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Secrets of Iraq’s death chamber

October 7, 2008

Prisoners are being summarily executed in the government’s high-security detention centre in Baghdad. Robert Fisk reports

The Independent, Oct 7, 2008

The headquarters, pictured in 2003, where the killings are carried out

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The headquarters, pictured in 2003, where the killings are carried out

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Like all wars, the dark, untold stories of the Iraqi conflict drain from its shattered landscape like the filthy waters of the Tigris. And still the revelations come.

The Independent has learnt that secret executions are being carried out in the prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki’s “democratic” government.

The hangings are carried out regularly – from a wooden gallows in a small, cramped cell – in Saddam Hussein’s old intelligence headquarters at Kazimiyah. There is no public record of these killings in what is now called Baghdad’s “high-security detention facility” but most of the victims – there have been hundreds since America introduced “democracy” to Iraq – are said to be insurgents, given the same summary justice they mete out to their own captives.

The secrets of Iraq’s death chambers lie mostly hidden from foreign eyes but a few brave Western souls have come forward to tell of this prison horror. The accounts provide only a glimpse into the Iraqi story, at times tantalisingly cut short, at others gloomily predictable. Those who tell it are as depressed as they are filled with hopelessness.

“Most of the executions are of supposed insurgents of one kind or another,” a Westerner who has seen the execution chamber at Kazimiyah told me. “But hanging isn’t easy.” As always, the devil is in the detail.

“There’s a cell with a bar below the ceiling with a rope over it and a bench on which the victim stands with his hands tied,” a former British official, told me last week. “I’ve been in the cell, though it was always empty. But not long before I visited, they’d taken this guy there to hang him. They made him stand on the bench, put the rope round his neck and pushed him off. But he jumped on to the floor. He could stand up. So they shortened the length of the rope and got him back on the bench and pushed him off again. It didn’t work.”

There’s nothing new in savage executions in the Middle East – in the Lebanese city of Sidon 10 years ago, a policeman had to hang on to the legs of a condemned man to throttle him after he failed to die on the noose – but in Baghdad, cruel death seems a speciality.

“They started digging into the floor beneath the bench so that the guy would drop far enough to snap his neck,” the official said. “They dug up the tiles and the cement underneath. But that didn’t work. He could still stand up when they pushed him off the bench. So they just took him to a corner of the cell and shot him in the head.”

The condemned prisoners in Kazimiyah, a Shia district of Baghdad, are said to include rapists and murderers as well as insurgents. One prisoner, a Chechen, managed to escape from the jail with another man after a gun was smuggled to them. They shot two guards dead. The authorities had to call in the Americans to help them recapture the two. The Americans killed one and shot the Chechen in the leg. He refused medical assistance so his wound went gangrenous. In the end, the Iraqis had to operate and took all the bones out of his leg. By the time he met one Western visitor to the prison, “he was walking around on crutches with his boneless right leg slung over his shoulder”.

In many cases, it seems, the Iraqis neither keep nor release any record of the true names of their captives or of the hanged prisoners. For years the Americans – in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad – did not know the identity of their prisoners. Here, for example, is new testimony given to The Independent by a former Western official to the Anglo-US Iraq Survey Group, which searched for the infamous but mythical weapons of mass destruction: “We would go to the interrogation rooms at Abu Ghraib and ask for a particular prisoner. After about 40 minutes, the Americans brought in this hooded guy, shuffling along, shackled hands and feet.

Continued . . .

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Dealing With the Indo-US Nuclear Deal

October 6, 2008

by: J. Sri Raman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective, October 3, 2008

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Activists shout slogans during a protest in New Delhi against the Indo-US nuclear deal. (Photo: Reuters)

India received a strange and darkly significant gift on a once-sacred day of its annual calendar. In the early morning of October 2, marking the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi of hallowed memory, the nation heard the news about the victory for the US-India nuclear deal in Washington.

We can leave it for historians to answer the deeper and larger question arising from this dramatic irony: how did the India of a nonviolent, anticolonial struggle end up as a nuclear-weapon state proudly entering into a pact of strategic partnership with a neocolonial superpower? We will deal here with a simpler question.

How did the deal come to be done, and with little difficulty? How did this happen despite presumed opposition to it from many quarters and predictions of its defeat at several stages? The answer may help us face and fight the after-effects better than the deal struck originally between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Capitol Hill on July 18, 2005.

When the two leaders uttered the D word, the deal seemed an indefinite distance away. Opponents and independent observers of the move assumed the obstacles were too many to overcome easily. The chief obstacle was deemed to be democracy in both countries. The presumption has proven premature.

Bipartisan backing for the deal was considered extremely unlikely. The hurdle of political opposition in the USA did not even stop the first stage of the process – the Henry J. Hyde US-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of December 2006, passed as enabling legislation for a bilateral agreement. Such an accord, the 123 Agreement as it is called, was signed in July 2007, just about two years after the Bush-Singh brainwave, despite the many differences that media depicted as almost unbridgeable.

Bipartisan support, of a hidden kind, helped Singh at home too. The main opposition, Bharatiya Janata Party, which in its term of power had set India on the path of strategic partnership with the US, had no basic objection to the Bush-Singh advance upon the idea. The objective took precedence over all else for the main political players in both countries. Little wonder, the Singh government won a trust vote in Parliament on July 22, 2008, on the deal without any difficulty that the numbers seemed to denote initially.

The next stage where the deal was expected to be stalled also proved smooth. On August 1, 2008. the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) approved the deal. India’s earlier votes against Iran in the IAEA were not the only reason, with more Iran-friendly states also helping to facilitate the deal. It was expected to meet its nemesis at the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). On September 8, 2008, however, the Bush administration succeeded in bullying and cajoling the NSG into a consensus in the deal’s favor.

The peace movement in India and the world campaigned against the deal all through, with indisputable persistence and determination. If the campaign still failed, the main cause should not be far to seek. It fought the deal, above all, as a dire threat to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and sought to undo the deal through an appeal to pro-NPT states. Founded on a false hope, perhaps, the campaign was bound to fail.

The illusions entertained about the NPT never really helped the cause of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament in India or elsewhere. The discriminatory and hypocritical treaty, which allows five nuclear powers to preserve formidable arsenals and prescribes nuclear abstinence for the rest of the world, does not deserve any credit for any decrease in the global stock of these weapons due to other factors. The much-hyped Article VI of the treaty – a polite plea to the P5 to proceed towards nuclear disarmament “in good faith” – does not detract from the global terror posed by the self-appointed guardians of non-proliferation.

Not only in the US of Bush, but also its allies swearing uncompromising commitment to the non-proliferation cause have lent powerful support to the pact for the sake of larger strategic and corporate interests.

Prominent sections of the peace movement have proceeded on the assumption that the NPT represents the strongest weapon in its hands. Experience, however, makes it eminently clear that the treaty, in fact, places the strongest weapon in the hands of nuclear hawks in nations like India. They have only to turn to their people and tell them of patent discrimination in the NPT’s provisions to peddle their nuclear-weapons programs.

Sections of the peace movement in India and elsewhere have also played into the hands of these hawks by stressing the issue of sovereignty while talking of the NPT and the deal. The absurd argument that national sovereignty can be asserted by producing nuclear weapons cannot defeat either devotees of the treaty or advocates of the deal. It is egregiously erroneous to see the deal as damaging to the NPT or “the current world non-proliferation regime” as it is incorrectly described. The deal, on the contrary, must be viewed as one of the results of the faith placed in a fundamentally flawed and false treaty.

There is increasing recognition in the world peace movement of the need to replace the NPT with a UN convention to ban nuclear weapons. The movement, however, must beware of attempts by nuclear hawks in India and similar other states to extend hypocritical support to the effort. The government of India, for example, has already named former National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, intimately associated with the initiation of the “strategic partnership” as its representative in an international commission for nuclear disarmament set up by Australia and Japan!

The deal could have been stalled only through democracy. Only the people of India and the US could have done so by declining a mandate for nuclear militarism. Only democracy of this kind can combat the consequences of the deal, too.

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A freelance journalist and a peace activist in India, J. Sri Raman is the author of “Flashpoint” (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to Truthout.

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What is to be done?

October 6, 2008

Paul D’Amato sets Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? in the context of the struggle to build a socialist organization in Russia.

Socialist Worker, September 29, 2008 | Issue 681

IN DECEMBER 1895, Vladimir Lenin, then a young Russian Social Democrat, was arrested in St. Petersburg and spent the next four years in Siberian exile. He had been the leader of a local social democratic circle for two years.

Series: Ten socialist classics

Socialist Worker writers introduce ten of the most important writings by leading thinkers in the revolutionary socialist tradition.

In exile, he spent part of the time working on a massive work analyzing the nature of Russian capitalism. On the practical side, he hatched a plan to produce a national newspaper that could unite around it the scattered, isolated groupings of Russian revolutionaries throughout the empire into a single all-Russian Social Democratic Party.

An attempt to form a national party had been made at the first national Russian Social Democratic conference in 1898, but it was small and unrepresentative, and most of its participants were arrested immediately after the conference took place.

It did, however, produce a manifesto that encapsulated the orthodox view of the majority of Russian Marxists at the time, including Lenin: “The further east one goes in Europe, the meaner, more cowardly and politically weak the bourgeoisie becomes, and the greater are the cultural and political tasks that fall to the proletariat.”

Lenin’s plans bore fruit; the periodical Iskra (the Spark)–which gathered as editors both the most prominent young leaders, such as Lenin and Julius Martov, but also the founders of Russian Marxism, such as George Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod–was able over a period of three years, from 1900 to 1903, to win over the majority of Russian committees to Lenin’s proposal for the all-Russian party.

What else to read

Lenin outlined his plan in a number of articles in Iskra. The first step, he said, was an all-Russian political newspaper. “Without it,” he wrote, “we cannot conduct that systematic, all-round propaganda and agitation, consistent in principle, which is the chief and permanent task of Social Democracy in general and, in particular, the pressing task of the moment, when interest in politics and in questions of socialism has been aroused among the broadest strata of the population.”

This passage gives a hint of the urgency of Lenin’s call; he believed that the working-class movement was advancing by leaps and bounds, and that the socialists, with their purely local, agitational work, usually centered around lending assistance to workers’ economic struggles, were lagging behind these developments. The working class, he wrote, “has demonstrated its readiness, not only to listen to and support the summons to political struggle, but boldly to engage in battle.”

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THE TASKS of the Iskraists, therefore, were not purely organizational or technical. Lenin and his cohorts were waging a political fight against other trends in the movement–namely, the trend known as “economism,” centered around a newspaper called Rabochaya Mysl (Workers Thought), but also the eclectic trend around the newspaper Rabochaya Dyelo (Workers Dawn), which seemed unable to take a firm stand on anything.

In Lenin’s opinion, the economists made a virtue of the socialist movements’ weaknesses, arguing that the task of socialists was merely to support workers’ economic struggles. The elitist assumption was that workers weren’t ready for political agitation.

The economists, argued Lenin, were the Russian variant of the German “revisionists,” led by Eduard Bernstein, who famously wrote that the movement was everything and the final goal nothing. In Russia, Lenin argued, the economists were attempting “to narrow the theory of Marxism, to convert the revolutionary workers’ party into a reformist party.”

Lenin’s beef with the Dyelo group was that it downplayed the danger of economism, alternatively criticizing and flirting with their ideas. The Dyeloists also were uncritical of terrorism, and though it is rarely acknowledged by Lenin’s critics over the years, Iskra spent some time engaging in a polemic in favor of the methods of mass struggle and against individual terror, on the grounds that this tactic “disorganizes the forces, not of the government, but of the revolution.”

For Lenin, the main imbalance was between the rapid growth of class struggle–strikes, even general strikes, and May Day demonstrations–while the organization of socialists that could provide a national leadership and unite the disparate struggles into a common front against the autocracy was lacking. Worse, there were political trends in the movement that saw this as a perfectly fine state of affairs.

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RIGHTS-PAKISTAN: Civil Society United Against ‘Honour’ Killings

October 6, 2008

By Ashfaq Yusufzai | Inter-Press Service

PESHAWAR, Oct 6 – The current campaign against “honour” killings in Pakistan led by anti-death penalty NGOs has support from lawmakers and lawyers pressing for modifications of Islamic law to prevent perpetrators from evading justice.

The NGOs take a principled stand against the death penalty under any circumstances. Some lawmakers and lawyers who support them in the struggle against “honour” killings may not be active opponents of capital punishment, although it is inconceivable that they would back Pakistan’s death penalty for consensual sex outside marriage.

The groups have joined forces over the alleged killings of five women in Balochistan, a region known for its highly conservative and patriarchal traditions. On Jul. 13, five women were kidnapped by armed men objecting to three of them — Fauzia, 20, and two unnamed schoolchildren between 16 and 18 — wanting to marry men of their own choosing, according to the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC). In defiance of Umrani tribal elders in the village of Babakot, the young women, accompanied by a mother of one of the teenagers and an aunt of Fauzia, were abducted as they were preparing to leave to get married at a court in Usta Mohammad, a city 80 km away. The men forced them into a jeep with Balochistan government number plates. They were driven to a remote area where the three young women were allegedly beaten and shot. They were still breathing when the men “hurled them into a wide ditch and covered them with earth and stones”. The two married female relatives who tried to intervene were also pushed into the ditch and all five were buried alive, according to AHRC. On Sep. 24, the police, under intense pressure from NGOs and lawmakers in parliament, arrested seven people.

“We have seven suspects, including the brother of two of the girls,” Balochistan police chief, Asif Nawaz Warraich, told IPS. One of the arrested had allegedly confessed to the crime, although the police still had no other evidence. “The federal government is sending a top official to Quetta [the provincial capital] to investigate the murders,” he added. Senator Mohammad Adeel told IPS that the parliament human rights committee would be recommending legislation that would reform the Islamic Qisas and Diyat law. The committee was set up after heated exchanges in parliament over the alleged killings.

Qisas gives the victim’s heirs the right of retribution. But Diyat orders them to seek compensation rather than demand this. Both concepts are incorporated into Pakistani law.

Adeel said he was also proposing that those accused of “honour” killings be tried by judges sitting on the anti-terrorism courts rather than the ordinary courts of justice. “If that happens, the relatives of the deceased women will not be able to get away with the crime by invoking Diyat law.”

Adeel said he had told the parliamentary human rights committee that the police in Balochistan were facing difficulties investigating the case because of political interference. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) and some lawyers would prefer the government to amend the 2005 law specifically outlawing “honour” killings, reining in the rights given to the accused under Qisas and Diyat. Since most of “honour” killings took place within families, agreements were being reached in accordance with Islamic law which undermined the ability of the state to prosecute those guilty. “We have been urging the government to reform the law,” Asma Jehangir, chair of the HRCP, told IPS. “But when our reform proposals were presented to parliament in 2005, they were defeated as ‘un-Islamic’.” The Peshawar-based women’s rights lawyer, Noor Alam Khan, also wanted the law against “honour” killings amended. She predicted that no one would be punished for the alleged killings in Balochistan because the families would invoke Islamic law. “All [those allegedly guilty] are relatives and they will be set free because of Qisas Law,” she told IPS. HRCP’s statistics on “honour” killings show that they have been increasing, in spite of the 2005 legislation. In 2007, there were 636 “honour” killings, of which 61 victims were under 18. In 2006, the number was 271. So far this year, HRCP has recorded 283. “Many more cases go unreported. Almost all go unpunished,” said AHRC. Anti-death penalty NGOs say the increase in “honour” killings is also a reflection of the growing brutalisation of Pakistani society. The death penalty, and its steady extension, has contributed to this. “Pakistan currently has 26 criminal offences that allow for the death penalty — as opposed to just two, for murder and treason, at the time of independence in 1947,” Human Rights Watch said, in an open letter to Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gillani in June, calling for a ban on state executions. Over 7,000 people, including 40 women, are awaiting execution, although most of these were promised a commutation of their death sentences in June. In 2007, 134 people were executed by the state in Pakistan.

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Haiti: In Solidarity with its Five Freedoms

October 5, 2008

By James Petras | Information Clearing House, Oct 5, 2008

Today the acid test for all democrats in North and South America is the issue of the military occupation of Haiti, the economic pillage and denial of elementary political and human rights of the Haitian people.

In 2004 a US-led invasion force overthrew the democratically elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide and subsequently promoted and organized an occupation army. This colonial military force has repeatedly violently repressed popular demonstrations, violently raided the neighborhoods of the poor and killed, wounded and arrested Haitians who were affirming their rights of self-determination and an end to foreign occupation.

Since the United States bears major responsibility for the invasion, occupation and subsequent pillage and privatization of essential public services, we have a special responsibility to speak out clearly and forcefully to the United Nations (UN) in support of Haiti’s Five Freedoms:

1. The UN must end its military presence of Haiti through its occupation army (MINUSTAH), action contrary to the very founding principles of the organization. Haiti must recover the right of self-determination and the freedom to govern itself.

2. The Haitian people demand the end of the pillage of its national treasury by official and private banks extracting payments of $1 million USD a week for illegitimate debts contracted by past corrupt dictatorial regimes. Haitians demand freedom from illegitimate elite debts in order to finance basic life-sustaining programs for the 80% of the population living in extreme poverty.

3. Every country, which has suffered massive natural disasters, as the hurricanes that recently devastated Haiti, is entitled to large-scale, long-term humanitarian aid with no strings attached. Haitians demand the immediate fulfilling of aid pledged and its allocation according to needs without MINUSTAH manipulation to perpetuate its occupation.

4. The collapse of the free market model today highlights the disastrous consequences of the IMF-World Bank policies of privatization of public services in Haiti, where ‘private health and education’ effectively excludes the vast majority of Haitians. Haitians must regain the right to re-nationalize public services and all other strategic economic sectors necessary for their well-being.

5. Free elections means the return of deposed, exiled and persecuted political leaders and the end of foreign military occupation and repression of anti-colonial movements. Elections with occupation guns pointed at the heads of the electors and candidates have no legitimacy. We, the American people in North, South and Central America, have a responsibility to demand the end of MINUSTAH and the return national sovereignty to the Haitian people. No government no matter what its political claims and rhetoric can justify its democratic credentials when it acts as a colonial gendarme.

James Petras latest book , Zionism,Militarism and the Decline of U.S. Power – Clarity Press :Atlanta Ga.

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Why Paulson’s Plan is a Fraud

October 5, 2008

Bail Out the Homeowners!

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | Counterpunch, Oct 3-5, 2008

Is the Paulson bailout itself as big a fraud as the leveraged subprime mortgages?

Yesterday, here on CounterPunch,  I discussed the bailout as proposed and noted that the proposal cannot succeed if it impairs the US Treasury’s credit standing and/or the combination of mark-to-market and short-selling permits short-sellers to prosper by driving more financial institutions into bankruptcy.

A reader’s comment and an article by Yale professors Jonathan Kopell and William Goetzmann raise precisely this question of the fraudulence of the Paulson package.

As one reader put it,“We have debt at three different levels: personal household debt, financial sector debt and public debt.  The first has swamped the second and now the second is being made to swamp the third.  The attitude of our leaders is to do nothing about the first level of debt and to pretend that the third level of debt doesn’t matter at all.”

The argument for the bailout is that the banks will be free of the troubled instruments and can resume lending and that the US Treasury will recover most of the bailout costs, because only a small percentage of the underlying mortgages are bad.  Let’s examine this argument.

In actual fact, the Paulson bailout does not address the core problem.  It only addresses the problem for the financial institutions that hold the troubled assets. Under the bailout plan, the troubled assets move from the banks’ books to the Treasury’s.  But the underlying problem–the continuing diminishment of mortgage and home values–remains and continues to worsen.

The origin of the crisis is at the homeowner level.  Homeowners are defaulting on mortgages.  Moving the financial instruments onto the Treasury’s books does not stop the rising default rate.

The bailout is focused on the wrong end of the problem.  The bailout should be focused on the origin of the problem, the defaulting homeowners.  The bailout should indemnify defaulting homeowners and pay off the delinquent mortgages.  As Koppell and Goetzmann point out,  the financial instruments are troubled because of mortgage defaults.  Stopping the problem at its origin would restore the value of the mortgage-based derivatives and put an end to the crisis.

This approach has the further advantage of stopping the slide in housing prices and ending the erosion of local tax bases that result from foreclosures and houses being dumped on the market. What about the moral hazard of bailing out homeowners who over-leveraged themselves?  Ask yourself: How does it differ from the moral hazard of bailing out the financial institutions that securitized questionable loans, insured them, and sold them as investment grade securities? Congress should focus the bailout on refinancing the troubled mortgages as the Home Owners’ Loan Corp. did in the 1930s, not on the troubled institutions holding the troubled instruments linked to the mortgages. Congress needs to back off, hold hearings, and talk with Koppell and Goetzmann.Congress must know the facts prior to taking action.  The last thing Congress needs to do is to be panicked again into agreeing to a disastrous course.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

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Robert Fisk: When it comes to Palestine and Israel, the US simply doesn’t get it

October 4, 2008

Biden and Palin hid like rabbits from the centre of the Middle East earthquake

The Independent, Saturday, October 4, 2008

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Palestinians ceased to exist in the United States on Thursday night. Both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin managed to avoid the use of that poisonous word. “Palestine” and “Palestinians” – that most cancerous, slippery, dangerous concept – simply did not exist in the vice-presidential debate. The phrase “Israeli occupation” was mercifully left unused. Neither the words “Jewish colony” nor “Jewish settlement” – not even that cowardly old get-out clause of American journalism, “Jewish neighbourhood” – got a look-in. Nope.

Those bold contenders of the US vice-presidency, so keen to prove their mettle when it comes to “defence”, hid like rabbits from the epicentre of the Middle East earthquake: the existence of a Palestinian people. Sure, there was talk of a “two-state” solution, but it would have mystified anyone who didn’t understand the region.

There was even a Biden jibe at George Bush for pressing on with “elections” – again, the adjective “Palestinian” went missing – that produced a Hamas victory. But Hamas appeared to exist in never-never land, a vast landscape that gradually encompassed all the vast and black deserts that stretch, in the imagination of US politicians, from the Mediterranean to Pakistan.

“Pakistan’s (nuclear) missiles can already hit Israel,” Biden thundered. But what was he talking about? Pakistan has not threatened Israel. It’s supposed to be on our side. Both vice-presidential candidates seemed to think that our ally in the “war on terror” was now turning into an ally of the axis of evil. Even Islam didn’t get a run for its money.

Indeed, one of the funniest reports of the week, yet another investigation of Obama’s education, came from the Associated Press news agency. The would-be president, the Associated Press announced, had attended a Muslim school but hadn’t “practised” Islam.

What on earth did this mean, I asked myself? Would AP have reported, for example, that McCain had attended a Christian school but hadn’t “practised” Christianity? Then I got it. Obama had smoked Islam but he hadn’t inhaled!

Travelling across the US this week – from Seattle to Houston to Washington and then to New York – I kept bumping into the results of America’s White House-induced terror. A well-educated, upper-middle-class lady at a lunch turned to me and expressed her fear that Islam “wanted to take over America”. When I suggested that this was pushing things a bit, she informed me that “the Muslims have already taken over France”.

How does one reply to this? It’s a bit like being informed by a perfectly sane and rational person that Martians have just landed in Tennessee. So I used the old Fisk trick when confronted by ravers of the “admit George Bush did 9/11” school. I looked at my watch, adopted a shocked expression and shouted: “Gotta go!”

But seriously. There was Biden on Thursday night, telling us that along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan – he was referring, of course, to the old frontier drawn by Sir Mortimer Durrand which most Pushtuns (and thus all Taliban) regard as fictional – “there have been 7,000 madrassas built … and that’s where bin Laden lives and we will go at him if we have actually (sic) intelligence”.

Seven thousand? Where on earth does this figure come from? Yes, there are thousands of religious schools in Pakistan – but they’re not all on the border. In another extraordinary bit of myth-making, Obama’s man told us that “we kicked the Hizbollah out of Lebanon” – which is totally untrue.

And, of course, Israel – a word that must be uttered, repeatedly, by all US candidates – became the compass point of the entire Middle East, this “peace-seeking nation … our strongest and best ally in the Middle East” (quoth Palin) of whom “no one in the United States Senate has been a better friend…than Joe Biden” (quoth Biden).

Israel was “in jeopardy” if America talked to Iran, Palin revealed. “We have got to assure them that we will never allow a second Holocaust.” Thus was the corpse of Hitler dug up yet again – just as McCain resurrected the shadow of the Second World War last week when he blathered on about Eisenhower’s sense of responsibility before D-Day. That Israel can quite adequately defend herself with 264 nuclear warheads went, of course, unmentioned, because acknowledging Israel’s real power undermines the image of a small and vulnerable country relying on America for its defence.

Israelis deserve security. But where were the promises of security for Palestinians? Or the sympathy which Americans would immediately grant any other occupied people? Absent, needless to say. For we must gird ourselves for the next struggle against world evil in Pakistan.

Biden actually demanded a “stable” government in Islamabad, which was a little bit hypocritical only a few days after US troops had crossed its sovereign border to shoot up a Pakistani house allegedly used by the Taliban. As General David Petraeus told The New York Times this week, “The trends in Afghanistan have been in the wrong direction … wresting control of certain areas from the Taliban will be very difficult.”

It’s an odd situation. Obama and Biden want to close down Iraq and re-conquer Afghanistan. The Palin College of Clichés characterised this as “a white flag of surrender in Iraq” while continuing to warn of the dangers of Iran, the name of whose loony president – Ahmadinejad – defeated McCain three times in last week’s pseudo-debate.

But it’s the same old story. All we have learned in America these past two weeks, to quote Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War, is that the war goes on.

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Paul Wolfowitz Up to More Mischief?

October 3, 2008

Jim Lobe | LobeLog.com

Just 15 months after being forced to resign as president of the World Bank over a conflict of interest regarding his professional and personal relationships with his girlfriend, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz may be involved in another, far more geo-strategic conflict of interest involving his dual roles as chairman of the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board (ISAB) and chairman of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council, among whose U.S. members are military contractors who have been dying to get the Bush administration’s approval to sell about 11 billion dollars worth of arms to the island to protect it against the threat of an attack by the mainland.

Condi Rice appointed Wolfowitz — apparently part of her campaign that featured the appointment of Eliot Cohen to become to her Counselor at the State Department to co-opt neo-cons — back in January this year. Like the Defense Policy Board, the ISAB became under Bush a stronghold for all manner of national-security hawks (among the members are former Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Robert Joseph; James Woolsey; former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger; and missile-defense devotees associated with the Center for Security Policy, the National Institute for Public Policy, and Southwest Missouri State University, including Keith Payne, Robert Pfaltzgraff, and William Van Cleave), as well as executives from the arms industry (Lockheed, Boeing, SAIC, to name a few). Wolfowitz’s appointment, coming after his disgrace at the Bank — not to mention his performance as Rumsfeld’s deputy and Douglas Feith’s superior from 2001 to 2005 — was seen as a kind of token public redemption that would presumably have little consequence in actual policy terms.

That assessment may have been premature, because, judging by an article appearing in Wednesday’s Washington Times by Bill Gertz, Wolfowitz’s ISAB may be trying to gin up tensions with China, acting as a new “Team B” in persuading policymakers and the public at large that Beijing’s military modernization, especially its missile program, is more threatening to the U.S. than, in Gertz’s words, “many current government and private-sector analyses” have depicted it. At least, that’s the message of the article, which is purportedly based on a draft of an ISAB report that Gertz says is due out in a few weeks.

According to Gertz’s account, the report, the product of a task force headed by Joseph, recommends that the U.S. “should undertake the development of new weapons, sensors, communications, and other programs and tactics to convince China that it will not be able to overcome the U.S. militarily” and specifically that it obtain, in Gertz’s words, “new offensive space and cyber warfare capabilities and missile defenses as well as ‘more robust sea- and space-based capabilities’ to deter any crisis over Taiwan.” As Gertz points out, Washington has until now repeatedly reassured Beijing that its missile defense efforts were directed solely against “rogue states” like North Korea and Iran.

The report also predicts that China will have more than 100 nuclear missiles, some with multiple warheads, capable of reaching the U.S. by 2015, compared to only 20 missiles at the present time. “To avoid an ‘emerging creep’ by China toward strategic nuclear coercion, ‘the United States will need to pursue new missile defense capabilities, including taking full advantage of space,’” Gertz quotes the report as asserting.

The report, according to Gertz, also stresses — and this is where Wolfowitz’s stewardship of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council raises questions — the pivotal importance of Taiwan in all this. Again quoting from the draft, Gertz writes:

“‘In China’s view, Taiwan is the key to breakout: If China is to become a global power, the first step must include control of this island.’ Taking over the island would allow China to control the seas near ts coasts and to project power eastward, the report said.

“China views Taiwan …as central to ‘the legitimacy of the regime and key to power projection,’ the report said. Taiwan is seen by China as a way to deny the United States a key ally in ‘a highly strategic location’ of the western Pacific, the report said.

“…The advisory panel report also recommended that the U.S. increase sales of advanced conventional forces to allies in Asia…”

Now, one has to be careful about anything that Gertz reports, particularly about China. A charter member of the “Blue Team” — the group of hawkish policy specialists, Congressional staff, and journalists (including Kristol and Kagan and their Project for the New American Century) who, from the end of the Cold War until 9/11, insisted that Beijing represented the single greatest threat to U.S. hegemony and global peace and security — Gertz has been obsessed with the ChiComs for years and has certainly been known to exaggerate and take things out of context in his zeal to alert the world to the looming peril that confronts it. It’s also important to stress that this remains a draft, which could be substantially toned down before it reaches final form. It may not yet have even been seen by Wolfowitz, whose chapter on China policy in Present Dangers, the book published by PNAC before the 2000 elections, was almost certainly considered insufficiently alarmist by Blue Team stalwarts like Gertz.

That said, it’s clear that someone associated with ISAB wanted to leak what — to China anyway — will be seen as a highly provocative document that will tend to confirm the worst fears of its military (which, according to the draft, already suffers from “clear paranoia”) about U.S. intentions, particularly with respect to missile defense and the military use of space. And it’s also clear that the leaker is also very concerned about the pivotal role Taiwan can play in thwarting what the task force sees as China’s military ambitions and hence the importance not only of enhancing U.S. capabilities, but, presumably, of selling advanced weapons to the island, as well.

Moreover, the leak comes at a critical moment in the administration’s deliberations about the long-pending arms package for Taiwan whose approval Wolfowitz and other advocates had hoped would have been forthcoming last week. Wolfowitz had virtually assured his friends in the Business Council Taipei in July that Bush would go ahead with the package some time after the Olympics, but, according to my daily guide on the subject, Chris Nelson of the Nelson Report, a recent study by a Naval War College expert that has gained considerable attention from administration policymakers argues that much in the pending package will do very little, if anything, to improve Taiwan’s ability to resist an attack by Beijing. The study proposed an alternative “porcupine” strategy for defending the island which, it noted, would likely be strongly opposed by “the arms manufacturers who stand to benefit form the sale of aircraft, ships, and supporting systems to Taiwan” that are included in the current package.

Needless to say, some of those same arms manufacturers were behind Wolfowitz’s selection as the (well-paid) chairman of the Business Council, and they would be sorely disappointed if his influence and connections with the administration did not yield the anticipated dividends. (See Tim Shorrock’s excellent article in the Asia Times on Wolfowitz’s help in promoting their interests when he became Number Two at the Pentagon.) In fact, Chris reports this evening that they have indeed won the day and that most, if not all of the package will be approved by the White House.

But the episode still raises important questions, particularly in light of the current election debate over the influence of lobbyists in Washington policy-making, about conflicts of interests. Once again, Wolfowitz’s actions suggest that his grasp of the concept is pretty shaky. On the other hand, the presence of senior executives from Lockheed (a huge beneficiary of the current package) and Boeing, among other arms contractors heavily invested in missile defense and space weapons, on the State Department’s board indicate that Wolfowitz is not exactly alone in that respect. (Gertz reports that Allison Fortier, a Lockheed vice president, served on the task force that produced the draft.) “It’s basically functioning like a lobbyist group,” Chris told me.

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Ethiopia/Kenya: Account for Missing Rendition Victims

October 3, 2008

Secret Detainees Interrogated by US Officials Are Still in Custody

Source: Human Rights Watch

(Washington, DC, October 1, 2008) – At least 10 victims of the 2007 Horn of Africa rendition program still languish in Ethiopian jails and the whereabouts of several others is unknown, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Several of the detained men were interrogated by US officials in Addis Ababa soon after they were secretly transferred from Kenya to Somalia, and then to Ethiopia in early 2007.

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The 54-page report, “‘Why Am I Still Here?’: The Horn of Africa Renditions and the Fate of the Missing,” examines the 2007 rendition operation, during which at least 90 men, women, and children fleeing the armed conflict in Somalia were unlawfully rendered from Kenya to Somalia, and then on to Ethiopia. The report documents the treatment of several men still in Ethiopian custody, as well as the previously unreported experiences of recently released detainees, several of whom described being brutally tortured.

“The dozens of people caught up in the secret Horn of Africa renditions in 2007 have suffered in silence too long,” said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “Those governments involved – Ethiopia, Kenya and the US – need to reverse course, renounce unlawful renditions, and account for the missing.”

In late 2006, the Bush administration backed an Ethiopian military offensive that ousted the Islamist authorities from the Somali capital Mogadishu. The fighting caused thousands to flee across the border into Kenya, including some who were suspected of terrorist links.

Kenyan authorities arrested at least 150 men, women, and children from more than 18 countries – including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada – in operations near the Somali border and held them for weeks without charge in Nairobi. In January and February 2007, the Kenyan government then rendered dozens of them – with no notice to families, lawyers or the detainees themselves – on flights to Somalia, where they were handed over to the Ethiopian military. Ethiopian forces also arrested an unknown number of people in Somalia.

Those rendered were later transported to detention centers in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa and other Ethiopian towns, where they effectively disappeared. Denied access to their embassies, their families, and international humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, the detainees were even denied phone calls home. Several have said that they were housed in solitary cells, some as small as two meters by two meters, with their hands cuffed in painful positions behind their backs and their feet bound together.

A number of prisoners were questioned by US Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in Addis Ababa. From February to May 2007, Ethiopian security officers daily transported detainees – including several pregnant women – to a villa where US officials interrogated them about suspected terrorist links. At night, the Ethiopian officers returned the detainees to their cells.

“The United States says that they were investigating past and current threats of terrorism,” Daskal said. “But the repeated interrogation of rendition victims who were being held incommunicado makes Washington complicit in the abuse.”

For the most part, detainees were sent home soon after their interrogation by US agents ended. Of those known to have been interrogated by US officials, just eight Kenyans remain. (A ninth Kenyan in Addis Ababa was rendered to Ethiopia in July/August 2007, after US interrogations reportedly stopped.) These men, who have not been subjected to any interrogation since May 2007, would likely have been repatriated long ago but for the Kenyan government’s longstanding refusal to acknowledge their claims to Kenyan citizenship or to take steps to secure their release.

Human Rights Watch recently spoke by telephone to several of the Kenyans in detention in Ethiopia, many of whom complained of physical ailments and begged for someone to help get them home. Although Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga made a campaign pledge to help repatriate these detainees, little progress has been made to date. In mid-August 2008, Kenyan authorities visited these men for the first time. The officials reportedly told the detainees they would be home within a few weeks, but more than a month and a half has now passed.

“The previous Kenyan government deported its own citizens and then left them to rot in Ethiopian jails,” Daskal said. “The new Kenyan government should reverse course, bring these men home, and show that it is not following the same shameful path as the old.”

The Ethiopian government also used the rendition program for its own purposes. For years, the Ethiopian military has been trying to quell domestic Ogadeni and Oromo insurgencies that receive support from neighboring countries, such as Ethiopia’s archrival, Eritrea. The Ethiopian intervention in Somalia and the multinational rendition program provided them a convenient means to gain custody over people whom they could interrogate for suspected insurgent links. Once these individuals were in detention, Ethiopian military interrogators and guards reportedly subjected them to brutal beatings and torture.

Detainees said Ethiopian interrogators pulled out their toenails, held loaded guns to their heads, crushed their genitals, and forced them to crawl on their elbows and knees through gravel. Several reported being beaten to the point of unconsciousness.

The Human Rights Watch report calls upon the Ethiopian government to immediately release the rendition victims still in its custody or prosecute them in a court that meets basic fair trial standards. It also urges the Kenyan government to take immediate steps to secure the repatriation of Kenyan nationals still in Ethiopian custody, and the US government to withhold counterterrorism assistance from both governments until they provide a full accounting of all the missing detainees.

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How the Media Sold Their Souls to Wall Street

October 3, 2008

Published on Thursday, October 2, 2008 by The Huffington Post

by Josh Silver

If you are like me, the pundits, and 99.9% of the American public, you really don’t know much about economics. And despite Monday’s refreshing moment of rebellion in the Congress, in all likelihood the House and Senate will pass a modified version of the $700 billion handout this week to fat cat Wall Street financiers.

The likely result, according to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz: “The unemployment rate will still increase, growth will remain anemic, house prices will continue to fall, the number of houses in foreclosure will continue to rise, credit will be harder to get, states and localities will remain in a fiscal crisis, and there will be cutbacks in basic public services. …. Our living standards in the future will be lower than they otherwise would have been. ”

Here’s the problem: None of us really know that the hell is going on, and what the largest financial bailout in the history of our nation would actually achieve. Based on McCain and Obama’s hasty support of the bailout, it would seem they are both too far under the thumb of Wall Street to look at viable alternatives to an unprecedented handout to the same reckless bankers who got us into this mess.

And like they did in the run-up to war in Iraq and the passage of the Patriot Act, the media are compounding the problem rather than helping it. While TV devotes 24/7 coverage to pretending that mudslinging Democrats and Republicans represent the full range of debate, while right-wing radio hosts scream socialism, and while pundits like Thomas Friedman implore Congress “to give them the capital and the flexibility to put out this fire,” the American people are getting virtually no hard economic analysis about what the bailout would achieve or what the range of options are.

Why aren’t Luc Laeven and Fabian Valencia on television right now? They just submitted a comprehensive report to the International Monetary Fund after studying 42 banking crises over the past 37 years. Their conclusion: Bailouts often do not work, they often result in more bad practices, and they distort economies by transferring wealth from taxpayers to bankers and their customers.

Why hasn’t economist Dean Baker been invited onto a single television program in the past week ? He is one of the guys who actually predicted the current crisis. He wrote this week: “There is no way that the failure to do a bailout will lead to more than a very brief failure of the financial system. The worst case scenario is that we have an extremely scary day in which the markets freeze for a few hours. Then the Fed steps in and takes over the major banks. The system of payments continues to operate exactly as before, but the bank executives are out of their jobs and the bank shareholders have likely lost most of their money. In other words, the banks have a gun pointed to their heads and are threatening to pull the trigger unless we hand them $700 billion.”

Why isn’t New York University economist Nouriel Roubini all over the news right now? He says the claim that “spending $700 billion of public money is the best way to recapitalize banks has absolutely no factual basis or justification. This way of recapitalizing financial institutions is a total rip-off that will mostly benefit – at a huge expense for the U.S. taxpayer – the shareholders and even unsecured creditors of the banks. ….The pockets of reckless bankers and investors (will) have been made fatter under the fake argument that bailing out Wall Street was necessary to rescue Main Street from a severe recession.”

Roubini continues, “Instead, the restoration of the financial health of distressed financial firms could have been achieved with a cheaper and better use of public money. It is pathetic that Congress did not consult any of the many professional economists that have presented alternative plans that were more fair and efficient and less costly ways to resolve this crisis. … and it is a scandal that even Congressional Democrats have fallen for this Treasury scam that does little to resolve the debt burden of millions of distressed home owners.”

But turn on your television – the place where more than 60% of Americans get their primary news – turn on your radio, or open your local newspaper, and you’re not going to see what these top economists are saying. It’s a McCain quote, an Obama sound byte, and the same pundits who have proven their incompetence over and over. The result is an American public that is fundamentally uninformed about the issues that matter most – like economics, health care, and war – and over-informed about those that matter least: sports, celebrity, the latest campaign ad, and horserace analysis of elections.

We have no reason to believe that the press — and along with it, most politicians — will ask the tough questions, expand the range of debate, and bring the facts to the American people. But until they do, our economy – and our democracy — will continue its race to the bottom.

Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Josh Silver is the Executive Director of Free Press a national, nonpartisan organization that he co-founded with Robert McChesney and John Nichols in 2002 to engage citizens in media policy debates and create a more democratic and diverse media system.

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