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Archive for September, 2008

Mad and bad – but the West will turn a blind eye

September 7, 2008

Dogged by allegations of crime and corruption, Pakistan’s new president could lose power to his army if he fails his restive people

Jamima Khan | The Independent, Sep 7, 2008

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President Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, formerly known as Mr Ten Per Cent because of kickbacks received during his wife’s time in office, has become one of the most powerful and potentially dangerous men in the subcontinent. Mad and bad. And now omnipotent. He is head of state, supreme commander of the armed forces, has the power to dismiss parliament, appoint the heads of the army and election commission – and, as chairman of the National Command Authority, has the final say in the deployment of nuclear weapons.

Earlier Zardari vowed to relinquish the executive powers that Pervez Musharraf gave to the originally ceremonial presidency. Now he’s evasive. Despite the fact that he has little public support (14 per cent, according to a recent poll), holds no seat in parliament and has no mandate other than his association with the Bhutto name, he had every right to nominate himself or anyone else as President. His party – inherited from his late wife – was democratically elected in February and has the largest number of seats in parliament.

The man who now has his finger on the nuclear button was only last year declared unfit to stand trial in a UK court on account of multiple mental problems. According to court documents filed by his psychiatrists, he suffers from dementia, major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress after spending 11 of the past 20 years in jail in Pakistan. According to their testimony last year, he found it hard even to recall the names of his wife and children.

He has long had memory problems. In the past he has been unable to recall whether he was the owner of a multimillion-pound Surrey estate (he thought not, but later took possession of it) or if $60m (£34m) in a frozen Swiss bank account was actually his. He also thought that he had graduated from the London School of Economics, or was it the London School of Business Studies? There are no records of his doing either.

The doctors’ diagnoses of severe mental ill-health rid Zardari of his corruption case in the UK. Last November’s National Reconciliation Ordinance, brokered by the Americans to allow Bhutto’s return to Pakistan and passed by Musharraf, rid him of the rest. It also guaranteed him lifelong immunity from prosecution for corruption. He appears to have made medical history and rid himself of his dementia in time to become President. The only thing he can’t shake off is his appalling reputation.

Zardari has long been dogged by allegations of crime and corruption. In 2003, a Swiss magistrate found him guilty in absentia of laundering $10m. Musharraf’s National Accountability Bureau estimated that he had looted up to $1.5bn from the treasury during his wife’s two terms in office. In 1990, he was in trouble for allegedly tying a remote-controlled bomb to the leg of a businessman and sending him into a bank to withdraw money from his account as a pay-off. More sinisterly, he was charged with complicity in the murder of his brother-in-law Murtaza Bhutto, but the case was never tried. He was also implicated in the 1996 murder of a judge, Justice Nizam Ahmed, and his lawyer son.

Even if Zardari is given the benefit of the doubt and has changed after his wife’s assassination and his many years in jail, his behaviour in the run-up to his election as President proves he still can’t be trusted. He has already reneged on several written agreements made with the coalition, including his pledge to field a non-partisan candidate for president, as well as his pre-election promise to reinstate the judges deposed by Musharraf. If reinstated, they could repeal the amnesty granted to him and reopen corruption investigations.

Inside Pakistan, people are despondent. The economic situation is worse than ever, with inflation at almost 25 per cent. Outside Pakistan, despite his reputation, he is tolerated. He’s seen as pro-West. He will be another “key ally in the war on terror”.

America is stepping up its military campaign in the region, not least because George Bush wants Osama bin Laden’s grizzled head before the US presidential election on 4 November. Strikes against Pakistan’s tribal areas by US/Nato forces are not uncommon, but on Wednesday, for the first time, ground forces attacked a village on the Pakistani side of the border, in South Waziristan, killing 20 innocent people. Tribesmen are up in arms – literally – and have promised revenge, and there has been widespread condemnation. If Zardari is seen to be tolerating such attacks by foreign troops inside Pakistan, a violent backlash is likely.

On Friday, he pledged to eliminate the Taliban. A tall order. Since Musharraf joined the “war on terror” at US bidding and expense and sent Pakistani troops into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Pashtun tribesmen have been falling over their Kalashnikovs to join the Taliban. With hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people from Bajaur as a result of conflict, weekly reports of aerial attacks and collateral damage, the Taliban movement is growing in strength by the day.

And it’s not just the formidable Pashtuns on the warpath. The Taliban is operating on fertile soil. Nationwide, 71 per cent of Pakistanis oppose co-operating with the US in counterterrorism and 51 per cent oppose fighting the Taliban at all, according to a June Gallup poll. The vast majority of Pakistan’s 190 million people may not like the Taliban, but they dislike the US and what is seen as its proxy army even more. Even within the army, there are rebels who object to being forced to kill their own people. The majority of the population is also deeply opposed to what it sees as a foreign occupation in Afghanistan, with more than 80 per cent favouring a negotiated settlement and withdrawal.

Suicide attacks within Pakistan – unheard of before 9/11 – are now so commonplace they barely make the front pages. From the wilds of the tribal areas to the mosques of west London, the war on terror has been hopelessly counterproductive, despite being fuelled by millions of dollars. Its chief beneficiaries have been the Taliban and their sympathisers who feed on the instability.

Zardari has replaced Musharraf, but their policies will be the same. He is unlikely to prove more successful at tackling extremism. His already meagre popularity rating is expected to dwindle rapidly as he is increasingly perceived as another US stooge. And despite all his powers, he is still less powerful than the army. As ever, if the politicians fail to steer Pakistan through its myriad problems, the military, which has notched up 33 years of rule in Pakistan’s 61-year history, will step in.

What is depressing is not that everything now changes with the election of Asif Ali Zardari, but that everything stays the same.

Tags:'Mr 10 Per Cent', Asif Ali Zardari, corruption charges, economic situation, mental and health problems, power, South Waziristan, suicide attacks, Swiss magistrate, US military operations
Posted in Commentary, Pakistan | Leave a Comment »

Bush may be going. But the religious right is fighting fit

September 7, 2008

Stryker McGuire
The Observer , Sunday September 7 2008

Not so long ago, Britain and the rest of Europe were rejoicing in America’s presidential choice of Barack Obama versus John McCain. The hated George W Bush would be gone and a sensible, smart leader would inhabit the White House again – whoever won. The Economist put McCain and Obama on its cover and declared, ‘This is the most impressive choice America has had for a very long time.’ Praise the Lord.

Then along came Sarah Palin, the lightly travelled Christian evangelical McCain chose as his running mate. Much has been made of the soap-operatic side of the governor of Alaska: the caribou-hunting, mooseburger-eating mother-of-five who drives herself to work, her beauty queen past, her pregnant, unwed 17-year-old daughter. What really matters is what she believes in and why McCain selected her. On both counts, much of the world outside America will not be pleased.

Palin describes herself and her family as ‘typical’. But to most of the planet, she’s an exotic. She’s a fundamentalist Christian. She advocated teaching creationism alongside evolution in Alaska’s schools. Her right-to-life convictions extend to stem cell research, which she opposes.

She’s opposed to gay marriage. She’s about as right as a Republican can get. She does not believe human behaviour is responsible for global warming. She supports home schooling and other alternatives to traditional state education. She’s anti-gun control; for example, she supports ending the ban on handguns that has existed in Washington DC for more than three decades.

Palin has said she would not force her views on others. Indeed, she kept a campaign pledge not to push as governor for mandatory inclusion of creationism in her state’s school curriculum. But she cannot pretend always to divorce her personal views from matters of state and governance. In praying that a natural gas pipeline would be built in Alaska, she used traditional evangelical language. She believes the US mission in Iraq is a ‘task that is from God’.

The McCain who chose Palin is not the McCain familiar to many of us outside the US. The McCain we know is a worldly, well-informed, straight-talking Republican who’s a likeable fixture at policy talking shops in London and Berlin, a man at ease with men and women of international affairs across the world. His views do not always coincide with his chums in world capitals – eg, his hawkishness on Iraq – but he’s long been seen as a safe and pragmatic pair of hands on big issues like trade (he’s a free trader, more so than Obama) and the environment (unlike Palin, he accepts that human behaviour is a contributor to climate change).

The McCain who chose Palin is someone who found himself in a political panic. In the weeks before the Democratic national convention, the polls put Obama and McCain head to head. Predictably, Obama got a boost after the Democratic lovefest in Denver. But even discounting that, at a time of widespread disaffection with Bush and the Republican party more generally, the inertia of public opinion heading into an election seemed to favour Obama. The natural inclination of many of McCai n’s advisers was to turn to the base, the far right wing of the party, much of it evangelical, whose money, hard work and get-out-the-vote fervour could make a big difference on 4 November.

Under other circumstances, McCain might have gone for somebody more like himself – Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a pro-Iraq war Democrat-turned-independent, or former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, chosen by Bush to be the first director of the Office of Homeland Security after 9/11. But Lieberman, who is Jewish, and Ridge, a Catholic, are supporters of abortion rights. McCain occupies a kind of middle ground: he’s in favour of overturning Roe versus Wade, the Supreme Court decision upholding a woman’s right to abortion, but he’s against prosecuting women who have abortions. If how to appeal to the base was the question, neither Lieberman nor Ridge was the answer.

Palin was. Her inexperience is easily ridiculed, especially when Cindy McCain, John’s wife, comes along and tries to portray Palin as a keen Kremlinologist (‘Remember: Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia. So, it’s not as if she doesn’t understand what’s at stake.’) Palin’s message to the world is much like the one she delivered last Wednesday to her detractors in America: ‘Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion – I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.’

The message of her candidacy, the message of McCain’s choice, is equally plain. America’s religious right is back. In fact, despite all the wishful thinking riding on the departure of Bush, the religious right never really went away.

· Stryker McGuire is a contributing editor of ‘Newsweek’ and editor of ‘International Quarterly’.

Tags:Alaska, Barack Obama, Christian evangelical, George W. Bush, John McCain, religious right, Sarah Palin, US presidential campaign
Posted in Commentary, USA | 1 Comment »

US attack inside Pakistan threatens dangerous new war

September 6, 2008

by Peter Symonds

Global Research , September 5, 2008
wsws.org

A ground assault by US Special Forces troops on a Pakistani village on Wednesday threatens to expand the escalating Afghanistan war into its neighbour. Pakistan is already confronting a virtual civil war in its tribal border regions as the country’s military, under pressure from Washington, seeks to crush Islamist militias supporting the anti-occupation insurgency inside Afghanistan.

The attack, which left up to 20 civilians dead, marks a definite escalation of US operations inside Pakistan. While US Predator drones and war planes have been used previously to bomb targets, Wednesday’s raid was the first clear case of an assault by American ground troops inside Pakistani territory. The White House and Pentagon have refused to comment on the incident but various unnamed US officials have acknowledged to the media that the raid took place and indicated that there could be more to come.

The attack was unprovoked. US troops landed by helicopter in the village of Jalal Khei in South Waziristan at around 3 a.m. and immediately targetted three houses. The engagement lasted for about 30 minutes and left between 15 and 20 people dead, including women and children.

A US official acknowledged to CNN that there may have been women and children in the immediate vicinity but when the mission began “everyone came out firing from the compound”. Even this flimsy justification for a naked act of aggression is probably a lie. “It was very terrible as all of the residents were killed while asleep,” a villager Din Mohammad told the Pakistan-based International News.

The newspaper provided details of the dead and injured: nine family members of Faujan Wazir, including four women, two children and three men; Faiz Mohammad Wazir, his wife and two other family members; and Nazar Jan and his mother. Two other members of Nazar Jan’s family were seriously wounded.

The US and international media have described the Angoor Adda area around the village as “a known stronghold of the Taliban and Al Qaeda” but offered no evidence to support the claim. A villager, Jabbar Wazir, told the International News: “All of those killed were poor farmers and had nothing to do with the Taliban.”

In comments to the International Herald Tribune, a senior Pakistani official branded the raid a “cowboy action” that had failed to capture or kill any senior Al Qaeda or Taliban leader. “If they had gotten anyone big, they would be bragging about it,” he commented.

The attack has provoked outrage in Pakistan. Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement branding the attack as “a gross violation of Pakistan territory” and summoned US ambassador Anne Patterson to provide an explanation. North West Frontier Province (NWFP) governor Owais Ahmed Ghani declared that “the people expect that the armed forces of Pakistan would rise to defend the sovereignty of the country”. He put the number killed at 20.

Pakistani military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said the raid was “completely counterproductive” and risked provoking an uprising even among those tribesmen who have previously supported the army’s operations in the border areas.

The International News reported: “Angry villagers later blocked the main road between Pakistan and Afghanistan in Angoor Adda by placing the bodies of their slain tribesmen on the road. They chanted slogans against the US and NATO military authorities for crossing the border without any provocation and killing innocent people.”

The US raid has compounded the political crisis inside Pakistan, where the selection of a new president is due to take place tomorrow. The ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) has been engaged in a delicate balancing act—continuing to support US demands for a crackdown by the Pakistani military along the border with Afghanistan, while trying to defuse widespread anger and fend off accusations that it is a US puppet.

Reaffirming his support for the Bush administration’s bogus “war on terror”, PPP presidential candidate Asif Ali Zardari declared in a column in yesterday’s Washington Post: “We stand with the United States, Britain, Spain and others who have been attacked.” Zardari went on to promise that he would ensure that Pakistani territory would not be used to launch raids on US and NATO forces inside Afghanistan.

However, as PPP spokesman Farhatullah Babar explained, the US attack was politically compromising. “We have been very clear that any action on this side of the border must be taken by Pakistani forces themselves,” he told the Associated Press. “It is very embarrassing for the government. The people will start blaming the government of Pakistan.”

An expanded war

The decision to launch Wednesday’s attack was undoubtedly taken at the top levels of the White House and Pentagon. As the New York Times reported in articles earlier this year, a high-level debate has been taking place in Washington over the use of US Special Forces inside Pakistan as well as the intensification of existing CIA operations, which include Predator missile strikes.

A meeting in early January involved Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and top national security and intelligence officials advisers. According to the New York Times on January 6, options discussed included “loosening restrictions on the CIA to strike selected targets in Pakistan” and operations involving US Special Operations forces, such as the Navy Seals.

The Times reported on January 27 that then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf rejected proposals put by US Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael Hayden for an expanded American combat presence in Pakistan, either through covert CIA missions or joint operations with Pakistani security forces. While apparently accepting the refusal, the US intensified pressure on Pakistan to bring its border areas under control.

As the anti-occupation insurgency has expanded in Afghanistan, claiming a growing number of US and NATO casualties, Pakistan has become a convenient scapegoat. Washington has repeatedly accused the Pakistani military of failing to suppress Islamist militia and alleged that Pakistani military intelligence is actively supporting anti-US guerrillas inside Afghanistan.

Admiral Mullen has held five meetings since February with his Pakistani counterpart, army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to press for tougher action. The most recent took place last weekend aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, stationed in the Arabian Sea. In comments to CNN, a US official “declined to say” whether there were any new agreements for US troops to operate inside Pakistani airspace or on the ground to attack Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Whether the Pakistani military quietly approved Wednesday’s attack or not, the Bush administration is making clear that it intends to extend the war into Pakistan. Citing top American officials, the New York Times reported on Wednesday that the raid “could be the opening salvo in a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces against the Taliban and Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, a secret plan that Defence Secretary Robert Gates has been advocating for months within President George W. Bush’s war council”.

This utterly reckless policy, which risks the eruption of a US war against Pakistan, is bipartisan in character. In fact, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has repeatedly declared his support for broadening the “war on terror” through unilateral US attacks on insurgents based inside Pakistan. His candidacy has been strongly backed by sections of the US establishment that have been critical of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq for undermining US interests. Far from opposing aggressive US military action, Obama has become the political vehicle for shifting its focus to Afghanistan and Pakistan as the means of advancing US strategic interests in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

The US attack on the village of Jalal Khei is another demonstration that the shift in policy, with all its potentially catastrophic consequences, is already underway.

Peter Symonds is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Peter Symonds

Tags:Afghanistan, attack, civilians killed, Pakistan, reactions in Pakistan, South Waziristan, Taliban, US special forces
Posted in Pakistan, Uncategorized, US policy | Leave a Comment »

Wide protests in Kashmir Valley on Coordination Committee call

September 6, 2008

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Police quell demonstration at Geelani’s house

ARIF SHAFI WANI, M TASIM ZAHID | Greater Kashmir, Sep 5, 2008

Srinagar, Sep 5: The call for peaceful protests after Friday prayers by the Coordination Committee evoked tremendous response across the Valley in spite of heavy rains in the afternoon.
However police used extensive force to quell peaceful processions outside the house of Hurriyat (G) chairman, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, at Hyderpora here and south Kashmir’s Islamabad district injuring dozens of persons.
The Coordination Committee, which is an amalgam of various pro-freedom parties, traders, lawyers and members of the civil society, had called for peaceful protests after Friday prayers.
Maisuma sit-in
Pro-freedom slogans rented Maisuma and its adjoining areas when hundreds of people staged a peaceful sit-in there amidst heavy rains.
After the Friday prayers a massive procession took off from Central Jamia Masjid Gaw Kadal, led by president of Jamait-e-Ahlihadis, Maulana Showkat. Hurriyat leaders Shahid-ul-Islam and Javid Ahmad Mir and Showkat Bakshi and Bashir Ahmad Bhat of JKLF participated in the sit-in at Maisuma.
The procession was joined by a large number of people, including the traders and shopkeepers of Lal Chowk and its adjoining areas. Shouting pro-freedom slogans the protesters staged a sit-in for half-an-hour at the Maisuma Chowk.
“We want freedom,” the protesters continuously shouted as the troopers of paramilitary CRPF looked on. Addressing the gathering, Maulana Showkat appealed people to maintain unity and make programmes of the Coordination Committee successful.
Talking to Greater Kashmir on the spot, Shahid-ul-Islam termed the peaceful protests across the Valley as huge success. “India cannot suppress the sentiments and aspirations of Kashmiris. The administration led by puppet Governor made all attempts to stop the Lal Chowk march. But we are determined to carry out the march soon and no power can stop it,” Shahid-ul-Islam said.

Continued . . .

Tags:Indian occupation, injured people, Kashmir valley, Lal Chowk, lawyers demonstrate, peaceful protests, police action, pro-freedom parties, protests in Varmul, Srinagar, Syed Ali Shah Geelani
Posted in Human rights, India, Kashmir | Leave a Comment »

At Least Five More Civilians Killed in New US Strike on Pakistan-Afghan Border

September 6, 2008

Antiwar.com, September 5, 2008

Last night we reported a story, also run in Pakistan’s media, which cited an air-strike by a US drone which killed at least six people. The strike reportedly occurred on the outskirts of Miramshah, a small town in North Waziristan just a few miles from the Afghanistan border. While that is essentially correct, there was an important detail that emerged only this morning: the strike hit the village of Al Must, which though quite close to Miramshah is actually on the Afghan side of the border. A Pakistani Army spokesman confirmed that none of the missiles landed in Pakistani territory.

Rather, according to residents, three missiles hit two residential compounds in the small Afghan border village, killing somewhere between six and 12 people. It was suggested that some of those killed were Arabs, and that they may have been renting living space in the homes, a common practice in the region.

But also among the dead were two women and three children, so we can conclude that at a minimum five civilians were slain in the attack. There has as yet been no official comment from the Afghan government regarding the incident, but President Hamid Karzai has been harshly critical of US-inflicted civilian casualties in the wake of a massive strike in Herat which killed 90 civilians, and he warned yesterday that the civilians deaths were straining relations with the foreign forces operating in the country.

compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]

Tags:civilians killed, Herat killings, Miramshah, Pakistan, US missile strikes
Posted in Pakistan, US policy | Leave a Comment »

How the Bush Administration is Helping McCain

September 6, 2008

The Fake U.S. Victory in Iraq

By PATRICK COCKBURN | Counterpunch, Sep 3, 2009

Political events in Iraq are seldom what they seem. The hand- over by the US military of control of Anbar province, once the heartland of the Sunni rebellion, to Iraqi forces is a case in point. The US will keep 25,000 American soldiers in Anbar, so the extent to which the Iraqi government will really take over is debatable. But the future of Anbar is a crucial pointer to the fate of Iraq. It is a vast area and one of the few parts of Iraq that is overwhelmingly Sunni.

The Iraqi government is dominated by Shia Islamic parties in alliance with Kurdish nationalists. The vital question now is whether or not this Shia-dominated government can reassure the Sunni minority that they are not going to be overrun as the US withdraws its forces. The Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is in a very confident mood. In the past four months he feels he has successfully faced down the Shia militiamen of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army by taking back control of Basra, Sadr City and Amarah. Then he refused to sign a new security accord with the US which President George Bush wanted to see agreed by August 31.

In the past few weeks he has been confronting his Kurdish allies over the future of the oil city of Kirkuk and the town of Khanaqin.

Mr Maliki may be overplaying his hand but there is no doubt that the Iraqi state is becoming more powerful in Iraq and the Mahdi Army, the Americans and the Kurds less so. The Americans in particular feel that he exaggerates the extent to which his success against the Mahdi Army was because of the new strength of the Iraqi security forces.

These troops were doing badly until they received American support.
Nevertheless, Mr Maliki’s position is strong. He seems to have realized that he may need the US, but the US also cannot do without him and is in no position to replace him as it did with his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

Much of what the White House is now doing is done to help the Republicans in the presidential election. The aim is to give the impression that Iraq has finally come right for the US and victory is finally in its grasp. The surge is promoted as the strategy by which the tide was turned and it is true that the Sunni uprising against the US occupation has largely ended.

But it has done so for reasons that have little to do with the surge or American actions of any kind. Crucial to the success of the government against the Mahdi Army has been the support of Iran. It is they who arranged for the Shia militiamen to go home.

It takes real cheek for Mr Bush to claim yesterday that “Anbar is no longer lost to al-Qa’ida” since during the last presidential election in 2004, he was claiming that the media was exaggerating the success of the insurgents.

Patrick Cockburn is the Ihe author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.

Tags:Anbar province, Iraq, Iraqi government, Nuri al-Maliki, presidential election, US forces, US occupation
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Antiwar March Ends In Tense Standoff, 396 Arrests

September 6, 2008

The final night of the convention led to confrontations between police and protesters. At least 396 people were arrested, an official said this morning.

by Curt Brown, Terry Collins, Randy Furst and Heron Marquez Estrada | St Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune, Sep 5, 2008

Police arrested scores more people Thursday night after another series of tense showdowns with protesters on the final night of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

Police push people back after a person was arrested during a protest at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Sweeping into the State Capitol grounds in riot gear, police used snowplows, horses and dump trucks to seal off downtown from antiwar demonstrators attempting a march to the Xcel Energy Center.

“They chose not to leave when told to do so and now everyone’s paying the price,” said one officer on the scene.

This morning, the Joint Information Center said 396 people were arrested during Thursday’s demonstrations, and a total of 818 people were arrested during the four-day convention. The numbers are preliminary; an official count will be released later today, said a spokeswoman for the center, which has been providing information about arrests and security during the convention.

Most of those arrested were ticketed and released, the spokeswoman said.

Thursday night, as police blocked off bridges to stop demonstrators from getting downtown, a rolling series of sit-down protests started on the John Ireland Boulevard bridge over Interstate 94. The arrests ended with more than 200 demonstrators, squatting with their hands on their heads, taken into custody on the Marion Street bridge.

Police used tear gas and pepper spray to quell some of the unrest.

A group of more than 700 demonstrators had a permit to rally and march. But they were angry the permit expired at 5 p.m., before delegates began arriving at the Xcel Energy Center for GOP presidential nominee John McCain’s acceptance speech.

Among those arrested were two Associated Press reporters covering the event. They were issued a citation and detained, along with a KARE-11 TV photographer and more than a dozen other members of the media. All were released later in the evening.

“They’re trying to steal our protest — we have to ignore the police intimidation,” Katrina Plotz, an organizer with the Anti-War Committee, hollered from a stage in front of the Capitol steps.

But ignoring the police wasn’t easy during one of the largest shows of force on the fifth straight day of confrontations in St. Paul.

Tags:antiwar march, arrests, demonstrations, police action, Republican National Convention, United States
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Analysis: Pakistan’s future leader?

September 6, 2008

Al Jazeera, Sep 5, 2008

By Kamran Rehmat, Pakistani analyst and news editor

The alliance between Zardari (left) and Sharif collapsed over the failure to reinstate deposed judges [GALLO/GETTY]

President Asif Ali Zardari.It is a description that has led to much disquiet in Pakistan ever since the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) named him their candidate for the highest office.

The presidential election, which follows the resignation of Pervez Musharraf, the former president, last month after nine years in power, will be held on September 6 and legislators will be asked to cast their ballots.

Historically, the day is observed as Defence of Pakistan Day.

However, apart from party loyalists, few have been able to defend the PPP decision to allow Benazir Bhutto’s widower to occupy the most powerful office in Pakistan.

The president is the supreme commander of the armed forces, the head of the National Command Authority — theoretically, with a finger on the nuclear button — and has the power to dismiss the government and parliament.

He also makes the most critical appointments from armed forces chiefs and provincial governors to the country’s chief justice.

Such wide-ranging powers for a man with a controversial past and an even more controversial present has led to much discontent about what awaits Pakistan after his election as president.

Trust deficit

Pakistan election facts

Pakistan’s electoral college is made up of two houses of parliament and four provincial assemblies.

The National Assembly is the lower house, and the Senate is the upper house.

In all, 700 votes are up for grabs (but for the two seats in the National Assembly still waiting bye-polls) under the formula governing presidential election.

Given the party position and affiliations, if all legislators vote according to party lines, Zardari should be able to secure at least 424 votes, against 150 of PML-N’s Saeeduz Zaman Siddiqui and 126 by PML-Q’s Senator Mushahid Hussain.

Zardari anointed himself the party’s de facto leader following Bhutto’s assassination last December citing a handwritten will she purportedly wrote.Many doubt it is genuine.

He then sidelined her circle of trusted lieutenants and repeatedly reneged on public pledges of restoring deposed judges.

Almost every newspaper of national reckoning has balked at the prospect of Zardari occupying the presidency, given the gnawing credibility gap and his uncertain mental health following revelations made by the Financial Times last month.

Zardari was diagnosed in 2007 with serious illnesses including dementia, major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder in medical reports spanning over two years.

According to the paper, court records showed Zardari had used the medical diagnoses to argue successfully for the postponement of a now-defunct English High Court case in which Pakistan’s government was suing him for alleged corruption.

The PPP denies Zardari’s health is in doubt but pointedly evades any discussion on the specifics of the medical records.

The elections have so worried some that even, Shaheen Sehbai, the group editor of The News, a leading Pakistani newspaper, and a self-professed Zardari friend, called on the army “to restore balance”.

“Let the power of the guns and barrels be used, for a change, in the interest of the nation and the people. It is obvious that the politicians cannot clean the dirt as they are neither visionaries, nor that tall, nor experienced, nor prepared nor motivated to look beyond their noses,” Sehbai argued.

Fantastic script

For Zardari, the spoils of the highest office would mark the culmination of a fantastic script even by Pakistan’s notoriously, unpredictable plots: from a playboy to president.

After marrying Bhutto in 1987, he quickly became a prime mover-and-shaker when only a year later she rose to become the Muslim world’s first woman prime minister. Bhutto was ousted on corruption charges in 1990.

Bhutto won a second term in 1993 when her nemesis, Nawaz Sharif, was also shown the door, but three years later her own handpicked president sacked her government on similar charges of misrule. Subsequently, Zardari was jailed and Bhutto went into exile.

The charges, which the Bhutto couple always asserted were politically motivated, could not be proved. Zardari was released in 2004 after spending eight years in jail.

Comeback trail

The two won a reprieve when decade-old corruption cases were quashed in 2007 under a controversial deal with Musharraf.

This was part of the former president’s so-called national reconciliation drive overseen by foreign powers to facilitate a new power equation to continue the war-on-terror with the ex-general as president and Bhutto his new prime minister.

Bhutto was assassinated following a public rally in Rawalpindi on December 27 and Musharraf resigned under the threat of impeachment only last month.

His defeat came after a sweeping rejection of his allies in the February 18 polls, which returned his sworn opponents to power.

Following Bhutto’s assassination, Zardari returned to take the reins of the PPP and stunned his party by producing a handwritten will, which purportedly, directed the party to follow her husband’s lead until they decided with consensus on a new leader.

Far from evolving consensus, Zardari quickly anointed their 19-year-old son Bilawal as the party’s chairman while he pledged to look after the party until the young scion completed his education in faraway Oxford.

The co-chairman has since sidelined the inner circle of his slain spouse, prominent among them Amin Fahim, a veteran who led the party in Bhutto’s absence, and was primed to become the PM.

Despite consolidating his hold on the party, critics noted how Zardari did not trust any member of his party to be even a covering candidate, let alone run for the highest office.

He named Faryal Talpur, his sister, to be the alternate candidate.

Hour of reckoning

Not everyone is convinced that Zardari has earned his spurs. Yousuf Nazar, an economist and author of The Gathering Storm in Pakistan: Political Economy of a Security State says the PPP leader has a misplaced sense of overconfidence:

“Zardari needs to understand that the power bequeathed to him by that larger-than-life figure, Benazir Bhutto, and Musharraf’s exit had more to do with his own blunders and with the policy of the US that never really trusted him in the first place and had become increasingly frustrated with his double-dealing particularly since February 2008,” Nazar said.

Of particular concern to Pakistanis is how Zardari will perform once he is ensconced in the presidency. For a man who runs the party by personal fiat — the directions come through two mobile phones which he keeps in each of his jacket pockets — it will be a major test of his political skills to stay apolitical.

Traditionally, a civilian president is expected to resign from his party to maintain the neutrality of the office. To be sure, his predecessor in the party, Farooq Leghari, too, had to give up the party membership to become president in 1993.

Word is already doing the rounds that Zardari may hand over the day-to-day running of the party to his sister Faryal but such a move could lead to further fissures within the party.

The writer is News Editor at Dawn News, an independent Pakistani TV channel.

The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of Al Jazeera.

Tags:Asif Ali Zardari, corruption charges, marriage to Bhutto, PPP, presidential powers, sacked judges
Posted in Pakistan | Leave a Comment »

Revelations of an Abu Ghraib Interrogator

September 6, 2008

By Aaron Glantz | Inter-Press Service News

SAN FRANCISCO, Sep 4 – Few people have thought as much about the morality of the U.S. occupation of Iraq than Joshua Casteel, a former U.S. Army interrogator who served at Abu Ghraib prison in the wake of the detainee abuse scandal there.

Once a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and raised in an evangelical Christian home, Casteel became a conscientious objector while he was stationed at the prison.

It wasn’t the kind of abuse shown in the famous graphic images that made him feel morally compelled to leave the military — Casteel says that kind of behaviour had ceased by the time he showed up in June 2004 — but the experience of gleaning information speaking to the detainees in their own language.

Those experiences, and the spiritual awakening Casteel experienced inside the walls of the prison, are contained in “Letters from Abu Ghraib”, a compendium of e-mail messages he sent home from the prison, which was published last month by Iowa’s Essay Press.

The e-mails, compiled in a lean 118-page volume, are less concerned with the details of prison operations than their moral implications. By what right, the former interrogator asks, does one derive the authority to question prisoners as part of a military occupation?

It’s an important question to ask and timely too given the steady growth in the number of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. custody over the course of its occupation of Iraq. Pentagon statistics show the U.S. military now holds over 24,000 “security detainees” in Iraq — more than double the number incarcerated by Coalition at the time of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal four and a half years ago.

U.S. forces are holding nearly all of these persons indefinitely, without an arrest warrant, without charge, and with no right to any type of open legal proceedings. It’s perhaps a mark of the failure of the United States’ political and religious establishments that it falls to a U.S. Army Specialist like Joshua Casteel to wrestle with the moral difficulties of these massive imprisonments. “Letters from Abu Ghraib” shows how the ethical failures of their leaders affect soldiers on the ground.

When he first arrives at Abu Ghraib’s interrogation centre, Casteel tells his family he really loves his work. “I see my job much more as a Father Confessor than an interrogator,” he writes, “As a Confessor you cannot coerce a person to reveal that which they wish to hide. A Confessor’s aim is to help the one confessing to be sincere, to arrive at the kind of contrition that actually desires self-disclosure — and to that end, empathy and understanding go a long way.”

But Casteel, who prays daily and considers “keeping the liturgy with others and taking the Eucharist — Communion” to be “the most important part of the week,” begins to feel uncomfortable after just a few weeks on the ground.

“The weight of the job sometimes is more painfully present to me than at other times,” he writes a month into the deployment. He is uncomfortable “exploiting” prisoners for their “intelligence” value rather then interacting with them as fully equal human beings.

Making matters worse is that many of the detainees he interrogated turned out to be completely innocent.

“I was constantly being asked, ‘Why am I being held here? I want answers!'” Casteel told IPS. “But that was my job. We were supposed to be finding answers to our questions, but we kept being put into situations that were incredibly puzzling because talking to people was like trying to get blood from a turnip. They were the ones that had a greater justification for the need to have answers.”

Faced with such a dilemma, Casteel turns to an army chaplain for help. “We talked, I vexed and I summoned whatever strength we could conclude upon to go back to my interrogation…He prayed me back into combat,” Casteel writes. “I was no longer afraid to demand authority, to play upon certain weaknesses of my detainee, and to question in a most heated fashion — because ultimately, I thought, it would lead me to a more accurate assessment of the veracity of his statements.’

“I transgressed no lines of ‘proper conduct,’ but I certainly, and without hesitation, used a man’s anxieties, weaknesses and fears, and my particular place of power and dominance to assess him according to his word…And I even left with what I thought was a clearer picture of the man I was assessing — perhaps to his benefit. So, why did I feel like a complete failure?”

The answer to his question comes in October 2004, five months into his tour at Abu Ghraib.

“I had an interrogation with a 22-year-old Saudi Arabian who was very straightforward that he had come to Iraq to conduct jihad,” Casteel said. “We started having a conversation about religion and ethics and he told me that I was a very strange man who was a Christian but didn’t follow the teachings of Jesus to love my enemy and pray for the persecuted…I told him that I thought he was right and that there was a massive contradiction involved with me doing my job and being a Christian.”

“I wanted to have a conversation with him about ethics and the cycle of vengeance and how idiotic it was that his people said it was okay for him to come and kill me and my people told me it was okay to kill him,” he said in an interview. “Why is it that we can’t find a different path together?”

Since that type of conversation was not possible as a U.S. Army interrogator, Joshua Casteel filed an application for discharge as a conscientious objector. Much to his surprise, his command endorsed it, and offered to speed his transition out of the Army. He now hopes to serve as a bridge between conservative Christians and the antiwar left.

He hopes “Letters from Abu Ghraib” will “give conservative Christians an unfiltered picture of one Christian’s wrestling with violence and also help the secular world get a backstage pass to the way a conservative Christian operates.”

Since his discharge, Casteel converted to Catholicism, attracted by the Church’s tradition of “social teaching,” and has worked with other like-minded Catholics to push the Church play a more active role in bringing the war to an end.

He’s excited his book has been assigned to students at a number of Catholic high schools in the Midwest and the former interrogator has been invited to speak at religious schools from New Jersey to Colorado.

“Catholics are 30 percent of the military. They’re equally 30 percent of Congress,” he said. “The Vatican had a strong rebuke of the Iraq war but the Iraq war could not have happened were it not for Catholics. Christ has turned up in the people of Iraqi bodies and it’s Iraq that’s getting crucified and it’s largely Christian America that’s allowed to be prosperous in the midst of it.”

*IPS correspondent Aaron Glantz is author of the upcoming book “The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans”.

Tags:Abu Ghraib prison, Catholics, Iraq, Joshua Gasteel, Letters from Abu Ghraib, prisoners, US forces, US occupation
Posted in Commentary, Iraq, USA, War Criminals | Leave a Comment »

Top Kashmir separatist leaders under house arrest

September 5, 2008

Hidustan Times, Sep 5, 2008

Agence France-Presse

Srinagar, September 05, 2008

The three top separatist leaders in Kashmir were put under house arrest on Friday ahead of planned protests against Indian-rule during weekly prayers, police said.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Syed Ali Geelani and Yasin Malik were locked in their homes with “strict instructions by police not to try to move out,” a police official told AFP on condition he not be named.

Police and federal paramilitaries were also deployed in thousands in Kashmir’s summer capital Srinagar ahead of the first Friday prayers of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Separatists had told residents of Srinagar and the surrounding Kashmir valley, which have witnessed an upsurge in anti-India protests in recent months, to stage fresh demonstrations on Friday.

“We call upon the people of Kashmir valley to hold peaceful sit-in protests outside the mosques after Friday congregational prayers,” said a statement by a separatist committee.

“The protests should remain peaceful. People have been asked to raise slogans seeking freedom and the right to self-determination,” it said.

Indian Kashmir has been wracked by a Muslim insurgency since 1989.

The recent wave of protests was triggered by a state government plan made public in June to donate land to a Hindu shrine trust in the valley. The decision was later reversed after massive Muslim protests, angering Hindus.

On Sunday, the government agreed to temporarily provide land to the trust during the period of pilgrimage, a move rejected by separatists.

Since June, at least 39 Muslims and three Hindus have died in police shootings in the Kashmir valley and the mainly Hindu area of Jammu, further to the south.

India has detained protest leaders under tough laws and also held scores of separatist activists.

On Thursday, Geelani threatened to launch a “major agitation” against the government if the separatists were not released by the end of Ramadan.

Tags:arrests, deaths in Kashmir, Indian-held Kashmir, Mir Waiz Umer Farooq, pilgrimage, protests against Indian-rule, separatis activists, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, under house arrest
Posted in India, Kashmir | Leave a Comment »

Peace and Justice Post

Archive for September, 2008

Mad and bad – but the West will turn a blind eye

Bush may be going. But the religious right is fighting fit

US attack inside Pakistan threatens dangerous new war

Wide protests in Kashmir Valley on Coordination Committee call

At Least Five More Civilians Killed in New US Strike on Pakistan-Afghan Border

How the Bush Administration is Helping McCain

The Fake U.S. Victory in Iraq

Antiwar March Ends In Tense Standoff, 396 Arrests

The final night of the convention led to confrontations between police and protesters. At least 396 people were arrested, an official said this morning.

Analysis: Pakistan’s future leader?

Revelations of an Abu Ghraib Interrogator

Top Kashmir separatist leaders under house arrest

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The Fake U.S. Victory in Iraq

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