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U.S. escalating covert operations against Iran: report

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

U.S. congressional leaders agreed late last year to President George W. Bush’s funding request for a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing its leadership, according to a report in The New Yorker magazine published online on Sunday.

The article by reporter Seymour Hersh, from the magazine’s July 7 and 14 issue, centers on a highly classified Presidential Finding signed by Bush which by U.S. law must be made known to Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders and ranking members of the intelligence committees.

“The Finding was focused on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” the article cited a person familiar with its contents as saying, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.”

Hersh has written previously about possible administration plans to go to war to stop Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons, including an April 2006 article in the New Yorker that suggested regime change in Iran, whether by diplomatic or military means, was Bush’s ultimate goal.

Funding for the covert escalation, for which Bush requested up to $400 million, was approved by congressional leaders, according to the article, citing current and former military, intelligence and congressional sources.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. U.S. Special Operations Forces have been conducting crossborder operations from southern Iraq since last year, the article said.

These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in Bush’s war on terrorism, who may be captured or killed, according to the article.

The U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, told CNN’s “Late Edition” he had not read the article, but denied the allegations of cross-border operations.

“I’ll tell you flatly that U.S. forces are not operating across the Iraqi border into Iran, in the south or anywhere else,” he said in an interview from Baghdad on Sunday.

The scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which include the Central Intelligence Agency, have now been significantly expanded, the New Yorker article said, citing current and former officials.

Many of these activities are not specified in the new finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature, it said.

Among groups inside Iran benefiting from U.S. support is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, according to former CIA officer Robert Baer. Council on Foreign Relations analyst Vali Nasr described it to Hersh as a vicious organization suspected of links to al Qaeda.

The article said U.S. support for the dissident groups could prompt a violent crackdown by Iran, which could give the Bush administration a reason to intervene.

None of the Democratic leaders in Congress would comment on the finding, the article said. The White House, which has repeatedly denied preparing for military action against Iran, and the CIA also declined comment.

The United States is leading international efforts to rein in Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, although Washington concedes Iran has the right to develop nuclear power for civilian uses.

(Additional reporting by Paul Eckert in Washington; writing by Chris Michaud; editing by Eric Beech and David Wiessler).

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The ‘W.’ Stands for ‘War Criminal’

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

By Nat Hentoff | In a June 6 letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey—largely ignored by a press immersed in the future of Hillary Clinton—56 Democrats in the House of Representatives asked for “an immediate investigation with the appointment of a special counsel to determine whether actions taken by the President, his Cabinet, and other Administration officials are in violation of the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441) . . . and other U.S. and international laws.”

This isn’t front-page news?

The letter began with a brief account of the notorious facts about Abu Ghraib (”sexual exploitation and torture”) and Guantánamo (”an independent investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross documented several . . . acts of torture . . . including soaking a prisoner’s head in alcohol and lighting it on fire”). Nor was “coercive interrogation” in Afghanistan omitted: “In October 2005, The New York Times reported that three detainees were killed during interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq by CIA agents or CIA contractors.”

This is not a call for articles of impeachment. Bush will soon be gone, and the new president and Congress have far too much to do to get mired in that quicksand. These are grave criminal charges, and since international crimes are involved as well as the U.S. War Crimes Act and the Anti-Torture Act, other nations whose laws include “universal jurisdiction” could prosecute.

But why would House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers Jr. and Intelligence Committee members Jerrold Nadler (my congressional representative) and Jan Schakowsky—among other signers—make such dramatic and historic charges of “war crimes” now, after most congressional Democrats have not shown the same interest? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for example, is not on the list of signers; she and Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid have never, in their opposition to the administration, come anywhere near these shocking accusations.

As of this writing, I’ve seen no alarm evident among Republicans, but if the story has legs, the response will begin with a derisive claim that this is a cheap, transparent, and bush-league trick to propel the election of Barack Obama.

But in the letter, these latter-day Thomas Paines (assuming you agree with them) assert that what impelled them to act immediately was that, “within the last month, additional information has surfaced that suggests the fact that not only did top Administration officials meet in the White House and approve of the use of enhanced techniques, including waterboarding against detainees, but that President Bush was aware of and approved of the meetings taking place. . . . This information indicates that the Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law.” (Emphasis added.)

If Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, et al. are ever in the dock after such an investigation, I am sure that the prosecutors will show, among other thoroughly documented sources, the very specific names of the perpetrators and the dates of this series of crimes, as published in Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values by Phillippe Sands (Palgrave MacMillan) and the irrefutable evidence found in University of Houston professor Jordan J. Paust’s Beyond the Law: The Bush Administration’s Unlawful Responses in the “War” on Terror (Cambridge University Press).

The latter is a book I wish every voter in November will have read, along with the same publisher’s 1,249-page The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, edited by Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel. Such books will help build the careers of future historians around the world.

I am further encouraged because chairman John Conyers, the June 8 Washington Post reported, “is looking into the role played by administration lawyers” in all of these crimes.

Conyers, calling treatment of detainees “a truly shameful episode,” emphasizes that Bush’s “enhanced” interrogation techniques were “used under cover of Justice Department legal opinions,” and so “the need for outside counsel is obvious.”

And since the letter from the 56 House Democrats is going to Attorney General Michael Mukasey—who claims that he cannot prosecute any perpetrator of these alleged war crimes because, by golly, they were authorized by Justice Department legal opinions—these House patriots are saying that Mukasey must appoint a special counsel rather than handle the investigation himself.

To give you a snapshot of Michael Mukasey’s dedication to the rule of law and its essential requirement of fairness and impartiality in all trials, Bush’s attorney general recently told an annual conference of Washington federal judges that trials of suspected terrorists by military commissions at Guantánamo will be “in the best traditions of the American legal system” (New York Sun, June 5). On June 12, the Supreme Court, declaring the commissions unconstitutional, exposed Mukasey’s constitutional ignorance.

The administration lawyers, whom Conyers is also going after, designed those Guantánamo military commissions after advising Bush that the prisoners were not entitled to the protections of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions—and didn’t have to be tried in our federal courts.

In Beyond the Law, Paust says of these lawyers (most of them graduates of our premier law schools): “Not since the Nazi era have so many lawyers been so clearly involved in international crimes concerning the treatment and interrogation of persons detained during war. . . . Such a direct role in a process of denial of protections under the laws of war [and our Constitution] is far more serious than the loss of honor and integrity to [presidential] power. It can form the basis for a lawyer’s civil and criminal responsibility. . . .

“[These were lawyers] . . . directly advising how to deny protections in the future (denials of such protections are violations of the laws of war and war crimes).” And dig this: The administration lawyers advised the president how to take “actions that allegedly would avoid the restraints of various criminal statutes and their reach to the President and others with respect to future conduct,” and especially with respect to the planned “coercive” interrogation tactics authorized by George W. Bush. (Emphasis added).

Some of these lawyers have gone on to prominent government positions—like Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington.

Next week: the legal and historic precedents for “command responsibility.”

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Guantanamo’s days numbered, tough choices ahead

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

ANDREW O. SELSKY | This was a sleepy Navy outpost before the U.S. began using it to hold prisoners in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks — and it may soon become one again.

It is increasingly obvious that the days of this U.S. offshore prison are numbered. The Bush administration’s main rationale for holding terrorism suspects without trial vanished when the Supreme Court ruled on June 12 that they have certain legal rights. John McCain and Barack Obama have both called for the detention center to be shut.

But whoever becomes the new president will have to figure out what to do with those left at Guantanamo — roughly 270 at present.

“It’s pretty easy to say ‘Let’s close Guantanamo,’” Navy Rear Adm. Mark Buzby said in an interview before leaving as commander of the detention center last month. “But the fact of the matter is there are some pretty dangerous people that have to be kept someplace.”

McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has said he wants to move the detainees to the military’s prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. But finding room for them all might be a problem — just over 400 inmates are now locked up at Fort Leavenworth, which has a capacity for 515.

McCain wants the prisoners tried at military commissions, or war crimes courts, which are allowed under a 2006 law that he supported. These commissions act as criminal courts run by the U.S. armed forces to try those considered enemies during wartime. So far, 19 Guantanamo detainees have been charged in such commissions.

Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, said he would close Guantanamo and move the detainees to both civilian and military facilities in the United States, including Leavenworth, according to campaign spokesman Reid Cherlin. Obama wants the detainees to be tried in federal criminal courts or in military courts martial.

The Pentagon now plans to try about 80 prisoners at military commissions, but another 130 are considered too dangerous to let go and won’t be prosecuted. About 60 are slated for transfer from Guantanamo, but the Pentagon says they can’t go home because their governments won’t accept them, might release them and create a security risk for the U.S., or might even torture them.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently told lawmakers he too wants Guantanamo’s prison shut down, but added: “We’re stuck in several ways.”

In general, convictions would be harder to secure in federal courts, but would also stand up better in the long run, according to David Glazier, an associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Another option would be to create a national security court that could apply military or federal standards but keep intelligence sources and methods secret.

Just before he was nominated attorney general last year, Michael Mukasey wrote an opinion column saying a national security court deserves “careful scrutiny by the public, and particularly by the U.S. Congress.” He also suggested looking at a proposal to lock up suspected terrorists using legal norms that allow the insane to be involuntarily committed.

The Supreme Court’s latest ruling gave all detainees the right to petition federal judges for immediate release. In a separate case for an individual detainee, a federal appeals court on Monday decided he was not an enemy combatant and ordered the military to release him, transfer him or hold a new proceeding promptly.

Commanders on this 45-square-mile base encompassing arid hills and a broad bay say they are ready to move the prisoners out if given the order.

Flexibility is literally built in. If Washington decides the war crimes trials should be moved to the U.S., a new high-tech courthouse and related facilities built on an abandoned airfield here can be dismantled and shipped over.

The $12 million Expeditionary Legal Complex was completed in May instead of a proposed $100 million permanent structure that Gates rejected in February 2007. Air Force Maj. Gail E. Crawford of the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions said Guantanamo is not bound by law to be the site of the war crimes trials.

The courthouse downsizing was one of several signs that the Pentagon wants to get rid of the detention center, which has drawn international condemnation. Only one detainee has been transferred to Guantanamo this year and five in 2007, compared to almost 800 in previous years.

“We are making concerted efforts to decrease the population at Guantanamo,” said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. “We have no desire to be the world’s jailers, as we have often stated.”

Defense lawyers want the detention center closed and say the war crimes trials are unfair because they allow evidence obtained under harsh interrogations, even possibly by waterboarding, and permit hearsay. They say the prisoners include innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were sold to U.S. forces for bounties.

“President Bush, our commander in chief, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not, started the U.S. down a slippery slope, a path that quickly descended, stopping briefly in the dark, Machiavellian world of the ends justify the means, before plummeting further into the bleak underworld of barbarism and cruelty, of anything goes, of torture,” attorney Air Force Maj. David Frakt said in military court last week. Frakt represents an Afghan detainee who records show was subjected to sleep deprivation at Guantanamo months after he attempted suicide.

Men were first held here in cages, then in shipping containers, then in barracks fronting a dusty courtyard and finally also in maximum-security lockups modeled after U.S. prisons.

“The same skill set that allowed Guantanamo to build up in a very frantic situation will serve it well when it comes time to go the other way,” said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey M. Johnston, who drew up initial plans for the detention center on a yellow legal notepad after being told in December 2001 that the first detainees would soon be headed over.

Guantanamo Bay, which was first taken by U.S. Marines in the Spanish-American war, has seen many mission expansions and contractions. In the early 1990s, it housed tens of thousands of Haitian boat people. Johnston said if the detention center is closed, some facilities — like buildings where guards and interrogators live — could be repurposed.

Former President Jimmy Carter, in an e-mail to The Associated Press, expressed his own ideas of what to do with the detention center. The Nobel laureate is a sharp critic of Guantanamo who charges that the indefinite detention of hundreds of men has fueled animosity toward the U.S.

“After it has been emptied, perhaps the facility should be closed forever, or made into a museum where people can study the importance of respecting the Geneva Conventions and other human rights treaties,” Carter said.

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Secret U.S. operation kills Iraqi, strains relations

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

By Hannah Allam | BAGHDAD, Iraq — Senior Iraqi government officials said Saturday that a U.S. Special Forces counterterrorism unit conducted the raid that reportedly killed a relative of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki , touching off a high-stakes diplomatic crisis between the United States and Iraq .

U.S. military officials in Baghdad had no comment for the second day in a row, an unusual position for a command that typically releases information on combat operations within 24 hours.

The raid occurred at dawn Friday in the town of Janaja near Maliki’s birthplace in the southern, mostly Shiite Muslim province of Karbala . Ali Abdulhussein Razak al Maliki , who was killed in the raid, was related to the prime minister and had close ties to his personal security detail, according to authorities in Karbala .

The incident puts an added strain on U.S.-Iraqi negotiations to draft a Status of Forces Agreement, a long-term security pact that will govern the conduct of U.S. forces in Iraq . Members of the Iraqi government and security forces said the raid only deepened their reluctance to sign any agreement that did not leave Iraqis with the biggest say on when and how combat operations are conducted.

The U.S. military handed Iraqi forces control of Karbala security in October 2007 . By the end of 2007 the U.S. military had transferred nine of the country’s 18 provinces to Iraqi control.

“We are afraid now of signing the long-term pact between Iraq and America because of such unjustified violations by the troops. Handing over security in provinces doesn’t mean anything to the American troops,” said Mohamed Hussein al Musawi , a senior Najaf-based member of the prime minister’s Dawa Party . “We condemn these barbaric actions not only when they target a relative of Maliki’s, but when any Iraqi is targeted in the same way.”

Outrage over the mysterious operation has spread to the highest levels of the Iraqi government, which is demanding an explanation for how such a raid occurred in a province ostensibly under full Iraqi command.

“This is a Special Forces operation, an antiterrorism unit that operates almost independently so there’s been no coordination with the local forces on the ground,” said a high-ranking member of the Iraqi government who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the extreme sensitivity of the issue. “That’s why it’s so important to have a Status of Forces Agreement to regulate this relationship. As long as it’s vague and open, these incidents will continue to happen.”

U.S. and Iraqi officials have been in difficult negotiations to draft a Status of Forces Agreement. Among the main sticking points are whether the U.S. military can stage combat operations without the consent of the Iraqi government and whether to grant immunity to American troops and security contractors.

Kurdish legislator Mahmoud Othman called Friday’s operation “unacceptable” and had strained relations between the countries.

“This is a big embarrassment for Prime Minister Maliki because he was in that area two days before the incident, telling his people that we are the masters in our country and the decisions were ours to make,” Othman said. “This is why we are afraid of agreements and immunity. … If there are wanted people in any area, why not send an Iraqi force to do the job?”

Iraqi officials in Karbala said the operation began at dawn Friday with U.S. aircraft delivering dozens of American troops to the rural Shiite Muslim town of Janaja, which is populated mostly by members of the Maliki tribe. Authorities said the raid apparently was aimed at capturing what the military calls a “high-value target,” often a reference to the leader of a militant cell.

Raed Shakir Jowdet, the Iraqi military commander of Karbala operations, told journalists Friday that the Americans had acted on faulty intelligence. He said four U.S. military helicopters and a jet fighter soared over the area that morning. About 60 U.S. ground forces then stormed the town, “terrifying the families,” Jowdet said. At least one man was detained, though some Iraqi authorities said more were taken into custody.

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Bill Clinton says Barack Obama must ‘kiss my ass’ for his support

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

By Tim Shipman in Washington and Philip Sherwell in New York | Mr Obama is expected to speak to Mr Clinton for the first time since he won the nomination in the next few days, but campaign insiders say that the former president’s future campaign role is a “sticking point” in peace talks with Mrs Clinton’s aides.

The Telegraph has learned that the former president’s rage is still so great that even loyal allies are shocked by his patronising attitude to Mr Obama, and believe that he risks damaging his own reputation by his intransigence.

A senior Democrat who worked for Mr Clinton has revealed that he recently told friends Mr Obama could “kiss my ass” in return for his support.

A second source said that the former president has kept his distance because he still does not believe Mr Obama can win the election.

Mr Clinton last week issued a tepid statement, through a spokesman, in which he said he “is obviously committed to doing whatever he can and is asked to do to ensure Senator Obama is the next president of the United States “.

Mr Obama was more effusive at his unity event with Mrs Clinton on Friday, speaking fondly of the absent former president, who attended Nelson Mandela’s birthday celebrations in London instead. The candidate told the crowd: “I know how much we need both Bill and Hillary Clinton as a party. They have done so much great work. We need them badly.”

But his aides said he has so far concentrated on cementing relations with Mrs Clinton first. They say they are content to let relations with Mr Clinton thaw gradually.

It has long been known that Mr Clinton is angry at the way his own reputation was tarnished during the primary battle when several of his comments were interpreted as racist.

But his lingering fury has shocked his friends. The Democrat told the Telegraph: “He’s been angry for a while. But everyone thought he would get over it. He hasn’t. I’ve spoken to a couple of people who he’s been in contact with and he is mad as hell.

“He’s saying he’s not going to reach out, that Obama has to come to him. One person told me that Bill said Obama would have to quote kiss my ass close quote, if he wants his support.

“You can’t talk like that about Obama - he’s the nominee of your party, not some house boy you can order around.

“Hillary’s just getting on with it and so should Bill.”

Another Democrat said that despite polls showing Mr Obama with a healthy lead over Republican John McCain, Mr Clinton doesn’t think he can win.

The party strategist, who was allied to one of the early rivals to Mr Obama and the former First Lady, said Mr Clinton was “very unhopeful” about the nominee’s prospects in November.

“Bill Clinton knows the party will unite behind Obama, but he is telling people he doesn’t believe Obama can win round voting groups, especially working-class whites, in the swing states,” the strategist said.

“He just doesn’t think Obama will be able to connect with the voters he needs.”

Joe Klein, the author of Primary Colours, a fictionalised account of Mr Clinton’s 1992 election, who has known the former president for 20 years, said he also heard that he was “very, very bitter”, from people who have spoken with him.

“It’s time for him to get over it or go off and do his charitable work. He knows the rules of the road. What’s going on now is kind of strange. I think his behaviour is really, really shocking.”

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