Peace and Justice Post

Elana Schor in Washington
The Guardian, Monday April 21 2008

The former head of interrogations at Guantánamo Bay found that records of an al-Qaida suspect tortured at the prison camp were mysteriously lost by the US military, according to a new book by one of Britain’s top human rights lawyers.

Retired general Michael Dunlavey, who supervised Guantánamo for eight months in 2002, tried to locate records on Mohammed al-Qahtani, accused by the US of plotting the 9/11 attacks, but found they had disappeared.

The records on al-Qahtani, who was interrogated for 48 days – “were backed up … after I left, there was a snafu and all was lost”, Dunlavey told Philippe Sands QC, who reports the conversation in his book Torture Team, previewed last week by the Guardian. Snafu stands for Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

Saudi-born al-Qahtani was sexually taunted, forced to perform dog tricks and given enemas at Guantánamo.

The CIA admitted last year that it destroyed videotapes of al-Qaida suspects being interrogated at a secret “black site” in Thailand. No proof has so far emerged that tapes of interrogations at Guantánamo were destroyed, but Sands’ report suggests the US may have also buried politically sensitive proof relating to abuse by interrogators at the prison camp.

Continued . . .

By Jonathan Wright | Reuters, April 18, 2008

CAIRO (Reuters) – Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter called the blockade of Gaza a crime and an atrocity on Thursday and said U.S. attempts to undermine the Islamist movement Hamas had been counterproductive.

Speaking at the American University in Cairo after talks with Hamas leaders from Gaza, Carter said Palestinians in Gaza were being “starved to death”, receiving fewer calories a day than people in the poorest parts of Africa.

“It’s an atrocity what is being perpetrated as punishment on the people in Gaza. it’s a crime… I think it is an abomination that this continues to go on,” Carter said.

Israel has been blockading Gaza most of the time since Hamas took control of the impoverished coastal strip in June last year, allowing only basic supplies to enter.

Israel has not accepted Hamas proposals for a truce including an end to Hamas rocket attacks on Israel and to Israeli attacks on Hamas personnel in Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli officials say a truce would enable Hamas to rearm.

Carter said Israel and its ally the United States were trying to make the quality of life in Gaza markedly worse than in the West Bank, where the rival Fatah group is in control.

Continued . . .

A PENTAGON CAMPAIGN Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage from inside the TV and radio networks.

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Continued . . .

Tan Ee Lyn

Reuters North American News Service, Apr 19, 2008 07:30 EST

KABUL, April 19 (Reuters) – The Afghan government plans to investigate whether the United States used depleted uranium during its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and if it might be linked to malformed babies born afterwards.

Parts of Afghanistan, particularly the mountainous region of Tora Bora in the east — the suspected hideout of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden — came under heavy U.S. bombing in late 2001 when the Taliban regime was ousted.

Depleted uranium is a heavy metal used in some weapons that can pierce armour. It has small levels of radioactivity associated with it.

Cases of malformed babies delivered in the heavily bombed Afghan areas have come to light, Faizullah Kakar, Afghan deputy public health minister for technical affairs said on Saturday, citing an unnamed U.S. expert.

Kakar told Reuters the Afghan government planned to investigate the matter.

“We have decided to do a study to see what is going on. We will take samples of soil, rocks, water in different areas where the war had taken place in the past and look in the same area to see if there is an excess of malformed babies,” Kakar said.

“It’s then that we can tell you what is going on. But until then it is still speculation,” he said.

“In Afghanistan, we have so many problems with nutritional deficiency, like folic acid. So it’s difficult to tell if it’s due to depleted uranium or due to some nutritional problems or some other genetic issues,” he said.

Asked if the United States had told Afghanistan if depleted uranium was used during the war, Kakar said: “They have not told us that they have used it, but my source said it was used.”

Kakar said he would like to see the study done as soon as possible, but the Afghan government, which largely relies on Western aid and troops, needed to find ways of funding it. (Editing by Sayed Salahuddin and Charles Dick)

Haaretz, Israel, April 18, 2008

Hamas’ Gaza-based leader Mahmoud al-Zahar yesterday compared activity against Israel in the Gaza Strip to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis. In an opinion piece published yesterday in The Washington Post, Zahar wrote: “Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world’s largest open-air prison, can do no less.”

Zahar denounced Israel as waging a “total war” against the Palestinian people, which he said justified last week’s attack by Gaza militants on the Nahal Oz fuel depot. Zahar said that resistance was the only option left to the Palestinians.

Zahar offered praise for former American president Jimmy Carter, who asked to meet with Hamas leaders. He added that peace talks cannot succeed unless Hamas takes part.

Zahar wrote that the world must not forget that Israel turned the Palestinians into refugees. He added that the Palestinians understand the need for patience against Israel, which “is all too vulnerable to time, fatigue and demographics.”

The newspaper described Zahar as “foreign minister in the government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, which was elected in January 2006” – even though that government was declared illegal by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas following Hamas’ takeover of the Gaza Strip.

The answer, we have learned recently, is that — with President Bush’s clear knowledge and support — some of the very highest officials in the land not only approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of harsh interrogations and helped to create a legal structure to shield from justice those who followed the orders.

We have long known that the Justice Department tortured the law to give its Orwellian blessing to torturing people, and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of ways to abuse prisoners. But recent accounts by ABC News and The Associated Press said that all of the president’s top national security advisers at the time participated in creating the interrogation policy: Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; Colin Powell, the secretary of state; John Ashcroft, the attorney general; and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence.

Continued . . .

By Robert Parry | Consortiumnews.com, April 18, 2008

In the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, with Sen. Joe McCarthy near the peak of his guilt-by-association bullying, he famously attacked the patriotism of a young Boston lawyer who worked for Joseph Welch, the Army’s chief legal representative.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Welch responded. “Have you left no sense of decency?”

Now, as Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues to sink into a mud pile of guilt-by-association smears against Barack Obama, Welch’s famous question could be posed to the Clintons and their supporters: How far are they prepared to go – and have they “left no sense of decency?”

In the April 16 debate in Philadelphia, Sen. Clinton pounced when her husband’s former adviser, George Stephanopoulos, finally asked one of her campaign’s long-plotted attack lines – raising a tenuous association between Obama and an aging Vietnam-era radical William Ayers.

Acting as an ABC News debate moderator, Stephanopoulos — and Clinton — also injected a false suggestion that Ayers had either hailed the 9/11 attacks or had used the occasion as a grotesque opportunity to call for more bombings.

(In reality, an earlier interview about his memoir was coincidently published by the New York Times in its Sept. 11, 2001, edition, which went to press on Sept. 10, before the attacks. But Stephanopoulos and Clinton left the impression with the public that Ayers’s comments represented a ghoulish reaction to the 9/11 attacks.)

In another guilt-by-association moment, Clinton linked Obama, via his former church pastor Jeremiah Wright, to Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan and a Hamas representative who had been allowed to publish an essay in the church’s newsletter.

“You know, these are problems, and they raise questions in people’s minds,” Clinton said. “And so this is a legitimate area, as everything is when we run for office, for people to be exploring and trying to find answers.”

So, Sen. Clinton believes it is now justified to question Sen. Obama’s patriotism by delving into the opinions of people who have played even minor roles in his political and personal life – or even people who associated with those people.

Continued . . .

Bruce Loudon, South Asia correspondent | The Australian, April 19, 2008

MOVES to drive Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf into a corner and force him to quit were being finalised last night as part of a parliamentary package that could end with Pakistan’s sacked chief justice being reinstated as early as next week.

Sources said constitutional changes were being prepared that would “so cripple (Mr Musharraf’s) authority in all respects” that he will have “no option but to bow out without facing impeachment”.

Mr Musharraf’s ouster would be a blow to the administration of US President George W. Bush and its widely criticised policy on Pakistan, attacked yesterday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the Congress in Washington.

The GAO held that even though it faced an enhanced terrorist threat from al-Qa’ida safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the administration had failed to develop a plan to deal with the situation.

In what was being described last night as a “searing report” the GAO sharply criticised the administration, saying it had relied too heavily on Pakistani security forces to deal with a major US national security problem.

Continued . . .

The Independent, April 19, 2008

In shocking testimonies that reveal abductions, beatings and torture, Israeli soldiers confess the horror they have visited on Hebron

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

NAYEF HASHLAMOUN/REUTERS/CORBIS

Israeli soldiers detain a Palestinian student during a protest in Hebron in 2005. Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the Israeli military

• enlarge

The dark-haired 22-year-old in black T-shirt, blue jeans and red Crocs is understandably hesitant as he sits at a picnic table in the incongruous setting of a beauty spot somewhere in Israel. We know his name and if we used it he would face a criminal investigation and a probable prison sentence.

The birds are singing as he describes in detail some of what he did and saw others do as an enlisted soldier in Hebron. And they are certainly criminal: the incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back – for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten “to a pulp” when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.

The young man left the army only at the end of last year, and his decision to speak is part of a concerted effort to expose the moral price paid by young Israeli conscripts in what is probably the most problematic posting there is in the occupied territories. Not least because Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the military, 24/7, to protect the notably hardline Jewish settlers there. He says firmly that he now regrets what repeatedly took place during his tour of duty.

Continued . . .

“Just as the Wall is Called a Fence, So are the Mercenaries Called Contractors”

By DAN GLAZEBROOK | CounterPunch, April 18, 2008

Robert Fisk has a well-earned reputation as one of the most honest and hard hitting foreign correspondents in the British media. He has worked in Northern Ireland, where he exposed the presence of the SAS in the mid-1970s, as well as Bosnia, Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon. It was here, as a witness to the immediate aftermath of the Israeli-organised Sabra and Shatila massacre of 2000 Palestinian refugees, that his journalism took on its current form: angry, passionate, and as he puts it “partial on the side of the victims”–a style of journalism which, unfortunately, is not shared by many of his colleagues in the profession. In the midst of a torrent of lies and propaganda emanating from our media about British and US policy on the Middle East, Fisk’s writings are a breath of fresh air–although the hellish reality he depicts does not always make for pleasant reading.

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