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U.S. forces apologize for civilian death

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

Thi-Qar | The U.S. forces offered an official apology for the Thi-Qar province police over the killing of a civilian in an airdrop operation on Friday, a security official said.

 

“The apology, offered on Saturday by two senior U.S. officers, involved a pledge not to conduct any more operations without the previous knowledge of the local police,” the Thi-Qar police chief, Brig. Sabah Mohsen al-Fatlawi, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq – (VOI).

“The U.S. side also pledged to afford moral and financial compensations for the wounded victims in the operation and pay for their treatment and transport to Baghdad,” Fatlawi added.

On Friday the media advisor for the U.S. army, Abdellatif Rayan, said a joint Iraqi-U.S. force killed a civilian and wounded two others during an airdrop operation in central al-Nassiriya city during the early hours of the day.

“The airdropping targeted the house of a wanted man believed to be a financer of special groups in al-Thawra neighborhood, central Nassiriya. The force opened fire at a man when he raised a weapon, killing him in self defense and wounding two others,” Rayan told VOI.

Earlier, Maj. Nasser al-Majidi, a media spokesman for the Thi-Qar province police, told VOI a U.S. force airdropped troops on the house of 65-year-old citizen Muhammad Hammoud Hereiz in Nassiriya, killing him instantly.

“The U.S. force denied access to Iraqi policemen to the area under the gun,” the source said, not indicating the reason for this U.S. operation.

Thi-Qar, 380 km south of Baghad, has an area of 12,900 square kilometers (4,980.7 sq mi). In 2003 the estimated population of the governorate was 1,454,200 people. Thi-Qar’s capital is the city of al-Nassiriya. It also includes the ancient Sumerian ruins of Ur, Eridu, Lagash and Ngirsu. Before 1976 the province was known as al-Muntafiq.

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War, oil caused most U.S recessions since 1950

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

Reuters | Wars and sharp spikes in oil prices were behind most of the seven recessions in the United States since the Great Depression.

Following is a list of recessions since 1950:

1953 — Inflation caused by spending during the Korean War prompted the Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy, causing a one-year recession.

1957-1958 — A recession hit developing countries the hardest because industrial nations sharply cut their purchases of minerals and farm products. U.S. unemployment rose during this period but, unusual for a recession, prices did also.

1973-1975 — The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, quadrupled oil prices. That and the ongoing expense of the Vietnam war caused two years of inflation with little or no growth.

1980, 1981-82 — The Federal Reserve’s sharp rise in rates to quell the inflationary period of the 1970s and another spike in oil prices, this time triggered by the Iranian revolution, tipped the United States into a brief recession in 1980. A short expansion was followed by a deeper downturn from 1981 to late 1982.

1990-1991 — A credit crisis prompted by the insolvency of many failed U.S. savings and loans and a spike in oil prices during the first Gulf War resulted in a contraction followed by several years of sub-par growth.

2001-2002 — The bursting of the dot-com bubble, the Sept 11 attacks and corporate accounting scandals induced a relatively short and shallow recession followed by two years of slow growth.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz, editing by Philip Barbara)

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President George W Bush backs Israeli plan for strike on Iran

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

By Uzi Mahnaimi in Washington | President George W Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official.

Despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread scepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran, the president has given an “amber light” to an Israeli plan to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties, the official told The Sunday Times.

“Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack and tell us when you’re ready,” the official said. But the Israelis have also been told that they can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use US military bases in Iraq for logistical support.

Nor is it certain that Bush’s amber light would ever turn to green without irrefutable evidence of lethal Iranian hostility. Tehran’s test launches of medium-range ballistic missiles last week were seen in Washington as provocative and poorly judged, but both the Pentagon and the CIA concluded that they did not represent an immediate threat of attack against Israeli or US targets.

“It’s really all down to the Israelis,” the Pentagon official added. “This administration will not attack Iran. This has already been decided. But the president is really preoccupied with the nuclear threat against Israel and I know he doesn’t believe that anything but force will deter Iran.”

The official added that Israel had not so far presented Bush with a convincing military proposal. “If there is no solid plan, the amber will never turn to green,” he said.

There was also resistance inside the Pentagon from officers concerned about Iranian retaliation. “The uniform people are opposed to the attack plans, mainly because they think it will endanger our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the source said.

Complicating the calculations in both Washington and Tel Aviv is the prospect of an incoming Democratic president who has already made it clear that he prefers negotiation to the use of force.

Senator Barack Obama’s previous opposition to the war in Iraq, and his apparent doubts about the urgency of the Iranian threat, have intensified pressure on the Israeli hawks to act before November’s US presidential election. “If I were an Israeli I wouldn’t wait,” the Pentagon official added.

The latest round of regional tension was sparked by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which fired nine long and medium-range missiles in war game manoeuvres in the Gulf last Wednesday.

Iran’s state-run media reported that one of them was a modified Shahab-3 ballistic missile, which has a claimed range of 1,250 miles and could theoretically deliver a one-ton nuclear warhead over Israeli cities. Tel Aviv is about 650 miles from western Iran. General Hossein Salami, a senior Revolutionary Guard commander, boasted that “our hands are always on the trigger and our missiles are ready for launch”.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, said she saw the launches as “evidence that the missile threat is not an imaginary one”, although the impact of the Iranian stunt was diminished on Thursday when it became clear that a photograph purporting to show the missiles being launched had been faked.

The one thing that all sides agree on is that any strike by either Iran or Israel would trigger a catastrophic round of retaliation that would rock global oil markets, send the price of petrol soaring and wreck the progress of the US military effort in Iraq.

Abdalla Salem El-Badri, secretary-general of Opec, the oil producers’ consortium, said last week that a military conflict involving Iran would see an “unlimited” rise in prices because any loss of Iranian production — or constriction of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz — could not be replaced. Iran is Opec’s second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia.

Equally worrying for Bush would be the impact on the US mission in Iraq, which after years of turmoil has seen gains from the military “surge” of the past few months, and on American operations in the wider region. A senior Iranian official said yesterday that Iran would destroy Israel and 32 American military bases in the Middle East in response to any attack.

Yet US officials acknowledge that no American president can afford to remain idle if Israel is threatened. How genuine the Iranian threat is was the subject of intense debate last week, with some analysts arguing that Iran might have a useable nuclear weapon by next spring and others convinced that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is engaged in a dangerous game of bluffing — mainly to impress a domestic Iranian audience that is struggling with economic setbacks and beginning to question his leadership.

Among the sceptics is Kenneth Katzman, a former CIA analyst and author of a book on the Revolutionary Guard. “I don’t subscribe to the view that Iran is in a position to inflict devastating damage on anyone,” said Katzman, who is best known for warning shortly before 9/11 that terrorists were planning to attack America.

“The Revolutionary Guards have always underperformed militarily,” he said. “Their equipment is quite inaccurate if not outright inoperable. Those missile launches were more like putting up a ‘beware of the dog’ sign. They want everyone to think that if you mess with them, you will get bitten.”

A former adviser to Rice noted that Ahmadinejad’s confrontational attitude had earned him powerful enemies among Iran’s religious leadership. Professor Shai Feldman, director of Middle East studies at Brandeis University, said the Iranian government was getting “clobbered” because of global economic strains. “His [Ahmadinejad's] failed policies have made Iran more vulnerable to sanctions and people close to the mullahs have decided he’s a liability,” he said.

In Israel, Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, has his own domestic problems with a corruption scandal that threatens to unseat him and the media have been rife with speculation that he might order an attack on Iran to distract attention from his difficulties. According to one of his closest friends, Olmert recently warned him that “in three months’ time it will be a different Middle East”.

Yet even the most hawkish officials acknowledge that Israel would face what would arguably be the most challenging military mission of its 60-year existence.

“No one here is talking about more than delaying the [nuclear] programme,” said the Pentagon source. He added that Israel would need to set back the Iranians by at least five years for an attack to be considered a success.

Even that may be beyond Israel’s competence if it has to act alone. Obvious targets would include Iran’s Isfahan plant, where uranium ore is converted into gas, the Natanz complex where this gas is used to enrich uranium in centrifuges and the plutonium-producing Arak heavy water plant. But Iran is known to have scattered other elements of its nuclear programme in underground facilities around the country. Neither US nor Israeli intelligence is certain that it knows where everything is.

“Maybe the Israelis could start off the attack and have us finish it off,” Katzman added. “And maybe that has been their intention all along. But in terms of the long-term military campaign that would be needed to permanently suppress Iran’s nuclear programme, only the US is perceived as having that capability right now.”

Additional reporting: Tony Allen-Mills in New York

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Psychiatric Group Faces Scrutiny Over Drug Industry Ties

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

By BENEDICT CAREY and GARDINER HARRIS | It seemed an ideal marriage, a scientific partnership that would attack mental illness from all sides. Psychiatrists would bring to the union their expertise and clinical experience, drug makers would provide their products and the money to run rigorous studies, and patients would get better medications, faster.

But now the profession itself is under attack in Congress, accused of allowing this relationship to become too cozy. After a series of stinging investigations of individual doctors’ arrangements with drug makers, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is demanding that the American Psychiatric Association, the field’s premier professional organization, give an accounting of its financing.

The association is the voice of establishment psychiatry, publishing the field’s major journals and its standard diagnostic manual.

“I have come to understand that money from the pharmaceutical industry can shape the practices of nonprofit organizations that purport to be independent in their viewpoints and actions,” Mr. Grassley said Thursday in a letter to the association.

In 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available, the drug industry accounted for about 30 percent of the association’s $62.5 million in financing. About half of that money went to drug advertisements in psychiatric journals and exhibits at the annual meeting, and the other half to sponsor fellowships, conferences and industry symposiums at the annual meeting.

This weekend in Chicago, the psychiatry association’s board will meet behind closed doors, in part to discuss how to respond to the increasingly intense scrutiny and questions about conflicts of interest.

“With every new revelation, our credibility with patients has been damaged, and we have to protect that first and foremost,” said Dr. Steven S. Sharfstein, a former president of the association and now president of the Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore. “I think we need to review all arrangements between doctors and industry and be very clear about what constitutes a conflict of interest and what does not.”

One of the doctors named by Mr. Grassley is the association’s president-elect, Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg of Stanford, whose $4.8 million stock holdings in a drug development company raised the senator’s concern. In a telephone interview, Dr. Schatzberg said he had fully complied with Stanford’s rigorous disclosure policies and federal guidelines that pertained to his research.

Blocking or constraining researchers from trying to bring medications to market “will mean less opportunities to help patients with severe illnesses,” Dr. Schatzberg said, adding, “Drugs that are helpful may not be developed by big pharmaceutical companies, for a variety of reasons, and we need some degree of communication between academia and industry” to expand options for patients.

Commercial arrangements are rampant throughout medicine. In the past two decades, drug and device makers have paid tens of thousands of doctors and researchers of all specialties. Worried that this money could taint doctors’ research plans or clinical judgment, government agencies, medical journals and universities have been forced to look more closely at deal details.

In psychiatry, Mr. Grassley has found an orchard of low-hanging fruit. As a group, psychiatrists earn less in base salary than any other specialists, according to a nationwide survey by the Medical Group Management Association. In 2007, median compensation for psychiatrists was $198,653, less than half of the $464,420 earned by diagnostic radiologists and barely more than the $190,547 earned by doctors practicing internal medicine.

But many psychiatrists supplement this income with consulting arrangements with drug makers, traveling the country to give dinner talks about drugs to other doctors for fees generally ranging from $750 to $3,500 per event, for instance.

While data on industry consulting arrangements are sparse, state officials in Vermont reported that in the 2007 fiscal year, drug makers gave more money to psychiatrists than to doctors in any other specialty. Eleven psychiatrists in the state received an average of $56,944 each. Data from Minnesota, among the few other states to collect such information, show a similar trend.

In both states, individual psychiatrists are not top earners, but consulting arrangements are so common that their total tops all others. The worry is that this money may subtly alter psychiatrists’ choices of which drugs to prescribe.

An analysis of Minnesota data by The New York Times last year found that on average, psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from makers of newer-generation antipsychotic drugs appear to have written three times as many prescriptions to children for the drugs as psychiatrists who received less money or none. The drugs are not approved for most uses in children, who appear to be especially susceptible to the side effects, including rapid weight gain.

Senator Grassley’s investigations have not only detailed how lucrative those arrangements can be but have also shown that some top psychiatrists failed to report all their earnings as required.

After The Times reported on such an arrangement involving Dr. Melissa P. DelBello of the University of Cincinnati, Mr. Grassley asked the university to provide her income disclosure forms and asked AstraZeneca, the maker of the antipsychotic Seroquel, to reveal how much it paid her.

In scientific publications, Dr. DelBello has reported working for eight drug makers and told university officials that from 2005 to 2007 she earned about $100,000 in outside income, according to Mr. Grassley.

But AstraZeneca told Mr. Grassley it paid her more than $238,000 in that period. AstraZeneca sent some of its payments through MSZ Associates, an Ohio corporation Dr. DelBello established for “personal financial purposes.”

The University of Cincinnati agreed to monitor those payments more closely.

In early June, the senator reported to Congress that Dr. Joseph Biederman, a renowned child psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and a colleague, Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, had reported to university officials earning several hundred thousand dollars apiece in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 when in fact they had earned at least $1.6 million each.

Another member of the Harvard group, Dr. Thomas Spencer, reported earning at least $1 million after being pressed by Mr. Grassley’s investigators. The Harvard psychiatrists said they took conflict-of-interest policies seriously and had abided by disclosure rules.

In late June, after Mr. Grassley singled out Dr. Schatzberg, Stanford disputed some of the numbers in the report and has denied that Dr. Schatzberg violated any research rules devised to police such conflicts.

In an interview on Wednesday, Dr. Nada L. Stotland, president of the psychiatric association, said the group had studied Mr. Grassley’s letter and Stanford’s response and agreed with Stanford. Dr. Schatzberg will take over as president of the association as planned, she said.

“The larger issue here is that there’s a revolution going on” in how medicine handles industry money, said Dr. Stotland, a psychiatrist at Rush Medical College in Chicago. “That’s good, that’s what we need, and I believe we’ve been on the cutting edge of that revolution in many ways.”

Dr. Stotland said that the association began reviewing the income it received from pharmaceutical companies last March, to identify potential conflicts. Doctors and academic researchers generally worked at arm’s length from industry until the early 1980s, when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act. This legislation encouraged closer collaboration between researchers and industry to bring products to market more quickly. The act helped foster the growth of the biotech industry, and soon professors and universities were busy obtaining patents and building relationships with industry.

Some psychiatrists have long argued that consulting with a company — to help design a rigorous drug trial, for instance — benefits patients, as long as the researcher has no financial stake in the product and is not paid to speak about the drug to other doctors, like a traveling pitchman.

Others say industry and academic researchers are now so deeply intertwined that exposing doctors’ private arrangements only stokes suspicion without correcting the real problem: bias.

“Having everyone stand up like a Boy Scout and make a pledge isn’t going to quell suspicion,” said Dr. Donald Klein, an emeritus professor at Columbia, who has consulted with drug makers himself. “The only hope to rule out bias is to have open access to all data that’s produced in studies and know that there are people checking it” who are not on that company’s payroll.

Studies have shown that researchers who are paid by a company are more likely to report positive findings when evaluating that company’s drugs. The private deals can directly affect patient care, said Dr. William Niederhut, a psychiatrist in private practice in Denver who receives no industry money.

Dr. Niederhut said company-sponsored doctors had spread the word that new and expensive drugs were better in treating bipolar disorder than lithium, the cheaper old standby treatment.

“It’s a sales pitch, and now it’s looking like a whole lot of people would have done better if they’d started on lithium in the first place,” Dr. Niederhut said in a telephone interview. “The profession absolutely has to come clean on these industry deals, and soon.”

Tighter rules, stronger statements and more debate may not make much difference, if Mr. Grassley’s findings are any guide. Universities have rules requiring that faculty members disclose their outside income so that conflicts of interest in research or patient care can be managed. But some of the psychiatrists named in the investigations apparently ignored the rules.

“I think we may be coming to a point where hospitals and medical schools have to get serious about sanctioning,” said Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, director of the division of psychiatry, medicine and the law at Columbia. “You can suspend doctors’ privileges, or suspend their right to treat patients; both have a huge impact on income and career. But if you’re serious about these disclosure policies, you have to be willing to back them up.”

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SchNEWS SWINGS ITS LONG LENS TOWARDS STATE SURVEILLANCE

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

SchNEWS | It’s time to get yer party masks out- FITwatch are celebrating their 1st birthday! FITwatch have been a welcome presence at demos - obscuring the view of the police Forward Intelligence Teams and preventing police evidence gathering and intimidation of crowds.

FIT teams (for the uninitiated) are uniformed officers, whose job it is to build profiles on those opposed to the status quo. The same few officers from a variety of police forces turn up at anti-capitalist, anti-arms trade, animal rights, squat evictions, the climate camp etc etc. Taking literally hundreds of photos at often very innocuous events, their job is to build understanding of our networks. They in turn pass that information onto agencies such as the National Public Order Intelligence Unit and the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordinating Unit. If you’re on a demo and you see a group of cops with ‘blue-topped’ Hi-Vis jackets and long lens cameras then you’re probably looking at the FIT.

Their methods could be charitably described as ‘pro-active’ as they follow and harass activists who have the misfortune to make it onto one of their spotter cards. One individual who’s made the way up this ladder of enhanced surveillance told SchNEWS “Police men who at first are total strangers accost you in the street by your first name, trying to give the impression that they’re ‘onto’ you in some way. You then get singled out for stops and searches and on big demos you might even get the pleasure of your own police escort! You don’t have to have been convicted of any crime to end up on the list – mere suspicion is enough”.

One of their spotter cards fell into the hands of activists at the DSEi 2003 Arms Fair and revealed the bizarre range of people considered potential sources of disorder – including comedian/activist Mark Thomas. At least one campaigner has been driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown by their constant harassment. They’ve also received criticism from the NUJ for cataloguing photographers who regularly attend demos.

The FIT teams were first deployed as a police tactic against football hooligans – travelling to games around the U.K and Europe spotting known ‘troublemakers’. Plans are now afoot to roll the tactic out as a form of social control on council estates. Announcing she intended to extend FIT operations to problem estates, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith admitted she wanted targets “harried and harassed.” And this is exactly what they are doing on demonstrations - they are trying to harass people enough they no longer attend..

For a long while the movement didn’t really deal with the issue, almost adopting a policy of ‘ignore them and they’ll go away’ and not letting them know the chilling effect they were having on political activism.

Within the last year however the tables have been turned, and no street action is now complete without FITwatch, who have been very successful at changing the vibe at demos, by blocking off the cameras with massive black banners and following the evidence gatherers - basically doing to the FIT teams what the FIT have been doing to us for years. With these tactics, they’ve been honing the art of creating blind spots in the police’s intelligence, making spaces in which activists can feel safe. And ironically the FIT team seem rather coy themselves - they don’t like being filmed. Generally they try to get other cops to effect arrests and keep their names from becoming public knowledge.

FIT team personnel don’t have a very high turnover – just think how long new recruits must take to memorise all those names and faces. That means that some of them at least have become very familiar to us. Here’s a small selection of our favourites….

Until the arrival of FITwatch on the scene, a couple of coppers with some oversized camcorders seemed plenty enough to put the frighteners. A year of activity disrupting the police’s invasive strategies and, in FITwatch’s own words:

“FIT no longer feel safe on our demonstrations. According to their own statements, they have felt ‘intimidated’ by our tactics, and we have at times, rendered their intelligence gathering operations ‘ineffective’. We have seen several demonstrations where the cameraman has had to be ‘withdrawn’, and we have shown we can do this even when our numbers are small.”

Fitwatch
e-mail: defycops@yahoo.co.uk
web: www.fitwatch.blogspot.com

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Troops accused of Iraq boy abuse

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

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Scandal of Diego Garcia Rendition Flights

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

By Andy Worthington | This has been a bad week for the British government, in relation to two of the running sores of its foreign policy, both centred on the Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

 

Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands — known collectively as the Chagos Islands — were shamefully cleared of their existing population in the late 1960s, to make way for a US airbase on Diego Garcia itself. This was a manifestation of the “special relationship” between the UK and the US, which involved the old empire facilitating its successor’s global reach, in exchange for a significant discount on the UK’s Trident nuclear missile programme.

 

Ever since, the exiled Chagossians have been attempting to regain access to their ancestral lands, but with limited success. Although successive British governments have toned down the racist rhetoric used at the time of the islanders’ forced removal — when official documents referred to them as “Tarzans or Men Fridays” — Diego Garcia and the Chagos Islands have remained at the forefront of a colonial mindset that has never quite been extirpated from the Foreign Office’s mentality.

 

Although the islanders won a stunning victory in the High Court in 2000, which ruled that their expulsion had been illegal, the government fought back in 2003, when Prime Minster Tony Blair invoked an ancient and archaic “royal prerogative” to strike down their claims once more. Although the court of appeal reversed this decision in May 2006, ruling that the islanders’ right to return was “one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings,” it was clear that, in the struggle between a group of cruelly disposed islanders on the one hand, and the US military-industrial complex on the other, the Chagossians’ fight was far from over.

 

Last week, just after a party of Chagossians visited London to hear lawyers for the Foreign Office appealing in the House of Lords against the 2006 verdict and claiming, as the Guardian put it, that “[a]llowing the Chagossian islanders to go back to their Indian Ocean homes would be a ‘precarious and costly’ operation,” and that “the United States had said that it would also present an ‘unacceptable risk’ to its base on Diego Garcia,” David Miliband, the foreign secretary, delivered a short statement relating to the other scandal of Diego Garcia: its use for “extraordinary rendition” flights in the “War on Terror.”

 

After years of denials by the British government that rendition flights had passed through Diego Garcia, David Miliband admitted in February that he had just been informed by his US counterparts that, upon searching their records, they had discovered that two flights had stopped on Diego Garcia in 2002. “In both cases a US plane with a single detainee on board refuelled at the US facility in Diego Garcia,” Miliband said. “The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US Government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia. US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other Overseas Territory or through the UK itself since then.”

At the time, I noted that this appeared to be a sly form of damage limitation, as there was compelling evidence that, far from being used on just two occasions as a transit point, the island had actually housed a secret prison. Three examples will suffice for now, although it’s a safe bet that more revelations are forthcoming.

In October 2003, Time magazine ran an exclusive feature by Simon Elegant focusing on the imprisonment of Hambali, a “high-value detainee,” who spent years in various secret CIA prisons — including Diego Garcia — until he was transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. Other evidence came from Council of Europe investigator (and Swiss senator) Dick Marty, who reported in June 2006 that, having spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, he had “received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees.’”

 

The final piece of evidence came from inside the US administration itself, when Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, and currently a professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, let slip on two occasions that Diego Garcia had housed a secret prison. In May 2004, he blithely declared, “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” and in December 2006 he slipped the leash again, saying, “They’re behind bars … we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

 

David Miliband’s statement last Thursday did nothing to suggest that the British government had any intention of pushing the matter further with its US allies, even though, as the sovereign power in charge of the islands, the ministers are unable to evade responsibility for what has taken place on Diego Garcia.

 

Rather feebly, the foreign secretary stated that, after sending a list of possible rendition flights that may have passed through British territory to the US authorities, “The United States Government confirmed that, with the exception of two cases related to Diego Garcia in 2002, there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the United Kingdom, our Overseas Territories, or the Crown Dependencies, with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001.”

 

Reprieve, the legal action charity that has spent several years investigating “extraordinary rendition” and secret prisons, responded by pointing out that the British government “intentionally failed to ask the right questions of the US, and accepted implausible US assurances at face value,” noting that the Foreign Office had declined to ask the US government for the names of the prisoners transported via Diego Garcia in 2002, that it had failed to ask if any other rendition flights had passed through Diego Garcia, even if, as the US asserted, no other planes landed there, and had also failed to ask whether any other flights passed through UK territory en route to engaging in “extraordinary rendition,” which would make the UK complicit in the crime.

 

The British government faced a fresh barrage of criticism just three days later, when the Foreign Affairs Select Committee published its latest report (PDF) on the Overseas Territories. With reference to Diego Garcia, the Committee declared that “it is deplorable that previous US assurances about rendition flights have turned out to be false. The failure of the United States Administration to tell the truth resulted in the UK Government inadvertently misleading our Select Committee and the House of Commons. We intend to examine further the extent of UK supervision of US activities on Diego Garcia, including all flights and ships serviced from Diego Garcia.”

 

For good measure, the Committee also had harsh words about the government’s treatment of the Chagossians, noting, “We conclude that there is a strong moral case for the UK permitting and supporting a return … for the Chagossians. The FCO (Foreign Office) has argued that such a return would be unsustainable, but we find these arguments less than convincing.”

 

Under pressure on two fronts over Diego Garcia, it remains to be seen whether the government can once more worm its way out of trouble. Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, is keen not to let this happen. Speaking after the report was published, he chastised the foreign secretary for dismissing his concerns about “extraordinary rendition” when he first raised the issue last October. “The Foreign Secretary persistently gave me the brush-off. He said we could rely on US assurances,” Tyrie said, adding, “My allegations were correct. The Foreign Secretary’s brush-off was not just misplaced, it was a disgrace.”

Reprieve was even more blunt, stating, “This remains a transatlantic cover-up of epic proportions. While the British government seems content to accept whatever nonsense it is fed by its US allies, the sordid truth about Diego Garcia’s central role in the unjust rendition and detention of prisoners in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ cannot be hidden forever.”

 

Andy is the author of The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

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Westminster blasted over rights of asylum seekers

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

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Suit filed against US law on surveillance

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

DAWN | The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit to stop the US government from conducting surveillance under a new wiretapping law that gives the Bush administration virtually unchecked power to intercept e-mails and telephone calls.

The case was filed on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labour, legal and media organisations whose ability to perform their work - which relies on confidential communications - will be greatly compromised by the new law.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, passed by the US Congress on Wednesday and signed by President George W. Bush, not only legalises the secret warrantless surveillance programme President Bush approved in late 2001, it also gives the US government new powers to conduct surveillance of Americans’ international communications.

“Spying on Americans without warrants or judicial approval is an abuse of government power - and that’s exactly what this law allows. The ACLU will not sit by and let this evisceration of the Fourth Amendment go unchallenged,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero.

“Electronic surveillance must be conducted in a constitutional manner that affords the greatest possible protection for individual privacy and free speech rights. The new wiretapping law fails to provide fundamental safeguards that the Constitution unambiguously requires.”

In its legal challenge, the ACLU argues that the new law violates Americans’ rights to free speech and privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution. The new law permits the US government to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and e-mail addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it’s conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing.

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PROTEST OVER CHAVEZ ‘BLACKLIST’

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

Have Your Say: PROTEST OVER CHAVEZ ‘BLACKLIST’
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Red Cross finds Bush administration guilty of war crimes

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

By Andrew McLemore | In a secret report last year, the Red Cross found evidence of the CIA using torture on prisoners that would make the Bush administration guilty of war crimes, The New York Times reported Friday.

The Red Cross determined the culpability of the Bush administration after interviewing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, according to the article.

Prisoner Abu Zubaydahwho said he had been waterboarded, “slammed against the walls” and confined in boxes “so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position.”

The information comes from a new book written by Jane Meyer, who has frequently published articles concerning counter-terrorism in The New Yorker.

The book is titled “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” and will be released next week.

Mayer cited “sources familiar with the report” to explain the confidential document as a warning “that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.”

The report was submitted to CIA last year and concluded that American interrogation methods are “categorically” torture that violates both domestic and international law, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported Friday.

Although the CIA had already admitted to the use of waterboarding, Meyer says in the book that several CIA officers confirm the findings of the Red Cross, including the other forms of torture mentioned.

Maddow called George W. Bush a “torture-approver-in-chief who has yet to be held to account for anything” and said that congressman Dennis Kucinich had reintroduced his articles of impeachment against the president.

Maddow questioned constitutional law expert Johnathan Turley about the development.

“The problem for the bush admin is that they perfected plausible deniability techniques,” Turley said. “They bring out one or two people that are willing to debate on cable shows whether waterboarding is torture and it leaves the impression that its a closed question.

“It’s not. It’s just like the domestic surveillance program that the federal court said just a week ago was also not just a closed question.”

When asked by Maddow if the chances are now greater that Bush will be prosecuted now or after leaving office by the international community, Turley compared the situation to Serbia in the early 90s.

“I’d never thought I would say this, but I think it might in fact be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought in my lifetime I would say that.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3PvIFx-WDE

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U.S. treatment of Khadr may have exceeded military’s own guidelines

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

By OMAR EL AKKAD | In subjecting Omar Khadr to the so-called “frequent flier program” - a sleep deprivation technique that has since been prohibited - the U.S. military may have exceeded even its own guidelines on the controversial practice.

Department of Foreign Affairs documents made public this week show that the U.S. military intentionally deprived Mr. Khadr of sleep in order to “make him more amenable and willing to talk” prior to a visit by Canadian officials to Cuba in 2004.

A May, 2008, U.S. Department of Justice audit found that the frequent flier program was employed throughout Guantanamo, designed to disorient detainees and make them more co-operative.

According to an FBI agent stationed at the naval base between December of 2003 and September of 2004, “under the program detainees were moved every four hours, but that the program could only be continued for a week or two.”

According to the Foreign Affairs document, however, Mr. Khadr was moved every three hours for 21 days.

The origin of such practices at Guantanamo dates back to an April 16, 2003, memo by then-secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld.

The memo explicitly authorized “sleep adjustment,” which it defined as “[adjusting] the sleeping times of the detainee … e.g. reversing sleep cycles from night to day.”

A subsequent military review found that the distinction between “sleep adjustment” and the prohibited sleep deprivation was “blurry.”

Mr. Khadr’s inclusion in the frequent flier program will likely stand as one of the most significant revelations in the detained Canadian’s six-year saga.

Given that the Canadian Federal Court has found the practice to be in violation of international law, the revelation that Mr. Khadr was subjected to the program directly contradicts repeated assurances from Ottawa that the Canadian was treated humanely.

However, Canada was not the only nation to have the U.S. military soften up detainees before interrogation sessions.

According to an FBI agent stationed at Guantanamo, a group of Chinese Muslim prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation while being questioned at the naval base by Chinese officials.

While the frequent flier program may now be prohibited, its details are spilling out in a Guantanamo Bay courtroom.

Last month, Afghan detainee Mohammed Jawad testified about his own experiences with the program.

The prisoner, who is charged with attempted murder, was made to change prison camp cells 112 times over the course of two weeks in May, shortly after Mr. Khadr’s own experiences with the program.

Mr. Jawad’s U.S. Air Force lawyer, Major David Frakt, filed a motion calling the treatment torture and asking for charges against his client to be dismissed.

Records show the U.S. military also had a technique similar to the frequent flier program, dubbed “Operation Sandman,” that was used on some Saudi detainees the military believed were exerting too much influence on other prisoners.

An FBI agent who served as “On-Scene Commander” at Guantanamo in 2003 described the program as involving frequent cell relocations and sleep interruption “designed to keep some of the Saudi detainees mentally off balance, to isolate them either linguistically or culturally, and to induce them to co-operate.”

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Iraqis tortured by UK military settle case for $6M

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

By GREGORY KATZ | A major case involving the abuse and torture of 10 Iraqi civilians at the hands of the British military was settled Thursday, with lawyers for the victims saying the Ministry of Defense agreed to pay them just under $6 million.

The settlement involves the family of slain hotel clerk Baha Mousa and nine others who suffered injuries while in the custody of British forces in southern Iraq, said the law firm Leigh Day & Co.

The Ministry of Defense said in a statement that an “amicable” settlement had been reached but refused to state the amount of money to be paid out.

Officials said the settlement was “accompanied by an apology from the Ministry of Defense.”

In the statement, the Ministry of Defense admits having liability in the case, based on an admission earlier this year by Defense Secretary Des Browne, who conceded “substantive breaches” of several articles of the European Convention on Human Rights had occurred.

The statement says the conventions on the right to life and the prohibition of torture were both violated.

Lawyer Martyn Day, representing Mousa and the other victims, said they were “very pleased” with the settlement. He said they had been “through hell” and that the cash awards will help them rebuild their lives.

“The lesson is that people in any army will do wrong at times and the important thing is to speedily right that wrong,” he said. “This has taken far too long to reach resolution.”

Still, he praised Adjutant Gen. Freddie Viggers for personally apologizing to the victims when face-to-face mediation started Wednesday morning. Seven of the torture victims were present, he said.

“The men were very angry about what had happened to them, but that apology went a long way toward melting the ice and setting the right atmosphere,” he said, adding that he was still unhappy that only one soldier was convicted of criminal charges stemming from the case.

“We want to see the people who were responsible behind bars,” he said. “So far, the criminal justice system has failed.”

Mousa was a 26-year-old hotel receptionist who died in September 2003 after being detained in the southern Iraqi city of Basra along with a group of other Iraqis on suspicion of being insurgents.

A post-mortem found Mousa suffered 93 different injuries, including a broken nose and fractured ribs. It said he died of asphyxia, caused by a stress position that soldiers forced him to maintain.

Daoud Mousa, the victim’s father and an Iraqi police colonel, praised the resolution of the long-standing dispute.

“The death of my son is with me every day of my life,” he said. “Today’s settlement will ease a little of that pain and will go some way to enabling his children and my grandchildren to rebuild their lives.”

At a High Court hearing in 2004, Daoud Mousa described in a statement how he was “horrified” by the state of his son’s body.

He said: “I was asked to accompany them to identify the corpse. When I saw the corpse I burst into tears and I still cannot bear to think about what I saw,” he said. “Every time I tell this story I break down.”

He said that the body was covered in blood and bruises and that his nose was badly broken.

Cpl. Donald Payne, who became Britain’s first convicted war criminal, was dismissed by the army and sentenced to a year in prison in 2007 over the killing.

He had pleaded guilty to inhumanely treating Iraqi civilians in southern Basra in 2003 — the first war crimes case in Britain — but had been cleared earlier of manslaughter charges and of perverting justice.

Payne was on trial at a court martial with six other soldiers who were cleared due to a lack of evidence.

Martyn Day, the senior lawyer handling the case, said the settlement was welcome after years of legal proceedings stemming from the events in Basra.

“We are very pleased that we have been able to reach this settlement,” he said. “Our clients have been through hell over the last few years and this settlement will go some way to enabling our clients to have some semblance of a decent future life.”

Day, the senior lawyer handling the case for the victims, said the Ministry of Defense agreed to pay different sums to each of the victims, but said the individual payments would not be made public. The figure released represented the total that will be paid out, he said.

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