| Al Jazeera, May 9, 2009 | |||||
Pakistan is preparing for a humanitarian crisis as hundreds of thousands of people flee fighting between the Taliban and government troops in the country’s northwest. Helicopter gunships blasted Taliban positions in the Swat valley on Saturday, as frequent curfews prevented residents from joining those who have already fled. Sohail Rahman, Al Jazeera’s correspondent reporting from Islamabad, said local residents faced heavy odds in fleeing the fighting, “Its very difficult because as soon as sporadic fighting occurs between the military and the Taliban then the curfew – unannounced – gets reimposed in that area.” The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and Pakistani officials say that about half a million people have been displaced in the last few days since the Pakistani government launched a major offensive against the Taliban. Another 500,000 people had reportedly been displaced by sustained violence in the region over the last few months, bringing the total number of displaced people to a million. Aid appeal Antonia Paradela, a spokeswoman for Unicef, the UN children’s rights organisation, said aid agencies would need more funding to cope with the influx of refugees.
“We need urgently more funds – for example Unicef needs at least $10m to continue helping the previous group of displaced families, which is more than half a million people. We’re talking now more than 200,000 – and more [are] on the move,” she told Al Jazeera. The fighting has prompted the abandonment of a peace deal, agreed in February, between the government and the Taliban. The pact, brokered by a local religious leader, allowed for the enforcement of the Taliban’s strict interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, across Malakand division – which includes Swat valley – in return for peace. The deal had been criticised both at home and abroad and its critics, especially in the US, have welcomed the government’s offensive.During a visit to Washington, Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s president, pledged an all-out war against the Taliban fighters. “This is an offensive – this is war. If they kill our soldiers, then we do the same,” Zardari told America’s PBS public television. Zardari was in Washington for talks with Barack Obama, the US president, and Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. For his part, Obama pledged a “lasting commitment” to both Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the US is itself fighting Taliban forces. ‘On the run’ Up to 15,000 members of the security forces have been deployed in Swat, located in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The military says it has killed scores of fighters and claims to be beating back the Taliban. “They are on the run,” the army said in a statement on Saturday, without making clear exactly how much progress it had made in driving fighters from their positions. People fleeing the area have also accused the military of killing civilians in its bombardment of the area. |
Archive for May, 2009
Pakistan fighting sparks exodus
May 9, 2009
Nine killed is US missile strike in Pakistan
May 9, 2009The Independent, UK, May 9, 2009
Nine people were killed in a suspected US missile strike on a militant stronghold near the Afghan border today, Pakistani officials said.
And doctors rushed to treat an influx of wounded civilians as thousands of troops backed by bomb-dropping warplanes sought to purge Taliban militants from a north-western valley.
It was not immediately clear who the victims of the suspected US strike were.
Pakistan’s leaders, encouraged by the US, launched a full-scale offensive in the Swat Valley this week to halt the spread of Taliban control in districts within 60 miles of the capital, Islamabad.
But the fighting has caused hundreds of thousands of terrified residents to flee, adding a humanitarian emergency to the nuclear-armed nation’s security, economic and political problems.
Witness accounts indicated that scores of civilians have already been killed or injured in the escalating clashes in Swat and the neighbouring Buner and Lower Dir districts.
Today, medics at the hospital in Swat’s main town, Mingora, were at full stretch to deal with dozens of residents caught up in the fighting.
Riaz Khan, a 36-year-old schoolteacher, his wife and two daughters occupied four of the beds, the shrapnel wounds on their arms and legs covered by bandages.
Mr Khan said his other two daughters were killed three days earlier when a mortar shell hit their home near Mingora.
“We buried our daughters on Thursday when the army relaxed the curfew,” he told an Associated Press reporter. “We reached the hospital only with great difficulty.”
Nisar Khan, one of only three doctors left at the hospital, said there were about 25 war-wounded among the 100 patients.
The unidentified bodies of three women and a man apparently killed in the fighting were also being kept there, even though the hospital had no morgue, he said.
Pakistan’s army is fighting to wrest Swat and neighbouring districts from militants who dominate the adjoining tribal belt along the Afghan frontier, where US officials believe al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden is holed up.
Taliban militants seized much of the area under a peace deal, even after the government agreed to their main demand to impose Islamic law in the region.
US officials likened the deal to a surrender. Pakistani leaders said the agreement’s collapse had opened the eyes of ordinary citizens to the extremist threat.
The army formally launched its offensive on Thursday, when Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said the government would wipe out groups trying to “take Pakistan hostage at gunpoint”.
The military said yesterday that more than 140 militants and two soldiers had been killed in Swat in the last 24 hours – roughly doubling the number of casualties reported so far.
Today, an AP reporter saw jet fighters flying over Mingora and later heard explosions from further up the valley. Details of the fighting were not available.
The army said it was reinforcing the 12,000 to 15,000 troops in Swat as they take on 4,000 to 5,000 militants, including small numbers of foreigners and hardened fighters from the South Waziristan border region.
South Waziristan has been the scene of numerous suspected American missile attacks in recent months, including today’s strike in the Tabai area.
Two intelligence officials said several missiles struck a disused hospital building known to be frequented by foreign militants and a tunnel in a nearby mountain, killing a total of nine militants.
The officials said field agents were still trying to determine the nationalities and names of the victims.
Pakistani leaders oppose the strikes, apparently carried out by unmanned CIA aircraft, complaining that they feed anti-American sentiment and help militants to recruit new fighters. Washington says the attacks have killed a string of al Qaida and Taliban leaders without causing mass civilian casualties.
Torture Images From Set Of Standard Operating Procedure Retell Story Of Abu Ghraib
May 8, 2009
Text by Katharine Thomas
One of President Obama’s first executive decisions in office was to prohibit the use of interrogation techniques previously sanctioned by the Justice Department under the Bush administration.
Memos released on April 16, 2009 describe in detail “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on terrorism suspects. While many American’s have heard the controversy surrounding the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, few have clear depictions of what these techniques look like.
These photographs were created on the set of Standard Operating Procedure, a film by Errol Morris that tells the story of what happened at Abu Ghraib.
These images are accurate reenactments of events that took place in the prison. They are intended to make visible the idea of torture and to provoke the observer to imagine what it is like to be tortured.
In a memo to John Rizzo, Assistant Attorney General, Jay S. Bybee, wrote “…The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict “severe pain or suffering…The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.”
Some individuals who did not believe that waterboarding constituted torture changed their opinions after experiencing the procedure for themselves. Writer and political observer Christopher Hitchens was challenged to undergo waterboarding. After the experience Hitchen’s is quoted as saying, “if waterboarding does not constitute torture, there is no such thing as torture.”
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Waterboarding typically refers to a procedure in which a cloth is placed over an individual’s nose and mouth and water is poured over the face for a period less than a minute. The technique simulates the experience of drowning. The gurney that the individual is strapped to may be put at an incline with the head below the lungs to prevent the water from going into the lungs and actually drowning the individual.
In addition to coercive techniques such as waterboarding, the Office of Legal Council prescribed the use of conditioning techniques. These were a set of ongoing conditions intended to show detainees that they had “no control over basic human needs.” This included forced nudity, dietary manipulation, and sleep deprivation.
Un-muzzled dogs were used to intimidate detainees. In one case, a detainee suffered from multiple bite wounds.
Dog handlers reportedly had a contest to see who could make the most prisoners urinate out of fear of the dogs.
One of the infamous images documented by soldiers at Abu Ghraib shows a hooded man standing on a box. The detainee’s hands were attached to wires. He was told that he if he stepped off the box he would be electrocuted.
Cement bags were often used as hoods to cover detainee’s faces, one of many techniques used to make them feel out of control.
Detainees were routinely shackled in uncomfortable positions and left for hours. Stress positions and sleep deprivations were used to soften the detainees for interrogation.
This image shows military personnel playing “grab ass” in the interrogation room with a hooded detainee. Sexual abuse and the licentious behavior of military personnel are documented in photographs taken by the soldiers themselves.
This photograph was taken from a monitor attached to a film camera positioned underneath a fifty-gallon drum with a glass bottom. It shows the face of an individual whose head is being held under water.
In describing water torture techniques used in the Philippine-American war, Lieutenant Grover Flint said, “his sufferings must be that of a man who is drowning, but cannot drown.”
CIA Says Pelosi Was Briefed on Use of ‘Enhanced Interrogations’
May 8, 2009By Paul Kane | The Washington Post, May 7, 2008
Intelligence officials released documents this evening saying that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was briefed in September 2002 about the use of harsh interrogation tactics against al-Qaeda prisoners, seemingly contradicting her repeated statements over the past 18 months that she was never told that these techniques were actually being used.
In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on the interrogation tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002, one week before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The memo, issued by the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency to Capitol Hill, notes the Pelosi-Goss briefing covered “EITs including the use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah.” EIT is an acronym for enhanced interrogation technique. Zubaydah was one of the earliest valuable al-Qaeda members captured and the first to have the controversial tactic known as water boarding used against him.
The issue of what Pelosi knew and when she knew it has become a matter of heated debate on Capitol Hill. Republicans have accused her of knowing for many years precisely the techniques CIA agents were using in interrogations, and only protesting the tactics when they became public and liberal antiwar activists protested.
In a carefully worded statement, Pelosi’s office said today that she had never been briefed about the use of waterboarding, only that it had been approved by Bush administration lawyers as a legal technique to use in interrogations.
“As this document shows, the Speaker was briefed only once, in September 2002. The briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used,” said Brendan Daly, Pelosi’s spokesman.
Pelosi’s statement did not address whether she was informed that other harsh techniques were already in use during the Zubaydah interrogations.
In December 2007 the Washington Post reported that leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees had been briefed in the fall of 2002 about waterboarding — which simulates drowning — and other techniques, and that no congressional leaders protested its use. At the time Pelosi said she was not told that waterboarding was being used, a position she stood by repeatedly last month when the Bush-era Justice Department legal documents justifying the interrogation tactics were released by Attorney General Eric Holder.
The new memo shows that intelligence officials were willing to share the information about waterboarding with only a sharply closed group of people. Three years after the initial Pelosi-Goss briefing, Bush officials still limited interrogation technique briefings to just the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees, the so-called Gang of Four in the intelligence world.
In October 2005, CIA officials began briefing other congressional leaders with oversight of the intelligence community, including top appropriators who provided the agency its annual funding. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam and an opponent of torture techniques, was also read into the program at that time even though he did not hold a special committee position overseeing the intelligence community.
A bipartisan collection of lawmakers have criticized the practice of limiting information to just the “Gang of Four”, who were expressly forbidden from talking about the information from other colleagues, including fellow members of the intelligence committees. Pelosi and others are considering reforms that would assure a more open process for all committee members.
In the Name of Mothers Around the World
May 8, 2009By Jodie Evans | The Women’s Media Center, May 8, 2009
The author, co-founder of the grass-roots peace and justice movement CODEPINK and board member of the Women’s Media Center, calls on us to honor Mother’s Day as it was originally intended—by the abolitionist, feminist and pacifist Julia Ward Howe.
Women know that war is SO over. We know it in our hearts, in our guts, in our wombs. We know that the madness in Iraq and Afghanistan has to end, that we cannot keep sending our children to kill the children of mothers across the globe. Last month at an appearance in Turkey, President Obama himself said “…sometimes I think that if you just put the mothers in charge for a while, that things would get resolved.”
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| Mother’s Day pledge by Noo Dal Molin |
It is nearly 140 years since Julia Ward Howe wrote her Mother’s Day Proclamation, a pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco–Prussian War. It flowed from her feminist belief that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level. Every year since CODEPINK began in 2002, we have worked to remind the public and media that Mother’s Day isn’t really about Hallmark and Teleflora, but was a call for women to gather in “the great and general interests of peace.” Howe knew then what we know now. It will take women’s leadership to undermine what have become the USA’s greatest exports: Violence, Weapons and War.
This year we knew those who could attend our 24-hour weekend vigil outside the White House would be smaller than before, given the fiscal crunch we are all feeling. We created a project so those who wanted could add to the activities. In the past we have done an aerial image of thousands of bodies spelling Mother’s Say No To War photographed from the Washington Monument with the White House in the background. But this year we put out a call for people to knit pink and green squares that we would sew together to read “We will not raise our children to kill another mother’s child” and place across the White House fence. Thousands of pink and green knitted squares have been filling the basement of the CODEPINK house in D.C. They arrive with stories of how they were knitted with love, passion and conviction, with photos of the joys shared in knitting circles around the world. The surprise has been that more women than ever want to participate, more women want to join together in community and engage in conversation.
They want answers. What they hear in the media makes no sense. Why are we leaving more soldiers and private mercenaries in Iraq and not getting out on the date promised? Why are we moving soldiers to Afghanistan when our military has told us there is no military solution? How can we end the violence and protect the women? How can we turn our back on the women and children in Gaza? Why is the military budget larger than under Bush (and that’s not counting another supplemental on Iraq and Afghanistan tacked on)? Why are we spending so much money on destruction, when Obama himself said in his inaugural address, “people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy”?
Women are fired up to gather together and expose the emptiness of the continued push for more weapons and more money for war.
We hope that our gathering on Mother’s Day will plant the seeds of new energy and new coalitions we will need to affect a world drunk on war. It falls on us to bring peace to the table, to push our way to the table and not let up. Women know that instead of sending our young people overseas as soldiers, we need to send troops of doctors, teachers, business leaders, economists, farmers and peacekeepers who can build the economic structures for security to take root.
During our Mother’s Day weekend in DC, we will celebrate our sisterhood with song and poetry and fun, peace-building children’s activities, but we will also share our pain and grief by hearing the stories of women whose lives have been shattered by war—both women from war zones and mothers of American soldiers. When we bear witness to one another’s stories, we create a deeper, more compassionate foundation from which we can work together for peace.
Even if you can’t join us in D.C., you can send a rose to honor a mother whose life has been profoundly affected by war. On Mother’s Day we will deliver the roses to the mothers and tie others to the fence outside the White House as a memorial to the dead and a moving call for peace.
However you spend your Mother’s Day, remember those women who have relentlessly stood for our rights in the past and know that we can bring peace. But first we MUST see it as possible and put our hoe in the ground.
Civilians Pay Price of War from Above
May 8, 2009Of course there will be an inquiry. And in the meantime, we shall be told that all the dead Afghan civilians were being used as “human shields” by the Taliban and we shall say that we “deeply regret” innocent lives that were lost. But we shall say that it’s all the fault of the terrorists, not our heroic pilots and the US Marine special forces who were target spotting around Bala Baluk and Ganjabad.
When the Americans destroy Iraqi homes, there is an inquiry. And oh how the Israelis love inquiries (though they rarely reveal anything). It’s the history of the modern Middle East. We are always right and when we are not, we (sometimes) apologise and then we blame it all on the “terrorists”. Yes, we know the throat-cutters and beheaders and suicide bombers are quite prepared to slaughter the innocent.
But it was a sign of just how terrible the Afghan slaughter was that the powerless President Hamid Karzai sounded like a beacon of goodness yesterday appealing for “a higher platform of morality” in waging war, that we should conduct war as “better human beings”.
And of course, the reason is quite simple. We live, they die. We don’t risk our brave lads on the ground – not for civilians. Not for anything. Fire phosphorus shells into Fallujah. Fire tank shells into Najaf. We know we kill the innocent. Israel does exactly the same. It said the same after its allies massacred 1,700 at the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in 1982 and in the deaths of more than a thousand civilians in Lebanon in 2006 and after the death of more than a thousand Palestinians in Gaza this year.
And if we kill some gunmen at the same time – “terrorists”, of course – then it is the same old “human shield” tactic and ultimately the “terrorists” are to blame. Our military tactics are now fully aligned with Israel.
The reality is that international law forbids armies from shooting wildly in crowded tenements and bombing wildly into villages – even when enemy forces are present – but that went by the board in our 1991 bombing of Iraq and in Bosnia and in Nato’s Serbia war and in our 2001 Afghan adventure and in 2003 in Iraq. Let’s have that inquiry. And “human shields”. And terror, terror, terror. Something else I notice. Innocent or “terrorists”, civilians or Taliban, always it is the Muslims who are to blame.
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper. He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.
When peace means war
May 8, 2009looks at the U.S. war drive taking shape in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Socialist Worker, May 8, 2009
President Barack Obama with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai (Pete Souza)
WHILE BARACK Obama stage-managed a Washington meeting with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan to discuss regional peace, the U.S. was escalating the war in both countries–and civilian deaths and a mass refugee crisis were the result.
As Obama met with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai May 7, mourners in Afghanistan had barely buried an estimated 120 people killed the day before–the latest in a series of killings by civilians in that country by U.S. and NATO occupation forces.
And by the time Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari arrived in Washington, an estimated 200,000 people had fled the Swat Valley after the U.S. pressured the Pakistani military into breaking a ceasefire with elements of the Taliban. Government officials in Pakistan fear the total number of refugees from Swat could reach 500,000–in addition to an estimated 500,000 Pakistanis who have already fled other war-torn areas near the border with Afghanistan.
The suffering of the Swat refugees is directly due to U.S. policy, which pressured Pakistan to overturn a three-month truce with the Taliban. The government blames the breakdown of the truce on the Taliban for its attempt to seize the town of Buner, but the Pakistani military was already on the offensive (and the U.S. had been carrying out periodic air strikes on Pakistani territory using Predator drones).
Bad as the situation has been, it’s likely to get worse. U.S officials have rebranded the occupation of Afghanistan, which dates from the “war on terror” begun in 2001, as the “Af-Pak” war–a regional campaign to crush the Taliban, whose resistance is an obstacle to U.S. domination.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
OVERSEEING THE policy is special envoy Richard Holbrooke, the egomaniac veteran diplomat who used U.S.- and NATO-backed ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to broker the 1995 Balkans peace deal. He’s out to do the same thing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, pushing a divide-and-conquer strategy that involves trying to buy off “good” Taliban elements, while waging an all-out war to crush the rest.
Holbrooke’s intervention has led directly to heightened conflict on both sides of the border.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. is casting doubts on whether Karzai should run again for president, crippling his already minimal ability to act as a broker among Afghanistan’s warlords. To prop himself up, Karzai chose as his running mate Mohammad Fahim, a warlord notorious for human rights abuses and reputedly a big player in the opium trade. Karzai’s weakness, in turn, has encouraged the Taliban to resist the planned escalation of 25,000 U.S. troops.
In Pakistan, Holbrooke has decided to bypass Zardari, a weak and corrupt politician, by publicly opening a channel of communication with former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who has close connections with Islamist political parties in areas where the Taliban and its allies are strong. Here, too, the aim is to deepen the turmoil in Pakistani politics, where a mass democracy movement recently forced Zardari to reinstate Supreme Court justices ousted by the previous military ruler, Pervez Musharraf.
To justify the increasingly aggressive U.S. intervention in Pakistani politics, the Obama administration raises the specter of a Taliban takeover of the Pakistani state and nuclear-armed jihad. But this is extremely unlikely, given that the Taliban is primarily based among the Pashtun people who live on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
The real difficulty for the U.S. is that the Pakistani state is ambivalent about fighting the Taliban, because of deep connections between Islamist militants and the Pakistani armed forces and security services that date from the 1980s.
Back then, U.S.- and Pakistani-backed Afghani resistance groups, along with money and volunteers like Osama bin Laden, fought a successful war against the former USSR’s occupation that ended in 1989. In a bid to end the turmoil and civil war that followed, Pakistan backed the Taliban’s seizure of power.
In 2001, the U.S. turned the September 11 attacks into an opportunity to seize control of Afghanistan, a strategic crossroads between Central and South Asia and a pressure point for both Russia and China.
Since then, Afghanistan has been dominated by corrupt and brutal warlords, which allowed the once unpopular Taliban to make a military and political comeback. Ironically, the Taliban, which all but eradicated the cultivation of opium poppies in the 1990s, can now tap the opium trade for income. But U.S.-backed warlords are even more involved in the drug trade.
Further complicating matters for the U.S. is the Pakistani military. Assigned by Washington the role of guarantor of stability in Afghanistan, the Pakistani military has been unable or unwilling to deliver. And if Pakistan’s armed forces are reluctant to do Obama’s bidding, it’s not only because of its long-term interests in Afghanistan, but because Pakistan’s generals are wary of the growing economic and military ties between the U.S. and Pakistan’s historic rival, India.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
OBAMA’S SOLUTION to this crisis is the “Afghanistan surge,” a troop buildup modeled on the last phase of George W. Bush’s policy in Iraq, where the Pentagon quieted much of the insurgency by putting it on the U.S. payroll and granting it local political power.
In Iraq, that plan is fraying badly because of the unwillingness of the central government to come to terms with its former enemies. In Afghanistan, such an effort is even more problematic, given the Taliban’s ethnic and social roots. But Washington will pursue this aim anyway, as journalist Pepe Escboar writes:
What matters for the Pentagon is that the minute any sectarian outfit or bandit gang decides to collude with the Pentagon, it’s not “Taliban” anymore; it magically morphs into a “Concerned Local Citizens” outfit. By the same token, any form of resistance to foreign interference or Predator hell from above bombing is inevitably branded “Taliban.”
So far, Afghanistan’s image as the “good” war fought in response to 9/11 has given Obama sufficient political cover for a troop buildup. Obama claims that the escalation is about “making sure that al-Qaeda cannot attack the U.S. homeland, and U.S. interests and our allies” or “project violence against” U.S. citizens.
Obama added more recently: “We want to respect [Pakistan’s] sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.”
But more than a few U.S. foreign policy experts dismiss the notion that today’s weak and scattered al-Qaeda can muster a serious threat against the U.S., and reject the idea that the Taliban has any agenda beyond taking power in its home region. That raises the question of just what the Afghanistan war is really about. John Mueller, a professor at Ohio State University and author of a book critical of what he calls the “terrorism industry,” wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs:
If Obama’s national security justification for his war in Afghanistan comes to seem as spurious as Bush’s national security justification for his war in Iraq, he, like Bush, will increasingly have only the humanitarian argument to fall back on. And that is likely to be a weak reed.
500,000 fleeing Pakistan fighting, UN reports
May 8, 2009- Air strikes target militants in Taliban-controlled Swat
- Exodus brings total to 1 million since August
- Declan Walsh in Islamabad, Sana ul Haq in Mingora and agencies
- guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 May 2009 11.51 BST
Declan Walsh reports on the refugee crisis Link to this video
More than 500,000 people have fled fighting in north-western Pakistan in recent days, bringing the total displaced since August to 1 million, the UN refugee agency said today.
A spokesman for the UN high commissioner for refugees said the fighting had led to huge displacement in the area. Ron Redmond said up to 200,000 people had arrived in safe areas in the last few days and another 300,000 were on the move or about to flee.
This morning, Pakistani jets bombed suspected militant positions in a Taliban-controlled town as residents appealed for a pause in the fighting so they could escape to safety.
Pakistan’s government yesterday declared an end to peace initiatives with Taliban insurgents controlling Swat, signalling the start of a major military operation to drive them from the valley.
In a televised address, the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said the army was being called in “to restore the honour and dignity of our homeland. We will destroy those elements who have destroyed the peace of our people and our nation,” he said.
The announcement, coming after a day of fierce air bombardment against militant positions, was expected to signal the start of a ground offensive similar to the one already under way in neighbouring Dir and Buner districts, where the army claims to have killed more than 200 militants in the last two weeks.
Gilani appealed for international aid to deal with the humanitarian crisis and to “help enhance the capacity of our law-enforcing institutions”. He called on Muslim clerics to support the government action “and tell the world that Islam does not sanction suicide bombing”.
It promises to be a bloody battle marked by urban warfare, which has rarely occurred in clashes with the Taliban. They have dug into positions across Mingora, the main town in the valley, where helicopter gunships pounded houses under militant control yesterday.
Several militants were killed when a rocket destroyed a lawyer’s house, while a mortar destroyed a house in nearby Matta village, killing five people, including two children. The death toll from the violence was thought to run into dozens.
During the afternoon thousands of Mingora residents took advantage of a break in the curfew to flee; some residents estimated that up to 80% of the population had left. On one street Abdul Qayuum, 61, sat on a suitcase by the roadside as he waited for his son to find a vehicle that would transport them out of the area. “We want to leave as quickly as we can,” he said.
The Taliban took advantage of the curfew to lay mines around the city. Commanders wearing face masks roamed the streets, issuing orders through walkie-talkies. One commander scorned the Islamabad government as an American stooge. “We are Muslims and we want an Islamic system. Who the hell are they [America] to object?” said Marwan, 30.
The Taliban promised the army a bloody reception in Mingora and boasted of having planted hundreds of mines. “The security forces cannot even budge in this area,” he said. Sajjad Khan, 22, said he knew of 14 funerals for civilians in his district of the city. “Now there is fear everywhere and everyone is leaving.”
The violence coincided with a visit by the president, Asif Ali Zardari, to Washington, where the army’s newly aggressive stance against the Taliban has been loudly welcomed by previously critical Obama administration officials. The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said the Taliban push into Buner, 60 miles north of Islamabad, had served as an “alarm call” to the Zardari government.
Greenpeace India: Save an endangered species of turtles, Video
May 7, 2009Editor’s Note: I have received the following letter from an Indian Greenpeace activist. I reproduce the letter that contains the links to a video so that the message reaches as many people as possible with a view to mobilise people’s support to protect an endangered species of turtles at the hands of the powerful Indian capitalist Ratan Tata:
“I just heard from Greenpeace today explaining why they have to stop and catch their breath in the campaign to save endangered Olive Ridley Turtles from the Tatas’ destructive port in Dhamra.
They’ve got a video that packs in all the blood, sweat and tears that 115,000 Tata customers like myself have put into this campaign for over a year.
I’m not telling you what I think of this video, I just want you to watch it for yourself.
Just click here to take a look.
PS: Oh, we’re also planning to make this the Most Viewed video on YouTube India today, before midnight, so Mr. Ratan Tata knows how many of his own customers have watched it! That will only happen if you view it too.”
US interrogators may have killed dozens, human rights researcher and rights group say
May 7, 2009By John Byrne | The Raw Story, May 6, 2009
United States interrogators killed nearly four dozen detainees during or after their interrogations, according a report published by a human rights researcher based on a Human Rights First report and followup investigations.
In all, 98 detainees have died while in US hands. Thirty-four homicides have been identified, with at least eight detainees — and as many as 12 — having been tortured to death, according to a 2006 Human Rights First report that underwrites the researcher’s posting. The causes of 48 more deaths remain uncertain.
The researcher, John Sifton, worked for five years for Human Rights Watch. In a posting Tuesday, he documents myriad cases of detainees who died at the hands of their US interrogators. Some of the instances he cites are graphic.
Most of those taken captive were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. They include at least one Afghani soldier, Jamal Naseer, who was mistakenly arrested in 2004. “Those arrested with Naseer later said that during interrogations U.S. personnel punched and kicked them, hung them upside down, and hit them with sticks or cables,” Sifton writes. “Some said they were doused with cold water and forced to lie in the snow. Nasser collapsed about two weeks after the arrest, complaining of stomach pain, probably an internal hemorrhage.”
Another Afghan killing occurred in 2002. Mohammad Sayari was killed by four U.S. servicemembers after being detained for allegedly “following their movements.” A Pentagon document obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2005 said that the Defense Department found a captain and three sergeants had “murdered” Sayari, but the section dealing with the department’s probe was redacted.
Perhaps the most macabre case occurred in Iraq, which was documented in a Human Rights First report in 2006.
“Nagem Sadoon Hatab… a 52-year-old Iraqi, was killed while in U.S. custody at a holding camp close to Nasiriyah,” the group wrote. “Although a U.S. Army medical examiner found that Hatab had died of strangulation, the evidence that would have been required to secure accountability for his death – Hatab’s body – was rendered unusable in court. Hatab’s internal organs were left exposed on an airport tarmac for hours; in the blistering Baghdad heat, the organs were destroyed; the throat bone that would have supported the Army medical examiner’s findings of strangulation was never found.”
In another graphic instance, a former Iraqi general was beaten by US forces and suffocated to death. The military officer charged in the death was given just 60 days house arrest.
“Abed Hamed Mowhoush [was] a former Iraqi general beaten over days by U.S. Army, CIA and other non-military forces, stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord, and suffocated to death,” Human Rights First writes. “In the recently concluded trial of a low-level military officer charged in Mowhoush’s death, the officer received a written reprimand, a fine, and 60 days with his movements limited to his work, home, and church.”
Another Iraqi man was killed in a US detention facility on Mosul in 2003.
“U.S. military personnel who examined Kenami when he first arrived at the facility determined that he had no preexisting medical conditions,” the rights group writes. “Once in custody, as a disciplinary measure for talking, Kenami was forced to perform extreme amounts of exercise—a technique used across Afghanistan and Iraq. Then his hands were bound behind his back with plastic handcuffs, he was hooded, and forced to lie in an overcrowded cell. Kenami was found dead the morning after his arrest, still bound and hooded. No autopsy was conducted; no official cause of death was determined. After the Abu Ghraib scandal, a review of Kenami’s death was launched, and Army reviewers criticized the initial criminal investigation for failing to conduct an autopsy; interview interrogators, medics, or detainees present at the scene of the death; and collect physical evidence. To date, however, the Army has taken no known action in the case.”
Death from interrogation is hard to separate from simple detainee death while in US custody. But one particular case stands out that seems to have fallen by the wayside — the murder of CIA “ghost” detainee named Manadel al-Jamadi, who was tortured to death by a CIA team at Abu Ghraib in 2003.
“Pictures of Abu Ghraib guards Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman posing with al-Jamadi’s dead body, the so-called Ice Man, were among the most notorious of the Abu Ghraib photographs published in April 2004,” Sifton notes. “A CIA officer named Mark Swanner and an interpreter led the team that interrogated al-Jamadi. Nine Navy personnel were also implicated. An autopsy conducted by the U.S. military five days after al-Jamadi’s death found that the cause: “blunt force injuries complicated by compromised respiration.”
“Reporting by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer and NPR’s John McChesney revealed that al-Jamadi was strung up from handcuffs behind his back, a torture tactic sometimes called a ‘Palestinian hanging,’” he adds. “After an investigation, the CIA referred the case to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution of the CIA personnel involved, but no charges were ever brought. Prosecutors accused 10 Navy personnel of the crime; nine were given nonjudicial punishments, such as rank reductions and letters of reprimand, and a 10th was acquitted.”
Additionally, Sifton notes the CIA may have had some close calls with detainees nearly dying during interrogations: the May 10, 2005, Bush Administration torture memo by Stephen Bradbury notes that doctors were nearby to perform a tracheotomy if during waterboarding the suspect is approaching death.
“Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue of psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness,” Bradbury wrote. “An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately, and the integrator should deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water. If this fails to restore normal breathing, aggressive medical intervention is required….’”
The memo says CIA doctors were on hand with necessary equipment to perform a tracheotomy if necessary during waterboarding sessions: “[W]e are informed that the necessary emergency medical equipment is always present—although not visible to the detainee—during any application of the waterboard.”
Peace and Justice Post 
Huffington Post Contributors | Nubar Alexanian and Katharine Thomas | The Huffington Post, May 7, 2009
Photographs by Nubar Alexanian