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War Criminals, Including Their Lawyers, Must Be Prosecuted

February 21, 2009

Marjorie Cohn, Feb 19, 2009

Since he took office, President Obama has instituted many changes that break with the policies of the Bush administration. The new president has ordered that no government agency will be allowed to torture, that the U.S. prison at Guantánamo will be shuttered, and that the CIA’s secret black sites will be closed down. But Obama is non-committal when asked whether he will seek investigation and prosecution of Bush officials who broke the law. “My view is also that nobody’s above the law and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen,” Obama said. “But,” he added, “generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.” Obama fears that holding Team Bush to account will risk alienating Republicans whom he still seeks to win over.

Obama may be off the hook, at least with respect to investigating the lawyers who advised the White House on how to torture and get away with it. The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has written a draft report that apparently excoriates former Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, authors of the infamous torture memos, according to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff. OPR can report these lawyers to their state bar associations for possible discipline, or even refer them for criminal investigation. Obama doesn’t have to initiate investigations; the OPR has already launched them, on Bush’s watch.

The smoking gun that may incriminate George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., is the email traffic that passed between the lawyers and the White House. Isikoff revealed the existence of these emails on The Rachel Maddow Show. Some maintain that Bush officials are innocent because they relied in good faith on legal advice from their lawyers. But if the president and vice president told the lawyers to manipulate the law to allow them to commit torture, then that defense won’t fly.

A bipartisan report of the Senate Armed Services Committee found that “senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

Cheney recently admitted to authorizing waterboarding, which has long been considered torture under U.S. law. Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Colin Powell, and John Ashcroft met with Cheney in the White House basement and authorized harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, according to an ABC News report. When asked, Bush said he knew about it and approved.

John Yoo wrote in a Wall Street Journal oped that Bush “could even authorize waterboarding, which he did three times in the years after 9/11.”

A representative of the Justice Department promised that OPR’s report would be released sometime last November. But Bush’s attorney general Michael Mukasey objected to the draft. A final version will be presented to Attorney General Eric Holder. The administration will then have to decide whether to make it, and the emails, public and then how to proceed.

When the United States ratified the Convention Against Torture, we promised to extradite or prosecute those who commit, or are complicit in the commission, of torture. We have two federal criminal statutes for torture prosecutions – the Torture Statute and the War Crimes Act (torture is considered a war crime under U.S. law). The Torture Convention is unequivocal: nothing, including a state of war, can be invoked as a justification for torture.

Yoo redefined torture much more narrowly than U.S. law provides, and counseled the White House that it could evade prosecution under the War Crimes Act by claiming self-defense or necessity. Yoo knew or should have known of the Torture Convention’s absolute prohibition of torture.

There is precedent for holding lawyers criminally liable for giving legally erroneous advice that resulted in great physical or mental harm or death. In U.S. v. Altstoetter, Nazi lawyers were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for advising Hitler on how to “legally” disappear political suspects to special detention camps.

Almost two-thirds of respondents to a USA Today/Gallup Poll favor investigations of the Bush team for torture and warrantless wiretapping. Nearly four in 10 favor criminal investigations. Cong. John Conyers has introduced legislation to establish a National Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties. Sen. Patrick Leahy advocates for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission; but this is insufficient. TRC’s are used for nascent democracies in transition. By giving immunity to those who testify before them, it would ensure that those responsible for torture, abuse and illegal spying will never be brought to justice.

Attorney General Eric Holder should appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute high Bush officials including lawyers like John Yoo who gave them “legal” cover. Obama is correct when he said that no one is above the law. Accountability is critical to ensuring that our leaders never again torture and abuse people.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and President of the National Lawyers Guild.  She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law and co-author of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent (with Kathleen Gilberd), which will be published this winter by PoliPointPress.  Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com (The views expressed in this article are solely those of the writer; she is not acting on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild or Thomas Jefferson School of Law)

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Israel’s Dirty War in Gaza and Complicity of Her Allies

February 20, 2009

Marc Herbermann | uruknet.info, Feb 19, 2009

‘How did the current mess in the Gaza Strip begin?’

In recent years, life had become more and more unbearable in the area which once was called Palestine. Palestinians today, under a Jewish state that allows them no autonomy, suffer from miserable living conditions in a land that was theirs more than 60 years ago.

Jews, separated by huge concrete walls from the Palestine population, are scared of continuous rocket fire and the notion of being a victim of another devastating suicide attack. And now, Palestinians, expelled from their former homeland, crammed and trapped in a ghetto in the Gaza Strip, are the victims of a criminal military campaign.

Let’s get it right; we should respect people’s wish to live in peace, no matter in which country they live, whether they are Jews, Muslims or Buddhists. The brutal murder of civilians is a crime, the summary execution of people that are not involved in military operations and the deliberate shelling of U.N. buildings, convoys, hospitals, media installations and mosques are war crimes.

Over a period of 22 days, covered by the complicit apathy of the U.S., which is leading a disgraceful war in Iraq which it started illegally, the Israeli military operation in Gaza had claimed over 1300, at least half of them are civilians.

Thousands are wounded and traumatized. The attacks were meant to destroy the “infrastructure of terror,” yet they are ruining the social and cultural infrastructure of a community that has already been suffering under a harsh blockade Egypt and Israel imposed nearly 18 months ago.

Similarities between the current onslaught and the Lebanon War are evident. More than two years ago, Israel concocted a casus belli to attack Lebanon, half the size of Israel, with overwhelming air power, in utter contempt for civilian life and international institutions. Remember the deadly bombing of the apartment building in Qana and the destruction of the U.N. post that killed four U.N. observers.

And yet this small, relatively prosperous land, Lebanon, has nearly 30 times the landmass of the Gaza Strip, where desperate population is hiding and trembling between shattered walls, waiting for the next fatal blow, unable to sleep, drink clean water, eat or seek refuge in mosques or hospitals.

Even clearly marked international buildings are intentionally shelled. More than 40 people died after an Israeli attack on a U.N. school in the Jabalya refugee camp, where there were no fighters. In the Shifa and other hospitals, the situation is disastrous.

The recent mass executions by the Israel Defense Forces (IDFs) were not meant to destroy a well equipped enemy, as Israeli commanders suggest, but they knocked down an impoverished population administrated by Hamas, a political organization with a militant ideology, which was elected democratically in January 2006.

What are the underlying reasons for Israel’s assault on Gaza? Mark Regev, spokesman for the prime minister of Israel, repeatedly claims that the IDFs want to stop the firing of rockets, which fly out of the Gaza Strip everyday, flying deeper and deeper into the south of Israel.

If so, why is the best equipped army in the Middle East, which receives billions of dollars in military aid and uses the latest weapons from its American ally (including precision-guided munitions, phosphor bombs and depleted uranium shells) incapable of preventing these crude, homemade, and mainly inaccurate rockets from firing?

The IDFs, therefore, seem to pursue other aims: restoring their prestige, damaged by the Lebanon war, by demonstrating their strength regardless of civilian causalities.

More likely, the hidden agenda of this operation is aimed at removing Hamas from the Gaza Strip and finally, as the Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky puts it, terrorizing and expelling the Palestinians from their land.

How did the current mess in the Gaza Strip begin? The standard narration ¯ shared by mainstream media outlets and declared by the Israeli government, George W. Bush, his biased German colleague, Angela Merkel, and the French President Nicolas Sarkozy ¯ blames Hamas alone.

Yet the EU presidency conceded that “even the undisputable right of the state to defend itself does not allow actions which largely affect civilians.” United Nations Security Council Resolution 1860, intended to resolve the 2008-09 Israel-Gaza conflict, has yet to bear fruit.

But who really broke the last ceasefire? According to various sources in Western newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian, The Economist and the U.S. News and World Report, the truth is that Israeli commandos killed six Hamas fighters during a raid on a tunnel they suspected was being dug for the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers at the beginning of November.

According to The Guardian, “Hamas responded by firing a wave of rockets into southern Israel.” Israeli newspaper Haaretz claims that operation “Cast Lead” had been prepared six month earlier and, coupled with a carefully staged disinformation campaign, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

– Marc Herbermann, full-time instructor at Dongduk Women’s University in Seoul, works occasionally as a journalist and lectured on methods of political science at the University of Trier. This article was contributed to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact the author at: herbermann@gmx.de .

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Afghanistan, the Next US Quagmire?

February 20, 2009
by Thalif Deen | Antiwar.com, Feb 20, 2009

The United States is planning to send an additional 17,000 troops to one of the world’s most battle-scarred nations – Afghanistan – long described as “a graveyard of empires.”

First, it was the British Empire, and then the Soviet Union. So, will the United States be far behind?

“With his new order on Afghanistan, President (Barack) Obama has given substantial ground to what Martin Luther King Jr., in 1967 called ‘the madness of militarism,'” Norman Solomon, executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy, told IPS.

“That madness should be opposed in 2009,” said Solomon, author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

The proposed surge in U.S. troops will bring the total to 60,000, while the combined forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including troops from Germany, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands, amount to over 32,000.

When in full strength, U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan could reach close to 100,000 by the end of this year.

Still, in a TV interview Tuesday, Obama said he was “absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban (insurgency), the spread extremism in that region solely through military means.”

“If there is no military solution, why is the administration’s first set of decisions to continue drone attacks and increase ground troops?” Marilyn B. Young, a professor of history at New York University, told IPS.

She said the uncertainty around Afghan policy seems to be spreading even while the Obama administration announces an increase in troops.

“This is one of the ways events seem to echo U.S. escalation in the Vietnam War,” said Young, author of several publications, including “Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn From the Past.”

On Tuesday, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) released a report revealing that in 2008, there were 2,118 civilian casualties in Afghanistan, an increase of almost 40 percent over 2007.

Of these casualties, 55 percent of the overall death toll was attributed to anti-government forces, including the Taliban, and 39 percent to Afghan security and international military forces.

“This is of great concern to the United Nations,” the report said, pointing out that “this disquieting pattern demands that the parties to the conflict take all necessary measures to avoid the killing of innocent civilians.”

During his presidential campaign last year, Obama said the war in Iraq was a misguided war.

The United States, he said, needs to pull out of Iraq, and at the same time, bolster its troops in Afghanistan, primarily to prevent the militant Islamic fundamentalist Taliban from regaining power and also to eliminate safe havens for terrorists.

But most political analysts point out that Afghanistan may turn out to be a bigger military quagmire for U.S. forces than Iraq.

Solomon of the Institute for Public Accuracy said Obama’s moves on Afghanistan have “the quality of a moth toward a flame.”

In the short run, Obama is likely to be unharmed in domestic political terms. But the policy trajectory appears to be unsustainable in the medium-run, he added.

“Before the end of his first term, Obama is very likely to find himself in a vise, caught between a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and a political quandary at home that significantly erodes the enthusiasm of his electoral base while fueling Republican momentum,” Solomon argued.

Dr. Christine Fair, a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation and a former political officer with UNAMA in Kabul, told IPS she is doubtful that more troops will secure Afghanistan.

“Perhaps several years ago more troops would have been welcomed. My fear is that more troops means more civilian losses and further erosion of good will and support for the international presence,” Fair said.

“I would personally prefer a move from kinetics and towards using this increased capacity to help build Afghan capacity,” she noted.

“I also think greater support from the international community for reconciliation is needed. Afghans need to own this process,” said Fair, a former senior research associate with the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention at the U.N. Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington.

However, she said, the international community has legitimate interests in remaining in some capacity to ensure that Afghanistan does not again emerge as a safe haven for al-Qaeda and other international terrorist groups.

Fair also co-authored (along with Seth Jones) a USIP report released early this week, titled “Securing Afghanistan,” which spelled out the reasons why international stabilization efforts have not been successful in Afghanistan over the last seven years.

“Security issues in Afghanistan are extraordinarily complex, with multiple actors influencing the threat environment – among them, insurgent groups, criminal groups, local tribes, warlords, government officials and security forces,” the report said.

Afghanistan also presents a multi-front conflict that includes distinct security challenges in the northern, central and southern parts of the country, the study declared.

In Afghanistan, Solomon argued, the U.S. president is proceeding down a path that can only be too steep and not steep enough.

The basic contradiction of his current position – asserting that the situation cannot be solved by military means yet taking action to try to solve the problem by military means – signifies that Obama is bargaining for short-term wiggle room at the expense of longer-term rationality, he added.

“In a very real sense, Obama is kicking a bloody can down the road, unable to think of any other way to confront circumstances that will grow worse with time in large measure because of his actions now,” he said.

Even while disputing some thematic aspects of the “war on terrorism” at times, Obama is reinvesting his political capital – and re-dedicating the Pentagon’s mission – on behalf of a U.S. war effort that is probably doomed to fail on its own terms, Solomon said.

“Reliance on violence is a chronic temptation for a commander-in-chief with the mighty U.S. military under its command. We’ve seen the results in Iraq – or, more precisely, the people of Iraq and many American soldiers have seen and suffered the results,” he added.

(Inter Press Service)

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The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

February 20, 2009

By Rannie Amiri | Counterpunch, Feb 18, 2009

“They are trying to silence the voices that criticize the [Egyptian] government’s performance and send a message by assaulting and kidnapping, to say that criticism will not be tolerated.”

– Gamal Eid, executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information on the recent spate of blogger arrests in Egypt.

Philip Rizk wasn’t “unlucky” or at “the wrong place at the wrong time.” Instead, he found himself quite the deliberate target of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

On Feb. 6, the 26-year-old German-Egyptian blogger and filmmaker took part in a march with fellow activists belonging to the group “To Gaza,” an organization under the umbrella of the Gaza Popular Committee in Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Rizk and 14 others held the six-mile march in Qalyubiya governate, a rural area north of Cairo. Their purpose was to draw attention to, and raise awareness of, the terrible humanitarian situation in Gaza under the Israeli embargo and subsequent attack. They also protested Mubarak’s order to keep the vital Rafah border crossing with Gaza closed and demanded an immediate end to the blockade of the territory.

A graduate student at the American University of Cairo, Rizk, a frequent contributor to CounterPunch, had previously spent two years living in Gaza and made a documentary film of life there. He also ran the Tabula Gaza blog, where he was critical of both Egyptian and Israeli policies toward Palestinians.

On their way back to Cairo from Qalyubiya, all 15 activists were stopped and detained by Egyptian State Security officers. They were arrested and then released. Except Philip Rizk. He was taken out the back door of the police station and whisked away in an unmarked van.

Like so many others in Egypt who dare to speak out, Rizk simply disappeared.

An intense campaign by family, friends, colleagues and human rights groups ensued. A website and Facebook group set up in his name rallied support in calling for his immediate release. Five days later, Rizk was unceremoniously dropped off at his apartment. No criminal charges were ever filed.

Rizk told reporters he had been held in solitary confinement, blindfolded and handcuffed. During interrogation, he was alternately accused of being an Israeli spy and a gun-runner for Hamas and was subjected to psychological abuse, but not physically harmed. While in custody, his apartment was broken into and his computer, hard drives, digital and video cameras, film, phones, and documents confiscated. His blog was also taken down.

Rizk spent little time talking about himself though. He preferred the media’s attention be focused on the fate of other Egyptian bloggers imprisoned or who had simply disappeared, mentioning Diaa Eddin Gad in particular.

Gad is a 23-year-old blogger who also had taken part in a peaceful demonstration in support of Palestinians in Gaza, and ran the Sout Gadeb or “An Angry Voice” blog (in it, he described Mubarak as a “Zionist agent”). The same day Rizk was arrested in Qalyubiya, four security men jumped Gad outside his family’s apartment and arrested him. He has not been heard from since and his whereabouts remain unknown.

In addition, Egyptian military tribunals this month sentenced Ahmed Douma and Ahmed Kamal to one year in prison for “illegally” crossing into Gaza during the Israeli invasion and blogging from there.

As one might surmise, Egypt still operates under Emergency Law, which it has been under since 1981. For 27 years, these laws have afforded Mubarak and his State Security officers the ability to arrest and detain any citizen without warrant or charge for an indefinite period of time. They restrict both freedom of speech and assembly. Amnesty International estimates that there are approximately 18,000 political prisoners being held in Egypt under the provisions of Emergency Law.

If the Gaza war accomplished anything, it was to bring many longstanding Middle East realities to full light. These include the savage extent to which the Israeli government will go to crush resistance to occupation and Palestinian aspirations to form a state independent of their dictates; the successful fracture and dissolution of the Palestinian leadership; Mahmoud Abbas’ utter lack of credibility and integrity; the marked political divisions between the Arab states opposed to, and those that tacitly approved of (or were complicit in) the Israeli invasion of Gaza; and the complete failure of the Arab League as an effective body.

Even more evident was the disconnect between rulers and the ruled. Specifically, the hypersensitivity of the Mubarak government to not just criticism of its policy keeping the Rafah border closed, but to any public expression of sympathy or support for Gaza.

While Israel has ended its war (for now), Mubarak’s is ongoing. As true of all dictators, it is one being constantly waged against the people.

Rannie Amiri is an independent Middle East commentator. He may be reached at: rbamiri at yahoo dot com.

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Sri Lanka’s war of terror

February 20, 2009

Nagesh Rao explains the historical background to the Sri Lankan government’s latest war crimes against the Tamil minority.

Socialist Worker, February 18, 2009

A group of made refugees in Sri Lanka's civil warA group of made refugees in Sri Lanka’s civil war

THE SRI LANKAN military is intensifying its war on the country’s Tamil minority–but the international media is focused far more on the violence of the Tamil resistance.

Just as the Israelis did during their most recent invasion of Gaza, Sri Lankan authorities have prevented journalists from entering war zones. Consequently, the media has largely followed official Sri Lankan pronouncements and viewed this decades-old conflict through the relatively new lens of the “war on terror.”

Meanwhile, human rights organizations, various NGOs, and Tamil organizations worldwide have produced evidence of a brutal military campaign by the Sri Lankan state directed against the Tamil population at large.

A January 28 Amnesty International press release about the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Sri Lanka stated:

“Recent fighting has placed more than a quarter of a million civilians at great risk. People displaced by the conflict are experiencing acute shortages of humanitarian aid, especially food, shelter and medical care. There has been no food convoy in the area since 16 January,” said Yolanda Foster, Amnesty International’s Sri Lanka researcher.

The Government of Sri Lanka is carrying out military operations in areas with a civilian population. The aerial and artillery bombardment has reportedly led to civilian deaths, injuries, the destruction of property and mass displacement on this island nation off India’s southeastern coast.

Sri Lankan government forces have pushed the Tamil Tigers out of all major urban areas they had held for nearly a decade and into a small pocket of land. More than 300,000 civilians who have fled the oncoming government troops are also trapped in this small area. They have been displaced multiple times and are increasingly vulnerable as fighting moves closer.

Hundreds of people have been killed or injured and such medical care as has been available is threatened due to danger to the few health workers and damage to hospitals.

The government had declared “safe zones” to allow civilians to seek shelter, but information made available to Amnesty International indicates that several civilians in the so-called safe zone have been killed or sustained injuries as a result of artillery bombardment.

A doctor working in a hospital in a “safe zone” says that about 1,000 shells fell around the hospital.

Yet even though Amnesty International demonstrated that the overwhelming responsibility for the violence lay with government authorities, it titled its press release, “Government and Tamil Tigers violating laws of war.” According to Amnesty, “in at least one instance,” the rebel Tamil Tigers blocked the movement of a Red Cross convoy of injured and at-risk people out of the war zone. The statement ends by quoting Yolanda Foster again:

The immediate priority is medical attention for the seriously wounded. The Tamil Tigers must let injured civilians go. Preventing civilians from accessing medical care constitutes a war crime.

The Amnesty International statement thus offers a lengthy list of crimes committed by the Sri Lankan military, only to end by suggesting that the obstacle to meeting the most “immediate priority” is the “war crime” being committed by the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) group. Nowhere in the statement are the words “war crime” associated with the government’s actions, which are instead referred to as “a military campaign.”

In response, many Tamil activists and organizations have urged the international community to recognize the Sri Lankan government’s latest military assault on the Tamils as constituting, at a minimum, “acts of genocide” as defined by the Geneva Convention.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

ON THE streets of the capital Colombo, roving gangs of political thugs have waged a campaign of terror designed to intimidate any and all opposition to the Sri Lankan state. On January 28, human rights lawyer and activist Amitha Ariyaratne received death threats from police officers at a police station just north of Colombo. Three days later, his office was burned down by an unknown arsonist.

This came on the heels of the sensational assassination on January 8 of a leading journalist and critic of the government and editor of the Sunday Leader newspaper. Lasantha Wickramatunga was assassinated by unidentified assailants during his morning commute in rush-hour traffic. His car window was smashed in, and he was shot in the head, the chest and the stomach. He died on the way to the hospital.

Wickramatunga’s last article, “And then they came for me,” was a moving and passionate letter to his readers predicting his own death at the hands of his government. Not surprisingly, Reporters Without Borders ranks Sri Lanka 165th (out of 173 countries) in its index of press freedom around the world.

The Sri Lankan government has turned a deaf ear to international human rights organizations and Tamil NGOs who have complained about innumerable human rights violations and the ongoing humanitarian disaster in the northeast. Using “war on terror” rhetoric, Sri Lankan state propaganda has instead deflected international media attention towards war crimes allegedly committed by the LTTE.

However, the Sri Lankan government has absolved itself of its own obligation to respect human rights. In 2006 the Supreme Court declared that “[T]he Human Rights Committee at Geneva…is not reposed with judicial power under our constitution,” (see the text of the ruling here) providing a legal fig-leaf for the government’s draconian crackdown on the Tamils. The Asian Human Rights Commission has declared, “The Supreme Court of Sri Lanka is a part of the human rights violation mechanism.”

About 74 percent of the Sri Lankan population consists of Sinhala-speaking Buddhists, while the rest are Tamil-speaking Hindus and Muslims. Since the 1980s, a brutal civil war between the government forces and the Tamil Tigers has claimed over 70,000 lives, with hundreds of thousands more injured and displaced, the majority of them Tamils.

Most media reports date the origins of the conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese to the founding of the LTTE in the 1980s, but the Tamils have faced discrimination and repression at the hands of Colombo’s Sinhala-dominated government ever since Sri Lanka achieved its independence from Britain in 1948.

One of the first acts of the newly independent state in 1949 was to disenfranchise, at the stroke of a pen, some 1 million Tamils who had arrived in Sri Lanka in the twentieth century. They were declared non-citizens and told to return to India. Many of these “Indian Tamils” had been brought in by the British from India to not only labor in the tea plantations but to serve in the colonial administrative bureaucracy. British divide-and-rule policies resulted in special privileges for middle-class Tamils who had been educated in English in India. This bred resentment among sections of the Sinhala majority, and right-wing Sinhalese chauvinism began to gain ground during the waning years of British rule.

By disenfranchising the “Indian Tamils,” the newly-independent Sri Lankan state had resorted to a despicably ethnic-chauvinist policy, and encouraged the growth of the far right. In 1956, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) rode this wave of Sinhalese-Buddhist chauvinism to come to power and unleashed the first anti-Tamil pogrom, leaving some 100 Tamils dead and thousands displaced from their homes. The pogroms were led, and egged on, by militant and fascistic Buddhist monks.

Another wave of anti-Tamil hysteria in the 1960s resulted in the declaration of Sinhala as the only official language of the state. More pogroms followed in the early 1970s, with the monks and their allies periodically terrorizing and intimidating the Tamil population, while their political patrons reaped the rewards of a ready-made majority at the polls. In 1981, in an act that often referred to as “cultural genocide,” rioting policemen burned down the Jaffna Library, which housed much of the cultural memory of the Tamil population.

Continued >>

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U.S.: Calls Mount for Obama to Appoint “Truth Commission”

February 20, 2009

By Jim Lobe* | Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON, Feb 19 (IPS) – Eighteen U.S. human rights groups Thursday joined a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and a retired top diplomat in calling on President Barack Obama to appoint a non-partisan commission of leading citizens to examine and report on the treatment of detainees held by the United States during President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.”

In a joint statement, the groups, which included Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Human Rights First (HRF), said members of such a commission “should be persons of irreproachable integrity, credibility, and independence” with “reputation for putting the truth and the respect for our nation’s founding principles ahead of any partisan advantage.”

Such a commission should also report on the consequences of alleged abuses committed by U.S. officials against detainees and “make recommendations for future policy in this area,” according to the statement, which was also signed by ret. Maj. General Antonio Taguba, the senior military officer whose 2004 report and subsequent Congressional testimony on abuses committed by U.S. soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq drew headlines and outrage around the world.

The statement comes amid a growing public clamour, particularly from Obama’s Democratic base, for some forum that will determine responsibility for some of the more notorious abuses sanctioned or committed by U.S. official personnel during Bush’s war on terror and help inform the detention and interrogation policies of the new administration.

“The abuses carried out over the past eight years have not only undermined America’s moral authority, but also jeopardised its national security,” said Jennifer Daskal, senior counter-terrorism counsel at HRW. “We need to understand exactly what happened in order to protect our fundamental freedoms and keep the country safe.”

To date, Obama and his top officials, including his attorney general, Eric Holder, have been ambiguous about their views on the question. Obama has said he believes that “nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.”

Democratic lawmakers, led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, have made a number of suggestions, including creating a “truth commission” that could summon witnesses, including high-ranking Bush administration officials who authorised interrogation techniques that rights groups consider to be torture, and make recommendations, but could not bring criminal charges.

The plan appears, at least in theory, to enjoy not insubstantial public support. A Gallup poll conducted late last month found that nearly two-thirds of respondents favoured some form of investigation into alleged administration abuses, including the torture of detainees. While a quarter of respondents said they favoured investigations without criminal charges, almost 40 percent indicated support for criminal prosecutions if the investigations found evidence that laws had been violated.

“There’s a growing sense both in Washington and the country at large that people don’t want these abuses swept under the carpet,” said Tom Parker, policy director for terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights for Amnesty International USA, one of the statement’s signatories. “They want to know what’s been done in their name; and, if they don’t approve of what was done in their name, they want to see people held accountable.”

Republicans, however, appear united in strongly opposing the creation of any independent forum, least of all one that could result in criminal prosecutions.

They have argued that Congress has already held a number of hearings on detainee abuse and that appointing an independent commission would amount to a “political vendetta” that would not only make bipartisanship more difficult but could also set a damaging precedent.

“If every administration started to re-examine what every prior administration did, there would be no end to it,” warned Sen. Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee who had himself frequently complained about the Bush administration’s denial of habeas corpus and authorisation of aggressive interrogation techniques for detainees, last month. “This is not Latin America,” he added.

But rights groups have long claimed that Congress’s hearings that have looked into the alleged abuses have been far too limited in their scope and have provided only a partial picture of how specific policies authorising the alleged abuses were derived and implemented. Moreover, the hearings were mostly conducted in a highly politicised context.

The signatories of the new statement stressed that the president should solicit recommendations from both parties’ Congressional leaders before choosing members of the commission.

Among the kinds of members who should be considered, according to the statement, are “leading academics, retired judges and government officials, retired military officers and intelligence officials, and human rights experts.”

“We need people of the stature of John McCain or John Kerry who have knowledge of military service, people with a great deal of experience with the intelligence community,” said Parker. “It isn’t just about morality; it’s about the right policy, whether these kinds of methods worked. We don’t think they do,” he added.

In addition to Taguba, who last year accused the Bush administration of having committed war crimes in its treatment of detainees, individual signatories of the statement included ret. U.S. Amb. Thomas Pickering, who served as Washington’s envoy to the United Nations under President George H.W. Bush and is among the highest-ranking and most-decorated diplomats of his generation; and Judge Williams Sessions, who served as FBI director under both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Also signing was Juan Mendez, president of the New York-based International Centre for Transitional Justice and former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organisation of American States. Mendez, an Argentine native who gained asylum in the United States, has advised truth commissions that were established in Latin America and elsewhere around the world to investigate abuses committed by military and other authoritarian governments.

In addition to HRW, HRF, and AIUSA, other institutional signatories included the National Institute of Military Justice, the Centre for Victims of Torture, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the Open Society Institute, and Physicians for Human Rights, among others.

The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) also called this week for the Obama administration to conduct an investigation into abuses against terrorism suspects.

“Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and repeal abusive laws and policies enacted in recent years,” former Irish President Mary Robinson told reporters. “Human rights and international humanitarian law provide a strong and flexible framework to address terrorist threats.”

Robinson was one of several members of an ICJ panel that looked into abuses committed during the war on terror. The panel also included Stella Rimington, the former head of Britain’s MI5.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

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Afghan Official Claims 15 Civilians Killed in US Strike in Herat

February 19, 2009

Eyewitness say six women, five men, and four children in the village of Karez Sultan were killed in the strike. Several hundred animals are also said to have been killed there.

By Shapoor Saber in Herat | RAWA News, Feb 18, 2009

Afghans carry body parts of the victims
Afghans carry body parts of the victims, who the villagers said were killed in an air strike in Gozara district of Herat province west of Kabul, Afghanistan on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2009. (AP photo)

Photo Gallery of US victims in Afghanistan
The Afghan Victim Memorial Project by Prof. Marc

United States forces in Afghanistan claim to have killed up to 15 militants associated with an infamous warlord in Herat province in an airstrike on February 16, but district officials and eyewitnesses say that the dead were a family of Kuchis, or nomads, who were camped out nearby.

“A Coalition forces precision strike targeted Ghulam Yahya Akbari, a key insurgent commander, near Gozara district, Herat province, Monday. Killed in the attack were up to 15 militants suspected of associating with Yahya,” read a press release issued by Lieutenant Commander Walter Matthews of the US Forces Public Affairs Office.

Yahya himself, it seems, was not hurt in the attack, despite an earlier Coalition press release reporting his death.

“They tried to hit me but struck a family of Kuchis instead,” said Yahya, speaking by telephone to IWPR, Tuesday, February 17.

Ghulam Mahboob Afzalzada, district governor of Gozara, insisted the strike had claimed the lives of Kuchis, a nomadic people who shepherd their animals throughout the country.

“Foreign forces, without coordinating the attack with the local government, killed innocent people,” said Afzalzada, speaking from the scene of the attack Tuesday afternoon. “All those killed were civilians.” All are Kuchi nomads.”

Eyewitness say six women, five men, and four children in the village of Karez Sultan were killed in the strike. Several hundred animals are also said to have been killed there.

“There was a [Kuchi] man and his family, including women and children,” said local resident Gul Ahmad, who was standing near the site of the strike Tuesday afternoon.

Speaking by telephone Tuesday morning, Captain Elizabeth Mathias said that US military had no information on civilian casualties. The press release, issued later in the day, said that the Coalition forces were arranging for a combined Coalition and Afghan assessment team.

Afghans dig graves for the victims

Afghans dig graves after an air strike in Gozara district of Herat province February 17, 2009. In an air strike in western Afghanistan that Afghan police say killed 12 civilians and U.S. forces said killed 16 militants. (Reuters Photo)

Afghans look at animals killed after the air strike

Afghans look at animals killed after the air strike at a tented nomad encampment, in Gozara district of Herat province February 17, 2009. (Reuters Photo)

“There are no official reports of civilian casualties at this time,” said Lieutenant Colonel Rick Helmer, spokesperson for US Forces Afghanistan. “However, when we receive confirmed reports of civilian deaths we take those reports very seriously and investigate them along with out Afghan counterparts. Coalition forces make every effort to prevent the injury or loss of innocent lives.”

Civilian casualties are an extremely sensitive issue in Afghanistan, causing anger among the population and tension with the Afghan government. President Hamed Karzai has become increasingly outspoken in his criticism of foreign troops, who, he says, carry out their operation without sufficient coordination with the Afghan government.

There was a 40 per cent rise in civilian casualties last year, according to a United Nations report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, released on Tuesday. In all, 2118 civilians were killed, 828 of them by Afghan government or foreign forces. However, said the report, the figures could be much higher.

“UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) does not claim that the statistics represented in this report are complete; it may be that, given the limitations of the operating environment, UNAMA is underreporting civilian casualties,” read the report.

The UN report also questioned the ability of the military to investigate thoroughly in cases where locals allege that civilians have been killed.

“International forces showed themselves more willing than before to institute more regular and transparent inquiries into specific incidents, although the independence of these inquiries is still questionable,” it said.

Several high-profile incidents last year undermined the credibility of the international forces in reporting civilian casualties. First came an attack in July in Nangahar province that killed 47 members of a wedding party, including the bride.

In August, a bombing in Herat province left more than 90 civilians dead, according to the UN and the Afghan government. In both instances, the international forces claimed to have targeted and killed only militants. Only after many weeks and mounting pressure did they acknowledge that some intelligence mistakes may have been resulting in civilian deaths.

Yahya, who is also known as “Siyawooshan” after his home village in Gozara district, is a controversial figure with a long and colourful history in Herat. He began his fighting career as a jihadi commander associated with Mohamamd Ismail Khan, former “Emir” of Herat and currently minister of power and water management.

At the time of the mujaheddin civil war, in the mid-nineties, Yahya was mayor of Herat, where he earned a reputation for honesty and brutality in almost equal measure. During the Taleban regime, he fled to Iran, returning to battle the Islamists in the Herat area. He became head of the department of public works after the fall of the Taleban, and worked once again with Ismail Khan, until the latter’s appointment to Kabul.

Yahya did not get along with Ismail Khan’s successor in Herat, Sayed Hussein Anwari, whom he accused of unfairly distributing land and positions to the Shia minority.

Sacked by Anwari, Yahya retreated to his native Gozara district and took up arms against the government. For the past two years, he is said to have carried out missile strikes against the UNAMA compound in Herat, the nearby foreign military base and airport.

He is also reported to have supported himself and his men by kidnapping for ransom, including one Indian citizen who reportedly died while in Yahya’s custody.

He has been linked to the Taleban, al-Qaeda, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami faction, but insists he is operating on his own.

While the US forces insist that Yahya is “known to move throughout the mountains in this area, hiding amongst the civilian population to avoid detection”, he is easily accessible to reporters, who call him on his mobile phone to arrange interviews.

Yahya is feared by many and revered by some, according to those who live under his iron rule in Gozara district.

Most ordinary Heratis just want to live in peace.

“None of these [militant] groups are respecting us,” said Abdul Zahir, 30, a resident of Herat city, speaking for many locals. “The opposition factions kidnap people, and the foreigners kill innocent civilians.”

Shapoor Saber is an IWPR trainee in Herat.

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Pakistan Government ‘Privately’ Backing US Drone Attacks Inside Pakistan

February 19, 2009

Public Condemnations Carry Little Weight as Proof Grows of Complicity in Strikes

Antiwar.com

Posted February 18, 2009

There has been plenty of talk over the past several months that the Pakistani government had come to some sort of secret understanding with the United States about its continued use of Predator drones to launch attacks on Pakistani soil. But with the Pakistani government publicly denying it and the United States refusing to even officially confirm that it had launched most of the strikes, concrete evidence was elusive. That is no longer the case.

The Wall Street Journal cites several unnamed officials on both sides confirming that Pakistan’s military is giving “significant support” to the US attacks. The Times of London has published aerial photos from 2006 of a Pakistani airbase in Balochistan that also shows three Predator drones on the runway: seemly confirming last week’s comments by Senator Dianne Feinstein claiming that the United States had been using a Pakistani base for their drone attacks.

Predator DroneThe stakes are high for the already floundering coalition government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. If the formal protests and summoning of the US Ambassador is all really, as one Pakistani official put it “for the sake of public opinion,” the Zardari government has been openly lying to its citizenry about one of the most controversial domestic issues it faces. If it is possible for the already skeptical population of Pakistan’s tribal areas to lose more faith in the government, this would certainly be the issue for it.

The United States has been launching a growing number of drone strikes in North and South Waziristan since mid-2008, killing a large number of civilians as well as the militants it has targeted. President Obama made advocating the strikes a centerpiece of his Pakistan policy, and the attacks have continued since he took office last month.

Related Stories

compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]

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Barack Obama Administration Continues US Military Global Dominance

February 19, 2009

by Prof. Peter Phillips

Global Research, February 19, 2009

The Barack Obama administration is continuing the neo-conservative agenda of US military domination of the world— albeit with perhaps a kinder-gentler face.  While overt torture is now forbidden for the CIA and Pentagon, and symbolic gestures like the closing of the Guantanamo prison are in evidence, a unilateral military dominance policy, expanding military budget, and wars of occupation and aggression will likely continue unabated.

The military expansionists from within the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, G. W. Bush administrations put into place solid support for increased military spending. Clinton’s model of supporting the US military industrial complex held steady defense spending and increased foreign weapons sales from 16% of global orders to over 63% by the end of his administration.

The neo-conservatives, who dominated the most recent Bush administration, amplified this trend of increased military spending. The neo-cons laid out their agenda for military global dominance in the 2000 Project for a New American Century (PNAC) report Rebuilding America’s Defenses. The report called for the protection of the American Homeland, the ability to wage simultaneous theater wars, to perform global constabulary roles, and to control space and cyberspace. The report claimed that in order to maintain a Pax Americana, potential rivals — such as China, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — needed to be held in check. This military global dominance agenda required forward deployment of US forces worldwide and increasing defense/war spending well into the 21st century. The result was a doubling of the US military budget to over $700 billion in the last eight years. The US now spends as much on war/defense as the rest of the world combined, making Americans the highest war-tax payers in the world.

Barack Obama’s election brought a moment of hope for many. However, the Obama administration is not calling for decreased military spending, or a reversal of US military global dominance. Instead, Obama retained Robert Gates, thus making Obama the first president from an opposing party, in US history, to keep in place the outgoing administrations’ Secretary of Defense/War. Additionally, Obama is calling for an expanded war in Afghanistan and only minimal long-range reductions in Iraq.

The US military industrial complex is deeply embedded inside the Washington beltway. According to the most recent reports from OpenSecrets.org, 151 members of Congress in 2006 had up to $195.5 million of their personal assets invested in defense companies.

Major defense contractors were seriously involved in the 2008 elections. Lockheed Martin gave $2,612,219 in total political campaign donations, with 49% to Democrats ($1,285,493) and 51% to Republicans  ($1,325,159). Boeing gave $2,225,947 in 2008 with 58% going to Democrats, and General Dynamics provided $1,682,595 to both parties.  Northrop Grumman spent over $20 million in 2008, hiring lobbyists to influence Congress, and Raytheon spent $6 million on lobbyists in the same period. In a revolving door appointment, Obama nominated Raytheon’s senior vice president for government operations and strategy, William Lynn, for the number two position in the Pentagon. Lynn was formally the Defense Department’s comptroller during the Clinton administration.

The International Monetary Fund’s prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent—the worst since World War II. The United Nations’ International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to close in 2009, and while official unemployment is at 7 percent in the US, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers, joblessness is closer to 14 percent. The military-industrial-political elite are worried about the potential of increasing global insecurity. The answer inside the Obama Administration is to continue high defense/war spending to insure military control of both domestic and foreign instabilities.

The military, industrial, congressional, and administrative elite profit from defense spending, both financially and ideologically.  Insider profit taking from pentagon spending is widespread in Washington. But perhaps more important is the belief that this global military machine is seen as necessary for the protection of US corporate interests and the American upper classes in an increasingly destabilized world. Given that belief, the Obama administration is unlikely to change the defense spending policies of the previous US administrations without significant disruptive pressure from anti-war activists and global empire resisters.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored a media research organization. His 2006 study on the Global Dominance Group in the US is available on line at: http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/the-global-dominance-group/

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Shoot First, Ask Questions Later? Say It Ain’t So, Mr. President

February 19, 2009

by Tom Andrews | The Huffington Post,  Feb 18, 2009

Yesterday’s announcement by the White House that the president was ordering 17,000 more US troops into Afghanistan was particularly troubling to many of us who – unlike Mr. Limbaugh and his followers on Capitol Hill – actually want President Obama to succeed.

As a candidate, President Obama offered – and American’s overwhelming chose – “new thinking” on foreign policy and national security. We had all seen the devastating results of a “Bring ’em on” foreign policy where the hole dug by “shock and awe” militarism got progressively deeper and the incessant demand from Pentagon officials for yet more troops to deal with the consequences became increasingly greater. President Bush was always ready to meet these demands. The result was a weakened America, a broken military and more than a trillion dollars – and counting – added to the national debt.

We were relieved when the new president announced during his first week in office that he was ordering a comprehensive review of an obviously failed US policy in Afghanistan. Things had steadily gone from bad to worse there. What was desperately needed was a fundamental course correction guided by a healthy dose of “new thinking”.

New thinking was not in evidence yesterday when the White House announced that it was ordering 17,000 more US troops into harms way in Afghanistan even though it’s comprehensive review would not be completed for several more weeks.

Military commanders apparently warned that it would be too risky not to deploy troops now out of fear that they would not be in place by the anticipated spike in fighting this spring. Nothing surprising here – when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Military commanders have a point of view born out of their training and orientation.

But, new thinking requires a broader view than what can be seen from a military lens. It begins with considering the risk that a military escalation will actually make things worse, not better.

First off, where does military escalation end? According to the Army and Marine Corps field manual, counterinsurgency operations require, at a minimum, twenty counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents. In Afghanistan, this would mean combined forces of 640,000 troops. No, I did not incorrectly add an extra zero – that is 640,000 troops. In short, even if we wanted to go down this road, we can’t.

Several independent analysts have publicly warned that the presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important driving force in the resurgence of the Taliban. New thinking would at least consider the option of reducing, not increasing our military imprint as a means of dividing and weakening the armed opposition. At the very least, it would withhold final judgment and action until all of all options are subject to a truly comprehensive review.

The risks are too high to do anything else. As Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in The Nation:

Escalating the occupation of Afghanistan will bleed us of the resources needed for economic recovery, further destabilize Pakistan, open a rift with our European allies, and negate the positive consequences of withdrawing from Iraq on our image in the Muslim world.

We hope that this early display of shoot first, ask questions later will be an anomaly for the new administration. What the nation needs is a truly comprehensive plan for Afghanistan and the region that is fundamentally different from the approach that led us to where we now find ourselves. What we don’t need is another military quagmire and an albatross around the neck of a nation and an administration that we all need to succeed.

Tom Andrews, a former Member of Congress from the first Congressional District of Maine, is the National Director of Win Without War, a coalition of forty-two national membership organizations including the National Council of Churches, the NAACP, the National Organization of Women, the Sierra Club, and MoveOn.

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