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Soldier Refuses Deployment to Afghanistan

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Agosto, a soldier based at Fort Hood in Texas, is publicly refusing orders to deploy to Afghanistan. He recently wrote on military forms: “There is no way I will deploy to Afghanistan. The occupation is immoral and unjust. It does not make the American people any safer. It has the opposite effect.” Agosto also stated: “I will not obey any orders I deem to be immoral or illegal.” Portions of these statements are here .

Having served in the Army since 2005, including a tour in Iraq, Agosto can no longer bear to serve and says that he is “ready for the consequences, whatever they are.” On April 30 he told his commanding officer that he would not deploy with his unit to Afghanistan, and since May 11 he has been refusing all orders directly connected to his unit’s deployment. Agosto is waiting to see what the military will do to him. A possible outcome is military court martial and years in prison.

“I came to realize that the wars really don’t do what the stated reasons are, which is to make us safer,” said Agosto. “Both occupations fuel the insurgencies in those countries. We are creating ‘terrorists’ and we are killing so many innocent people.” See article by Dahr Jamail.

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US military spending hit $607 billion in 2008

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

The global arms madness continues.

A new report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (one of my favorite think tanks) confirms that worldwide military expenditure is again on the up and up, with spending having increased by 4 percent in 2008.

“All regions and subregions have seen significant increases since 1999, except for Western and Central Europe,” says the report (available at www.sipri.org).

The United States loomed large over all other countries, with a whopping $607 billion swallowed up by the military in 2008, nearly 10 percent more than the previous year. And SIPRI is being very conservative here, because the total U.S. expenditure was roughly $1 trillion when you add military-related costs that are not in the Pentagon budget. (See my column)

Sadly, the change of Administration has not reversed the trend. The Obama Administration has asked for $663 billion for the military for fiscal year 2010, including supplemental funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Although some wasteful big-ticket boondoggles have been cut and the budget is more transparently honest, the Pentagon is still being showered with money, even in our current parlous economic condition. Plus, President Obama has appealed for an additional $83.4 billion for fiscal year 2009 for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bizarrely enough, some of the U.S. media coverage of the SIPRI report has been focused on the faster increase in Chinese military spending. Duh: It’s called playing catch up. The United States accounts for nearly half of global military spending, and China’s double-digit increase was only slightly more than that of the United States. The U.S.-China rivalry is a strategic game about who can project power most forcefully. And, here, the United States has, by far, the upper hand.

The section of the SIPRI report that gave me the biggest heartburn was the one on international arms transfers. The United States, Russia, Germany, France and United Kingdom continued their gleeful dominance of the arms racket, while China and India, oblivious to the needs of their people, were the biggest importers of weapons.

“Together [the top five arms exporters] accounted for 79 per cent of the volume of exports for 2004–2008,” SIPRI states. “They have been the top five suppliers since the end of the cold war and have accounted for at least three-quarters of all exports annually.”

Boeing, BAE Systems (British), Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon were the largest producers of death, with arms profits for Boeing itself topping $4 billion. U.S. companies have almost a monopoly on the production of weapons in the big leagues, with almost two-thirds of the total arms manufactures of the top 100 companies being U.S. based.

Perhaps my all-time favorite quotation is by General Dwight David Eisenhower. (I even have a T-shirt with the first sentence printed on it.):

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

This is such a simple, graspable truth that it penetrated the consciousness of even a career military man like Ike. What will it take for the current crop of leaders around the world to comprehend it?

Amitabh Pal

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The Rise of Private Armies

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Journalist Jeremy Scahill warns against the growing power of corporate private armies and the “disintegration of the nation state apparatus.”

The following is a transcript from the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, broadcast on June 5.

There was good news and bad news about Afghanistan this week. And it was the same news.

That’s right. The Senate held confirmation hearings for Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, slated to be the next commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Here’s how two different news organizations reported his testimony:

The Associated Press headline read, “War in Afghanistan is ‘Winnable,’” but the “Washington Independent” reported that the general had, quote, “painted a bleak picture of the Afghanistan war” and that the United States “needed to show significant progress within ‘18 to 24 months’ or risk the war spiraling out of control.”

What we know for sure is that the fighting in Afghanistan is escalating. At least 21 thousand more American troops are going in and the number of private security contractors working for the military there jumped 29 percent in the last three months alone. Get this: there are now more private security contractors in Afghanistan than there are U.S. soldiers. And as of next year, according to new Pentagon documents, the war in Afghanistan will be costing more than the war in Iraq.

It’s the job of experienced, knowledgeable investigative reporters to throw a monkey wrench into the spin machine and try to make some sense of all this. They’re an endangered species, but one of the best in the business is Jeremy Scahill, who’s been digging into Pentagon documents and thick congressional hearings for several years now. He’s twice winner of the George Polk Award for special achievement in journalism, and author of this best selling book, BLACKWATER: THE RISE OF THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL MERCENARY ARMY. Jeremy now runs the new Web site, RebelReports. Jeremy Scahill, welcome back to the JOURNAL…

Jeremy Scahill: It’s great to be with you Bill.

Bill Moyers: How do explain this spike in private contractors in both Iraq and Afghanistan?

Scahill: Well, I think what we’re seeing, under President Barack Obama, is sort of old wine in a new bottle. Obama is sending one message to the world, but the reality on the ground, particularly when it comes to private military contractors, is that the status quo remains from the Bush era. Right now there are 250 thousand contractors fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s about 50 percent of the total US fighting force. Which is very similar to what it was under Bush. In Iraq, President Obama has 130 thousand contractors. And we just saw a 23 percent increase in the number of armed contractors in Iraq. In Afghanistan there’s been a 29 percent increase in armed contractors. So the radical privatization of war continues unabated under Barack Obama.

Having said that, when Barack Obama was in the Senate he was one of the only people that was willing to take up this issue. And he put forward what became the leading legislation on the part of the Democrats to reform the contracting industry. And I give him credit for doing that. Because he saw this as an important issue before a lot of other political figures. And spoke up at a time when a lot of people were deafeningly silent on this issue. I’ve been critical of Obama’s position on this because I think that he accepts what I think is a fundamental lie. That we should have a system where corporations are allowed to benefit off of warfare. And President Obama has carried on a policy where he has tried to implement greater accountability structures. We now know, in a much clearer way than we did under Bush, how many contractors we have on the battlefield. He’s attempted to implement some form of rules governing contractors. And it has suggested that there should be greater accountability when they do commit crimes.

All of these things are a step in the right direction. But, ultimately, I think that we have to look to what Jan Schakowsky, the congresswoman from Illinois, says. We can no longer allow these individuals to perform what are inherently governmental functions. And that includes carrying a weapon on U.S. battlefields. And that’s certainly not where President Obama is right now.

Moyers: But many people will say of course, the truth, which is he inherited a quagmire from the Bush administration. What’s he to do?

Scahill: Well, there’s no question that Obama inherited an absolute mess from President Bush. But the reality is that Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan right now. And is maintaining the occupation of Iraq. If Obama was serious about fully ending the occupation of Iraq, he wouldn’t allow the U.S. to have a colonial fortress that they’re passing off as an embassy in Baghdad. Bill, this place is the size of 80 football fields. Who do you think is going to run the security operation for this 80 football field sized embassy? Well, it’s mercenary contractors.

Moyers: So we’re supposed to be withdrawing from Iraq. But you’re suggesting, in all that you’ve written, that I’ve read lately, that we will be leaving a large mercenary force there.

Scahill: Absolutely. In fact, you’re going to have a sizable presence, not only of U.S. forces, certainly in the region, but also in Iraq. These residual forces… I mean, Bill, you remember, during Vietnam, the people who were classified as military advisors. Or analysts. And, in reality, the U.S. was fighting an undeclared war. So, in Iraq, I think that we’ve seen reports from Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News’ Pentagon correspondent. He’s quoting military sources saying that they expect to be in Iraq 15 to 20 years in sizable numbers. Afghanistan, though, really is going to become Obama’s war. And, unfortunately, many Democrats are portraying it as the good war.

Moyers: Let me show you a snippet of what he said in Cairo on Thursday. Take a look:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Make no mistake. We do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.

Scahill: Well, I mean, we have two parallel realities here. We have the speeches of President Obama. I’m not questioning his sincerity. And then you have the sort of official punditry that’s allowed access to the corporate media. And they have one debate. On the ground though, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, you hear the stories of the people that are forced to live on the other side of the barrel of the gun that is U.S. foreign policy. And you get a very different sense. If the United States, as President Obama says, doesn’t want a permanent presence in Afghanistan, why allocate a billion dollars to build this fortress like embassy, similar to the one in Baghdad, in Islamabad, Pakistan? Another one in Peshawar. Having an increase in mercenary forces. Expanding the US military presence there.

Moyers: Walter Pincus is an old friend of mine, an investigative reporter at “The Washington Post” for, you know, 30 or more years now. A very respected man. He reported in “The Washington Post” last fall that these contracts indicate how long the United States intends to remain in Afghanistan. And he pointed, for example, to a contract given by the Corps of Engineers to a firm in Dubai to build to expand the prison, the U.S. prison at Bagram in Afghanistan. What does that say to you?

Scahill: Right. Look, we have President Obama making it a point, regularly, to say, “We’re going to have Guantánamo closed by early next year.” The fact is that, at Bagram, we see an expansion. They’re spending $60 million to expand that prison. You have hundreds of people held without charges. You have people that are being denied access to the Red Cross in violation of international law. And you have an ongoing position, by the Obama administration, formed under Bush, that these prisoners don’t have right to habeas corpus. There are very disturbing signals being sent with Afghanistan as a microcosm. Not to mention these regular attacks that we’re seeing inside of Pakistan that have killed upwards of 700 civilians using these robotic drones since 2006. Including 100 since Obama took power.

Moyers: Some people have suggested that the increasing reliance on military contractors in Afghanistan underscores the fact that the military is actually stretched very thin. General McChrystal said, this week, he admitted that he doesn’t even know if we have enough troops there to deal with the situation as it is now. Does that surprise you?

Scahill: No. It doesn’t surprise me. Because this is increasingly turning into a war of occupation. That’s why General McChrystal is making that statement. If this was about fighting terrorism, it would be viewed as a law enforcement operation where you are going to hunt down criminals responsible for these actions and bring them in front of a court of law. This is turning into a war of occupation. If I might add about General McChrystal, what message does it send to the Afghan people when President Obama chooses a man who is alleged to have been one of the key figures running secret detention facilities in Iraq, and working on these extra judicial killing squads. Hunting down, quote unquote, insurgents, and killing them on behalf of the U.S. military. This is a man who’s also alleged to have been at the center of the cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death, who was killed by U.S. Army Rangers.

Moyers: But he apologized for that this week be before Congress.

Scahill: Well, it’s easy to apologize when your new job is on the line. It’s a different thing to take responsibility for it when you realize that the mistake was made, or that you were involved with what the family of Pat Tillman says was a cover-up.

Moyers: You know, you talk about military contractors. Do you think the American people have any idea how their tax dollars are being used in Afghanistan?

Scahill: Absolutely no idea whatsoever. We’ve spent 190 million dollars. Excuse me, $190 billion on the war in Afghanistan. And some estimates say that, within a few short years, it could it could end up at a half a trillion dollars. The fact is that I think most Americans are not aware that their dollars being spent in Afghanistan are, in fact, going to for-profit corporations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These are companies that are simultaneously working for profit and for the U.S. government. That is the intricate linking of corporate profits to an escalation of war that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address. We live in amidst the most radical privatization agenda in the history of our country. And it cuts across every aspect of our society.

Moyers: You recently wrote about how the Department of Defense paid the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR more than $80 million in bonuses for contracts to install what proved to be very defective electrical wiring in Iraq. Senator Byron Dorgan himself, called that wiring in hearings, shoddy and unprofessional. So my question is why did the Pentagon pay for it when it was so inferior?

Scahill: This is perhaps one of the greatest corporate scandals of the past decade. The fact that this Halliburton corporation, which was once headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, was essentially given keys to the city of U.S. foreign policy. And allowed to do things that were dangerous for U.S. troops. Provide then with unclean drinking water. They were the premier company responsible for servicing the US military occupation of Iraq. In fact, they were deployed alongside the U.S. military in the build up to the war. This was a politically connected company that won its contracts because of its political connections. And the fact is that it was a behemoth that was there. It was it was the girl at the dance, and they danced with her.

Moyers: Yeah. The Army hired a master electrician, I read, in some congressional testimony, to review electrical work in Iraq. He’s now told congress that KBR’s work in Iraq was, quote, “The most hazardous, worst quality work he’d ever seen.” And that his own investigation, this is not a journalist, this is an employee of the Army, had found improper wiring in every building that KBR had wired in Iraq.

Scahill: Right. And we’re talking about thousands of buildings. And so we’ve had, U.S. troops that have died from electrocution in Iraq as a result of the faulty work of KBR. This should be an utter scandal that should outrage every single person in this country. And, yet, you find almost no mention of this in the corporate media.

Moyers: Do you get discouraged writing about corruption that never gets cured?

Scahill: Well, I don’t believe that it necessarily doesn’t get cured. I think that I’m very heartened by the fact that we have a very vibrant independent media landscape that’s developing right now. You know, to me, I once put on the tagline of an article that I wrote early on in the Obama administration that I pledge to be the same journalist under Barack Obama that I was under President Bush. And the reason I felt that it was necessary to say that is that I feel like we have a sort of blue-state-Fox culture in the media. Where people are willing to go above and beyond the call of partisan politics to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. This is a man- it’s time to take off the Obama t-shirts. This is a man who’s in charge of the most powerful country on earth. The media in this country, we have an obligation to treat him the way we treated Bush in terms of being critical of him. And, yet, I feel like many Democrats have had their spines surgically removed these days, as have a lot of journalists. The fact is that this man is governing over a policy that is killing a tremendous number of civilians.

Moyers: You mentioned you mentioned drones a moment ago. I was impressed to hear our new commander of our troops in Afghanistan admit this week that the United States cannot go on killing civilians. He said, in fact, this is creating a dangerous situation for our own country.

Scahill: Well, that that I mean, on the one hand, that those words are true. I think that the fact is that, when you are killing civilians, in what is perceived to be an indiscriminate way certainly by the people of Pakistan you’re going to give rise to more people that want to attack the United States. They view themselves as fighting a defensive war. But never are the statistics cited that come out of Pakistan. 687 people are documented to have been killed. That the Pakistani authorities say are civilians since 2006. In the first 99 days of this year over 100 people were killed. And the fact is…

Moyers: By American military action?

Scahill: Right. By American military action with these robotic drones.

Moyers: 60 Minutes, on CBS News, recently got some very special access to the military. And came out with a report on drones. Let me show you a few excerpts from that.

LARA LOGAN: Right now, there are dozens of them over the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan. Hunting down insurgents every minute of every day. The fight for the pilot is on the video screen. Here a truck full of insurgents in Afghanistan is being tracked by the pilot. When the ground commander gives the order-he first, hitting his target. The trigger is pulled in Nevada. Inside these cramped single white trailers of small offices.

COL. CHRIS CHAMBLISS: And that white spot that this guy is carrying is actually a hot gun. It’s been fired and already know that it’s been used. We’ve met positive identification criteria that these are bad guys. And so now we can go ahead and strike these targets.

Moyers: Now, many people are like that fellow. They say that these drones are new miracle weapons that enable the United States military to kill the bad guys, as he said, without exposing Americans to danger. There’s truth in that, right?

Scahill: Now, I have a lot of respect for Lara Logan, the CBS correspondent. She’s really put her neck on the line and been in the thick of battle, and has been injured in battle. But I think that this piece was propaganda. She allowed the military to make claims about the effectiveness of their weapons that are being contested passionately by the people on the ground in Pakistan itself. I recently did an article about “Time” magazine’s coverage of this. They said that the Taliban are using civilians as human shields. And that’s why so many civilians have been killed. Their source for that was an Air Force intelligence officer who was allowed to speak on as though it was a Pentagon press release. I think that this is sick. Where you turn war, essentially, into a videogame that can be waged by people half a world away. What this does, these drones, is they it sanitizes war. It means that we increase the number of people that don’t have to see that war is hell on the ground. And it means that wars are going to be easier in the future because it’s not as tough of a sell.

Moyers: You will find agreement on people who say war is hell. But you’ll also find a lot of people in this country, America a lot of Democrats and Republicans, who say Jeremy Scahill is wrong. That we need to be doing what we’re doing in Afghanistan because, if we don’t, there’ll be another attack like 9/11 on this country.

Scahill: I think that what we’re doing in Afghanistan increases the likelihood that there’s going to be another attack.

Moyers: Why?

Scahill: Because we’re killing innocent civilians regularly. When the United States goes in and bombs Farah province in Afghanistan, on May 4th, and kills civilians, according to the Red Cross and other sources, 13 members of one family, that has a ricochet impact. The relatives of those people are going to say maybe they did trust the United States. Maybe they viewed the United States as a beacon of freedom in the world. But you just took you just took that guy’s daughter. You just killed that guy’s wife. That’s one more person that’s going to line up and say, “We’re going to fight the United States.” We are indiscriminately killing civilians, according to the UN Human Rights Council. A report that was just released this week by the UN says that the United States is indiscriminately killing civilians in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. That should be a collective shame that we feel in this society. And yet we have people calling it the good war.

Moyers: So, step back to that issue of military contractors. You’ve been you’ve been writing about privatization and military contractors for a long time. In the large scheme of things what do you military contractors represent to you?

Scahill: Yeah. Well, I think that what we have seen happen, as a result of this incredible reliance on private military contractors, is that the United States has created a new system for waging war. Where you no longer have to depend exclusively on your own citizens to sign up for the military and say, “I believe in this war, so I’m willing to sign up and risk my life for it.” You turn the entire world into your recruiting ground. You intricately link corporate profits to an escalation of warfare and make it profitable for companies to participate in your wars. In the process of doing that you undermine U.S. democratic processes. And you also violate the sovereignty of other nations, ’cause you’re making their citizens in combatants in a war to which their country is not a party. I feel that the end game of all of this could well be the disintegration of the nation state apparatus in the world. And it could be replaced by a scenario where you have corporations with their own private armies. To me, that would be a devastating development. But it’s on. It’s happening on a micro level. And I fear it will start to happen on a much bigger scale.

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MEP Nick Griffin - An audience with a racist

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Nick Griffin: MEP elect, BNP mouthpiece, convicted Holocaust-denier and would-be deporter of black people invites me into the back seat of his car. He jokes that there is no egg on his jacket as I move it and climb in: last Tuesday he was pelted with eggs as he tried to give a victory press conference after Sunday’s election results.

On Thursday morning, a sunny day in Shrewsbury, Griffin makes small talk as we drive in his Mondeo estate to a garden centre: “Normally we’d do this in a pub but it’s too early for that.” From the moment we meet, there is an unspoken compact: he has never met me before but does not flinch or blanch when he does. I refuse to be shocked or angered, regardless of how sweeping or wild his claims about race.

At Dobbie’s Garden Centre, less than five minutes’ drive out of Shrewsbury, the BNP leader and I share a table. I sip black coffee, he swigs from a bottle of James White’s apple juice. We talk about the BNP’s election to two seats – North-West England for him and Yorkshire and Humberside for Andrew Brons – in the European Parliament; about being pelted with eggs; racism; whether his party deserves to be ignored because its views are abhorrent, or whether non-supporters should be told what he stands for and make up their own minds.

Is he a racist? The denial is out of his mouth before I finish the question. Does he have a problem personally with me because I am black? “None at all.” So why does he want to give me £50,000 to leave Britain? “This country is the most overcrowded in Europe.”

He argues that by paying non-whites to go away he is actually working to preserve racial diversity. So, why are people throwing eggs at him? He laughs, nervously. “Obviously it’s the immigration, race perception thereof, at one level, and also quite simply the people throwing eggs, the Union of Anti-Fascists, is based on the Communist Party, a little group of hardline Stalinists who’ve never really changed their views. So there’s an ideological opposition, and racism is merely an excuse, or alleged racism is merely an excuse.”

This is a recurrent theme. He is beset by enemies on all sides, including the hard left, smug liberal elitists and and nutty neo-Nazis. The last, he claims, have not forgiven him for distancing himself from his public statements of a decade ago, the Holocaust denial that saw him convicted in 1998. “The BNP has changed enormously, and in the course of changing enormously I’ve made myself literally the most unpopular person with Britain’s neo-Nazis in the entire world.”

Griffin grew up in Barnet, north London, where his mother walked him to school together with a West Indian neighbour and her children. At the age of eight he moved to Southwold, Suffolk. His father, Edgar, was a Conservative councillor who provided right-wing books for his son to read and took his family to National Front meetings. In 1975, the younger Griffin joined and became close to the party’s national organiser, Martin Webster. He went to Cambridge, where he gained a boxing blue. He lost an eye in 1990 when a shotgun cartridge exploded in a fire in France.

In 1995 he joined the BNP. He took over as leader in 1999, ousting its founder, John Tyndall, in a coup. A year earlier he was convicted of incitement to racial hatred after publishing material that denied the Holocaust. In 2005, he was tried, then retried and acquitted a year later, for alleged incitement to racial hatred. Recently, he has started an autobiography – “names have been changed to protect the guilty” he laughs.

He has spent the past 10 years changing the party’s image from a pack of violent thugs to something electable, softening its stance on repatriation and inter-racial marriage in an effort to make the BNP less nasty – not anti-black, but pro-English.

So, how would he feel if I moved in next door? He laughs, nervously again, and points out there is no house next door to his detached stone farmhouse home 10 miles from Welshpool. “In simple terms, if you moved in next door it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. One family doesn’t make any difference at all but, erm, where does it stop?”

So if I moved next door and my brother the other side, then that would trouble you? “Well, then that would concern me because, historically, in the 1970s I spent a lot of time in the old East End with the old community, and it was a wonderful place: poor, rough and ready, but extraordinarily hospitable and really good people with an identity of their own.

“Some of them are still there, and there’s an enormous amount of really bitter hostility towards mass immigration in the old, white East End. They don’t even vote for us; they’re so alienated by the process they simply don’t bother. If that was done to any other ethnic group, at the very least the liberal elite would be saying this is a terrible shame. In fact they’d want to stop it.”

Sitting in his suit and tie, with neatly combed hair and trotting out psephological jargon, he comes across as a sort of racist version of Tony Blair: coolly spouting dodgy dossiers of misinformation to justify a “war” against weapons of mass immigration and miscegenation. Most people don’t believe him; we’re not sure whether he sincerely believes himself, but he’s going to keep pushing his line for as long as he can.

At the moment he is trying to soft-sell repatriation. “We’re not talking about turfing everybody out. We’re talking about encouraging some to go. It would benefit them if we did a proper, sensible deal with countries that have suffered hugely from brain-drain, with people coming here – it’s the final form of colonialism. Instead of stealing, erm, gold and old statues, we steal the people and best brains, and the countries suffer as a result.

“We would help to stabilise all sorts of countries if some of their nationals or people who originate from there returned to their homelands with some of the skills that they’ve learnt here and applied them to make those a better place instead of coming here because it’s convenient for Britain and easier than training our own people.” Xenophobia as humanitarianism is just one of his verbal gymnastics.

Why does he want me out of Britain so badly? “Large-scale multi-cultural, multi-racial societies are clearly seen to be fundamentally unstable. They only work when there’s some repressive force to keep them in place. When the force is removed you get something like the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda. All the real horrors of human society are based on two tribes going to war.

“I would say in 30 years it’s inevitable that Europe will face a decision which is absolutely unavoidable between whether Europe will continue on the lines it is, which is founded on Christianity … a choice between that and becoming an Islamic caliphate. There’s no question about it, the government figures show it.”

What would he do, then, if one of his three daughters brought home someone like me? “I would be as disappointed, as I know many Sikhs, Hindus and black people would be, and I’d talk to them both about it, try and put them off. But in the end that’s their business.

“Children grow up and do their own thing. I wouldn’t go as far as, say, someone from the orthodox Jewish community could well do, which is to hold a funeral, a symbolic funeral for them. But I would ask you again – unless you’re going to condemn the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, for writing a book called Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? – don’t call me a racist, or some kind of wicked bigot, for saying I would be very disappointed.”

Here lies a clue to his single-handed conversion of the BNP into electability over the past 10 years: while what he says is frequently outrageous, deeply racist and often factually dubious, the way he says it – pointing to other ethnic groups allegedly acting in the same way – is designed to appear as devoid of malice, and simply an appeal for an equal hearing.

Colour, he claims, is being replaced by culture. Muslims, he says, are a community with whom everyone has a problem. I point out I don’t have a particular problem with Muslims. But he does, and he expounds at length about it. He believes there is a fault line in British society. “The fault line isn’t colour: Enoch Powell got that wrong. The fault line is between Islam and the rest. Islam will conquer Europe. It won’t do it through guns: it will just do it through having lots of children.” He blithely claims Muslims routinely groom young, non-Muslim girls for sex, that the Koran is a manual for the overthrow of the West.

I cannot let this pass: surely he doesn’t believe any of that. It’s nonsense isn’t it? “Nope. There’s an utter gulf of comprehension between us, isn’t there?”

I point out that the vast majority of people in this country are either highly antipathetic towards him or just apathetic. A minority may support him, but they are out of touch with reality. Most sensible people ignore the BNP or think they’re a bunch of crazy folk.

“Your perception of a vast number thinking we’re a bunch of dangerous crazies is coloured by the fact that your work colleagues, the social circles you mix in and so on [are liberal] – a self-reinforcing groupthink thing.”

I suggest that he can’t stop multiculturalism, and he spirals off into fantasy. “If we’d been sat in café anywhere from East Berlin to the Urals in 1988, anyone who was of the mindset of Pravda, Izvestia and so on would have said you can’t stop Communism. Inevitability is the chief weapon of totalitarianism, and we do live in a totalitarian society.”

Can he see why some people might think he was like King Canute trying to hold back the tide of multi-culturalism? “You may well be right. I could have a more comfortable life if I went along with the flow and said ‘yes, it’s inevitable’. Do you think I should just pass by on the other side of the road and let it happen? Why should I do that?

“So yeah, we may not win. I don’t believe we have a God-given right to win or come to power. It’s not even likely. But the more successful we become, the more opponents will have to co-opt our policies.”

Why such outbursts? Did black children steal his lunch at school or beat him? “I don’t hate or have any problem with black people other than I hope very much that they remain black people. Other than I hope their children will look as black as they are, and as different and as interesting. And where it doesn’t happen: it’s not my business. No, I haven’t got a problem, so where does it come from? I don’t really know.”

Your Views, Please: The liberal’s dilemma

Should we ignore the BNP, denying it the oxygen of publicity, or engage, thereby giving it a platform?

Have Your Say: MEP Nick Griffin - An audience with a racist
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Racist rants of elected BNP man, Andrew Brons, revealed

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

One of the British National party’s first MEPs’ attempts to play down his past links to the extreme right as “silly” teenage posturing are today exposed as a sham after it emerged that for many years he played a crucial role in shaping the National Front’s most overtly racist policies.

In 1983, when he was in his late twenties, Andrew Brons edited the National Front’s general election manifesto that called for a global apartheid to prevent the “extinction” of whites everywhere.

The Let Britain Live! manifesto was prepared by the party’s policy department, chaired by Brons. It outlined a series of hugely controversial positions, crystallised in one of its opening statements: “The National Front rejects the whole concept of multiracialism. We recognise inherent racial differences in Man. The races of Man are profoundly unequal in their characteristics, potential and abilities.”

The manifesto claimed the UK had been “swamped” by “racially incompatible Afro-Asians” and that “Black muggings of White people, especially elderly ladies, occurs regularly”.

It continued: “The eruptions in Bristol in 1980 and Brixton in 1981 were just two examples of the ‘cultural enrichment’ promised to us by the multiracialists.” And it claimed: “We believe the gradual dismantlement of the Apartheid system over the last 17 years to be retrograde … The alternative to Apartheid, multiracialism, envisages an extinction of the White man.”

Brons was also an enthusiastic contributor in the 1970s and 1980s to Spearhead, a far-right magazine considered so extreme even the BNP tried to distance itself from it. In two lengthy polemics for the magazine, Brons outlined the supposed importance of nationalism and interpreted genetic studies to suggest Europeans had a “greater cognitive ability” than non-whites. He attacked the influence of “people of Jewish ethnic origin” and peddled the myth that a number of predominantly Zionist organisations were controlling the world.

The now retired college lecturer wrote: “One ethnic, national and religious group whose power and influence has undoubtedly increased has been the Jews. It can be no mere coincidence that the number of people of Jewish ethnic origin to be found in internationalist and multiracialist schools of thought and organisations of action is out of all proportion to their numbers in the population.”

Brons, who was elected as the BNP MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber this month, has tried to distance himself from his National Front days. “People do silly things when they are 17,” he said recently. “Peter Mandelson was once a member of the Young Communist League but we don’t continue to call him a communist.”

But his critics say his relationship with the National Front was more than a youthful dalliance and question the extent to which he has left his past behind. A 1980 edition of National Front News, the party newspaper, carried an article about Brons saying he was prepared to go to jail for his beliefs. It noted that Brons refused a “Negro reporter permission to attend two National Front ticket-only meetings” and explains that Brons, then 29, has “campaigned against Coloured Immigration since he was a teenager” - suggesting his extremist views have been a feature as much of his adult as his teenage life.

Brons seized the NF chairmanship in 1980 when John Tyndall quit to form the BNP. In 1984 Brons was convicted of using insulting behaviour towards an ethnic-minority police officer and left the party, citing family problems.

At the National Front, Brons was a close ally of Richard Verrall, the author of the Holocaust-denial tract Did Six Million Really Die?, who was vice-chairman. In 1981, while Brons was chairman, the NF endorsed We are National Front, a pamphlet carrying an introduction from Verrall. It had photographs of Brons and Verrall as well as a picture of a gorilla and a black man stating: “These two creatures look the same, don’t they?”

Anti-racism and Jewish support groups yesterday described Brons’s failure to condemn his past activities as disturbing. “From a young man until well into his middle age, Andrew Brons was very much involved in a series of viciously antisemitic and racist far-right movements,” said a spokesman for the Community Security Trust, which monitors attacks on the UK’s Jewish community. “It’s hard to believe he has undergone a serious conversion since then.”

Searchlight, the anti-fascist organisation, said Brons was influential in shaping the NF and it was important that those voting for him should be aware of his past views. “The fact that Brons is an intellectual fascist and bigot rather than an ignorant fascist and bigot cuts little ice,” a spokesman said. “We are unimpressed by his claims that his prejudice was a result of youthful exuberance.”

Attempts to contact Brons through the BNP were unsuccessful.

Jamie Doward

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John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld and the Systematic Torture of Prisoners

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

On Jan. 17, 2003, Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel, received an urgent memo from the Pentagon’s top attorney. Attached to the classified document was a set of directives drafted two days earlier by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

“Establish a working group within the Department of Defense to assess the legal, policy and operational issues relating to the interrogations of detainees held by the U.S. Armed Forces in the war on terrorism,” the directives said.

Among the issues to be addressed were “policy considerations with respect to the choice of interrogation techniques, including contribution to intelligence collection, effect on treatment of captured U.S. military personnel, effect on detainee prosecutions, historical role of U.S. armed forces in conducting interrogations, recommendations for employment of particular interrogation techniques by [Defense Department] interrogators.”
John Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, drafted the document, dated March 14, 2003. It essentially provided military interrogators with legal cover if they resorted to brutal and violent methods to extract information from prisoners.

“If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network,” Yoo wrote. “In that case, we believe that he could argue that the Executive Branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”

The legal opinion for military interrogators was virtually identical to an earlier memo that Yoo had written in August 2002 for CIA interrogators. Widely called the “Torture Memo,” it provided CIA interrogators with the legal authority to use long-outlawed tactics, such as waterboarding, when interrogating so-called high-level terrorist suspects.

But Yoo did not work on the legal opinions alone.

Pentagon Frustrations

In early January 2003, commanders stationed at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba complained to Rumsfeld that military officials were unable to glean information from prisoners about alleged terrorist plots in the U.S. and abroad using conventional interrogation methods.

Following his conversation with military officials, on Jan. 15, 2003, Rumsfeld sent William Haynes II, the Pentagon’s general counsel, a memo requesting that he form a “working group” to determine what methods military interrogators could use to extract information from a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

Haynes asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel for guidance and selected Walker to chair a “working group” to write a report on legally permissible interrogation techniques.

The members of the group included former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency, representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and judge advocate generals (JAGs) from all four branches of the military.

By the time Walker’s group had settled in for its first meeting, interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had already begun to violate the Geneva Convention.

To ratchet up pressure on prisoners, U.S. military personnel were experimenting with unusual tactics, including placing women’s underwear on prisoners’ heads, a technique that later reappeared in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

A military official, who took part in discussions with Mary Walker’s group, told the Wall Street Journal in June 2004 that there was a growing frustration among interrogators.

“We’d been at this for a year-plus and got nothing out of them,” the official said, adding that threats were even made against the families of detainees.

The official said the message to a detainee would be: “I’m on the line with somebody in Yemen and he’s in a room with your family and a grenade that’s going to pop unless you talk.”

Framing the Debate

While Walker’s report was being drafted, the group discussed 35 different interrogation techniques that could be used to obtain information from prisoners.

Early drafts of the report advocated intimidating prisoners with dogs, removing prisoners’ clothing, shaving their beards, slapping prisoners in the face and waterboarding.

Though some of the more extreme techniques were dropped as the list was winnowed down to 24 from 35, the final set of methods still included tactics for isolating and demeaning a detainee, known as “pride and ego down.”

Such degrading tactics violated the Geneva Convention, which bars abusive or demeaning treatment of captives.

The more extreme interrogation methods that made it into the final draft of the report rankled some of the JAGs, who feared the methods would put U.S. soldiers in danger if they were captured – and would tarnish the reputation and image of the U.S. abroad.

“Will the American people find we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values,” wrote Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, a member of the “working group,” in a February 2003 letter to Walker.

“How would such perceptions affect our ability to prosecute the Global War on Terrorism,” asked Lohr.

The admiral was so upset with the draft report and the advice provided by the Justice Department that he requested Walker include a sentence in the final report making it clear that the legal findings were based exclusively on attorneys in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Lohr was not alone. Maj. Gen. Jack Rives, who at the time was judge advocate general of the Air Force, also wrote a letter to Walker warning that the interrogation techniques in the report would violate military law.

“Several of the exceptional techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law and the [Uniform Code of Military Justice],” Rives wrote. “Treating detainees inconsistently with the [Geneva] Convention arguably ‘lowers the bar’ for the treatment of U.S. POW’s in future conflicts.”

Maj. Gen. Thomas Romig, an Army JAG, and Brig. Gen. Kevin M. Sandkuhler, a Marine Corps JAG, also voiced concerns, specifically the determination that the President has the power to override the Uniform Code of Military Justice and other federal statutes and international treaties in the name of national security.

Defending Bush’s Authority

Walker’s group addressed these concerns, according to the report, by stating, in legal terms, that the President had the constitutional authority as Commander in Chief to ignore torture laws if national security were in jeopardy.

On March 6, 2003, eight days before Yoo issued his legal opinion, Walker sent Rumsfeld a draft 53-page “working group” report that said international treaties forbidding torture did not apply to prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The report, which asserted that President Bush had “sweeping” powers as Commander in Chief, said Bush could suspend international laws and treaties governing torture in the name of national security.

“In order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority,” the report stated.

The Justice Department could not prosecute military interrogators “who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the President’s constitutional power,” the report added.

Further, the report said that if a prisoner died as a result of a brutal interrogation technique, the interrogator would not be subject to prosecution if he had acted in a “good faith” effort to save lives.

“Good faith may be a complete defense,” the report said. “Sometimes the greater good for society will be accomplished by violating the literal language of the criminal law.”

The report cited a legal text, “Substantive Criminal Law” by Wayne LaFave and Austin W. Scott, to support the legality of the interrogation methods: “In particular, the necessity defense can justify the intentional killing of one person . . . so long as the harm avoided is greater.”

Rumsfeld signed the final report on April 2, 2003, two weeks after Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Iraq.

One year later, photos depicting U.S. soldiers abusing and humiliating detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were publicly released.

Congressional Reaction

The tide began to turn against Yoo’s and Walker’s expansive attitudes toward presidential authority when Jack Goldsmith took over as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel and, by early 2004, had rescinded Yoo’s opinions.

On June 15, 2004, the Senate passed an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill backed by Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, to give JAGs the same legal authority as military attorneys, like Walker, who are appointed by the President.

The amendment, dubbed the “Mary Walker bill,” was spurred by complaints from JAGs who said Walker had ignored their legal concerns about the interrogation of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

In February 2008, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) confirmed that it had launched a formal investigation into whether Yoo and other attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel gave the White House poor legal advice in authorizing CIA interrogators to use waterboarding to glean information about terrorist plots from prisoners.

In effect, the legal opinions from Walker and Yoo sought to provide a basis for the Bush administration to circumvent U.S. and international laws prohibiting torture of prisoners.

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the United Nations Committee Against Torture reaffirmed the prohibitions contained in the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

The Convention – approved by 145 nations, including the United States – states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Moreover, the convention says individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors.

The United States signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 under President Ronald Reagan, who hailed it as “a significant step” in preventing torture, which he called “an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.”

In a May 20, 1988, message to the U.S. Senate, Reagan noted that “the core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’

“Each state party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

It was this Convention, ratified by the Senate in 1994, that Walker, Yoo and other Bush administration officials sought to bypass.

Although the treaty mandates that the United States cooperate in the criminal prosecution of torturers, the administration’s post-9/11 legal opinions sought to shield American interrogators.

The Walker report, which was tailored to fit with Yoo’s legal arguments, advised military interrogators that they could defend their actions by saying Justice Department lawyers told them that their methods were legal.

Jason Leopold

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FDA Approves Antidepressants for Children, Even After Revelations of Bribery

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

The FDA has approved Forest Laboratories’ antidepressant Lexapro (escitalopram) for use in children and adolescents, even as the federal government and 11 states have filed a lawsuit against the company for illegally pushing the drug on kids.

The federal government has accused Forest of bribing pediatricians to prescribe Lexapro and a related drug, Celexa (citalopram), to treat depression in children, even though such use had not been approved by the FDA at the time. The government also claims that Forest concealed the results of studies showing the drugs to be no more effective than a placebo.

“By knowingly and actively promoting these antidepressants for off-label pediatric use without disclosing the results of the negative pediatric study and by paying kickbacks, Forest caused false claims to be submitted to federal health care programs in violation of the False Claims Act,” said the federal complaint, issued on Feb. 25.

Lexapro was introduced in 2001 as a successor to Forest’s blockbuster Celexa, which lost patent protection and became available for generic replication in 2003. Both drugs are antidepressants in the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) class, and like other SSRIs have been shown to significantly increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in children, adolescents and young adults after even short-term use.

Lexapro is the 15th biggest selling drug in the United States.

On March 20, the FDA approved Lexapro for the treatment of major depressive disorder in children between the ages of 12 and 17, based on the findings of only one clinical study. Another study showed the drug to have no more effect than a placebo.

“A lot of these kinds of trials are not successful because it’s very difficult to do depression studies,” said Forest spokesman Frank Murdolo. “But we have two studies that were successful.”

The second study referenced by Murdolo was conducted on Celexa, which the FDA declined to approve for use in children. A second Celexa study found no evidence that the drug was effective.

The FDA also approved Lexapro as a way to maintain control of depression symptoms, even though Forest admits there is no clinical evidence for that benefit in children. The FDA argued that it was possible to extrapolate the effectiveness of the drug from adult studies.

Lexapro is only the second antidepressant to receive US approval for use in children.

According to a federal complaint however, Forest has been marketing Lexapro and Celexa to children illegally for at least nine years.

In 1999, the FDA asked the company to conduct two independent clinical trials into Celexa’s effectiveness in children, offering as incentive a six-month patent extension. Forest commissioned two studies — one by the Danish company Lundbeck, which initially developed the drug, and another by U.S. researcher Karen Dineen Wagner. While the Wagner study found “a statistically … significant reduction in depressive symptoms in children and adolescents” and “no serious adverse events” from the drug’s use, the Lundbeck study found that Celexa provided no benefits over the placebo. In addition, out of a total participant population of 244 in the Lundbeck study, nine more Celexa patients attempted or considered suicide compared with those taking a placebo.

For the next three years, however, Forest widely publicized the Wagner study but did not disclose the results of the Lundbeck study.

David Gutierrez

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Man arrested and convicted for complaining about government

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Marshall Pappert waged a passionate, perhaps slightly obsessive, campaign of protest letter writing to Bridgeville, Pa. politicians and city officials to express his opposition to concrete plant. The city has responded, by arresting him, for criminally harassing the government.

ABC News Pittsburg reports: A Bridgeville man who was arrested and convicted after making repeated complaints to his local government took his appeal to one of Pennsylvania’s highest courts on Tuesday.Team 4 investigative reporter Jim Parsons, who originally broke the story, was in Superior Court for the arguments. At issue: How many letters to borough officials does it take to constitute a crime?

Marshall Pappert freely admits that when you add up all of the letters he has written to government officials — and include the copies of those letters he has sent to other public officials — the number of letters is about 350.While waiting for his case to be called, Pappert made no apologies for his letter-writing campaign to Bridgeville Borough.

“I did what any citizen should do when you see something that’s unhealthy to the community,” Pappert said.Pappert lives across Union Street from a Bridgeville concrete plant. The dust, the noise, the idling diesel trucks all combined to cause him to complain to the borough. He wrote letter after letter — hundreds of them — and he left voice mail messages for the borough manager.In one message, Pappert said, “I’m asking you as a Bridgeville resident of 56 years to resign and get off of your position. Do the right thing.”Instead, Pappert got arrested on a harassment charge and was convicted.At Tuesday’s appeal hearing, Assistant District Attorney Peggy Ivory told the court that Pappert “clearly crossed the line to a course of conduct designed to harass” the borough manager.Ivory declined an interview with Team 4 on Tuesday.”We really maintain that this is about the First Amendment and that public officials just have to tolerate it,” said Bruce Boni, an attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union who’s representing Pappert.Bridgeville Councilman Pat DeBlasio said he doesn’t just tolerate Pappert’s actions, he embraces them.”We go to Memorial Day and stand there and listen to ‘Taps’ and honor the people who died. Well, they didn’t die so we could have five different choices of breakfast cereal. They sacrificed their lives so that you have the right to complain when you see something wrong,” DeBlasio said.”If you can’t talk and do what I did to your government, what can you do? What are they going to do next to you?” Pappert said.A decision on whether to overturn Pappert’s criminal conviction is not expected until sometime in the summer.Team 4 also learned on Tuesday that Ed Bogats — who arrested Pappert — submitted his resignation as Bridgeville police chief last month.The borough council unanimously accepted Bogats’ resignation. DeBlasio said Bogats cited medical reasons.Bogats did not return Team 4’s call to his home on Tuesday.

Thanks to Jonathan Turley

Phil Leggiere
http://mondoglobo.wftk.org/blog/qa/

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The Federal Reserve Would Be Shut Down If It Was Audited

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is so out of whack that the central bank would be shut down if subjected to a conventional audit, Jim Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, told CNBC.

With $45 billion in capital and $2.1 trillion in assets, the central bank would not withstand the scrutiny normally afforded other institutions, Grant said in a live interview.

“If the Fed examiners were set upon the Fed’s own documents—unlabeled documents—to pass judgment on the Fed’s capacity to survive the difficulties it faces in credit, it would shut this institution down,” he said. “The Fed is undercapitalized in a way that Citicorp is undercapitalized.”

Grant said he would support legislation currently making its way through Congress calling for an audit of the Fed.

Moreover, he criticized the way the Fed has managed the financial crisis, saying the central bank’s target rate should not be around zero.

“I think zero is the wrong rate for almost any economy,” Grant said, adding the Fed has “embarked on a vast experiment in moral hazard. Interest rates are the traffic signals in a market economy, and everything’s green. … You have to wonder whether these interest rates are the right clearing rate or rather they are the imposition of a central bank.”

Amid a disparity between analysts predicting there will be no rate hikes soon and the fed funds futures indicating tightening by the end of the year, Grant said he thinks the Fed indeed will begin raising rates as inflation creeps into the picture.

CNBC

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The Long Ordeal of Guantánamo’s Youngest Prisoner

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

The long ordeal of Mohammed El-Gharani, Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, has finally come to an end. Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents him, reported yesterday that he has been sent back to Chad.

A Saudi resident and Chadian national, El-Gharani was just 14 years old when he was seized by Pakistani forces in a random raid on a mosque in Karachi, but was treated appallingly both by the Pakistanis who seized him, and by the U.S. military. I provided a detailed explanation of the abuse to which he was subjected in an article last year, “Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child,” which I condensed for an article in January, when I explained:

As with all but three of the 22 confirmed juveniles who have been held at Guantánamo, the U.S. authorities never treated him separately from the adult population, even though they are obliged, under the terms of the UN’s Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict) to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”

Instead, El-Gharani was treated with appalling brutality. After being tortured in Pakistani custody, he was sold to U.S. forces, who flew him to a prison at Kandahar airport, where, he said, one particular soldier “would hold my penis, with scissors, and say he’d cut it off.” His treatment did not improve in Guantánamo. Subjected relentlessly to racist abuse, because of the color of his skin, he was hung from his wrists on numerous occasions, and was also subjected to a regime of “enhanced” techniques to prepare him for interrogation — including prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and the use of painful stress positions — that clearly constitute torture. As a result of this and other abuse, including regular beatings by the guard force responsible for quelling even the most minor infractions of the rules, El-Gharani has become deeply depressed, and has tried to commit suicide on several occasions.

In January, over seven years after his initial capture, El-Gharani finally had his case reviewed in a U.S. court, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2008, that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to ask a court why they were being held. Judge Richard Leon, who had granted the habeas petitions of five Algerian prisoners in November, ruling that the government had failed to establish a case against them, was, if anything, even more dismissive of the claims against El-Gharani.

In his habeas petition, El-Gharani insisted, as he had throughout his detention, that he “traveled to Pakistan from Saudi Arabia at the age of 14 to escape discrimination against Chadians in that country, acquire computer and English skills, and make a better life for himself,” and that he “remained there until his arrest,” although the government claimed that he “arrived in Afghanistan at some unspecified time in 2001,” and was “part of or supporting Taliban or al-Qaeda forces,” for a variety of reasons, including claims that he received military training at an al-Qaeda-affiliated military training camp, fought against U.S. and allied forces at the battle of Tora Bora, and was a member of an al-Qaeda cell based in London.

Noting that the government’s supposed evidence against El-Gharani consisted of statements made by two other prisoners at Guantánamo, and that, moreover, these statements were “either exclusively, or jointly, the only evidence offered by the Government to substantiate the majority of their allegations,” Judge Leon stated that “the credibility and reliability of the detainees being relied upon by the Government has either been directly called into question by Government personnel or has been characterized by Government personnel as undermined,” and dismissed all the claims, reserving particular criticism for the claim that El-Gharani had been a member of a London-based al-Qaeda cell.

As I wrote in January,

This was, indeed, the most extraordinary allegation, as El-Gharani was just 11 years old at the time, and, as his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, explained in his book The Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantánamo Bay, “he must have been beamed over to the al-Qaeda meetings by the Starship Enterprise, since he never left Saudi Arabia by conventional means.”

Leon’s verdict was marginally less colorful, but no less devastating. “Putting aside the obvious and unanswered questions as to how a Saudi minor from a very poor family could have even become a member of a London-based cell,” he wrote, “the Government simply advances no corroborating evidence for these statements it believes to be reliable from a fellow detainee, the basis of whose knowledge is — at best — unknown.”

Despite this long-overdue court victory, El-Gharani’s suffering in Guantánamo did not come to an end. In April, he was finally allowed to call one of his relatives in Chad, but took the opportunity to call the Arabic broadcaster al-Jazeera instead, telling them, as Reuters described it, that “he had been beaten with batons and teargassed by a group of six soldiers wearing protective gear and helmets after refusing to leave his cell.” He explained, “This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I’ve been subjected to it almost every day,” and added, “Since Obama took charge he has not shown us that anything will change.”

El-Gharani’s return to Chad is not without its problems. He is currently being held by the security services, although they have stressed to his lawyers that it is just a formality and that they fully understand the horrors he has been through. More troubling is the fact that, although he has extended family in Chad who will take care of him, he cannot be reunited with his parents, because they live in Saudi Arabia. Representatives of Reprieve are expected to fly out to Chad this weekend, to help with his rehabilitation, but in the meantime El-Gharani himself has said only that he is, of course, delighted to be free, and is looking forward to undertaking an education, to make up for the lost years and lost opportunities while he was held in Guantánamo.

As Zachary Katznelson, Reprieve’s legal director, explained to me in a telephone conversation yesterday, “Reprieve is delighted that, after seven long years of unjust, illegal incarceration, Mohammed is finally out of Guantánamo Bay. A federal judge looked at his case in January, and found that there were never any valid grounds to hold him. He should have been released long ago, but we’re glad that justice has finally been served.”

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of ‘The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison’ (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk

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