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Norway Students Vote to Restrict Coca-Cola

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Students at the University of Oslo have voted overwhelmingly to restrict the dominant presence of Coca-Cola products on campus, and introduce ethical alternatives to Coca-Cola on campus.

 

In a resolution passed yesterday at the University of Oslo Welfare Council (Velferdstinget I Oslo), the student body will now seek to restrict significantly the size of Coca-Cola’s contract, offer alternative beverages that are ethical and fair trade as well as adopt more stringent criteria for ensuring that companies that do business with the University of Oslo have strong environmental and ethical records. The student body will also inform Coca-Cola of their decision to restrict Coca-Cola, citing the company’s practices in India.

 

The University of Oslo Welfare Council is a student representative body that oversees all aspects of student life at the University of Oslo - the largest university Norway.

 

Student groups had voiced concerns that in the absence of ethical products on campus, the students had no choice but to support Coca-Cola - which they found problematic because of the company’s unethical practices in India.

 

Communities across India have been campaigning against Coca-Cola, charging the company with creating water shortages and pollution. Two Coca-Cola plants have been shut down in India as a result of the campaign, and a Coca-Cola funded study released in January 2008 has recommended the closure of another bottling plant in India citing Coca-Cola’s significant role in worsening water shortages.

 

“As students, we want to send Coca-Cola and other businesses a clear message that we will not do business as usual with companies that engage in unethical practices,” said Mina Off, coordinator of Attac at the University of Oslo who has led the campaign.

 

The University of Oslo is the latest in a series of educational institutions to take action against Coca-Cola. In Norway, the University of Bergen, Vestfold University College and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences at Aas have also passed resolutions against Coca-Cola. Globally, several colleges and universities have also taken action against Coca-Cola, including Smith College in the US, Guelph University in Canada and University of Sussex in the UK.

 

“We welcome the move by students in Norway to put pressure on the Coca-Cola company. We need such actions globally to ensure that we do not have to go through another summer with little or no access to water because of Coca-Cola,” said Mahesh Yogi of the Kala Dera Sangharsh Samiti, the community group demanding the closure of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Kala Dera in the state of Rajasthan.

 

Coca-Cola’s operations in India are coming under increasing scrutiny internationally, and the company has resorted to announcing ambitious “corporate social responsibility (CSR)” initiatives to counter the criticism, including the announcement that the company will become “water neutral” in India by 2009.

 

“Increasing CSR initiatives around the world does nothing to improve the damages that Coca-Cola has caused locally in India,” said Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center who also spoke at the Welfare Council meeting. “It is no longer a question of whether Coca-Cola has acted unethically in India, but rather what the Coca-Cola company will do to correct the wrongs in has committed in India. We will ensure that the longer they wait, the more consumers they will lose.”

 

For more information, visit www.IndiaResource.org

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The Asian Brown Cloud: Global Climate Chaos and Tropical Glaciers

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Colonos |

The United Nations have released a report on the phenomenon dubbed as the Asian Brown Cloud, which is a thick soup of human waste engulfing Asia, and which has been widely reported:

“A dirty brown haze sometimes more than a mile thick is darkening skies not only over vast areas of Asia, but also in the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, changing weather patterns around the world and threatening health and food supplies, the U.N. reported Thursday.

The huge smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as “atmospheric brown clouds.”

When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth’s atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the U.N. Environment Program.”

In the report itself it reads:

“One of the most serious problems highlighted in the report is the documented retreat of the Hind Kush-Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers, which provide the head-waters for most Asian rivers, and thus have serious implications for the water and food security of Asia”

This taken together with the alarming development all over the world, but particularly with regards to propical glaciers in South America, mainly Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, it is looking more and more like game over soon. There really isn’t much time left. The Asian Brown cloud, first reported on in 2002 has now grown to a full scale threat of immanent disaster. Water is running out, the Himalayan glaciers whose decay are accelerated by the Asian Brown Cloud feed around 2 billion people with water to drink and to grow crops. Now go figure…

In the summer of 2008, colonos did research for and delivered a series of workshops about climate change for indigenous people of the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Peruvian Andes. Our findings were shocking, here in the words quoted from a World Bank report, not exactly the frame of reference we would normally choose, but the institution’s corporate bias puts things in an illuminating perspective:

“About 99 percent of the Chacaltaya glacier in Bolivia has disappeared since 1940, says World Bank engineer Walter Vergara, in his new report, “The Impacts of Climate Change in Latin America. One of the highest glaciers in South America, Chacaltaya is one of the first glaciers to melt due to climate change. Although the glacier is over 18,000 years old, it is expected to vanish this year. “The greenhouse gases are the main driver,” says Vergara. “The scientific community has a consensus - this is man made.”

Within the next 5-8 years, on a conservative estimate, more than 30 million people in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador will be without water, in particular in the big cities, La Paz, Lima and Quito and the problems have already begun:

“The effect of diminishing glaciers is most evident in El Alto, an indigenous community of 800,000 people perched above the capital of La Paz. Waves of mostly Aymara immigrants - the satellite city is growing at between 5 percent and 10 percent a year - arrive daily, fleeing the poverty of their native highlands. With the disappearance of glacial water supplies and a decrepit and poorly managed water company, the city could soon suffer a severe water shortage, experts say” (Murphy 2008)

Living as we do in a world of accelerated urbanisation where already the majority of the world’s population live in cities the pressure for the circulation of water is increased dramatically and the problems thus intensified:

“Ecuador’s Quito draws 50% of its water supply from the glacial basin, and Bolivia’s La Paz, 30%. The volume of the lost glacier surface of Peru is equivalent to 7,000 million cubic meters of water, that is about ten years of water supply for Lima.”

To get an idea of the scale of the problem already today it may be useful, for some, to think in terms of the lost production capacity in hydroelectricity plants, due to less water running down from the soon to be extinct glaciers (same source as above):

“The impact of Andean glacier retreat on the local economy is formidable. For example in Peru, the annual incremental cost to the power sector is estimated at US$1.5 billion”.

It will also be instructive to take a global view. The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) writes:

“Some of the most dramatic shrinking has taken place in Europe with Norway’s Breidalblikkbrea glacier thinning by close to 3.1 metres (2.9 metre water equivalent) during 2006 compared with a thinning of 0.3 metres (0.28 metres water equivalent) in the year 2005.

Other dramatic shrinking has been registered at Austria’s Grosser Goldbergkees glacier, 1.2 metres in 2006 versus 0.3 in 2005; France’s Ossoue glacier, nearly 3 metres versus around 2.7 metres in 2005; Italy’s Malavalle glacier 1.4 metres versus around 0.9 metres in 2005; Spain’s Maladeta glacier, nearly 2 metres versus 1.6 metres in 2005; Sweden’s Storglaciaeren glacier, 1.8 metres versus close to 0.080 metres in 2005 and Switzerland’s Findelen glacier, 1.3 metres versus 0.22 metres in 2005.”

Deglaciation is an effect of climate change. A major cause of climate change is deforestation, a problem that the indigenous people of the Amazon know very well. The relation between deglaciation and deforestation is of course very complex, but in its simplicity is also shows what prominent climate change researcher, James Hansen at NASA, identifies as positive feedback loops in the climatic systems.

(This is very simplified and quickly written) - When the output of a process becomes an input into the same process you have a positive feedback loop, which means that a system can run amok, since it keeps accelerating, in the crudest of terms. That is what is happening on various fronts in terms of climate change. The melting ice caps means that less sun is reflected and therefore more heart trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere, but the melting of the ice was caused by increased heat being trapped in the first place by the release of green house gasses.

Moreover, the increase in dark surface (or oceans) means that even more heat is trapped. More and more. The thawing of permafrost releases greenhouse gases trapped underneath its protective frozen, or, rather, melting shield, causing even more permafrost to give way for more gases.

The Asian Brown Cloud both attracts more heat as well we cause cooling in some places, but the mixture of the two leads to further climate chaos and irregularities on a sub-continent where they used to say that you could set your clock after the monsoon. Hot and cold and irregular weather and an acceleration of deglaciation in the Himalayas and dramatically increased “food security issues” beyond the glacially dependent regions, those are the “facts”, even if some cooling occurs:

“Globally however brown clouds may be countering or ‘masking’ the warming impacts of climate change by between 20 and up to 80 per cent the researchers suggest.

This is because of particles such as sulfates and some organics which reflect sunlight and cool the surface.

The cloud is also having impacts on air quality and agriculture in Asia increasing risks to human health and food production for three billion people.”

It is all connected.

Deforestation is predominantly directly human made, but the last few years in the Amazon, with less rain and less water running down from the glaciers have accelerated deforestation because non-human made forest fires are occurring on large scale in the Amazon, producing clouds not entirely unlike the Asian Black Cloud. The output of climate change has become inputs and when processes accelerate in this manner we reach what Hansen calls tipping points:

“The Earth’s climate is nearing, but has not passed, a tipping point beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences. These include not only the loss of the Arctic as we know it, with all that implies for wildlife and indigenous peoples, but losses on a much vaster scale due to rising seas.

Ocean levels will increase slowly at first, as losses at the fringes of Greenland and Antarctica due to accelerating ice streams are nearly balanced by increased snowfall and ice sheet thickening in the ice sheet interiors.

But as Greenland and West Antarctic ice is softened and lubricated by meltwater, and as buttressing ice shelves disappear because of a warming ocean, the balance will tip toward the rapid disintegration of ice sheets.

The Earth’s history suggests that with warming of two to three degrees, the new sea level will include not only most of the ice from Greenland and West Antarctica, but a portion of East Antarctica, raising the sea level by twenty-five meters, or eighty feet. Within a century, coastal dwellers will be faced with irregular flooding associated with storms. They will have to continually rebuild above a transient water level.” (James Hansen 2006)

Hansen leaves no doubt about where to find those responsible for human made climate change on a global and threatening scale. In 1988 Hansen spoke before the U.S Congress and said that we can be 99% sure that climate change is human made and in 2008 he returned to speak before congress, now certain not only of what causes climate change, but also about who to hold responsible, namely CEOs of corporations that are “fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading” (and causing). That would in other words be the leading capitalists in the oil and energy sectors of the market.

These climate change stories can be seen as evidence that the capitalist market place and mode of production are unsustainable: they use more resources than the world can regenerate with disasters already occurring.

Conclusion: industrial capitalism is bad for you! Act NOW!

For else, where do the children play?

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100 Nations to Ban Cluster Bombs - But not the biggest user, the USA

Friday, November 14th, 2008

By Angus Crawford

On 3 December, more than 100 countries, including the UK, will sign a treaty banning cluster bombs.

As a result Britain, by law, will have to destroy more than 30 million explosives.

The UK does not have the facilities, so they are being exported to Germany for disposal.

“I feel good to work for a good thing in the world and for peace,” says Jorg Fiegert, production manager for Nammo Demil.

It runs a site in Pinnow in Germany which destroys munitions.

Over the next five years its work will include taking apart bomblets from British cluster munitions.

“It can punch through armour,” Jorg explains as he holds up a British bomblet.

It is only the size of an egg cup, and came from the MLRS, the Multiple Launch Rocket System.

Each one has six rockets, and within each rocket are 644 bomblets. They are designed to split open in the air and spread small bomblets over a wide area.

Cluster bombs have been used in countries including Cambodia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and were used in the conflict in Lebanon in 2006.

Those who ratify the convention in December will then have eight years to get rid of their stockpiles of the weapons.

The UK government had already begun getting rid of its stocks by shipping them to Germany and elsewhere.

Nammo has a contract with the UK Ministry of Defence to destroy 28 million of these bomblets, and there are another 3.5 million in other systems to be disposed of.

“In principle everything except the explosive can be recycled,” explains Ola Pikner, Nammo’s vice president of marketing.

Whole weapons enter the factory, but raw materials for civilian use leave it.

He shows me how the MLRS rocket is split open.

The bomblets are extracted, the fuses are cut off and the copper inners are removed.

The explosive is then burnt off using red hot plasma.

The bombs have been used in Cambodia, Lebanon and Kosovo

The copper, aluminium and other metals are sold for scrap. The packaging for the bomblets is burnt for heating.

This will take up to 40% of their work for the next five years.

“There is huge potential”, says Ola Pikner, “but the number of cluster munitions from each country is not known.”

Campaigners believe there may be as many as a billion of them across Europe.

But the world’s biggest users - Israel and the USA - will not sign this treaty.

Nor, it’s thought, will China, Russia, India and Pakistan.

But Thomas Nash from the Cluster Munition Coalition remains undaunted by this.

“What you are going to see is a comprehensive stigmatisation of the weapon,” he says.

“Countries that don’t sign up won’t be able to use this weapon on operations with those that do.

“You’re going to see this weapon becoming a thing of the past.”

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British troops out of Iraq by end of 2009: Iraqi official

Friday, November 14th, 2008

All British troops will be out of Iraq by the end of next year, Iraq’s national security advisor said on Friday, days before Baghdad was expected to vote on a controversial US military pact.”By the end of next year there will be no British troops in Iraq. By the end of 2009,” Muwafaq al-Rubaie said, adding that negotiations between London and Baghdad on the pull-out had begun two weeks ago.

A defence ministry spokesman in London said in response that Britain has “no timetable” for the withdrawal of its roughly 4,000 troops in Iraq, the vast majority of which are based in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

 

“At the minute, we have no timetable,” the spokesman told AFP.

“We are hopefully making progress, we have made progress in Basra, and we are on course to meet the prime minister’s fundamental change of mission in 2009,” the spokesman said, reiterating previously-stated plans.

Baghdad has been racing to secure separate agreements with both Britain and the United States to replace the UN mandate currently governing the presence of foreign troops in the country, which expires December 31.

Iraq’s cabinet was expected to vote on the so-called Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), a wide-ranging US military pact, either Saturday or Sunday. The two sides have been wrangling over the document for months.

 

Rubaie insisted however that the agreement Iraq sought with the British was simpler and would not take as much time to complete.

“It will be a much shorter agreement with the UK,” Rubaie said. “And it progresses quite nicely. It’s much shorter and much simpler.”

He added that by the middle of next year there would be a “dramatic” reduction of British troops.

In July, Prime Minister Gordon Brown indicated he wanted to cut the number of Britain’s troop in the violence-wracked country but ruled out a timetable for their withdrawal.

But Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a British daily last month that British troops are no longer necessary for the security of Iraq and should go home.

 

“We thank them for the role they have played, but I think that their stay is not necessary for maintaining security and control,” he was quoted as saying in The Times.

“There might be a need for their experience in training and some technological issues, but as a fighting force, I don’t think that is necessary.”

Iraq has seen dramatic improvements in security over the past year as US and Iraqi forces have allied with local tribal militias to flush insurgents and militias out of vast swaths of the country that were once ungovernable.

 

Iraq’s top Shiite Muslim cleric, meanwhile, made it clear on Friday that he will leave it to the government to decide on the controversial US military pact.

Associates of the reclusive leader said, however, any accord must respect Iraqi sovereignty.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani — revered as the highest religious authority by Iraq’s Shiite majority — rarely involves himself in politics and usually communicates his views only through associates.

“The Guide (Sistani) called for general elections which produced the country’s government and the parliament,” a religious official close to Sistani told AFP on condition of anonymity.

“It is their constitutional responsibility to decide on the agreement.”

 

Copyright AFP 2008

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Fifth Columnist

Friday, November 14th, 2008

AS THE OBSERVER TROTS OUT POLICE LINE OVER ECO-TERRORISM

SchNEWS

“Of course I don’t have a f*cking agenda. I’m a national newspaper journalist – why would I have an agenda?” – Mark Townsend, Observer journalist.

The Observer launched a broadside this week against the environmental movement. Headlined “Police warn of growing threat from eco-terrorists”- handily sub-headed, “Fear of deadly attack by lone maverick as officers alert major firms to danger of green extremism” – the article goes on to allege that “Officers are concerned that a ‘lone maverick’ eco-extremist may attempt a terrorist attack aimed at killing large numbers of Britons.” Of course not one shred of evidence is referred to in the thinly disguised puff-piece for the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU).The words of an unnamed police source are all it takes to generate the spectre of carbon-neutral suicide bombings coming to a city-centre near you.

Apparently,

“The unit is currently monitoring blogs and internet traffic connected to a network of UK climate camps and radical environmental movements under the umbrella of Earth First! … A senior source at the unit said it had growing evidence of a threat from eco-activists. ‘We have found statements that four-fifths of the human population has to die for other species in the world to survive. There are a number of very dedicated individuals out there and they could be dangerous to other people.’”

The piece was written by one Mark Townsend (environmental journalist of the year and co-incidentally author of a mildy-amusing tome entitled “Fifty ways to fuck the planet”) and the mysterious Nick Denning, who doesn’t even work at the Observer.

When SchNEWS contacted Mark at his desk, at first he seemed defensive and grew increasingly aggressive as the interview went on. When asked if he’d just regurgitated a police press release he said, “You don’t know anything about NETCU mate – they don’t just stick out press releases”. Which is strange given that the unit comment very publicly on the work they do – just check out their website SchNEWS 503). More recently of course we had the much publicised discovery of a ‘weapons cache’ near this year’s Climate Camp. As far as the political police are concerned the media are just another weapon in the fight against domestic unrest – and for their journalist-dupes truth balance and fact-checking just don’t come into it. When we asked Mark where the claim that Earth First! advocates the disappearance of 80% of the population had come from he said, “I don’t know – they [NETCU] said they had seen them in blogs” – How’s that for speaking truth to power?

So why the sudden appearance of the article? It contains little that could be described as news, just a load of cobbled together wild-eyed speculation. One answer is that concern for NETCU jobs in the face of the credit crunch has triggered a search for a new enemy and a broader remit. How convenient that now the animal rights (AR) movement is in ‘disarray’, a new target hovers into view.

OFF WITH HIS SUBHEAD

Another possible explanation is that the growing movement against climate change has got the state more worried than we realise, and the idea is to spread fear amongst activists that they are being heavily watched. At the moment campaigners are generally regarded in a positive light and public support is absolutely crucial for successful defiance of the state. Just look at how lightly anti-GM activists and peace protestors are treated by the authorities compared to their animal rights counterparts. Perhaps the time has come to drive a wedge between environmental activists and the general public, and of course the best way to do this is with the emotive issue of ‘violence’. Are we observing the beginning of a smear campaign?

So far it’s AR that has felt the full weight of state-orchestrated demonisation. Despite the fact that the movement has never been responsible for a single death they are routinely described as ‘terrorists’ or ‘extremists’. A political climate has been created which enables the state to crack down hard. New criminal offences are drafted targeting the movement and people are imprisoned simply for organising demos (Sean Kirtley – see SchNEWS 634). The SOCPA legislation (sec 145) banning demos aimed at disrupting ‘contractual obligations’ currently only protects ‘animal research’ organisations. A who’s who of UK media organisations have lined up to take a pop at the AR movement – Dispatches, Panorama and all the main papers have parroted the police line that AR is full of dangerous violent fanatics with an irrational belief system. High profile waves of arrests make the front page, so do the convictions, but news of acquittals languish in the back pages. The actual cause that the AR movement is fighting for receives virtually no media examination. The industrial-scale use of animals for food and vivisection is one of the great hidden evils of our lifestyle – rather than confront that, it’s obviously best to throw those that confront it into prison.

The opening of the new Oxford animal lab, albeit two years late and millions over budget, is now being hailed as a victory by vivisectionists. Of course the very fact that they were able to achieve this much is because of a huge mobilisation on the part of the state. Back in SchNEWS 590 we described how Thames Valley Police accidentally taped themselves saying that they were ‘going to wage a dirty war’ against SPEAK, with one commander adding that, “We’re going to prosecute the shit out of them.” Publicity surrounding the tape didn’t prevent the arrest and prosecution of Mel Broughton, a prominent spokesperson for the campaign (see SchNEWS 616). Last week he was acquitted of possessing an explosive substance – packets of sparklers – with intent. Two other charges led to hung jury.

Despite this, the prosecution demanded a re-trial and Mel was remanded in prison with a trial date to be fixed ‘some time next year’. NETCUs attempts to take ‘ringleaders’ of the AR off the streets by fair means or foul continues.

We don’t know what agenda Townsend’s actually working to but it’s been clear for a while that the police want an increased ability to deal with all forms of dissent. Public demonisation is a key plank in the strategy. We’ll leave the last words to John Curtin, long term AR campaigner: “We used to be regarded as Robin Hood figures for what we did – rescuing animals from a life of torture in laboratories – and now we’re terrorists – the same people doing the same things.”

• Original article is at www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/eco-terrorism-earth-first-elf

 

• NETCU Watch www.netcu.wordpress.com

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Hillary Clinton, secretary of state?

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Barack Obama transition team declines to confirm reports she is under consideration for post

By John McCormick and Rick Pearson

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C.I.A. Chief Says Qaeda Is Extending Its Reach

Friday, November 14th, 2008

WASHINGTON — Even as Al Qaeda strengthens its hub in the Pakistani mountains, its leaders are building closer ties to regional militant groups in order to launch attacks in Africa and Europe and on the Arabian Peninsula, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency said Thursday.

The director, Michael V. Hayden, identified North Africa and Somalia as places where Qaeda leaders were using partnerships to establish new bases. Elsewhere, Mr. Hayden said, Al Qaeda was “strengthening” in Yemen, and he added that veterans of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan had moved there, possibly to stage attacks against the government of Saudi Arabia.

He said the “bleed out” from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also extended to North Africa, raising concern that the countries there could be used to stage attacks into Europe. Mr. Hayden delivered his report in a speech to the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington, and it offered a mixed assessment of Al Qaeda’s ability to wage a global jihad.

He drew a contrast between what he described as growing Islamic radicalism in places like Somalia and what he said had been the “strategic defeat” of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — the network’s affiliate group in Iraq.

Still, Mr. Hayden said that Pakistan’s tribal areas remained Al Qaeda’s most significant operations base because the group’s close ties to Pashtun tribes in the region gave Qaeda militants a sanctuary to plan attacks on Western targets.

“Today, virtually every major terrorist threat my agency is aware of has threads back to the tribal areas,” he said.

His remarks were the first public appraisal of Al Qaeda’s Pakistan sanctuary since the C.I.A. escalated what had been a secret campaign of airstrikes in the tribal areas over the summer.

President Bush signed orders in July allowing the C.I.A. to broaden the campaign.

The C.I.A. used to focus remotely piloted Predator aircraft attacks on a relatively small number of Arab fighters in the tribal areas, but it has begun striking Pakistani militant leaders as well as convoys bound for Afghanistan to resupply militant fighters there.

Mr. Hayden pointedly refused to give details about the strikes by remotely piloted aircraft, or even to acknowledge that they occurred. He did say that the recent killing of senior Qaeda operatives had disrupted the group’s planning and isolated its leadership.

In mid-October, a missile fired from an American drone killed Khalid Habib, the latest senior Qaeda planner to be killed this year in Pakistan.

“To the extent that the United States and its allies deepen that isolation, disturb the safe haven, and target terrorist leaders gathered there, we keep Al Qaeda off balance,” Mr. Hayden said.

The radicalization of Pashtun tribes, and their strengthening ties to Qaeda operatives, date in part to the decision by the Pakistani president at the time, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to raid the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007, the C.I.A. director said. That raid, at the end of an eight-day siege of the mosque by government troops, killed scores of Pakistani militants.

At the end of his remarks, Mr. Hayden deflected questions about whether he would consider remaining at the C.I.A. during the Obama administration and declined to say whether President-elect Barack Obama had asked him to extend his tenure.

“This is the business of the transition team,” Mr. Hayden said. “This is the business of the president-elect.”

 

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Guantánamo Bay was bad enough — Bagram is worse

Friday, November 14th, 2008

By Daphne Eviatar | Eric Lewis didn’t know much about Ruzatullah’s case when he decided to take it on two years ago. All he knew was that in October 2004, Ruzatullah, an Afghan man in his thirties, was spending a quiet evening at home with his family in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, when U.S. troops forced their way in and searched the place. The soldiers found no guns or other weapons, but they seized Ruzatullah and his brother Inavatullah (many Afghans have only one name) and took them to the U.S. military base at Bagram. Inavatullah was released 15 days later; Ruzatullah remained at the de facto detention center. When Lewis took the case in 2006, Ruzatullah was still in U.S. custody. No charges had been brought against him. His friends and family insisted that he had no connection to terrorists, criminals, or any armed forces.

A commercial litigator at Baach Robinson and Lewis — a boutique law firm in Washington, D.C. — Lewis ordinarily represents foreign banks, insurance companies, and governments in fraud and insolvency cases. He heard about the detainees at Bagram from Tina Monshipour Foster, a former attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), where Lewis had been a board member. Foster’s two-year-old nonprofit, the International Justice Network (IJN), provides legal assistance to victims of human rights abuses, as well as linking advocates around the world. The problems she described to Lewis — hundreds of detainees held incommunicado and without charges at Bagram for years, unable to contact family or friends or even to see the evidence against them — drew him in.

“I remember studying Korematsu in law school and thinking, of course, that it could never happen again,” Lewis says, referring to the landmark case of Korematsu v. United States, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the president’s right to force Japanese Americans into U.S. internment camps during World War II. “It became clear that [indefinite detention of foreigners by the U.S. government] was the legal issue of our time.”

On its face, the legal status of the detainees at Bagram, a U.S.-controlled air base leased from the government of Afghanistan, appears to be much like that of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, a U.S. military station leased from Cuba. One would expect the Bagram detainees to benefit from the legal arguments raised on behalf of the Guantánamo inmates, whose due process rights the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed, most recently in Boumediene v. Bush. But so far, Bagram detainees have not benefited from the precedents that now apply unequivocally to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Moreover, the Bagram detainees have failed to garner the same level of public attention and outrage — or the stampede of offers for pro bono representation from major commercial law firms [see related article, "Why Firms Say No"]. Foster says she’s asked several law firms for help, but so far none of them besides Baach Robinson have been willing to take on Bagram cases.

More than 600 prisoners remain at Bagram without being charged; some have been in legal limbo for more than five years. Because the United States calls Afghanistan a battleground in the war on terror, it contends that prisoners held there have no right to challenge their detention. Whether for political or strategic reasons, or merely because of Guantánamo Bay burnout, no more than a handful of detainees held by the U.S. government at Bagram have any legal representation. Yet their plight reflects a problem that extends far beyond the U.S. air base, and has implications for the United States and the prisoners it holds all over the world.

Of course, Guantánamo detainees weren’t so popular initially, either. Neal Katyal is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who represents Salim Hamdan, the personal driver of Osama Bin Laden who was recently convicted of aiding terrorism. Katyal recalls that when he first sought help on the Hamdan case, only one law firm, Perkins Coie, was willing to take it on, out of about 15 that he approached. “When I filed the case back in 2004, a lot of people were saying we’re fighting for the wrong side,” Katyal says [see "Courting Failure"]. That all changed after the Supreme Court decided Rasul v. Bush in June 2004, holding that the federal courts have jurisdiction to review detentions of foreign nationals captured abroad and imprisoned at Guantánamo.

But the success of dozens of prominent American lawyers in representing Guantánamo detainees has had an unintended consequence: The U.S. military has stopped sending captured suspects to Guantánamo, whose total prisoner population has dropped to roughly 275. As of April, reports Human Rights First, only about 30 Afghans remain at the installation, compared with some 200 in 2002. Instead, thousands of individuals who are suspected of participating in, assisting, or having knowledge of terrorism are now being held elsewhere — an estimated 14,000 in Afghanistan and 25,000 in Iraq. Although some will eventually be transferred to Afghan or Iraqi custody, all are initially detained pursuant to President George Bush’s November 2001 executive order authorizing indefinite detention of anyone who the president has “reason to believe” is or was a member of Al Qaeda or has engaged in or assisted terrorism against the United States.

The difficulty of challenging detentions authorized by the president may be part of what’s kept many large firms from taking on Bagram cases. But as insurgents have increased their attacks on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan in recent months, the idea of representing prisoners suspected of aiding terrorism there may also seem imprudent as a political matter. Some lawyers at large law firms deny being deterred by such considerations, but the IJN’s Foster disagrees. “They are afraid,” says Foster, who left Clifford Chance for CCR in 2004 to help organize pro bono representation for Guantánamo detainees. “There hasn’t been the public campaign for Bagram yet that we did for Guantánamo.”

Political considerations haven’t deterred Baach Robinson, however. “One advantage of being in a small law firm is you can ignore that pressure to a greater degree,” says Lewis, who’s working on the case with partner Katherine Toomey. “Most of our clients are abroad. Frankly, commercial clients abroad are proud to see their lawyers are part of this. I think there’s almost universal revulsion from every part of the political spectrum outside of the United States about the way the United States has been conducting its business abroad.”

The logistics of representing inmates at Bagram adds another substantial hurdle for U.S. lawyers. If representing detainees at Guantánamo seemed a Kafkaesque exercise for the many big-firm lawyers who made the tortuous trek through military obstacles, checkpoints, and security clearances to defend their clients there [See "Justice at Bay," May 2005], it’s a cakewalk compared with representing a client at Bagram.

Not only is Afghanistan about 6,000 miles farther away and much more dangerous than Cuba, but the U.S. Department of Defense does not allow detainees at Bagram to meet with lawyers or human rights organizations. No one has access to the prison other than U.S. government officials and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which does not issue public reports. “For reasons of operational security and military necessity, the number of visitors who can visit detention facilities in a country where U.S. forces are actively engaged in hostilities is necessarily limited,” Lt. Col. Mark Wright, spokesman for the Defense Department, wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

The U.S. government says that Bagram prisoners have no right to see the charges or evidence against them, or to know why they’re considered a terrorist threat. “Detention of enemy combatants during wartime is not criminal punishment and therefore does not require that individuals be charged or tried in a court of law,” Wright said in an e-mail.

According to the few lawyers representing prisoners there at the request of relatives, many Bagram detainees were turned over to U.S. authorities by former enemies or neighbors who wanted to settle an old score or collect a bounty from the U.S. — a contention supported by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International; news reports from the Associated Press, The McClatchy Company newspapers, and Time magazine; and even former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf’s recent memoir, In the Line of Fire. Yet those imprisoned have no way to prove-or even to claim-their innocence.

Conditions at the detention center are atrocious, according to lawyers, news reports, and organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the London-based group Reprieve. Ruzatullah’s habeas petition alleged that Bagram detainees are crowded together in wire-mesh cages without toilets or running water and “are regularly tortured and abused, including being starved, severely beaten, forced into painful, contorted body positions, ‘waterboarded,’ exposed to extremely cold temperatures, and sexually humiliated.” In December 2002, the Pentagon has acknowledged, U.S. soldiers beat two Bagram detainees to death. Although officers allegedly involved in the deaths were prosecuted — five were convicted, but none received a sentence of more than three months in prison — the Pentagon vehemently denies accusations of systemic torture or abuse at Bagram. “The conditions at the BTIF [Bagram Theater Internment Facility] meet international standards for care and custody of detained persons,” Wright told The American Lawyer by e-mail. “The United States strictly prohibits the abuse of detainees in its custody.” He acknowledged that there are now about 600 detainees at Bagram, although the facility wasn’t built to hold nearly that many.

Detainees at Guantánamo have at least some means of challenging their status as enemy combatants through a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, or CSRT. At Bagram, the process is even more circumscribed. A panel of five U.S. military officers, called an Enemy Combatant Review Board (ECRB), is supposed to review the detainees’ status, usually within 75 days of their capture and every six months thereafter. But sometimes just the commanding officer, instead of a review board, decides the case, as Col. Rose Miller, commander of detention operations at Bagram, confirmed in an affidavit submitted in the Ruzatullah case. According to Miller, the designation is based on “all reasonably available and relevant information available on the date of the review.” Lewis and Foster say that almost all the evidence used against detainees comes from military personnel involved in their capture and interrogation. The detainees themselves typically have no opportunity to speak at, or even attend, the hearing or subsequent reviews.

“It makes the CSRTs look like the latest thing from the world court of transgalactic justice,” Baach Robinson’s Lewis says. The disparate treatment of detainees at Bagram is justified, the government argues, because Bagram is different. At Guantánamo, a military base leased from Cuba for more than a century, the United States retains “complete jurisdiction and control,” the U.S. Department of Justice asserted in its motion to dismiss the Ruzatullah case. Yet the “United States’s use of the Bagram Airfield is ‘a wartime necessity’ subject to a rather typical lease with the host nation,” the Justice Department wrote. Therefore, “the petitioners have no statutory habeas rights in the United States.”

Ruzatullah’s lawyers vigorously disagree. “They have a U.S. lease at Bagram that’s similar to Guantánamo,” Lewis says. “It should be treated the same.” Regardless of the particular details of different military leases,Lewis and his colleagues are also trying to establish a broader principle that could apply to the thousands of other prisoners held elsewhere in the world by the United States. As they put it in their brief to the court opposing dismissal of Ruzatullah’s habeas case: “Freedom from arbitrary executive detention dates to the Magna Carta, is not limited territorially, and is one of the most fundamental tenets of the rule of law.” They also object that enemy combatant determinations don’t meet the demands of the Military Commissions Act (MCA); that such indefinite incarceration violates the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law; and that the MCA is unconstitutional because it does not provide an adequate alternative remedy to habeas corpus.

These may not be easy arguments to win. Traditionally, the government has been allowed to detain prisoners during a war indefinitely. Yet the “war on terror,” which does not conform to any definition of “war” under international law, presents a unique challenge to this principle, Lewis says. “What happens when you have a war that is unlimited in time and space?” he asks. “When the battlefield is everywhere and it will never end? It’s not a war against a nation-state, it’s a war against a concept. The law of war was developed when conflicts were defined in time and space. In the absence of that, you’re talking about detention for a lifetime.”

The case that Bagram detainees should have habeas corpus rights might be easier to make on behalf of non-Afghan prisoners who were captured outside of Afghanistan and then sent to Bagram. The United States can’t counter that such detainees are merely being held on the battlefield for the duration of hostilities.

Take the case of Fadi Al Maqaleh, whom Tina Foster represents in a habeas petition in federal court in Washington, D.C. Foster met Al Maqaleh’s father in Yemen in 2006. He knew only that his 25-year-old son had disappeared from his home in Sana’a, Yemen, until the International Committee of the Red Cross delivered a letter from Al Maqaleh in 2003. The letter informed Al Maqaleh’s father that his son was in U.S. custody. Any details that might have explained how Al Maqaleh ended up at Bagram were redacted. Al Maqaleh’s father insists that his son has never been an enemy or combatant of any kind against the United States. Yet neither he nor his son’s lawyer is allowed to visit his son, and no one outside the U.S. government is allowed to see the evidence against Al Maqaleh. The Justice Department has moved to dismiss the habeas case Foster filed on his behalf on the same grounds that it cited in seeking to dismiss the Ruzatullah case: The federal courts, the department maintains, have no jurisdiction to rule on habeas petitions of aliens captured abroad and detained outside the U.S.

The presence of non-Afghan detainees such as Al Maqaleh at Bagram, Foster insists, makes it clear that the government is not merely using the prison as a battlefield detention center for local suspects. “Bagram is functioning exactly the same way as Gitmo is functioning,” she says. “They’re using it as a prison because it is close to a zone of active combat. That makes it look more like a normal battlefield detention situation. But that is really camouflage for a law-free zone that the U.S. can use as cover to bring people from anywhere in the world.”

On June 19, 2007, eight months after Lewis and his colleagues filed a habeas petition in the D.C. federal court on his behalf, Ruzatullah, without ever having been charged with a crime, was transferred from Bagram to a special national security wing within an old Afghan prison called Policharky. A portion of the prison known as the Afghan National Detention Facility, also designated Block D, is being used to detain suspected terrorists previously held at Bagram or Guantánamo Bay, according to the Defense Department. More than 400 such prisoners have been transferred there.

Lawyers representing Afghan prisoners, such as Lewis and Foster (legal clinics at Stanford and Yale law schools are also helping Foster’s organization on several more habeas cases) believe the military is transferring some prisoners to Policharky in order to escape American judicial scrutiny. Indeed, in July the Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss Ruzatullah’s habeas petition as moot. The U.S. government said he was now in Afghan custody and no longer under U.S. control.

His lawyers disputed that, arguing that Block D, opened in April 2007, is in fact controlled by the U.S. military. A U.S. Department of State official responsible for U.S.-run programs to improve the Afghan justice system confirmed that while his team advises Afghan officials on their prison and criminal justice systems, Block D is “strictly within the province of the Department of Defense.” Other lawyers who represent detainees at Policharky — some transferred there from Guantánamo — say their clients describe a U.S.-controlled prison. “My client said to me, ‘The guards who bring us our food are in U.S. uniforms, the guards who take us to recreation time are in U.S. uniforms,’” says Kent Spriggs, a Tallahassee-based lawyer who recently gave up his employment litigation practice to focus on representing Guantánamo detainees, some of whom are now imprisoned at Policharky.

One advantage of Policharky, however, is that prisoners there have been allowed to meet with relatives and lawyers. In January, Foster met with Ruzatullah for the first time. Under the watchful eye of prison guards, she was able to communicate with her client, a lanky man with bright green eyes and a soft-spoken demeanor, through a tiny hole in a Plexiglas partition.

Ruzatullah told Foster that about a month earlier, he had received a trial of sorts in the prison. Although no witnesses and minimal evidence were presented, Afghan judges presided over the proceeding, and Ruzatullah himself was able to attend. Representing Ruzatullah was Shabeer, an Afghan lawyer from The International Legal Foundation (ILF), a nonprofit organization based in New York. However, neither Ruzatullah nor his attorney had more than a few days’ notice of the proceeding, according to Foster and Shabeer. (Because Shabeer does not speak English, his notes about the case were translated and provided to The American Lawyer by ILF director Natalie Rea.)

A panel of Afghan judges read a statement charging that Ruzatullah had aided terrorists. The only “evidence” presented, according to Shabeer’s notes, was that his captors had found names of “government enemies” in Ruzatullah’s diary; his mobile phone number was in the possession of other suspects who had been killed by coalition and Afghan forces; Ruzatullah had graduated from a university that many antigovernment suspects have attended; and he had been living in a refugee camp believed to serve as a base for government enemies. The judges, who acted also as prosecutors, did not present any witnesses or sworn statements to support the charges, according to Foster and Shabeer. During the proceeding, Shabeer objected that there was no evidence to support the claims; the names in the diary had not been written by Ruzatullah; and many who had attended the same university or lived in the refugee camp were neither terrorists nor enemies of the Afghan or U.S. government. Ruzatullah himself also denied the charges at the trial, he told Foster during their meeting. Two days after the trial, as he told Foster, Ruzatullah was informed that he had been convicted and sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison. Because he had already spent almost that much time in detention, however, he had only a month left in his sentence. Ruzatullah was released last spring. “They convicted him on the say-so of the U.S. government without any supporting evidence,” says Foster, who was bewildered by the news. “On the one hand, he got out of prison. But he got a criminal conviction based on nothing.” After Foster learned of Ruzatullah’s release, she and Lewis withdrew his habeas petition. (Another client of theirs, Ruhollah, named on the same habeas petition, was similarly transferred to Policharky on July 30; the Justice Department has moved to dismiss his petition.)

Ruzatullah is only one of dozens of prisoners in Block D who have undergone similar quasi-legal proceedings. Human Rights First reports that trials for prisoners at Block D began in October 2007, and by April, 65 prisoners had been convicted and 17 acquitted. No family members or members of the press have been allowed to observe the trials. Sahr MuhammedAlly of the Law & Security program of Human Rights First is one of the few Americans outside of the military who has been permitted to witness any of them. She confirms that no evidence was presented in the two proceedings she observed, but simply a statement of the charges. Based on that, “the prisoners were sentenced to eight and ten years, respectively,” she says. Although they had lawyers provided by the ILF, there was little that the attorneys could do for their clients.

“Defense counsel during hearings were asking, ‘Where is the evidence? Where are the witnesses?’” recalls MuhammedAlly. “Judges would say, ‘Why would the Americans lie? Why would the coalition forces lie?’”

The Defense Department has assisted Afghan authorities “in conducting the trials in a fair manner, and we have insisted that lawyers be provided for the accused to ensure that these proceedings are done in a manner consistent with fundamental guarantees of due process,” Defense spokesman Wright wrote in an e-mail. “The U.S. has provided information to the Afghan authorities where appropriate and necessary to provide information on the circumstances that led to detention by U.S. forces.”

As more detainees are transferred to Block D at Policharky, new prisoners continue to arrive at Bagram from around the world. Acknowledging that the current facility isn’t nearly large enough to hold the more than 600 detainees there, the Defense Department is now building a new facility on the base to house more prisoners. Whether more lawyers will be willing to represent these new prisoners, though, remains unclear.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain have said that if elected president, they will close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. If that happens, many prisoners will likely be shifted to centers where the right to challenge their detention is far less certain. For many, that will be in Afghanistan. “Afghanistan is the critical next frontier of trying to push the law to establish that there’s an irreducible minimum on actions of U.S. officials,” Lewis says. He insists: “Wherever they go, torture, indefinite detention, humiliation — these are not things U.S. officials can do.” Not even in Bagram.

Have Your Say: Guantánamo Bay was bad enough — Bagram is worse
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RINF Alternative News on Twitter

Friday, November 14th, 2008

If you don’t have a Twitter account yet you’re missing out.

Twitter is great for following news reports and community discussion, the benefit for RINF visitors is that it allows you to track the most recent site updates (aswell as updates from other sites too) all in one place. I use it myself for catching the latest headlines from a variety of news sites. It’s very easy to use.

You can sign up for one here https://twitter.com/signup

The main RINF newswire Twitter page is http://twitter.com/rinf_news

The RINF open publishing Twitter page is http://twitter.com/rinf_community

To see all updates across the RINF web site start following both on Twitter. There’s also a number of other radical /alternative news sites using Twitter, so you can get all your latest headlines in one place.

According to Wikipedia

Twitter has been used as a “social justice tool” to connect groups of people in critical situations. On April 10 2008, James Buck, a graduate journalism student at UC Berkeley, and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested in Egypt for photographing an anti-government protest. On his way to the police station, Buck used his mobile phone to send the message “Arrested” to his 48 “followers” on Twitter. Those contacted UC Berkeley, the US Embassy in Cairo and a number of press organizations on his behalf. While being detained, Buck was able to send updates about his condition to his “followers”. As a result of the message and the efforts of his Twitter friends, he was released the next day from the Mahalla jail after the college hired a lawyer for him.

If you’re a webmaster I would also recommend using Twitter to help get your message to a wider audience.

Have Your Say: RINF Alternative News on Twitter
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Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Contributions & Guests . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.