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Obama exonerates CIA torturers

April 17, 2009
By Patrick Martin |wsws.org, April 17, 2009

President Barack Obama announced Thursday that CIA agents who engaged in torture of prisoners over the past seven years will not be prosecuted or punished. As the Justice Department released memos documenting in grisly detail the interrogation guidelines set down by the Bush administration, the White House made it clear that neither those who ordered the torture nor those who carried it out would face justice.

The four memos released Thursday were written by the Office of Legal Counsel, an arm of the US Department of Justice, in 2002 and 2005. Their release was compelled by a court-established deadline in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The ACLU denounced the Obama White House statement barring any prosecution of torturers. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said the memos “provide yet more incontrovertible evidence that Bush administration officials at the highest level of government authorized and gave legal blessings to acts of torture that violate domestic and international law.”

The memos document in detail the methods employed against as many as 30 prisoners—a much larger number than previously admitted—including waterboarding, beating and kicking, slamming a prisoner’s head into the wall, slapping, forced standing, forced nakedness, prolonged shackling, sleep deprivation, deprivation of food and threats against a detainee’s family members.

Attorney General Eric Holder, chief US law enforcement officer, defended the decision not to enforce the laws against torture, saying, “At a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta, a former Democratic congressman and former White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, sent a message to CIA employees which declared that the CIA under the Bush administration had “repeatedly sought and repeatedly received written assurances from the Department of Justice that its practices were fully consistent with the laws and legal obligations of the United States. Those operations were also approved by the president and the National Security Council principals, and were briefed to the congressional leadership.”

Panetta’s statement underscores one of the principal considerations of the Obama White House. Any serious effort to prosecute torture at the CIA “black sites”—the secret prisons established as part of the Bush administration’s “war on terror”—would inevitably expose leading congressional Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to criminal sanctions, because they knew of and approved the brutal methods ordered by Bush and Cheney.

Not only will the Obama administration refuse to prosecute CIA officers, Panetta said, but the Department of Justice will provide free legal counsel to anyone “subject to investigations relating to these operations.” This means that the US government will represent and defend CIA torturers if they face congressional investigation, civil lawsuits by their victims, or prosecution under international law, such as the International Convention on Torture, to which the United States is a signatory. The US government will also pay any judgment against CIA agents if they lose a suit for damages.

Obama himself sent a letter to all CIA employees explaining his decision to release the torture memos, an action that was opposed by Panetta and former CIA Director Michael Hayden. He wrote, “the release of these memos is required by our commitment to the rule of law.” This commitment extends only to producing pieces of paper—released with names and other incriminating details redacted—but not to any actual sanctions against those who committed horrific crimes.

The text of the statement Obama issued from the White House is typical of the mix of hypocrisy, demagogy and lying that characterizes the major pronouncements of the new president. Obama never uses the word torture, substituting a series of euphemisms that were then parroted in media coverage, where the word “torture” appears only in quotations from critics of the White House decision.

Obama claims that “In one of my very first acts as president, I prohibited the use of these interrogation techniques by the United States because they undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer.” In fact, this prohibition is not absolute and is essentially a cosmetic gesture, aimed at restoring the “moral authority” of an imperialist power which has carried out massive war crimes.

Profusely apologizing to the CIA for releasing the documents, Obama hastens to reassure the intelligence agencies that he still supports them, declaring, “in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security. I have already fought for that principle in court and will do so again in the future.”

Obama describes the CIA torturers as people “who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.” This echoes the “just-following-orders” defense that was rejected by the Nuremberg Tribunal when Nazi war criminals sought to use it.

No one needed a memo to tell them that the methods employed in the CIA “black sites” were brutal, repugnant and criminal. That is why the CIA and its protectors have stonewalled the courts, long after the details have become public through leaks to the press based on the accounts of those who survived the interrogations, as well as the findings of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The bulk of the Obama statement is devoted to glorifying the “intelligence community,” in language that would be echoed word for word by Bush and Cheney: “The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer. We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs.”

The truth is that US intelligence agencies carry out assassinations, torture, subversion and provocation in the interests, not of the American people, but of the American corporate-financial ruling elite. The CIA is reviled all over the world as the American “Murder Inc.,” which has overthrown governments targeted by Washington, instigated civil wars and established military dictatorships in country after country.

Obama’s statement combines abject cowardice, as he bows before the power of the military/intelligence apparatus, and an embrace of its history of violence and counterrevolution, as he pledges in the statement, “I will always do whatever is necessary to protect the national security of the United States.”

In closing, the US president declares, “This is a time for reflection, not retribution … nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.”

What cynical rubbish! As if torture can be stopped by exonerating the torturers and concealing their crimes from the public!

The message is clear: anyone who demands accountability for the crimes committed under the Bush administration (and continued under the Obama administration) is acting to “divide” the nation.

By declaring an amnesty for those who carried out actions that—even according to the Obama administration—constituted torture and were illegal, the White House is sanctioning criminal activity by the state. This amounts to a carte blanche to the military and intelligence apparatus to utilize whatever illegal methods they choose to employ.

Obama’s kowtowing to the most reactionary forces within the state underscores the vast and ever-growing power that this “state within a state” exerts over all aspects of government policy. It is one more demonstration of the terminal decay of American democracy.

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Gorbachev: US military power blocks `no nukes’

April 17, 2009
AP

Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, foreground, is flanked by Italian AP – Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, foreground, is flanked by Italian Foreign Minister Franco …

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley, Ap Special Correspondent – Thu Apr 16, 12:07 pm ET

ROME – President Barack Obama‘s call for a nuclear weapons-free world is welcome, but the huge U.S. defense budget may prove an “insurmountable obstacle” to reaching that goal, former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said Thursday.

Talk of nuclear disarmament would be “just rhetorical” if other nations were asked to give up nukes while the United States maintains an overwhelming conventional military superiority, Gorbachev said. What’s needed, he said, are talks to “demilitarize” world politics.

Gorbachev, last leader of the now-defunct Soviet Union, helped inaugurate two days of discussions on nuclear disarmament involving some 100 former and current international leaders, under the sponsorship of the Italian Foreign Ministry, the U.S.-based organization Nuclear Threat Initiative and Gorbachev’s own World Political Forum.

The U.S. contingent was led by former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry and ex-Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia.

In an afternoon of talks, conference participants repeatedly applauded the positions Obama has taken on the nuclear future, including his unprecedented joint statement April 1 with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that the two leaders had “committed our two countries to achieving a nuclear free world.”

Egyptian diplomat Nabil Fahmy recalled a different time.

“In the 1970s, when we said we wanted a nuclear-free world, we were laughed out of the room. It was as if today I took this chair and threw it into that chandelier,” he told fellow conferees in a grand meeting room at the Italian ministry. “I am pleased and honored that we are discussing this seriously now.”

Shultz, 88, President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state in 1982-89, called nuclear abolition “an idea whose time has come.” But, he added, “time is not on our side. The key phrase must be `careful urgency.'”

Gorbachev, 78, who once bargained with Reagan over possibly eliminating nuclear arsenals, said the major nuclear powers only recently have recognized that “the current situation is untenable” — a world with more than 23,000 atomic warheads, 95 percent of them in U.S. and Russian hands.

But a “militarized” world without nuclear weapons would also be untenable, he suggested, since it would leave other nations potentially vulnerable to U.S. military power.

“Defense budgets far exceed reasonable security needs,” Gorbachev said. “The United States spends on military purposes almost as much as the rest of the world put together.” U.S. military spending totals more than $600 billion this year.

“Military superiority would be an insurmountable obstacle to ridding the world of nuclear weapons,” the ex-Soviet president said. “Unless we discuss demilitarization of international politics, the reduction of military budgets, preventing militarization of outer space, talking about a nuclear-free world will be just rhetorical.”

Asked about Gorbachev’s call for conventional arms negotiations, Perry said talks on nuke control could still go ahead independently.

“Many things need to happen in parallel with nuclear disarmament,” he said. “If there is no solution to all of these problems it does not mean that you don’t proceed on nuclear arms control.”

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Bush Administration authorized use of insects in interrogations

April 17, 2009
John Byrne | The Raw Story
Published: Thursday April 16, 2009
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The Bush Administration Office of Legal Counsel authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to put insects inside a confinement box as part of the Administration’s “harsh interrogation” practice, as well as throwing detainees into walls, according to memos released by President Barack Obama on Thursday.

Read the full memos here.

“You would like to place Zubadayah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us he has a fear of insects,” the Bush White House said.

“As we understand it, no actually harmful insect will be placed in the box. Thus, though the introduction of an insect may produce trepidation in Zubaydah (which we discuss below), it certainly does not cause physical pain.”

But, the memo cautioned, to comply with the law, the CIA “must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain.”

Part of the text beneath a description of the insect torture was redacted.

Time‘s Michael Scherer notes, “The insect interrogation technique, as it turned out, was never used by the CIA, according to a second declassified memo released Thursday. ‘We understand that — for reasons unrelated to any concerns that it might violate the [criminal] statute — the CIA never used the technique and has removed it from the list of authorized interrogation techniques,’ wrote Steven Bradbury, a principal deputy assistant attorney general, in the footnote to a on May 10, 2005 document.”

Detailed description of ‘walling’ detainees

It also provides a detailed description of “walling,” a practice in which detainees were thrown against walls as part of the interrogation process (one detainee said his neck was tied with a towel and thrown against a plywood wall in a recently leaked Red Cross report).

“For walling, a flexible false wall will be constructed. The individual is placed with his heels touching the wall. The interrogator pulls the individual forward and then quickly and firmly pushes the individual into the wall. It is the individual’s shoulder blades that hit the wall.

“During this motion, the head and neck are supported with a rolled hood or towel that provides a c-collar effect to help prevent whiplash. To further reduce the probability of injury, the individual is allowed to rebound from the flexible wall. You have orally informed us that the false wall is in part constructed to create a loud sound when the individual hits it, which will further shock or surprise in the individual. In part, the idea is to create a sound that will make the impact seem far worse than it is and that will be far worse than any injury that might result from the action.”

The White House lawyers characterized this practice as “rough handling.”

“While walling involves what might be characterized as rough handling, it does not involve the threat of imminent death or, as discussed above, the infliction of severe physical pain. Moreover, once again we understand that use of this technique will not be accompanied by any specific verbal threat that violence will ensue absent cooperation. Thus, like the facial slap, walling can only constitute a threat of severe physical pain if a reasonable person would infer such a threat from the use of the technique itself. Walling does not in and of itself inflict severe pain or suffering.”

As part of the release of the memos Thursday, the Justice Department said they would provide attorneys to any CIA interrogator who engaged in the practice thinking it was lawful under the aegis of the memo.

According to Newsweek‘s Michael Isikoff, writing earlier this year, former Bush officials may find themselves in hot water over one of the memos released Thursday.

“An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials,” Isikoff wrote. “H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department’s ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos ‘was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.’ According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials—Jay Bybee and John Yoo—as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said. (Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)”

“The matter is under review,” Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller is quoted as saying.

Read the full memos here.

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Errant Drone Attacks Spur Militants in Pakistan

April 17, 2009

By Gareth Porter* | Inter Press Service News

WASHINGTON, Apr 15 (IPS) – The U.S. programme of drone aircraft strikes against higher-ranking officials of al Qaeda and allied militant organisations, which has been touted by proponents as having eliminated nine of the 20 top al Qaeda leaders, is actually weakening Pakistan’s defence against the insurgency of the Islamic militants there by killing large numbers of civilians based on faulty intelligence and discrediting the Pakistani military, according to data from the Pakistani government and interviews with senior analysts.

Some evidence indicates, moreover, that the top officials in the Barack Obama administration now see the programme more as an incentive for the Pakistani military to take a more aggressive posture toward the militants rather than as an effective tool against the insurgents.

Although the strikes have been sold to the U.S. public as a way to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda, which is an explicitly counter-terrorist objective, al Qaeda is not actually the main threat to U.S. security emanating from Pakistan, according to some analysts. The real threat comes from the broader, rapidly growing insurgency of Islamic militants against the shaky Pakistani government and military, they observe, and the drone strikes are a strategically inappropriate approach to that problem.

“Al Qaeda has very little to do with the militancy in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” said Marvin Weinbaum, former Afghanistan and Pakistan analyst at the Bureau of Intelligence Research at the U.S. Department of State and now scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute.

John McCreary, a senior intelligence analyst for the Defence Intelligence Agency until his retirement in 2006, agrees with Weinbaum’s assessment. “The drone programme is supposed to be all about al Qaeda,” he told IPS in an interview, but in fact, “the threat is much larger.”

McCreary observes that the targets in recent months “have been expanded to include Pakistani Pashtun militants.” The administration apparently had dealt with that contradiction by effectively broadening the definition of al Qaeda, according to McCreary

Ambassador James Dobbins, the director of National Security Studies at the Rand Corporation, who maintains contacts with a range of administration national security officials, told IPS in an interview that the drone strikes in Pakistan are aimed “in the short and medium term” at the counter-terrorism objective of preventing attacks on Washington and other capitals.

But as they have shifted to Pakistani Taliban targets, Dobbins said, “To degree the targets are insurgents and are Pakistanis not Arabs it would be correct to assess that they are part of an insurgency.” That raises the question, he said, whether the drone programme “is feeding the insurgency and popular support for it.”

The drone program cannot even be expected to be a decisive factor in al Qaeda’s ability to operate, according to McCreary. “All you can do with drones is decapitate leadership,” McCreary told IPS in a recent interview. “Even in relation to al Qaeda’s organisational dynamics, it has only limited, temporary impact.”

McCreary warned that the drone strikes will cause much more serious problems when they increase and expand into new parts of Pakistan as the administration is now seriously considering, according to a New York Times article Apr. 7. “Now al Qaeda is fleeing to other cities, “said McCreary. “The programme is escalating and having ripple effects that are incalculable.”

McCreary said one of the longer-term consequences of the attacks is “the public humiliation of the Pakistan Army as a defender of the national patrimony”. That effect of striking Pakistani targets with U.S. aircraft is “the least understood dimension of the attacks, the most discounted and most dangerous”. McCreary said the attacks’ “ensure that successive generations of Pakistani military officers will be viscerally anti-American.”

Administration officials have defended the drone strikes programme as necessary to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda to prevent terrorist attacks, and officials have leaked to the media in recent weeks the fact that the programme has killed nine of 20 top al Qaeda leaders.

But the Pakistani government leaked data last week to The News in Lahore showing that only 10 drone attacks out of 60 carried out from Jan. 29, 2009 to Apr. 8, 2009 actually hit al Qaeda leaders, while 50 other strikes were based on faulty intelligence and killed a total of 537 civilians but no al Qaeda leaders.

The drone strikes have been even less accurate in their targeting in 2009 than they had been from 2006 through 2008, according to the detailed data from Pakistani authorities. Of 14 drone strikes carried out in those 99 days, only one was successful, killing a senior al Qaeda commander in North Waziristan and its external operations chief. The other 13 strikes had killed 152 people without netting a single al Qaeda leader.

Dobbins, speaking to IPS before the Pakistani data on drone strikes was released, said it was difficult for an outsider to evaluate the benefits of the programme but that “we can assess that there is a significant price that is being paid” in terms of the impact on Pakistani opinion toward U.S. efforts to stem the tide of the insurgency.

Dobbins said one of the reasons for the continuing drone attacks, despite the high political price, is that “it is an incentive aimed prodding the Pakistani government.” He said he believes the United States would be happy to trade off the strikes in return for a more effective counterinsurgency campaign by the Pakistani government.

Further bolstering that interpretation of the objective of continued drone strikes is a report, in the same story in The News, that the most recent strike took place only hours after U.S. officials had reportedly received a rejection by Pakistani authorities Apr. 8 of a proposal for joint military operations against militant organisations in the tribal areas from U.S. South Asia envoy Richard Holbrooke and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, who were visiting Islamabad.

Other analysts suggest that the programme has acquired bureaucratic and political momentum because it a politically important symbol that the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are against al Qaeda and because the United States has no other policy instrument to demonstrate that it is doing something about the growth of Islamic groups that share al Qaeda’s extremist Islamic militancy.

McCreary believes that the programme is related to the fear of the Obama administration that it would be unable to get support for operations in Afghanistan if it didn’t focus on al Qaeda. “I think it was a way to link Afghanistan operations to al Qaeda,” he said.

“That suggests to me that the tactic for motivating domestic support is influencing the policy,” said McCreary. The former senior DIA analyst added that the drone strike programme “has acquired its own momentum, which is now having immense consequences.”

Weinbaum told IPS in an interview that the drone attacks are being continued, “primarily because we’re enormously frustrated, and they represent the only thing we really have.”

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

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India’s Polls and South Asian Peace

April 17, 2009

By: J. Sri Raman, t r u t h o u t , April 16, 2009

photo
Women line up to vote in India’s national elections. (Photo: Ruth Fremson / The New York Times)

“Just as the winds of change have swept across the United States, I have no doubt that India too will witness change when the next parliamentary elections take place in a few months.”

Thus spoke, some time ago, Lal Krishna Advani, former deputy prime minister of India and the far right’s candidate for the country’s top political post. Seldom were more misleading words spoken.

India, indeed, embarks on an extensive democratic exercise on April 16, 2009. The general election – in which some 714 million people are scheduled to cast their votes in 543 constituencies across 35 States and smaller Union Territories in five phases until May 13 – cannot but have giant consequences. The epic event will lead to far more than the formation of a new Lok Sabha (the Lower House of India’s Parliament) and a new government (by the first week of June).

The election can unleash winds of change across not only India, but South Asia as well. But it can bring change of the kind Barack Obama represented for the American voter only if the people of India reject and rout Advani and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

History will pronounce its verdict on whether Obama lives up to the voters’ hopes. There never was any doubt, however, about the meaning of their mandate. Theirs was a vote against wars and one for an all-inclusive American identity. Advani, the “shadow prime minister” of the BJP, cannot cast himself as an Obama-like candidate of pro-changers merely through an imitative media and Internet campaign.

A vote for Advani and his party will be one for wannabe representatives of a religious majority with an agenda of rabid anti-minorityism. It will also be a vote for reversal of the peace processes and an escalation of the role of militarism in regional relations. A pro-BJP and a pro-Advani vote will mean this all the more for the particularly vicious campaign the party has chosen to pursue this time. It has been searching for a single wining issue, but in vain. No major corruption scandal, no manmade mega calamity of the kind that can lead to a landslide victory for a wily opposition has come its way. The BJP has made up for this lack by manufacturing a series of state-level issues of religious communalism aimed at the two major minorities – Muslims and Christians.

The party and the “‘parivar” (as the far-right “family” calls itself ) have combined their anti-minority violence with hate campaigns aimed at polarizing voters on religious lines and harvesting a Hindu vote that has never really been cast on a national scale. The far right is hitting a new low this time with speeches frothing with hate.

Young BJP leader Varun Gandhi (a nephew of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi) set a trend with a videotaped and widely circulated tirade, where he is heard threatening violence against “circumcised” traitors (with few nonparty takers for the theory about a “fake tape”). Narendra Modi, who presided over the infamous Gujarat pogrom of 2002, has been carrying the same divisive message across different parts of the country as a rabble-rouser with an elevated party role. Advani himself continues to insist on “cultural nationalism” as the true import of the party’s religious communalism, while strongly defending Varun and Modi against the diatribes of “pseudo-secularists.”

What is the likely fallout, in this context, of a far-right poll victory for South Asia?

Pakistan-India relations should be the area of primary concern on this count. Islamabad has repeatedly expressed the hope that the strains between the nuclear-armed neighbors after the Mumbai terrorist strike of November 2008 will start easing after the Indian general elections are over. New Delhi, for its part, even while denying any electoral politics behind its current toughness towards Pakistan on terrorism, has suggested revival of the India-Pakistan peace process after reassuring post-Mumbai action by Islamabad.

The BJP, however, is in no hurry to offer such a hope. In one of his recent election rallies, in fact, Modi has virtually threatened a Mumbai in Pakistan in India. “Response to terrorism should be given in the language of terrorism,” he declared. “Pakistan should be made to understand in Pakistani language.”

The BJP has not mentioned India’s other Muslim neighbor, Bangladesh, in connection with Mumbai, though Pakistan has done so. This, however, does not mean that the party has decided to pursue a policy of peace with Dhaka. The BJP has officially hailed the victory of Sheikh Hasina Wajed’s Awami League in the Bangladesh general elections and her government’s declared goal of a South Asian anti-terrorist task force. It has been left to Modi to revive talk of Bangladeshi “infiltrators” (never called either “migrants” or “refugees”) as part of the party’s election rhetoric.

It is not only the minority in India’s northeast, close to Bangladesh, that has been left quivering by Modi. Migrants in Mumbai and New Delhi, eking out a precarious existence in the most miserable of slums, also have reason to fear a recrudescence of attacks on them and their livelihood.

Hearts are not going to leap up with joy at any prospect of a BJP victory in the Himalayan state of Nepal as well. The BJP has not for a moment cared to conceal its disapproval of the dethronement of a hated monarch there and the advent of a democracy under Maoist leadership. The party is particularly upset at the re-born nation ceasing to be a Hindu kingdom and turning into a secular republic.

Alone among India’s political parties, the BJP described Nepal’s declaration as a “negative development.” Senior BJP leader and former External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh waxed emotional when he said, “As an Indian and a believer in ‘sanatan dharma’ [Hinduism], I feel diminished.” In the event of the BJP’s victory in the elections, the rulers in Kathmandu cannot look forward to a smooth revision of an old, unpopular and unequal Indo-Nepal treaty, as proposed some months ago.

Sri Lanka, another neighbor, cannot be sanguine about the prospect of a BJP return to power in New Delhi either. Officially, of course, the party takes the stand that it is for Colombo to deal with the terrorist problem of its own. Not many have noticed it at the national level, but the ethnic issue of the emerald island is becoming an electoral one for the party in one of the southern states.

In Tamilnadu, where the voters have a sense of ethnic solidarity with the suffering Tamil minority of Sri Lanka, the BJP is trying to include the issue in its ever-bloating religious-communal baggage. Recently, a party unit in the state staged a protest over the killings of “Tamil Hindus” in Sri Lanka and urged the Centre to take into consideration the deaths of “Hindus along with the Tamils” in that country. A local BJP leader said, “The BJP is taking it up as a Hindu problem, to which the whole nation will respond. The Central Government [in New Delhi] is not responding because they think of it as a Tamil problem alone.”

What the people of India, including common Hindus, can do in order to promote peace within India and with its neighbors is clear indeed. They can vote for this change by voting against the BJP.

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Barack Obama releases documents showing CIA ‘torture’ during Bush-era

April 17, 2009

From Times Online
April 16, 2009

Ankle handcuffs locked to the chair and floor in an interrogation room at Guantanamo Bay

(Haraz Ghanbari/AP)

Mr Obama ruled out prosecutions, saying the US needed a time of reflection, not retribution

Tom Baldwin in Washington

President Obama last night released documents detailing the harsh CIA interrogation techniques that had been kept secret by the Bush Administration as he declared it was time to move beyond “a dark and painful chapter in our history”.

Four memos published yesterday showed that terror suspects had been subjected to tactics such as being slammed against walls wearing a special plastic neck collar, kept awake for up to 11 straight days, simulated drowning known as “waterboarding” and being placed in a dark, cramped box.

The CIA also approved exploiting one detainee’s fear of insects by putting caterpillars in the box with him. Others were kept naked and cold for long periods, denied food, shackled for prolonged periods or had their family threatened.

Many senior figures in the Obama Administration, as well as human rights groups, believe such practices amounted to torture.

Both the President and Attorney General Eric Holder, however, reassured CIA operatives yesterday that those involved in the interrogations would not face criminal prosecution so long as they had adhered the legal advice given to them at the time from the Justice Department. “Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” said the President. “This is a time for reflection, not retribution.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta told employees that the interrogation practices had been approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration and that they had nothing to fear if they had followed the rules. “You need to be fully confident that as you defend the nation, I will defend you,” he said.

The techniques were used against 14 detainees that the US considered to have high intelligence value after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks between 2002 and 2005. These included the alleged al-Qaeda mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had initially refused to answer questions about other plots against the US.

Bush Adminstration officials believe that the “enhanced interrogations” subsequently used on him helped avert further attacks including one to crash a hijacked airliner into a tower in Los Angeles.

The memos, however, show just how much effort went into the squaring the techniques with the letter, if not the spirit, of international laws against torture. Interrogators were told not to allow a prisoner’s body temperature or food intake to fall below a certain level, because either could cause permanent damage. Passages describing forced nudity, slamming into walls, sleep deprivation and the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees were interspersed with complex legal arguments about what constituted torture.

One memo authorised a method for combining multiple techniques, a practice that human rights lawyers claim crosses the line into torture even if any individual methods did not.

Although some sections were still redacted last night, the CIA had unsuccessfully argued for large parts of the documents to be blacked out. Gen Michael Hayden, who led the CIA during the Bush Adminstration, said: “If you want an intelligence service to work for you, they always work on the edge. That’s just where they work.” Foreign partners will be less likely to cooperate with the US because the release shows it “can’t keep anything secret.”

Mr Obama, however, said much of the information had already been widely publicised and it was important to emphasise that the programme no longer exists as it once did. Withholding the memos, he suggested, “could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States”.

The documents were disclosed to meet a court-approved deadline in a legal case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s impossible not to be shocked by the contents of these memos,” said ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer. “The memos should never have been written, but we’re pleased the new administration has made them public.”

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1,500 farmers commit mass suicide in India

April 16, 2009

Belfast Telegraph, Wednesday, 15 April 2009

Change font size: A | A | A

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.

The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.

“The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago,” Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine

“Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well.”

Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.

In another village nearby, Beturam Sahu, who owned two acres of land was among those who committed suicide. His crop is yet to be harvested, but his son Lakhnu left to take up a job as a manual labourer.

His family must repay a debt of £400 and the crop this year is poor.

“The crop is so bad this year that we will not even be able to save any seeds,” said Lakhnu’s friend Santosh. “There were no rains at all.”

“That’s why Lakhnu left even before harvesting the crop. There is nothing left to harvest in his land this time. He is worried how he will repay these loans.”

Bharatendu Prakash, from the Organic Farming Association of India, told the Press Association: “Farmers’ suicides are increasing due to a vicious circle created by money lenders. They lure farmers to take money but when the crops fail, they are left with no option other than death.”

Mr Prakash added that the government ought to take up the cause of the poor farmers just as they fight for a strong economy.

“Development should be for all. The government blames us for being against development. Forest area is depleting and dams are constructed without proper planning.

All this contributes to dipping water levels. Farmers should be taken into consideration when planning policies,” he said.

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US army soldier convicted of killing Iraqi detainees

April 16, 2009

Jury finds John Hatley guilty of execution-style slayings of four bound and blindfolded Iraqi detainees in 2007

A US army master sergeant was convicted today of murder in the execution-style slayings of four bound and blindfolded Iraqi detainees.

John Hatley and two others took the four men to Baghdad’s West Rasheed neighborhood, shot them in the head and dumped their bodies into a canal in spring 2007, the prosecution said. Hatley acted as “judge, jury and executioner” in hatching the plot.

An eight-strong military jury found Haastley guilty of premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit premeditated murder after a three-day court-martial in Germany.

But the jury found him not guilty of premeditated murder in the January 2007 death of an Iraqi insurgent.

The 40-year-old career soldier, who has served in the first Gulf War, Kosovo and in Iraq, will be sentenced Thursday at the US army’s Rose barracks in southern Germany. He faces the possibility of life in prison without parole.

Army prosecutor captain Derrick Grace said testimony had pointed to “a complete breakdown of discipline and crimes that are among the worst of a soldier.”

“On two separate occasions, the accused became the judge, jury and executioner,” he said.

Prosecutors said Hatley oversaw the shootings of detainees and had told his comrades they were going to “take care” of the Iraqis and killed them.

Hatley had denied the charges. His lawyer David Court told the court martial there was no physical evidence that the killings ever happened as no bodies, witnesses or blood had been found.

According to testimony this week and at previous courts martial, the four Iraqis were taken into custody in spring 2007 after an exchange of fire with Hatley’s unit and the discovery of weapons in a building where suspects had fled.

Two soldiers in Hatley’s unit, sergeant first class Joseph Mayo and then-sergeant Michael Leahy, have been convicted of the killings at separate courts-martial earlier this year.

Another two soldiers pleaded guilty in the spring incident, one to conspiracy to commit premeditated murder and one to accessory to murder, and were sentenced to prison last year. Two others had charges of conspiracy to commit premeditated murder dropped this year.

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Indian Rightist leader L. K. Advani

April 16, 2009

By Badri Raina | ZNet, Apri 16, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page


 I

India’s oldest political formation, the Indian National Congress, dates back formally to 1885, a fact that the gauche Narendra Modi has recently scoffed at in his typical lumpen oratory.

It would hardly help to remind him, bruisingly bratish as he is in his paunchy middle age, that he exists in a free India thanks to the fact first that the Congress did start as early as it did. After all, the RSS of which he is such a poster boy, happened only in 1924—and happened chiefly to stymie the freedom movement led by Gandhi and the Congress.

As to L.K.Advani, the 82 year old aspirant to prime ministership on behalf of the right-wing Hindu BJP, his blood-soaked career may be said to be only as young as some two decades, marked forever by the fascist putsch on Ayodhya, the demolition of a four-hundred year old mosque as he stood on site, and the pogroms that followed in Mumbai and Gujarat.

And by his inability, as the home minister and deputy prime minister (1999-2004) to prevent several terrorist strikes, even as the draconian POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) was in place, including the strike on the parliament of India; his acquiescence in the shameful decision of allowing three first order terrorists to be escorted in a plane to Kandahar by no less than the foreign minister of the day, and by his refusal to intervene in Gujarat as Modi’s henchmen hacked the Muslims there. If anything, Modi, to whose influence Advani owes his electoral prospects in the constituency of Gandhinagar in Gujarat, remains his hero.

Interestingly, while some Congressmen raise hackles of a media friendly to the BJP for their still unproven involvement in the Delhi Sikh killings of 1984, following Indira Gandhi’s gruesome murder, the fact is never highlighted that, unlike those people, Advani is actually chargesheeted under section 153-A of the Indian Penal Code, an offence that can carry a sentence of upto or more than seven years in the slammer.

And nobody who routinely complains here about the law’s delay seems to complain that the case against him remains mysteriously in limbo. Or that he should still be allowed to stand for office in the face of that chargesheet while others similarly charged are routinely hounded by the media and other high-minded sections of the Indian elite.

Incidentally, with respect to the Sikh killings in Delhi (1984) for which only the Congress party is held accountable, (that many of its satraps were involved in instigating the killings is not in doubt) it is instructive to read what Nanaji Deshmukh, that most respected of the Hindutva echelon, wrote in the Hindi Weekly, Pratipaksh, in its issue of November, 25, 1984—a Weekly then edited by no less than the redoubtable George Fernandes, defence minister of India under the NDA regime of 1999-2004.

It was his straightforward view that the killings of the Sikhs reflected a broad-based animus that India’s Hindus harboured against them. And, in his view, justly. No wonder that only the other day, Jagdish Tytler, one of the Congress leaders under suspicion, fairly or unfairly, pointed to the fact that some forty or more FIRs (first information reports with the police) still remain in place against individuals known to belong to the Hindutva camp, a feature of the 1984 killings almost never brought to public light.

II

Not heeding Modi’s diatribe against gerontocracy —just the other day he has said that the Congress Party is an 125 year old female hag and deserves to be dumped, a fine tribute to the Hindutva tradition of respect for elders and women especially that Hindus are everyday taught in RSS shakhas—Advani, even at 82 wishes to be India’s chief executive. A pathetic case of Barkis being more than willing.

A man of little empathy and even less imagination, he now gives us clinching evidence as to why his success in achieving that goal (of which thankfully there is not even a minimal prospect as of this day) could spell the end of the secular Republic of India.

In a letter addressed to some 1000 religious leaders, the bulk of them belonging to the Hindu faith, Advani, would you believe it, has asked for their “support” and ended his letter to them with a “shastang namaskar” (to wit, a prostrated obeisance).

That this is much more than merely courting religious communalism and drafting it to electoral success, is underlined by what he says subsequently: “It will be my endeavour (as prime minister of a secular Republic, mind you) to seek on a regular basis the guidance of spiritual leaders . . .on major challenges and issues facing the nation. For this we shall evolve a suitable . . . consultative mechanism” (emphasis added).

Put simply, the BJP candidate for prime ministership promises to return the secular Republic to an era when India’s kings and queens—mainly kings—always had at their royal elbow the religious authority of the dharma guru, and whose counsel on matters of war and peace would be decisive.

A sort of holy Hindu empire, if you like, with Hindu versions of the Wolseys and the Cranmers ready at hand.

That Advani should have so blatantly sought this course must suggest something of the desperation with which he seeks the high office of prime minister, even if in doing so he kicks the fundamental principles and “basic features” of the Constitution of India down the communal cauldron.

Clearly, unable during the NDA regime led by the BJP (1999-2004) to conclude a successful communal review of the Constitution (for which a high-powered Commission was indeed set up), Advani has thought it best to obtain the same result as part of campaign strategy.

It is much to be hoped that the full significance of all this registers on those well-wishers of the Republic whose life-interests tend to make them lackadaisically certain that cunningly smirking faces do not harbour intentions of the most regressive consequence to India’s hard-earned secular democracy and secular citizenship, or to the sequestration of the state from allegiance to any religion or religion-based form of legislative or administrative culture. Or, in the final analysis, of the subservience of secular governance to religious diktat.

Given the continued supremacy of the RSS over the political/electoral career of the BJP, the letter in question must seem an ominous proof of what Advani intends under RSS tutelage, namely to reformulate the nation and the state along Hindutva-theocratic principles of belief and practice.

III

It is to be seen whether or not the Election Commission of India, charged with the task of ensuring that all provisions of electoral law as codified in the Representation of People’s Act, and under the primary injunctions of the Constitution, are observed by Parties and candidates at election time, will take notice of the magnitude of offence that the Advani letter comprises.

After all, one of the first injunctions of electoral law in India is that no appeal shall be made to religion or religious authority for electoral gain. That the Advani letter should in black and white give religious leaders the “assurance” that an institutionalized “consultative mechanism” shall be put in place by him as prime minister to conduct the governance of the state in deference to their advice surely must be seen by the Election Commission for what it is: namely, not only to alter and subvert electoral laws but the state itself.

Many in India will wait to see what public reaction the Advani move will elicit, and, more particularly, what implications this will or will not have first for his candidature and then for the nature of politics in India. And whether or not Public Interest Litigation, or other legal remedies will be sought.

It will also be instructive to see how the electronic media in India deal with this unprecedented departure from Constitutional sanctity and legitimacy.

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What Was the Point of the G-20 Meeting?

April 16, 2009

Immanuel Wallerstein,  Commentary No. 255, April 15, 2009

Almost everyone took the meeting of the G-20 in London on April 2 too seriously. Pundits and critics have been analyzing it as if it had been designed to accomplish some change in policies by the states which participated. The fact is that everyone who went knew in advance that nothing of any significance would change as a result of the meeting, and that the few minor changes that were adopted could easily have been arranged without the meeting.

The point of the meeting – for the United States, for France and Germany, for China – was to show their internal publics that they were “doing something” about the calamitous world economic situation when in fact they were doing nothing that would in any significant way save the sinking ship.

The meeting was perhaps most important for President Obama. He went to demonstrate three things: that he was personally popular around the world; that he would present himself in a radically different diplomatic style from that of George W. Bush; that the two together would make a difference.

Obama certainly demonstrated the first two. He was acclaimed by the crowds everywhere – in London, Paris, and Strasbourg, in Germany, Prague, and Turkey, as well as by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. So was Michelle Obama. And he certainly employed a different diplomatic style. His interlocutors all said he took them seriously, listened to them attentively, admitted U.S. past errors and limitations, and seemed open to compromise solutions of diplomatic disputes – nothing of which they might have accused George W. Bush.

But did this make any difference in achieving U.S. diplomatic objectives? It is hard to see in what way. The debate between, on the one hand, the U.S. approach to reigniting the world-economy (more “stimulus”), an approach supported by Great Britain and Japan and, on the other hand, the Franco-German approach (more international “regulation” of financial institutions) was in no way resolved. Whatever the merits of the two arguments, both sides stuck to their guns, and the communiqué simply papered over the differences.

It is true that the G-20 agreed to put together a package of 1.1 trillion dollars to be given to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to issue so-called Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) as part of a “global plan for recovery on an unprecedented scale.” But as many commentators have pointed out, the scale of the effort is far less than is implied. First of all, part of this is not new money. Secondly, this is financing and not necessarily spending. Thirdly, 60% of the SDRs will go to the United States, Europe, and China, who do not need them. And fourthly, 1.1 trillion isn’t all that much, when placed beside the 5 trillion already being provided in the fiscal stimulus plans around the globe.

Everyone came out against protectionism, and proposed to do things about it. But there were no enforceable measures adopted. In addition, there are three different kinds of protectionism in question. The first is protecting one’s own industries, something which virtually all G-20 members are already doing and most probably will continue to do. The second is regulating hedge funds and rating agencies. The Chinese cheer this on, while the United States and western Europe are hesitant. The third is regulating tax havens. The Europeans are pushing for this, the Chinese are very cool on the idea, and the United States is somewhere in-between. Nothing changed at London.

The French and the Germans seemed to use the London meeting more to demonstrate that the geopolitical commitments they refused to make for Bush they would continue to refuse to make for Obama. The German newspaper, Der Spiegel, was harsh in its judgment. It said the cause of the financial disaster is that George W. Bush had been a “poppy farmer” who had “flooded the entire world [with cheap dollars],…creating sham growth and causing a speculative bubble….” Worse still, “the change in government in Washington has not brought a return to self-restraint and solidity. On the contrary, it has led to further abandon.” Its conclusion: “German Chancellor Angela Merkel is right. The West may very well be giving itself a fatal overdose.”

In the geopolitical arena, the Franco-German approach to Afghanistan is unchanged – verbal support for U.S. objectives but no more troops. Would they receive prisoners released from Guantanamo? Germany continues to say absolutely not. France magnanimously agreed to receive one – yes, one.

Obama gave a major speech in Prague outlining a call for nuclear disarmament – presumably a big change from the Bush position. The French conservative newspaper, Le Figaro, reports that the diplomatic cell in Sarkozy’s inner circle took a very “abrasive” view of the speech. Just public relations, they said, masking the fact that the negotiations of the United States with Russia on this question were getting nowhere. Furthermore, France was not about to take moral lectures from the Americans. So much for Obama’s new diplomatic style appeasing the West Europeans.

Elsewhere, it didn’t seem to work too much better with the East-Central Europeans, where the outgoing conservative Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic denounced Obama’s stimulus proposals as “a way to hell.” Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament did get him great applause from all factions (except the proto-fascist right) for its concrete and modulated approach to Turkish questions. But observers noted that the language on Middle Eastern questions was both traditional and vague.

What China seemed to want from the G-20 meeting was for it to occur. China wanted to be included in the inner circle of the world’s decision-makers. Holding a G-20 meeting displayed this new reality. When the G-20 decided to meet again, it thereby confirmed China’s place. Will the G-8 ever meet again? That said, China showed its reserve about the actual decisions in many ways. It offered a derisory amount to the new IMF package. After all, it got no guarantees that there would be a real reform of IMF governance, which might accord an appropriate role to China.

What we can say in summary is that the principal actors strutted on the world scene. Did they ever intend to do something that was more than that? Probably not. The world economic downturn continues to wend its way, as though the G-20 meeting never occurred.

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