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U.S. forces kill Iraq family

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

The U.S. forces allegedly killed three people and wounded a fourth from one family in a town in Salahudin province, north of Baghdad, on Tuesday, a source from the U.S. and Iraqi liaison office said.

The incident took place at dawn in the town of al-Dowr, 30 km north of the provincial capital of Tikrit, the source from the provincial Joint Coordination Center (JCC) told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

He said that an interpreter working for the U.S. troops informed the branch of the JCC in the town of the killing and asked them to collect two bodies in a house in one of the town’s neighborhoods.

An Iraqi police force headed to the scene and found three bodies–those of a man and his wife in their 40s as well as their18-year-old son. All of the three were killed with gunshots in the head, he said.

The police also found many spent cartridges of weapons used by U.S. troops at the scene, he added.

Residents at the neighborhood told the police force that they heard gunshots at dawn and saw U.S. military vehicles leaving the neighborhood later, the source said.

He also said that a 16-year-old daughter of the family made a call with a mobile phone for help as she was injured and taken by the U.S. troops to a medical facility in a U.S. base in the province.

The three bodies were transported to the main hospital of Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, he said.

The U.S. military did not confirm the incident yet.

On Monday, the U.S. military conceded in a statement that its troops had killed accidentally nine Iraqis and wounded three others, including two children, in a military operation against al-Qaida, near the town of Iskandariyah, about 50 km south of Baghdad.

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Secret CIA flights to face top-level court inquiry

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Prosecutors from Spain’s National Court are seeking key witnesses in relation to alleged secret CIA flights in which dozens of Islamist prisoners were transported via Spain to Guantanamo Bay.

The National Court suspects that dozens of prisoners captured in Kandahar, Afghanistan by US forces were transported to Guantanamo via Spanish airports or using Spanish airspace between January 2002 and October 2006.

According to the Spanish daily El Pais, about 47 flights headed to or came from the US base at Guantanamo in Cuba and landed or flew over Spanish airports.

A document submitted to the court by the Spanish Airports and Air Navigation (AENA) authority, refers to eight flights in 2002, seven in 2003, twelve in 2004, nine in 2005, nine in 2006, and two in February 2007.

The National Court also wants to know why in 2002, just months after the deadly September 11 attacks against the twin towers, ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar and US president George W. Bush, updated a bilateral defence treaty, which had been in place in 1989.

The updated treaty made it more flexible for American planes to land at the US bases of Rota and Moron de la Frontera.

The court wants to know if these ‘more flexible’ terms were used to transfer the first 23 prisoners sent from the city of Kandahar in Afghanistan to Guantanamo.

Flight and airport officials as well as military and civilian air traffic controllers in the US bases located at Moron de la Frontera, Rota and Torrejon de Ardoz will be asked to give their testimony.

The flights took place under the leadership of former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar and the current prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

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The CIA op that should have prevented Iraq war

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

AFP

When Saad Tawfiq watched Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on February 5 2003 he shed bitter tears as he realised he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.

As one of Saddam Hussein’s most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in 1995 — and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was the then US secretary of state — Tawfiq’s television was able to received international news through a link pirated from Saddam’s spies next door — waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

“When I saw Colin Powell I started crying. Immediately. I knew I had tried and lost,” Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Now in his fifties, a round-faced man with a small moustache and lively eyes behind delicate spectacles, Tawfiq described how the CIA set up an elaborate operation to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists and then ignored the results.

From the end of 2002 the US spy agency had sources inside Iraq’s weapons plants telling them clearly what the whole world now knows — that Saddam had ended efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Nevertheless in March 2003 the United States and Britain invaded Iraq to disarm Saddam of this non-existent arsenal and in the process triggered the effective collapse of the Iraqi state, plunging it into chaos and bringing thousands of deaths.

Saad Tawfiq’s role in this drama began in June 2002 with calls from his sister Sawsan, a doctor who lives with her husband Ali in Moreland Hills, a pleasant suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, in the mid-western United States.

“Our Abu Mahmuds are putting pressure on me,” she told him, using the nickname they shared for Saad’s secret police minder as a makeshift code for the US intelligent agent who had contacted her, “Chris.”

“Chris was very nice, very polite,” Sawsan, a small energetic woman, told AFP. Chris wanted Sawsan’s help to discover the status of Saddam’s weapons programme, and in particular his efforts to build a nuclear bomb.

She joined one of the most successful attempts by the CIA to penetrate Saddam’s Iraq, a programme dreamt up by agency veteran Charlie Allen to target Iraqi weapons technicians through their relatives.

The scientists were well known to the UN weapons inspectors who had been keeping tabs on Iraq’s arms plants since 1991, and the Americans were able to draw up a list of 30 who had relatives in the United States.

The American relatives were to be sent to Iraq and ask about weapons.

“I was nervous, and we even discussed with Ali what to do if something happened to me,” Sawsan said. “It was a very emotional visit back home, because I had not been there for years and I had not seen my brother for years.”

Sawsan was right to be nervous. Saddam’s notorious secret police dealt with spies mercilessly. She was taking a risk with her life and that of her brother, but was determined to help rid her original homeland of a tyrant.

The CIA provided her with a detailed questionnaire about Iraq’s weapons programmes. Fearing she would forget it, Sawsan disguised it in sketches and crosswords in a kind of homemade code.

Tawfiq picked his sister up from Baghdad airport on September 9, 2002. Her homecoming was emotional, but the pair had work to do. They met secretly at night in the family garden and took walks together in the city.

The weapons engineer was astonished by the CIA’s questions, which he thought showed the depths of the agency’s ignorance about events in his country.

“I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me: ‘They know you have a programme,’ and I was saying: ‘There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing’,” Tawfiq said.

“She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: ‘No, no, no…’ I kept swearing on the grave of my mother.”

According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programmes in 1995, after his brother-in-law and arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed the UN inspectors.

“I was Saddam’s scientist,” Tawfiq declared, with an ironic smile. “In 1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In 1995 if you hid something you were killed!”

Sawsan dutifully gathered this information and returned to the United States to pass it on to her handlers. But the CIA was unimpressed.

“Saad told me there was nothing left,” she told AFP. “That everything had been either destroyed or dismantled by the UN and the regime has abandoned its nuclear programme. And he begged me to explain all that back in the States.

“I went back and I reported what he had told me in full detail. I even went personally to Washington. In the beginning they listened to me but then they told me that my brother was lying,” she said.

Of course Tawfiq and other colleagues approached by the CIA were telling the truth, as the United States would discover after it had launched a bloody war that has cost tens of thousands of lives.

Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the time of the operation to question Tawfiq, said weapons scientists had not been ignored, but had been contradicted by other sources.

“To the extent that the debriefings did not have more of an effect in Washington, it probably was not because the effort came too late but instead because there were other indications that seemed to contradict what the individuals were saying, and that suggested Iraqi unconventional weapons programmes were continuing,” he told AFP.

But as Saddam’s scientist lamented five years later: “You don’t have to destroy a country for that.”

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Illegal bug uncovered in second UK prison

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

A prison officer on B-wing at Wakefield Prison, West Yorkshire

Richard Ford, Home Correspondent and Sean O’Neill

Video briefing: who is Babar Ahmad?

Bugging devices planted in a prison telephone were illegally used to record privileged conversations between an inmate and his solicitor, The Times has learnt.

Defence lawyers said last night that the breach confirms long-held suspicions that the recording of legal visits is widespread. Security experts told The Times that they believed that dozens of prisoners are routinely the subject of covert surveillance.

The revelation comes days after it emerged that an MP’s meeting with a jailed constituent had been recorded. However the taping of legal meetings is considered far more serious because it may breach a defendant’s rights and has the potential to collapse criminal trials.

The full transcripts of the taped conversations with a 71-year-old man who is serving life for murder only came to light because they were disclosed to Simon Creighton, the solicitor who was caught up in the surveillance.

The revelation will bring demands for Jack Straw to widen the official inquiry into the bugging of Sadiq Khan, a Muslim MP visiting a terror suspect, to investigate the extent of covert surveillance in Britain’s prisons.

Mr Straw, the Justice Secretary, told MPs yesterday that Sir Christopher Rose, the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, is to head an inquiry into the bugging of a conversation involving Mr Khan and Babar Ahmad when the MP visited him in Woodhill jail.

Mr Creighton’s case involves Harry Roberts, who was convicted of the murder of three police officers in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, in 1966. Last night the solicitor said: “If they are prepared to go to these lengths in this case, it makes one wonder what they are prepared to do with other prisoners, particularly those convicted of serious offences.”

Roberts, currently in Littlehey prison in Cambridgeshire, is involved in a long battle to be released on parole. His 30-year minimum term expired 11 years ago.

His parole hearings have been held in secret but in documents sent to his solicitor, a government-appointed lawyer included transcripts of bugged telephone conversations. Two transcripts of discussions betweeen Mr Creighton and Roberts when he was in Channings Wood jail were found with other legal documents.

The transcripts of calls made in 2005 and 2006 include every word spoken from the moment that a receptionist at Mr Creighton’s firm answers the phone to Roberts and he asks: “Can I speak to Simon”.

Mr Creighton said that the transcripts included discussions of legal tactics that he was going to employ in court proceedings planned as part of Roberts’s struggle to win parole. They also included discussions about problems that Roberts was having in jail.

Mr Creighton, of Bhatt Murphy solicitors in London, said: “I am deeply shocked by this breach of such an important and fundamental right. It is especially worrying that it occurred in this case where there were already heightened sensitivities because of the decision made by the parole board to receive secret evidence.

“Had the secrecy order not been lifted it would never have come to light and it makes me wonder whether this is a more common practice than anyone has previously dared to imagine.”

He said that the bugging of legal telephone calls was a breach of common law and the European Convention of Human Rights.

It is not clear whether the bugging operation was being operated by the police or prison service.

The telephone calls of all prisoners are subject to monitoring but the recording or monitoring of calls to legal advisers is banned.

Prisoners have expressed concerns frequently that telephone calls with their lawyers and legal visits are being bugged. Mr Creighton said: “There has always been a degree of paranoia among prisoners that their calls are recorded. Sometimes they say that clicks heard during conversations are recordings being switched off. Whenever this has been raised with the authorities they have always denied it.”

Gareth Peirce, Mr Ahmad’s solicitor, said that defence lawyers had written to the governors of Woodhill and Belmarsh prisons on a number of occasions seeking assurances that legal visits were not being bugged.

Ms Peirce said: “Many prisoners . . . believe that their visits are being listened to and defence lawyers are concerned that they are not able to reassure them on that score.

“The position is very disturbing. Bugging of legal visits would be a serious intrusion. There is an absolute right to confidentiality when it comes to legal visits. To justify such a thing happening would need the Home Secretary to authorise it. If it were found to have happened, that would have the most enormous consequences.”.

The Ministry of Justice said last night: “The Justice Secretary was not previously aware of this matter.

We will consider what further steps are needed once we have more information.”

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The Year of Living Dangerously

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

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British plan to build Taliban training camp

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Revealed: British plan to build training camp for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan

By Jerome Starkey in Kabul

Britain planned to build a Taliban training camp for 2,000 fighters in southern Afghanistan, as part of a top-secret deal to make them swap sides, intelligence sources in Kabul have revealed. The plans were discovered on a memory stick seized by Afghan secret police in December.

The Afghan government claims they prove British agents were talking to the Taliban without permission from the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, despite Gordon Brown’s pledge that Britain will not negotiate. The Prime Minister told Parliament on 12 December: “Our objective is to defeat the insurgency by isolating and eliminating their leaders. We will not enter into any negotiations with these people.”

The British insist President Karzai’s office knew what was going on. But Mr Karzai has expelled two top diplomats amid accusations they were part of a plot to buy-off the insurgents.

The row was the first in a series of spectacular diplomatic spats which has seen Anglo-Afghan relations sink to a new low. Since December, President Karzai has blocked the appointment of Paddy Ashdown to the top UN job in Kabul and he has blamed British troops for losing control of Helmand.

It has also soured relations between Kabul and Washington, where State Department officials were instrumental in pushing Lord Ashdown for the UN role.

President Karzai’s political mentor, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, endorsed a death sentence for blasphemy on the student journalist Sayed Pervez Kambaksh last week, and two British contractors have been arrested in Kabul on, it is claimed, trumped up weapons charges. The developments are seen as a deliberate defiance of the British.

An Afghan government source said the training camp was part of a British plan to use bands of reconciled Taliban, called Community Defence Volunteers, to fight the remaining insurgents. “The camp would provide military training for 1,800 ordinary Taliban fighters and 200 low-level commanders,” he said.

The computer memory stick at the centre of the row was impounded by officers from Afghanistan’s KGB-trained National Directorate of Security after they moved against a party of international diplomats who were visiting Helmand.

A ministry insider said: “When they were arrested, the British said the Ministry of the Interior and the National Security Council knew about it, but no one knew anything. That’s why the President was so angry.”

Details of how much President Karzai was told remain murky. Some analysts believe Afghan officials were briefed about the plan, but that it later evolved.

The camp was due to be built outside Musa Qala, in Helmand. It was part of a package of reconstruction and development incentives designed to win trust and support in the aftermath of the British-led battle to retake the stronghold last year.

But the Afghans feared the British were training a militia with no loyalty to the central government. Intercepted Taliban communications suggested they thought the British were trying to help them, the Afghan official said.

The Western delegates, Michael Semple and Mervyn Patterson, were given 48 hours to leave the country. Their Afghan colleagues, including a former army general, were jailed. The expulsions coincided with a row within the Taliban’s ranks which saw a senior commander, Mansoor Dadullah, sacked for talking to British spies. One official claimed the camp was planned for Mansoor and his men.

The computer stick contained a three-stage plan, called the European Union Peace Building Programme. The third stage covered military training.

Curiously, the European Union says the programme did not exist and there were no EU funds to run it.

Afghan government officials insist it was bankrolled by the British. UK diplomats, the UN, Western officials and senior Afghan officials have all confirmed the outline of the plan, which they agree is entirely British-led, but all refused to talk about it on the record. President Karzai’s office claimed it was “a matter of national security”.

The memory stick revealed that $125,000 (£64,000) had been spent on preparing the camp and a further $200,000 was earmarked to run it in 2008, an Afghan official said. The figures sparked allegations that British agents were paying the Taliban.

President Karzai’s spokesman, Humayun Hamidzada, accused Mr Semple and Mr Patterson of being “involved in some activities that were not their jobs.”

The camp would also have provided vocational training, including farming and irrigation techniques, to offer people a viable alternative to growing opium. But the Afghan government took issue with plans to provide military training, to turn the insurgents into a defence force.

Afghan government staff also claimed the “EU peace-builders” had handed over mobile phones, laptops and airtime credit to insurgents. They said the memory stick revealed plans to train the Taliban to use secure satellite phones, so they could communicate directly with UK officials.

Mr Patterson, a Briton, was the third-ranking UN diplomat when he was held. Mr Semple, an Irishman, was the acting head of the EU mission. Officially, the British embassy remains tight-lipped, fuelling speculation that the plan may have been part of a wider clandestine operation.

A spokesman repeated the line used since Christmas: “The EU and UN have responded to inquiries on this. We have nothing further to add.”

But privately, the UN maintains it had no role in setting up the camp. Meanwhile, Mr Semple’s EU boss, Francesc Vendrell, admitted he had very little idea what was going on.

Yet the British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, cut short his Christmas holiday to meet President Karzai and “spell out the Foreign Office paper-trail” which diplomats claim proves his government had agreed. They met twice, but it was not enough to stop Mr Semple and Mr Patterson being forced to leave.

Gordon Brown has also said Britain would increase its support for “community defence initiatives, where local volunteers are recruited to defend homes and families modelled on traditional Afghan arbakai”.

Background to the proposal

* December 11

British and Afghan troops take Musa Qala, a Taliban stronghold in Helmand, after President Hamid Karzai reveals that a senior Taliban commander swapped sides.

* December 23-24

The acting head of the EU mission, Michael Semple, and the third-ranking UN diplomat in Afghanistan, Mervyn Patterson, hold talks with local dignitaries and Taliban sympathisers in Helmand. Afghan secret police arrest their colleague, General Stanikzai, and seize a memory stick containing plans for training camps.

* December 25

Semple and Patterson are given 48 hours in which to leave Kabul.

* December 27

The two diplomats fly out of the Afghan capital, despite international appeals to let them stay.

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‘Basic rules ignored in war on terror’

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

The White House has overlooked the basic rule of ‘know your enemy’ in its anti-terrorist strategy in the ‘war on terror’, an analyst says.

“The attention of the US military and intelligence community is directed almost uniformly towards hunting down militant leaders or protecting US forces, [and] not towards understanding the enemy we now face,” AFP quoted Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University as saying.

“Al-Qaeda’s ability to continue this struggle is based absolutely on its capacity to attract new recruits and replenish its resources,” Hoffman continued.

He noted that through ignorance of the enemy, the Bush administration faces ignorance of the nature of its policies against al-Qaeda, its goals, strengths and weaknesses.

“Without knowing our enemy, we cannot fulfill the most basic requirements of an effective counter-terrorist strategy: pre-empting and preventing terrorist operations and deterring their attacks,” he concluded.

MD/HGH/DT

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