some suggested answers below.
Since 9/11, Britain, under Tony Blair, chose to partner with the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism,” leaving aside the question of its legitimacy. Waging that type war or any other requires public support, and what better way to get it than by elevating fear levels with an outside threat made to seem real. Enter Al-Queda and “Enemy Number One” Osama bin Laden. Follow them up with unsubstantiated terror threats or episodes labeled terrorism. Then add color-coded alerts and round-the-clock hyperventilating news coverage with scary headlines at strategic moments like winning public support for repressive legislation, diffusing dissent, re-stoking public angst about terror threats so people don’t forget them, and giving a new administration cover to continue the same “war on terrorism” hard line agenda as the previous one.
Isn’t the timing of the above British “terror incidents” ironic at least? Don’t they raise suspicions by coincidentally occurring on days two and three of the new Gordon Brown administration at a time his predecessor’s was hated? Might it also not be important to check the record of past terror scares on both sides of the Atlantic and examine their legitimacy in hindsight? When it’s done, threats that headlined for days or longer nearly always turned out to be fakes based on cooked up intelligence or unsubstantiated claims. They continue being used, however, because they work. By the time they’re exposed as phony, it’s on to the next cooked up plot. Note Exhibit A, B and C below plus an additional Exhibit D:
Exhibit A:
There’s no need reconstructing the phony disinformation campaign about WMDs in the run-up to the Iraq war. Case closed on that one.
Exhibit B:
Around Christmas, 2003, Air France got stand down orders based on claimed evidence Al-Queda and Taliban operatives were on Flight 68. It was later exposed as a lie, but it kept Los Angeles International Airport on “maximum deployment” throughout the holiday period and FBI officials working round the clock. The nation was put on “high risk” Code Orange alert, six heavy-traffic Air France flights were cancelled for nothing, and the public was scammed. The scheme was all based on faked intelligence to heighten fear at a strategic moment when the administration felt it was needed.
This happens repeatedly like it did in Exhibit C:
In early June, hyped fake stories made headlines about a plot to blow up JFK Airport’s jet fuel tanks and supply lines some outrageous reports claimed would have been “more devastating then 9/11″ if it happened. It never did, of course, no crime was committed, but suspects were charged based on conversations between a “source” (identified as an unnamed drugs trafficker) and defendants. It was all faked to heighten fear again, and the “source” was willing to say anything in return for leniency on his pending sentence.
In his 2005 book, “America’s War on Terrorism,” Michel Chossudovsky explains the notion of a “Universal Adversary.” It’s being used to prepare the public for a “real life emergency situation” under which no political or social dissent will be tolerated. Other claimed “terrorist” events may be being used as prologue for a much greater one coming at a future time. If it happens, it will trigger a Code Red Alert in the US and something similar in Britain signaling the highest threat level of severe or imminent terrorist or other attack preparing the public for possible imposition of martial law and suspension of the Constitution.
Notice how close Britain is to that now in the wake of two claimed terrorist incidents on June 29 and 30. As stated above, the country was placed on highest level terrorism alert, based on two incidents causing only minor damage from one of them and no substantiation either one was related to terrorism. It’s likely, hindsight again will prove neither one was, but the damaging effects of heightened fear by them will have done their job. Gordon Brown is now empowered to be as hard line as his predecessor and will likely have broad support for it in the name of national security. Sound suspicious?
It should surprise no one if one or more similar incidents soon erupt on this side of the Atlantic. The Bush administration needs to reinforce the terror threat at a time popular support for its foreign wars and homeland agenda is waning. What better way to do it than by faking terror threats to heighten fear levels. What easier way is there to win over Congress and get the public to support any homeland measures put in place to “keep us safe.”
Exhibit D:
On July 1, ABC News reported a secret “US law enforcement report, prepared for the Department of Homeland Security, warns that al-Queda is planning a terror ’spectacular’ this summer.” The source is a “senior (always unnamed US) official.” The report indicated a similarity to intelligence warnings in summer, 2001 prior to September 11. It also mentioned warnings of the Glasgow Airport incident never sent to the Scottish government. Odd or by intent?
Do present and past terror scare incidents raise suspicions the public is about to be scammed again but this time end up losing what few precious rights remain? People never realize it until it’s too late to matter. Even worse, they never seem able to understand the cost. They better learn because the price for inattention and lack of diligence keeps rising and may soon become too high. Edmund Burke warned us that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Let’s hope enough of them in America and the UK got the message.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour at TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.
Have Your Say: Reinventing A War Criminal
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First genome transplant turns one species into another
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
· Research is aimed at producing green fuel
· Critics warn of terrorists creating new bioweapons
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday June 29, 2007
The Guardian
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 Photograph: Getty Images |
Scientists have converted an organism into an entirely different species by performing the world’s first genome transplant, a breakthrough that paves the way for the creation of synthetic forms of life.The team, led by Craig Venter, the man who raced to sequence the human genome, wants to build new microbes to produce environmentally friendly fuels.
The group’s study, details of which were revealed in the US journal Science yesterday, proves it is possible to transplant a complete set of genetic instructions into an organism, in effect turning it into the same species the DNA was taken from.
The proof of principle experiment solves the first of two big difficulties which have hindered the creation of artificial life. The team, based at Dr Venter’s not-for-profit institute in Rockville, Maryland, now hopes to overcome the second hurdle, by designing new genetic codes on computers and transplanting them into organisms to produce new life forms.
The team is focusing on creating micro-organisms which produce green fuels as natural waste products. “One of the goals we have is trying to see if we could design cells to manufacture new types of fuel to break our dependency on oil and coal and try to do something about carbon dioxide,” Dr Venter said. “We look forward to trying to have the first fuels from genetically modified and even synthetic organisms, certainly within the decade.”
The work is at the cutting edge of synthetic biology, which is rapidly becoming one of the most contentious fields in science. Researchers have developed the tools to recreate the devastating 1918 flu virus, and are working on ways to genetically modify human cells and understand the most fundamental mechanisms of life.
But critics fear the field is progressing too fast for society to grasp. Some are concerned that artificial organisms could escape and damage the environment, or that maverick scientists or terrorist groups could create powerful new bioweapons.
Dr Venter’s team commissioned an 18-month study into the bioethics of their research, which gave strong approval but echoed concerns about the dangers.
In the experiment, researchers extracted the whole genetic code from a simple bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides. They squirted the DNA into a test tube containing a related species, Mycoplasma capricolum. They found that some of the bacteria absorbed the new genome and ditched their own. These microbes grew and behaved exactly like the donor.
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New World Order denial: Just because the government can do these things, doesn’t mean that they actually do
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
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US airstrike leaves over 100 dead in Afghanistan
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
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The Guantanamo Whistleblowers
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Jostling for media space in the last week–and largely losing out to spurious claims that Guantánamo is about to close–is the story of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, an army intelligence officer with 26 years’ experience, who has bravely spoken out against the Guantánamo regime. In an affidavit filed with an Appeal Court petition on behalf of Kuwaiti detainee Fawzi al-Odah, Abraham delivered a damning verdict on the legitimacy of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which ran from July 2004 to March 2005, and were set up to determine whether the Guantánamo detainees had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants.”
Currently an army reservist and an attorney in California, Abraham worked at Guantánamo, from 11 September 2004 to 9 March 2005, in the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants (OARDEC) as “an agency liaison, responsible for coordinating with government agencies, including certain Department of Defense (DoD) and non-DoD organizations, to gather or validate information relating to detainees for use in CSRTs.” He also served as a member of a CSRT, and, as he described it, “had the opportunity to observe and participate in the operation of the CSRT process,” and he concluded from his experience that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, and that the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”
Specifically, Abraham complained that the OARDEC personnel–mostly from the military reserves–who were responsible for compiling the information used in the “Unclassified Summary of Evidence” against each detainee were woefully inexperienced, and that few of whom “had any experience or training in the legal or intelligence fields.” He also complained that the tribunals’ Recorders were similarly inexperienced, and were “typically relatively junior officers with little training or experience in matters relating to the collection, processing, analyzing, and/or dissemination of intelligence material,” and that those who actually aggregated the information–the case writers–”in most instances” had “the same limited degree of knowledge and experience relating to the intelligence community and intelligence products.” Given the shortcomings of the majority of the personnel involved, Abraham also noted that, although “large amounts of information” were received, the workers “often had no context for determining whether the information was relevant,” and frequently discarded information because it was “considered to be ambiguous, confusing or poorly written,” as well as “reject[ing] some information arbitrarily while accepting other information without any articulable rationale.”
Abraham expressed a similar disdain for the quality of the information produced by the various government agencies, which the largely unqualified workers were required to collate and aggregate. This information, he wrote, frequently consisted of intelligence “of a generalized nature–often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” and additional information, contained within the Detainee Information Management System and other databases, was equally “deficient,” typically “excluding information that was characterized as highly sensitive law enforcement information, highly classified information, or information not voluntarily released by the originating agency.” Neither the case writers nor the Recorders, Abraham asserted, had “access to numerous information sources generally available within the intelligence community.”
Further proof that the gathering of information for the tribunals was not geared towards justice and transparency came when, as “one of only a few intelligence-trained and suitably cleared officers,” Abraham was tasked with investigating aspects of the “evidence,” to confirm “in a statement to be relied upon by the CSRT board members that the organizations did not possess ‘exculpatory information’ relating to the subject of the CSRT.” When he approached the various agencies involved, however, he discovered that he was only allowed “limited access to information, typically prescreened and filtered,” was not permitted to request additional searches for information, and was rebuffed when he asked for written statements confirming that there was no exculpatory information. His experience confirmed that the agencies were largely providing or withholding information at their own discretion, without any process of outside scrutiny being available.
His bitterest experience, however, occurred when he was chosen–along with an Air Force colonel and an Air Force major–to take part in a CSRT. After reviewing the evidence, all three men “found the information presented to lack substance,” noting that supposedly specific factual statements “lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” that statements made by alleged witnesses “lacked detail,” and that generalized statements were presented “in indirect and passive forms without stating the source of the information or providing a basis for establishing the reliability or the credibility of the source.” In addition, Abraham wrote that statements by the interrogators, which were presented to the panel, “offered inferences” from which they were “expected to draw conclusions” that the detainee was an “enemy combatant,” but that when they subjected these statements to even the most cursory of questions, the Recorder’s only response was, “We’ll have to get back to you.”
Based on the “paucity and weakness of the information provided both during and after the CSRT hearing,” Abraham and his colleagues duly determined that there was “no factual basis” for concluding that the detainee was an “enemy combatant,” but that was not the end of the story. The director and deputy director of OARDEC “immediately questioned the validity” of the decision, ordering the tribunal members to prepare statements containing the specific questions they had raised to enable the Recorder to provide “further responses,” and reopening the hearing to allow the Recorder to “present further argument.” Refusing to bow to the pressure, Abraham and his colleagues failed to change their determination, and as a result, as he declared in a pithy conclusion to the affidavit, “I was not assigned to another CSRT panel.” He pointed out, however, that OARDEC’s response to the decision was “consistent with the few other instances” when the rigged system had been bucked. In meetings attended by Abraham that followed the sporadic decisions that detainees were not “enemy combatants”–there were only 38 in total, out of 558 CSRTs–he wrote that the focus of inquiry was always “what went wrong.”
Speaking after the affidavit was first publicized, Abraham said that he had first raised his concerns about the tribunals during his time at Guantánamo, but had decided to submit the affidavit because “the issues were not adequately addressed.” He told the Associated Press, “I pointed out nothing less than facts, facts that can and should be fixed,” adding that he had a responsibility to point out that officers “did not have the proper tools” to determine whether a detainee was in fact an “enemy combatant,” and explaining, “I take very seriously my responsibility, my duties as a citizen.” David Cynamon, one of al-Odah’s lawyers–who was put in contact with Abraham by his sister, after she attended a public lecture on Guantánamo given by Cynamon and his colleagues–described Abraham’s affidavit as “prov[ing] what we all suspected, which is that the CSRTs were a complete sham,” while adding that he feared that his courage was “probably an assurance of career suicide.” Cynamon’s colleague, Matthew J. MacLean, who pointed out that Abraham was the first CSRT member who has been identified, let alone been willing to criticize the tribunals in the public record, declared, “It wouldn’t be quite right to say this is the most important piece of evidence that has come out of the CSRT process, because this is the only piece of evidence ever to come out of the CSRT process. It’s our only view into the CSRT.”
In fact, MacLean’s comments were not entirely accurate. Whilst it’s certainly true that Abraham was the first ex-tribunal member to criticize the CSRT process in public, his is not the first reported example of dissent amongst tribunal members. In September 2006, in a Boston Globe article, Detentions over charity ties questioned , Farah Stockman reported on the case of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese hospital administrator, who was captured in May 2002 in Pakistan–where he had been working for 17 years–and sold to the American forces. In his CSRT, Hamad was judged to be an “enemy combatant” because of exactly the kind of “generic” allegations described by Lt. Col. Abraham. The Saudi charity he worked for, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, was described as an organization that “supports terrorist ideals and causes,” even though it has never appeared on a terrorism watchlist (despite being investigated by the US Senate), and was one of the favored projects of the late Saudi King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, and another organization that he had worked for previously, the Kuwait-based Lajanat Dawa Islamiya (which also does not feature on any US terrorism watchlist), was described as “one of the most active” Islamic NGOs “providing logistical and financial support” to mujahideen operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which “may be” associated with Osama bin Laden.
An exasperated Hamad refuted all the allegations, at one point telling his tribunal, “arresting employees like myself [who] is not capable of supporting terrorists financially, is this justice? I am an employee who works for a living and I have no connection to the [organization's] political views or its financial resources, so why do you punish me for a crime I did not commit. Why don’t you arrest the charities’ presidents or the people who support [them] financially instead of arresting a simple employee with no informational value?” Predictably, his tribunal judged that he had been correctly designated an “enemy combatant,” but although his pleas appeared to have been ignored, Stockman, who was allowed to examine the CSRT documentation, noted that one of the tribunal members–an unidentified army major, whose name was redacted–had issued a dissenting opinion. Taking into account the fact that neither WAMY nor LDI appears on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, he argued that, “even assuming all the allegations… are accurate, the detainee does not meet the definition of enemy combatant.” He added, “These NGOs presumably have numerous employees and volunteer workers who have been working in legitimate humanitarian roles. The mere fact that some elements of these NGOs provide support to “terrorist ideals and causes” is insufficient to declare one of the employees an enemy combatant.” Stockman noted, however, that the major was overruled by his colleagues, one of whom–in a single line that discredits the whole tribunal process as effectively as Lt. Col. Abraham’s affidavit–wrote that the case “passed the ‘low evidentiary hurdle’ set up by the rules of the hearings.”
In two other cases, the dissenting officer was not a tribunal member, but the detainees’ Personal Representative. In a majority of the CSRTs, the Personal Representative fulfilled his intended function as a pale shadow of a legitimate defense counsel, failing to “participate in any meaningful way,” as Lt. Col. Abraham noted of the Personal Representative in his tribunal. In February 2006, however, in two articles for the National Journal, Guantánamo’s Grip and Empty Evidence , Corine Hegland reported the story of an unidentified lieutenant colonel in the army (whose name was also redacted), who fought a brave, if unsuccessful battle for two of his detainees. Along the way, however, he demolished the tribunals’ legitimacy even more comprehensively than either Lt. Col. Abraham or Adel Hamad’s dissenting major.
The first case–that of Farouq Saif, a young Yemeni who went to Afghanistan to teach the Koran–is particularly noteworthy because Saif was judged as an “enemy combatant” because of two false allegations. The first–that he was a bodyguard of Osama bin Laden–was directed at 30 detainees in total, and was made under duress, and later retracted, by Mohammed al-Qahtani. One of several purported “20th hijackers” for the 9/11 attacks, al-Qahtani made the allegations during a seven-week period, from November 2002 to January 2003, when he was subjected to Pentagon-approved “extreme interrogation techniques” (otherwise known as torture). The second allegation–that Saif had been seen at Osama bin Laden’s private airport in Kandahar, where he was “wearing camouflage and carrying an AK-47″–proved so intolerable to his Personal Representative that he submitted a written protest, in which he stated that the government’s sole evidence that Saif had been at bin Laden’s airport was the statement of another prisoner, who, according to an FBI memo that he presented to the tribunal, was a notorious liar. According to the FBI, he “had lied, not only about Farouq, but about other Yemeni detainees as well. The other detainee claimed he had seen the Yemenis at times and in places where they simply could not have been.” The Personal Representative wrote, “I do feel with some certainty that [the accuser] has lied about other detainees to receive preferable treatment and to cause them problems while in custody. Had the tribunal taken this evidence out as unreliable, then the position we have taken is that a teacher of the Koran (to the Taliban’s children) is an enemy combatant (partially because he slept under a Taliban roof).”
The “notorious liar” actually made false allegations against 60 prisoners in total, as was revealed after the tribunal of Mohammed al-Tumani. A young Syrian economic migrant, who had traveled to Afghanistan with other family members to join his father in Kabul, where he was working as a cook, al-Tumani and his father were captured in Pakistan after fleeing the chaos of post-invasion Afghanistan. In his tribunal, he denied an allegation that he had attended the al-Farouq training camp with such vigor that his Personal Representative decided to investigate the matter further. When he looked at the classified evidence, however, he found that only one man–the same detainee mentioned above–claimed to have seen him at al-Farouq, and had identified him as being there three months before he arrived in Afghanistan. As Corine Hegland described it, “The curious US officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.”
The identity of the other 58 detainees falsely accused by the “notorious liar” are unknown, as the dissenting officer involved in unveiling this monstrous injustice–perhaps unwilling to risk “career suicide”–has not come forward to elaborate, but in my forthcoming book, The Guantánamo Files , I report on numerous other examples of patently false allegations masquerading as “evidence,” which were ignored by compliant tribunal members accepting the “low evidentiary hurdle” of the process. While I wait to see if Lt. Col. Abraham’s principled stand will encourage other insiders to speak out, it’s worth pointing out that Adel Hamad, Farouq Saif and Mohammed al-Tumani remain in Guantánamo. Hamad has finally been judged to be “No Longer an Enemy Combatant” and is awaiting release, but Saif and al-Tumani are still damned by the false confessions of a “notorious liar.”
Andy Worthington (www.andyworthington.co.uk) is a British historian, and the author of ‘The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison’ (to be published by Pluto Press in October 2007).
He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk
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How the media is rigging the 2008 election
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
By Sam Smith
The national media is rigging the 2008 election. That it doesn’t realize this makes as little difference as the unconsciousness of a drunk driver or the upbringing of a prejudiced individual. Intent may explain or mitigate an offense; it does not, however, alter the effect. And the practice should be regarded as disreputable as any form of negligence that contributes to great harm.
The main forces driving this manipulation are the cultural isolation of the national media, its incestuous relationship with those in power, its immersion in political mythology and the general collapse of skeptical and investigative journalism.
It is not a unique phenomenon. For example, the campaign media overwhelmingly supported the candidacy of Bill Clinton in 1992 and happily created a myth about him even as they ignored readily available evidence of the major corruption in which he was involved.
It is still early in the campaign, so we shall probably return to this topic from time to time, but here are some the clearly visible ways in which the media has rigged the election so far:
- It created the Barack Obama myth out of whole cloth. A political lightweight from the Chicago Democratic machine with a virtually non-existent record has been turned into JFK II.
- It has steadfastly refused to report on the numerous scandals associated with Hillary Clinton’s past, sending years of corruption, dissembling and abuse of power down the Orwellian memory hole.
- It has not done much better with the true history of Rudolph Giuliani, creating a heroic myth based largely on behavior on one particular day, 9/11, that might have been expected of any mayor of a major city.
- With both Clinton and Giuliani it has particularly avoided their extraordinary connections with criminal figures. Whatever the ultimate import of these relationships are, the voters are entitled to know with whom their candidates have consorted.
- As we have demonstrated with our headline survey, John Edwards has been consistently blacked out of the news coverage despite being ahead of Obama in more than a half dozen states.
- When covered, Edwards has been trivialized or criticized in a manner used on no other major candidate. For example, his wealth has been targeted in a way that John Kerry’s never was and Hillary Clinton’s isn’t. While it is fair ground to tell about his $400 haircut, it is not fair meanwhile to censor Obama’s parking tickets in Massachusetts that were left unpaid from college days until he decided to run for president. Even when Elizabeth Edwards criticized Ann Coulter for her hateful attacks on her husband, she was later said by major media to have “defended” her remarks as though standing up for her husband was beyond the pale.
- The media has bought into the Fred Thompson myth, despite the fact that Thompson - like Obama - has virtually nothing on his resume to recommend him for the job.
- The media has made little efforts to help voters understand the real differences between the candidates as opposed to the variations in their iconic and fantastical spin
- The major media has almost totally ignored the GOP vote caging scandal uncovered by Greg Palast.
- The major media has consistently treated majority American positions on the war and healthcare as out of the mainstream.
- And it has largely ignored the ever growing evidence of failure and corruption involving the use of electronic voting machines.
In short, the major media has used its freedom to manipulate, mythologize and mislead its audience and can be expected to continue to do so.
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Israel Seems Determined to Dig its own Grave
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
What would it take to persuade Israel to rethink its attitude towards its Arab neighbours - and primarily towards the Palestinians? The Hamas victory in Gaza is surely a clear signal that an Israeli change of direction is urgently needed.
All Israel’s efforts to break the democratically-elected Hamas government have failed. Its policies of boycott, siege and starvation, of bombing and shelling, of extra-judicial murder, of withholding tax revenues, of the systematic destruction of Palestinian institutions have served only to create a time-bomb of hunger, despair and defiance on Israel’s flank.
Yet Israel appears to have learned nothing. Instead of seeking peace with the Arabs - instead of seizing their outstretched hand - it persists in rejecting all peace overtures, preferring to rely on force and still more force, and on its ability to manipulate its American ally.
In Washington this week, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert managed to abort a tentative American initiative to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He persuaded George W Bush - a President painfully out of his depth in Middle East politics — that this was not the time for peace talks with either the Palestinians or the Syrians.
The appointment as Israel’s new defence minister of Ehud Barak, a former prime minister and chief of staff, who defines his primary task as restoring Israel’s deterrent capability, is another ominous sign that wars rather than peace talks lie ahead.
Israeli sources report that Barak will not admit, even in private, that he made some mistakes in 1999-2000 when, as prime minister, he missed the chance of peace with both the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad. This is a bad start for a man who is likely to play a prominent role in Israeli politics in the months and years ahead.
Condoleezza Rice, the unfortunate U.S. Secretary of State whom some had thought was planning a new push for Arab-Israeli talks, has clearly been outgunned by pro-Israeli hawks, such as Elliott Abrams at the National Security Council.
The word from Washington is that combating ‘terror’ remains the U.S.-Israeli priority. President Mahmud Abbas, who rules courtesy of the IDF and the settlers over three or four beleaguered Bantustans on the West Bank, has been instructed to join the war against his Palestinian brothers, if he is to earn a few crumbs from the rich man’s table.
To most independent observers it seems plain that Israel’s cruel, aggressive and expansionist policies have resulted in a steady deterioration in its strategic environment. It has acquired, or rather created, enemies on several fronts - Hizballah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, large numbers of dispossessed, brutalized and radicalized Palestinians eking out a living in refugee camps, Syria to the north, Iran not much further away, and radical groups such as Al-Qaida in many other places reflecting the angry mood of much of the Arab and Muslim world.
Some other trends should cause Israeli alarm bells to ring. Educated European opinion is increasingly outraged by Israel’s behavior; meanwhile the Arabs are getting better educated, better armed, and far, far richer than ever before; and soaring Arab demographics are producing tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of potential recruits for the asymetric wars which Israel is ill-prepared to fight but which seem to be the pattern of the future.
If this were not enough, the trend to which Israel should perhaps pay the greatest attention is that its main ally, the United States, is bogged down in an unwinnable war, waged in large part because Israel’s American friends, the Washington neo-conservatives, thought that if America smashed Iraq, Israel would no longer have anything to fear from the east. It could then continue its West Bank land-grab and its destruction of Palestinian society without risking any serous Arab reaction.
The neo-cons are now pressing hard for a U.S. war against Iran, as if unaware that the long-suffering American public is increasingly uneasy about their country being dragged into distant and costly wars on Israel’s behalf.
So, is Israel rethinking its strategies? There is no sign of it. It refuses to see that the regional balance of power may be changing. It continues to believe that it can uproot Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and defeat Syria and Iran - or get the U.S. to do the job on its behalf.
To avoid peace talks which might involve ceding territory, it continues to depict Hamas as a ‘terrorist organization’ bent on Israel’s destruction, thereby resorting to the well-worn trick of saying, ‘How can you negotiate with someone who wants to kill you?’
Is Hamas, in fact, a terrorist organization or is it a legitimate resistance movement to occupation and oppression? The Americans have swallowed the terrorist line and so has the timid and cowardly European Union, although several of its members now regret it.
Hamas certainly carried out suicide attacks against Israeli civilians during the second intifada beginning in 2000, which would qualify it for the terrorist label. But then, during that intifada, Israel killed more than four times as many Palestinians as Hamas and other groups killed Israelis.
More recently, in the 16 months from Hamas’s election victory in January 2006 to April 2007, Israel killed 712 Palestinians, including many children, while in the same period the Palestinians killed 29 Israelis (IDF and civilians). If terrorism is defined as the killing of innocent civilians for political ends, which of the two qualifies as the bigger terrorist?
Does Hamas want to destroy Israel? No doubt it would like to, in much the same way as Israel would like to destroy it. But emotions are one thing, policies are another. Hamas is now busy restoring law and order in Gaza. It is disarming the gangs which lived on extortion and blackmail (such as the Daghmush gang which is holding the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston). And it is seeing to the immediate needs of the sorely-tried population of 1.4m, densely-packed in a small territory which Israel has turned into the world’s largest outdoor prison.
This is what Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister and now the effective ruler of Gaza, told the French newspaper Le Figaro last weekend:
‘Our programme is clear. We seek the creation of a Palestinian state within the frontiers of 1967: that is to say in Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The PLO remains in charge of negotiations on this point. We undertake to respect all past agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority. We would like to see the introduction of a reciprocal, global and simultaneous truce with Israel.’
Would that Ehud Olmert or any of his colleagues said anything as sensible! Instead, Israel is planning to continue, even to intensify, its policy of sealing off the Gaza strip. As Tsipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, told EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg last Monday, ‘We should take advantage of the [West Bank-Gaza] split to the end. It differentiates between the moderates and the extremists.’ She urged the ministers to continue to isolate Hamas while easing the pressure on Fatah by ending the 15-month financial boycott of the West Bank. But will this be enough to save Mahmud Abbas? Can a policy of feeding the West Bank while starving Gaza succeed?
It does not seem likely. Israel’s security establishment will not agree to remove the hundreds of road blocks which make Palestinian life a misery. Israel’s powerful settler movement will not agree to freeze settlements, let alone remove them. And Israel’s political leaders will move heaven and earth to avoid negotiating peace with the Arabs on the basis of the 1967 borders.
As a result, Mahmud Abbas will move into ever greater illegality and will be seen more and more as a Quisling; Fatah will continue its terminal decline; and Israel and its neighbours will be doomed to decades more of violence and war. As an acute observer remarked to me this week, ‘The Middle East today is like Europe on the eve of the Great War of 1914-18. It needs only a spark to set the whole region on fire.’
*Original English
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Respectful Cameras?
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
A camera developed by computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, would obscure, with an oval, the faces of people who appear on surveillance videos. These so-called respectful cameras, which are still in the research phase, could be used for day-to-day surveillance applications and would allow for the privacy oval to be removed from a given set of footage in the event of an investigation.
“Cameras are here to stay, and there’s no avoiding it,” says UC Berkeley computer scientist Ken Goldberg. “Let’s figure out new technology to make them less invasive.” According to a 2006 report prepared by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the number of publicly and privately owned video cameras in Lower Manhattan increased by a factor of five between 1998 and 2005, and several thousand cameras are in place in Greenwich Village and Soho alone. The United Kingdom, however, holds the record for video surveillance. In a report filed on Tuesday, the information commissioner there estimates that there are four million video-surveillance cameras in the United Kingdom–that’s one for every 14 people. Goldberg thinks of the respectful cameras as a compromise between advocates for privacy and those concerned about security.
In its current state of development, the camera is only able to obscure the faces of people who are wearing a marker, in the form of a yellow hat or a green vest. The camera system was developed by the National Science Foundation-funded Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies, and it currently works in real time with Panasonic’s robotic security cameras operating at 10 frames per second and a resolution of 640-by-480-pixel videos. The researchers use a statistical classification approach called adaptive boosting to train the system to identify the marker in environments with a high degree of visual noise. But they also combined this classifier with a tracker, which takes into account the subject’s velocity, along with other interframe information. At a construction site where the researchers tested their camera with the vest, the system correctly identified the marker 93 percent of the time. Under more-uniform lighting conditions in their lab environment, they report 96 percent success at identifying the hat, even when two marked individuals cross paths.
The marker requirement is a trade-off, Goldberg admits, but he says that face-detection algorithms are simply not up to task for real-time operations in complex environments. “The idea is called structuring the environment,” he says. “If you’re willing to meet the system halfway and say, ‘I’ll help the computer,’ then that’s useful.” In areas with heavy surveillance, markers could be made available, just outside the camera’s view, to those who wish to maintain their privacy. In the future, Goldberg says, it may be possible to use a less conspicuous marker, like a button, particularly with systems of multiple cameras, which would be less susceptible to visual obstructions.
The cameras have impressed civil-liberties-minded lawyers. Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in San Francisco, says, “Any technological measures that can be taken to mitigate the privacy invasion and avoid the chilling of legitimate conduct in public or private spaces that are being recorded is a good thing.” The markers are a limitation, he says, but “that’s not an argument against this type of research. In fact, it’s an argument for this type of research.”
Bankston says that laws governing video surveillance in public spaces around the world offer little protection to those concerned about privacy. In a few cases, embarrassing or lewd footage recorded by security cameras has been posted on the Internet. Bankston contends that the overwhelming issue is the unease generated by knowing that someone out there may be watching you.
But even if privacy-shielding camera systems were put into use, there would be great debate about how hard it should be for governments to see fully unobscured video footage. Christopher Slobogin, a law professor at the University of Florida who has written on public camera surveillance, says, “I don’t think the government should have to demonstrate probable cause in order to find out the identity of some person.” Suspicious behavior, he argues, should be sufficient. He cites Terry v. Ohio, a well-known U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled that law-enforcement officers do not need a warrant to stop, detain, and frisk people.
Goldberg says that there may someday be “legislation where you can put up security cameras, but you have to use the p-chip, some privacy chip that encrypts the face. My hunch is that people will say that’s a step in the right direction.”
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New US accusations against Iran
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
By Joe Kay
A US military official leveled new accusations against Iran on Monday, asserting Iranian government involvement in a January, 2007 attack that killed five American soldiers in Iraq. The charges are the latest in a campaign to increase pressure on Iran, while laying out a rationale for possible future military action.
Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, the lead spokesman for US forces in Iraq, said that interrogations of prisoners in Iraq had provided evidence of Iranian involvement in a January raid in the city of Karbala. He accused Iran of using the Lebanese group Hezbollah as a “proxy” to help train Iraqis to attack US forces.
These allegations are based on statements Bergner said were made by Qais Khazali and Ali Musa Daqduq, both of whom were captured in Iraq by the US military in March.
Bergner said that Khazali has admitted to planning the Karbala attack, and that Daqduq admitted to being a member of Hezbollah. Bergner said that the two prisoners “state that senior leadership within the Quds force knew and supported planning for the eventual Karbala attack that killed five coalition soldiers.”
He added, “Our intelligence reveals that the senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity.” When asked by a reporter, “Do you think it’s possible that [Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] doesn’t know?”, Bergner replied, “I think that would be hard to imagine.”
Bergner said that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force has “funded, trained and armed” Shiite groups operating in Iraq. “Quds Force, along with Hezbollah instructors, trained approximately 20 to 60 Iraqis at a time” at camps near Tehran, he said. “The Iranian Quds force is using Lebanese Hezbollah essentially as a proxy, as a surrogate in Iraq.”
The US has been escalating accusations against Iran for several months, but the statements by Bergner represent the first time that top Iranian leaders have been accused so directly of helping plan specific attacks on US forces. The statement also represents the first time that Hezbollah has been directly accused of involvement in Iraq.
New York Times reporter Michael Gordon, himself a supporter of the Iraq war, was quick to draw the implications of Bergner’s statements. “In effect,” he wrote, “the United States is charging that Iran has been engaged in a proxy war against American and Iraqi government forces for years.” Clearly, Washington is alleging an Iranian “proxy war” in order to establish a “self-defense” rationale for launching military strikes against Iran.
When the Karbala raid happened in January, US officials were quick to blame Iran, despite the absence of any serious evidence for this claim. The operation was too complex to have been carried out by Iraqi insurgents operating on their own, the Bush administration asserted, so it was likely that Iran was involved.
There were vague suggestions that the raid was intended to capture American forces to be used as bargaining chips for the return of five Iranian diplomats captured, and still held, by the US military. Four of the five American soldiers killed in the attack died after first being captured by the assailants.
There are many reasons to doubt the story of Iranian direction of the Karbala raid. It took place at a convenient time for the Bush administration—only a week after Bush’s January 10 speech announcing plans for a “surge” of US forces in Iraq. In the same speech, Bush accused Iran of supporting Iraqi insurgents, and threatened to retaliate with military force.
The raid was carried out by about a dozen people who were waved through US military checkpoints because they were wearing US military uniforms, driving in a US-style convoy, and spoke English. The New York Times reported at the time that sections of the Iraqi government were discussing the theory that American mercenaries were behind the raid. There were a number of possible motives for staging an attack, including the most direct: that it could be used to increase threats against Iran. (See: “Unanswered questions about the Karbala raid”).
The statements that the US military says have been made by Khazali and Daqduq were given after months of incommunicado imprisonment, during which the two were likely abused. Bergner’s statements on Monday were the first acknowledgment from the US that Daqduq had even been captured. After a prolonged period of interrogation, the military now claims it has produced stronger evidence to back up what it had clearly wanted to conclude from the beginning.
In addition to the charges over the Karbala raid, the US government continues to assert high-level Iranian involvement in supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents. These claims, first laid out in February 2007, were immediately questioned by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace. Last month, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that Pace would not be nominated to serve another term.
Also last month, Gates accused Iran of sending weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan. In language similar to Bergner’s comments on Monday, Gates said at the time that “it is difficult to believe” the alleged transfer of weapons to Afghanistan “is taking place without the knowledge of the Iranian government.”
These accusations followed shortly on comments by Senator Joseph Lieberman that the US should “be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians.”
Iran may be involved in supporting groups in Iraq, though the Iranian government has strenuously denied any support for Iraqi insurgents. At the same time, Iran has accused the US of supporting oppositional groups within Iran that aim to overthrow the government. The US is promoting the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), which operates under US protection in Iraq near the border with Iran. MEK is still classified by the US State Department as a terrorist organization for its past role in assassinating Iranian and American officials.
An escalation of rhetoric against Iran may have a number of different motives. The US is currently pushing for a new round of United Nations sanctions against Iran and has faced resistance from Russia and China. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited with Bush on Monday, and Iran was one of the topics under discussion.
Behind this diplomatic offensive, however, prominent sections of the political establishment favor military action against Iran. Unsubstantiated allegations of involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with accusations that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program, are being prepared as potential pretexts for any such decision.
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Brown’s leadership rating soars in poll after terrorist attacks
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Gordon Brown has got off to flying start as Prime Minister with his poll ratings as a leader and for strength soaring following his handling of the terrorist attacks.
A new Populus poll for The Times confirms the strength of the “Brown bounce”, in contrast with a decline in David Cameron’s leader rating.
Labour has gained four points to 37 per cent since early last month and the Tories are down two points at 34 per cent. The Liberal Democrats are up one point at 18 per cent and other parties down three points at 11 per cent. This is in line with two other recent polls and suggests that 14 months of a sustained Conservative lead has ended.
The Labour advance has fuelled talk of an early election, but Mr Brown has dismissed such speculation. He wants to establish his new Government and is likely to be cautious.
The danger for Mr Brown is that such a sharp rise in his and Labour’s ratings cannot be sustained. The key then will be whether Labour can still stay ahead of the Tories. Although the questions were finalised before the terrorist attacks, the interviews were conducted after the London car bombs and were halfway through when the Glasgow attack occurred.
The number of voters regarding Mr Brown as strong has jumped by 14 points to 77 per cent over the past month. This compares with 43 per cent seeing Mr Cameron as strong, up by six points since early June.
The proportion saying that Mr Brown has what it takes to be a good Prime Minister has risen by 16 points to 57 per cent, compared with 37 per cent for Mr Cameron (up four points). Only 31 per cent say that they would rather have Mr Cameron as prime minister than Mr Brown, and 52 per cent disagree.
Mr Brown’s rating on the Populus leader index has jumped sharply since early May from 5.00 up to 5.49 (on a scale of 0 to 10). This is the second highest since the index was created in February 2003, being exceeded only by Mr Blair’s 5.75 in May 2003 immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Mr Brown gained entirely among nonLabour voters because his rating among Labour supporters has slipped slightly since May, from 6.96 to 6.88.
Mr Cameron’s leader rating has declined for the third consecutive month, down from 4.95 to a new low of 4.81. Among Tory voters his rating has picked up a little since May, from 6.54 to 6.65.
The initial public response to the Brown Government is pretty positive, with 82 per cent being hopeful that Mr Brown’s team “will really get to grips with the most important issues facing Britain”. There is, however, an even split (42 to 42 per cent) on whether Mr Brown has “succeeded in bringing freshness and a sense of change and renewal to the Labour Government”.
Mr Brown’s decision to include outsiders as Lords ministers to show that he is creating “a government of all the talents” is seen as improving the way Britain is governed by 46 per cent, making it worse by 7 per cent, and no difference by 40 per cent.
A third (35 per cent) say that it will help to restore voters’ confidence in politics, 9 per cent damage it and 49 per cent make no difference.
–– Populus interviewed a random sample of 1,504 adults aged over 18 by telephone between June 29 and July 1. Interviews were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to be representative of all adults. Populus is a member of the British Polling Council. For more details go to populuslimited.com.
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Police hunted Glasgow suspect before attack
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
By Peter Graff
Scottish police were investigating a man suspected of attacking Glasgow airport on Saturday even before the incident in which a fuel-laden jeep slammed into a terminal building.
Police had been trying to trace the suspect via a property agency from which he had rented a house close to Glasgow.
Daniel Gardiner, the proprietor of the Let It rental agency, told Reuters an agency employee had returned home from shopping at 3 p.m. on Saturday — some 15 minutes before the attack — and found a note under his door from police.
The employee said police told him a telephone call from Let It had been made to a mobile phone discovered as part of investigations which began with two unexploded car bombs in London on Friday.
On Saturday, police arrested the passenger and badly-burned driver of a Jeep Cherokee who had rammed the vehicle into the entrance of Glasgow’s airport, causing a huge fireball.
Police have linked the Glasgow incident to the discovery of car bombs in London last Friday filled with gas cylinders, petrol and nails. At least one of the bombs was to be detonated by a mobile phone which has been recovered by police.
Police have arrested seven people in the hunt for members of a suspected al Qaeda cell behind the three botched attacks.
Gardiner said the tenant who had rented the house was “a professional gentleman. There was nothing to distinguish them. They didn’t have a tattoo on their foreheads saying ‘Terrorist’ or anything.”
He said the agency had carried out a careful credit check before the tenancy began in April, and it had come up clean. The house is at 6, Neuk Crescent in Houston, near Glasgow.
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Tax breaks for rich
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
HIGH-income earners have benefited the most under the Howard Government’s tax changes since 1996, research released yesterday by the ACTU shows.
It says average workers have been ripped off, getting just $23 a week in tax cuts, while high-income earners received six times as much, $140 a week.
“Like the IR laws, the Howard Government’s tax changes are biased against average working Australians,” ACTU president Sharan Burrow said.
“While average earners are due to start receiving a small tax cut this week, this modelling shows that this is just a pre-election sweetener that doesn’t make up for the tax bias against average workers under 11 years of Coalition government.”
The ACTU model takes into account tax changes since 1966 and GST, but not social security payments.
Have Your Say: Tax breaks for rich
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“Every Citizen is a Reporter”
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Meet some of the citizen reporters of OhmyNews, a South Korean venture that in 2000 became the first online newspaper in the world to accept, edit, and publish articles from its readers. It was established by Oh Yeon Ho, who has earned his credibility in the student pro-democracy movement of the 1980s, including having served a prison term for his activities.
OhmyNews has grown since 2000 to a staff of 55, with as many as 50,000 citizen reporters contributing from over 100 countries, including a recent addition, Afghanistan. I was lucky enough to represent Daily Kos at a conference sponsored by OhmyNews in Seoul June 27 and 28. Along with the OhmyNews reporters from Cameroon to Afghanistan to Finland, new media pioneers from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, South Africa, Australia, Japan, Canada, and Israel met for a whirlwind two days of intense conversation and shared understanding of what we’re up against in this new venture of ours.
The model presented by OhmyNews and many of these other ventures contrast with Daily Kos and much of the U.S. blogosphere in that they are focused on creating an alternative media, being the journalists that they wish they had in their countries. Their efforts are geared more toward original reporting than the kind partisan political activism prevalent in our blogosphere. But the primary aims of Daily Kos and OhmyNews, or Realno.info, or NowPublic are all the same–having our voices heard above the din of traditional media fluff and, in too many cases, government-run media.
Dr. Oh’s efforts have paid off. OhmyNews was instrumental in bringing down the previous South Korean president in 2002, and the election of current President Roh Moo Hyun. Not only did OhmyNews garner the first media interview from new President Roh, but the president himself addressed the opening of the conference:
The media has to change if our society is to advance. The most powerful force that raises the standards of the media is no other than the participation of alert citizens. The standards of the media and quality of its products can improve when more citizens participate in the production and distribution stages and use their responsible criticism to act as a check against the possibility of the media morphing into a political power. Moreover, solidarity between the media organizations that are actively participated in by citizens will greatly contribute to advancing democracy globally.
It was eye-opening to discover the shared barriers–lack of funding to create and grow citizen-centered media, frustration with the traditional media and its disdain, distrust, and fear of our efforts, in some cases repressive government interference, and in others technological deficiencies. Seems that everyone in the world has heard more than enough about Paris Hilton, as her example was raised over and over again to point to the failures of the traditional media to provide the news that an informed citizenry demands. That’s where we come in.
The stakes are high for all of us, but the threats for some are much greater in, say Pakistan where one reporter, Shakil Turabi, has been abducted and beaten twice by Pakistan’s intelligence service, as reported by Asiam Khan at Internews in Pakistan. Undaunted, Khan has teamed with Munish Nagar, from India to create a new cooperative venture that has recently included Daud Khattak from Pajhwok Afghan News in Kabul. Makes the slings and arrows of the likes of Brooks, Broder, and Lieberman pretty laughable.
The conference was a non-stop conversation, luckily for me mostly in English, though I did have a chance to exercise my rusty Russian and a few of the Korean phrases I picked up from a very helpful seatmate on the flight over. I was asked again and again what would happen in Iraq, and why we were there. Mr. Khattak had a conversation with another American present about the critical need for the U.S. to refocus it’s efforts in Afghanistan–to not abandon the country to the Taliban and al Qaeda. And everyone was intensely interested in the upcoming presidential election. Like us, I suspect much of the rest of the world is just tired of the Bush administration and wants it to be over.
In the end, what I found most remarkable about the gathering was the very strong sense of community that developed almost immediately. That was largely the result of a shared understanding of what we are all up against, but mostly because we all have the same goal–people powered politics, and people-powered media.
Have Your Say: “Every Citizen is a Reporter”
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Bush ‘condones criminal conduct’: Democrats
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
TOP US Democrats condemned as “disgraceful” and a “betrayal” President George W. Bush’s decision today to commute the jail term of former senior White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
“The President’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence does not serve justice, condones criminal conduct, and is a betrayal of trust of the American people,” Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, said in a statement.
Mr Bush commuted the 30-month jail term imposed on Libby for lying to federal investigators in a case over an outed spy which highlighted doubts about the administration’s case for the war in Iraq.
Ms Pelosi’s condemnation echoed that of the other top Democrat in Congress, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid.
“The President’s decision to commute Mr Libby’s sentence is disgraceful,” Mr Reid said.
“Libby’s conviction was the one faint glimmer of accountability for White House efforts to manipulate intelligence and silence critics of the Iraq war.
“Now, even that small bit of justice has been undone,” Mr Reid said in a statement.
“The Constitution gives President Bush the power to commute sentences, but history will judge him harshly for using that power to benefit his own Vice-President’s chief of staff who was convicted of such a serious violation of law.”
Announcing his decision to commute the term, Mr Bush said in a statement: “I respect the jury’s verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr Libby is excessive.”
Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office issued a short statement saying he “supports the President’s decision”.
Libby was found guilty of lying to federal investigators in a case probing whether White House officials had leaked the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame, but not of actually leaking her name to the press in July 2003.
It was alleged that Ms Plame’s cover as a CIA agent was blown to avenge criticism of the White House’s decision to go to war by her husband, ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson, who argued the case for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq was flawed.
Mr Wilson said the Bush administration was “painting this almost as a compromise here, saying the President could have pardoned Scooter Libby, but rather he commuted the sentence.
“I would remind people that this is the president who was governor of Texas (and) refused to commute the first death sentence of a female prisoner, even after the Pope pleaded for clemency,” he said.
Senator John Edwards, a Democratic presidential hopeful, said the “cause of equal justice in America took a serious blow today.
“George Bush and his cronies think they are above the law and the rest of us live with the consequences.”
Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said “accountability has been in short supply in this Bush administration, and this commutation fits that pattern”.
Yet another Democratic Senator, Charles Schumer, weighed in to criticise Mr Bush’s decision, citing principles of US justice ahead of the nation’s July 4 anniversary of independence.
“One of the principles our forefathers fought for was equal justice under the law. This commutation completely tramples on that principle,” he said.
AFP
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MI5 ‘knew of plot in advance’
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
The internet was buzzing with claims yesterday that MI5 had prior intelligence on the London car bomb attack.
The suggestion was fuelled by the fact that nightclubs were warned a few weeks ago by police that they were potential targets for car bombers.
An advice booklet for bars, pubs and nightclubs was produced by the security services and included a section on “vehicle borne improvised explosive devices”.
But a Whitehall source said that the booklet’s distribution to clubs just a few weeks ago was long-planned and “purely coincidental”.
MI5 said it had no advance intelligence of the Haymarket bombs, though the threat level had been at ‘’severe”.
However, MI5 may have been monitoring those involved in a cell at some stage - which, if true, could provoke claims that they were allowed to slip through the net.
A number of proven and alleged terrorist plots have emerged in the UK since the Twin Towers attacks in September 2001:
Dec 2001: Richard Reid, a British-born convert to Islam, tries to blow up an airliner, bound from Paris to Miami, with a shoe bomb. Reid is in prison in the US.
Saajid Badat, another Briton, is jailed for 13 years for plotting to become a shoe bomber, but pulled out.
Jan 2003: Anti-terrorist police find a poison factory in a flat in Wood Green, north London. Days later, a raid on a flat in Manchester ends in the murder of a Stephen Oake, a special branch officer.
March 2004: British-born extremists of Pakistani background are arrested in the “fertiliser plot” case. They have more than half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, a basic ingredient of home-made explosives, in a self-storage depot in Hanwell, west London.
July 2005: Four British men blow themselves up on three Tube trains and a bus in central London, killing 52 passengers.
Two of them - Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer - had trained as terrorists in Pakistan.
July 2007: A jury is deciding the fate of a number of men accused of trying to repeat the carnage of July 7, 2005 on July 21, 2005.
In a separate case, a number of people are accused of plotting to blow up jets.
Have Your Say: MI5 ‘knew of plot in advance’
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