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Iraq rules out extension of U.S. withdrawal dates

May 4, 2009

Reuters, May 3, 2009

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq will not extend withdrawal deadlines for U.S. troops set out in a bilateral accord, ending months of speculation about whether U.S. combat troops would stay beyond June in bases in the restive northern city of Mosul.

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Iraq was committed to adhering to the withdrawal schedule in the pact, which took effect on January 1, including the requirement to withdraw U.S. combat troops from towns and cities by the end of June and a full withdrawal by the end of 2011.

“These dates cannot be extended and this is consistent with the transfer and handover of responsibility to Iraqi security forces,” Dabbagh said in a statement.

Violence has dropped sharply in Iraq, but suicide bombs and other attacks continue to rock the northern city of Mosul, seen as a final stronghold for Sunni Islamist al Qaeda and other insurgent groups.

The ongoing violence in the city, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, had prompted speculation that Iraq might grant a waiver for U.S. combat troops to stay in urban bases in Mosul.

Last month, five U.S. soldiers were killed in a suicide attack in Mosul, the single most deadly attack on American forces in more than a year.

Major-General David Perkins, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said last week that Mosul might be the one place where U.S. combat troops might stay on beyond June if requested to do so by the Iraqi government.

“It is quite honestly … the one area where you are most likely to possibly see a decision for U.S. forces to remain there, probably more so than any other place, just based on the activity there (and) the capability of Iraqi security forces,” Perkins said.

Even after June, U.S. forces can conduct combat and other operations within cities if authorized by the Iraqi government. A major U.S. base on the outskirts of Mosul, for example, will not be affected.

“There will still be joint patrols in the city — the difference is that now we will ‘drive’ to work so to speak since we won’t be living in the city any longer,” Colonel Gary Volesky, a senior U.S. official in Mosul, said last week.

(Additional reporting by Tim Cocks)

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Problem of Guantánamo detainees returns to haunt Barack Obama

May 4, 2009

The Times, UK, May 4, 2009

U.S. President Barack Obama wipes his face

Tim Reid in Washington

President Obama is on the verge of breaking two key campaign promises in his troubled attempt to shut Guantánamo Bay — with plans to revive the military tribunal system set up by George Bush and to continue the indefinite detention of up to 100 inmates.

The moves, which have not yet been signed off by Mr Obama but look increasingly likely, are a result of his promise on his second day in office to shut the Guantánamo Bay prison within a year.

Since then, officials charged with working out how to shut down the prison concede that up to 100 of the 241 detainees remaining are either too dangerous to release or cannot be tried in a military or civilian court. The evidence against many of them is tainted because they were tortured, or involves sensitive issues of national security that cannot be revealed.

The latest Administration thinking has been decried by human rights groups who point out that as a presidential candidate, Mr Obama called the military tribunal system an enormous failure and condemned the indefinite detention of detainees as a gross breach of the US Constitution.

In addition to his pledge to shut Guantánamo, Mr Obama ordered a 120-day suspension of the military tribunal system, pending a review. Officials say that they now want a three-month extension, and have indicated that the hearings are likely to be restarted, with some modifications.

On the campaign trail, Mr Obama criticised the military tribunals because they drastically reduced the rights of defendants, with hearsay evidence permitted and even testimony produced under the harsh interrogation techniques the new Administration says amounted to torture.

Now Mr Obama’s lawyers are worried that they will struggle to try many detainees in federal court because a civilian judge could throw out much of the evidence, allowing allegedly dangerous men to walk free. Plans being worked on are to modify the tribunal system to increase the rights of defendants, but without giving them the full protections provided by the American legal system.

At a recent House hearing, Eric Holder, Mr Obama’s Attorney General, said that military tribunals could still be used but “would be different from those previously in place”.

Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, who was asked last week if the Administration would abandon the Guantánamo tribunal system, said: “Not at all.” He added: “The commissions are still very much on the table.”

Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said: “To revive a fatally flawed system that was designed to evade due process and the rule of law would be a grave error and a huge step backward.” Just as dismaying for such groups is the admission by Mr Gates to Congress last week that up to 100 detainees will probably have to be detained without trial, possibly in facilities on the US mainland.

Mr Gates said that 50 to 100 inmates “who we cannot release and cannot try” could end up being held without trial, probably on US soil. When asked about Mr Obama’s pledge to shut Guantánamo by January, Mr Gates said: “I think that question is still open.” Mr Gates did not specify whether such detentions would be temporary or indefinite, but acknowledged that congressmen and senators in all 50 states would oppose taking such detainees into their regions.

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, said: “President Obama’s decision to close Guantánamo will be betrayed if we simply replace it with another detention centre on US soil that disregards the law.”

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Wallerstein: Cuba and the United States: The Slow Thaw

May 2, 2009
Immanuel Wallerstein, Commentary No. 256, May 1, 2009

After nearly 50 years of unremitting hostility to Cuba’s revolutionary government, the United States has taken its first steps towards a thaw in relations. The Cuban government has responded cautiously and skeptically, but has kept the door open to this possibility.

Some commentators have attributed this new situation to a change in leadership in both countries. The real explanation lies much more in the changed geopolitical situation – in the world-system as a whole and in Latin America in particular.

The Cuban revolutionaries came to power in January 1959. Relations with the United States deteriorated badly within a year. In March of 1960, President Eisenhower ordered the preparation of an invasion by Cuban exiles to overthrow the Cuban government. Shortly after John F. Kennedy became president, he approved a revised version of the Eisenhower plan in March of 1961. One month later, the plan was implemented. It is known as the Bay of Pigs (Playa de Girón) invasion. It lasted a very few days and was a military fiasco for the U.S.-supported invaders.

In January of 1962, the United States proposed at the meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) that Cuba be suspended from membership. The United States proposal was supported by 14 of 21 members, the bare two-thirds needed to pass it. Cuba voted no and six Latin American countries abstained. The principal ground for the suspension was the fact that Cuba had announced its adherence to Marxism-Leninism, which was deemed incompatible with membership. The United States in addition launched a total embargo on trade relations with Cuba and sought to get acquiescence in this boycott from its NATO allies in western Europe and from Latin American states.

October of 1962 marked the very dramatic Cuban missile crisis. The Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles in Cuban sites. The United States demanded they be withdrawn. The world feared it was on the brink of a nuclear war. In the end, the Soviet Union withdrew the missiles, presumably against a secret pledge by the United States that they would not support a further invasion of Cuba. The Cuban government indicated its disagreement with the Soviet Union’s decision, but maintained its good relations with that government.

As is evident, the main element in U.S. hostility to the Cuban government was Cold War considerations. From that point on, the U.S. government placed constant pressure on its NATO allies and Latin American states to cut all links with Cuba, which one by one most of them did.

At the same time, there were an increasing number of Cuban exiles in the United States. These exiles were determined to overthrow the Cuban government, and organized politically to ensure very strong support for this idea by the U.S. Congress and government. Over the first thirty years, this effort was increasingly successful.

Against this hostility, the Cuban government sought alliances not only with countries in the so-called socialist bloc but with revolutionary governments and movements in the so-called Third World. It “exported” to Third World countries its human capital in the form of well-trained physicians and schoolteachers. It offered crucial military assistance to the government of independent Angola, when it was fighting against invaders from the apartheid government of South Africa. Cuban troops helped defeat the South Africans at the crucial battle of Cuito Carnavale in 1988.

The entire situation changed in the 1990s in three crucial ways. The first new element was the collapse of the Soviet Union. This meant that Cold War considerations had now become irrelevant. It meant also that Cuba suffered great economic hardship in the 1990s because of the ending of Soviet/Russian economic assistance, and had to adjust its internal program.

The second new element, especially evident under the presidency of George W. Bush, was the acute decline of U.S. geopolitical power. This unleashed a serious reversal of Latin American politics, with the coming to power, in one country after another, of left-of-center governments. One by one, these countries all began to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba and to call for both the ending of the U.S. boycott and Cuba’s reintegration into the OAS.

The third element was a marked transformation of the U.S. political scene. For the first time, there began to be serious talk about the “failure” of U.S. policy towards Cuba. There was pressure from farm interests to gain the right to sell their products in Cuba. This gained support from many Republican senators, including notably Richard Lugar, the senior Republican on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Even more important perhaps was the fact that, after fifty years, the Cuban exile community had evolved in its political views. Large numbers of younger Cuban-Americans began to argue for the right to travel to Cuba, to send money there, and to have free and open exchange.

When Barack Obama became president, he was thus under some pressure to launch a “thaw” in Cuban-American relations. He did this by various initial gestures, undoing the restrictions on family remittances and travel imposed by his predecessor. How far Obama is ready to go to improve relations is as yet unknown. But whereas a mere ten years ago, the internal U.S. political pressure was overwhelmingly in favor of the economic boycott, the public and the politicians are now divided. And given the evolution of Latin American opinion and the growing size of the Latino population in the United States, it is likely that U.S. public opinion will evolve further in the coming year or two.

Cuba’s reaction has been prudent. Fidel Castro explained it well on April 5. He said that Obama’s gestures and statements were destined primarily to a U.S. public and expressed the view of a U.S. president. He then said two things: “Undoubtedly he is much better than Bush and McCain” (something many left critics of Obama are unwilling to admit) but Obama is constrained by the realities: “The empire is much stronger than he and his good intentions are.”

So, Cuba is tentatively exploring how far the United States is ready to go. There are “low-level” diplomatic discussions currently going on. The Obama government is under internal pressures towards a “thaw.” The Castro government is under Latin American pressures in favor of a “thaw.” If geopolitical realities continue to evolve in the direction they have been heading in the last few years, it is not impossible that Cuba and the United States can achieve “normal” diplomatic relations. No doubt, both would continue to have different perspectives on the world, and pursue somewhat different objectives, but that is true of most bilateral relations. A situation in which the relations between Cuba and the United States were ones of dignity and mutual respect would be a great improvement over the relations of the past fifty years.

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Robert Fisk: A historic day for Iraq – but not in the way the British want to believe

May 2, 2009

The Independent, UK, May 1, 2009 

Brigadier Tom Beckett (right) hands over to Colonel Henry A Kievenaar III at Basra Airbase yesterday

PA

Brigadier Tom Beckett (right) hands over to Colonel Henry A Kievenaar III at Basra Airbase yesterday

One hundred and seventy-nine dead soldiers. For what? 179,000 dead Iraqis? Or is the real figure closer to a million? We don’t know. And we don’t care. We never cared about the Iraqis. That’s why we don’t know the figure. That’s why we left Basra yesterday.

I remember going to the famous Basra air base to ask how a poor Iraqi boy, a hotel receptionist called Bahr Moussa, had died. He was kicked to death in British military custody. His father was an Iraqi policeman. I talked to him in the company of a young Muslim woman. The British public relations man at the airport was laughing. “I don’t believe this,” my Muslim companion said. “He doesn’t care.” She did. So did I. I had reported from Northern Ireland. I had heard this laughter before. Which is why yesterday’s departure should have been called the Day of Bahr Moussa. Yesterday, his country was set free from his murderer. At last.

History is a hard taskmaster. In my library, I have an original copy of General Angus Maude’s statement to the people of Baghdad – $2,000, it cost me, at a telephone auction a few days before we invaded Iraq in 2003, but it is worth every cent. “Our military operations have as their object,” Maude announced, “the defeat of the enemy… our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” And so it goes on. Maude, I should add, expired shortly afterwards because he declined to boil his milk in Baghdad and died of cholera.

Related articles

There followed a familiar story. The British occupation force was opposed by an Iraqi resistance – “terrorists”, of course – and the British destroyed a town called Fallujah and demanded the surrender of a Shiite cleric and British intelligence in Baghdad claimed that “terrorists” were crossing the border from Syria, and Lloyd George – the Blair-Brown of his age – then stood up in the House of Commons and said that there would be “anarchy” in Iraq if British troops left. Oh dear.

Even repeating these words is deeply embarrassing. Here, for example, is a letter written by Nijris ibn Qu’ud to a British intelligence agent in 1920: “You cannot treat us like sheep… it is we Iraqi who are the brains of the Arab nation… You are given a short time to clear out of Mesopotamia. If you don’t go you will be driven out.”

So let us turn at last to T E Lawrence. Yes, Lawrence of Arabia. In The Sunday Times on 22 August 1920, he wrote of Iraq that the people of England “had been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information… Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows.” Even more presciently, Lawrence had written that the Iraqis had not risked their lives in battle to become British subjects. “Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no justification for freedom.”

Alas not. Iraq, begging around Europe now that its oil wealth has run out, is a pitiful figure. But it is a little bit freer than it was. We have destroyed its master and our friend (a certain Saddam) and now, with our own dead clanking around our heels, we are getting out yet again. Till next time…

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.

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Obama’s 100 Days — The Mad Men Did Well

April 29, 2009

By John  Pilger | ZNet, April 29, 2009
John Pilger’s ZSpace Page

The BBC’s American television soap Mad Men offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the “smart” people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving dreamt up by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged and sold.

It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The “Obama brand” has been named “Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008”, easily beating Apple computers. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign as “an institutionalised mass-level automated technological community organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force”. Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino union organiser César Chávez – “Sí, se puede!” or “Yes, we can” – the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush.

No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous “Change you can believe in”, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. “We will be the most powerful,” he often declared.

Perhaps the Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers of a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticised him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as “adroit literary creations, rich, like those Doric columns, with allusion . . .” (Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian). The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote: “Many spiritually advanced people I know . . . identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who . . . can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On 24 April, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not “persons”, and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works. One of his senior US intelligence officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in 1989; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, the US experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of “defence”, Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, has been retained by Obama.

All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office.

In Afghanistan, the US “strategy” of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the “Taliban”) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the US military will remain indefinitely. Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, justifying it as a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing “a real threat” to Europe and the US. On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as “anti-nuclear”. It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead programme, the US is building new “tactical” nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.

Perhaps the biggest lie – the equivalent of smoking is good for you – is Obama’s announcement that the US is leaving Iraq, the country it has reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed US army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain “for the next 15 to 20 years”. On 25 April, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they have been suckered – especially as the nation’s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Lawrence Summers, Obama’s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3trn at the same banks that paid him more than $8m last year, including $135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in.

Much of the American establishment loathed Bush and Cheney for exposing, and threatening, the onward march of America’s “grand design”, as Henry Kissinger, war criminal and now Obama adviser, calls it. In advertising terms, Bush was a “brand collapse” whereas Obama, with his toothpaste advertisement smile and righteous clichés, is a godsend. At a stroke, he has seen off serious domestic dissent to war, and he brings tears to the eyes, from Washington to Whitehall. He is the BBC’s man, and CNN’s man, and Murdoch’s man, and Wall Street’s man, and the CIA’s man. The Madmen did well.

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Stunt to Silence Meaningful Debate on Racism

April 29, 2009

Nobody has explained what was offensive about the Iranian president’s speech. He presented the unvarnished truth. The offence was refusing to listen, says Stuart Littlewood.

Middle East Online,

First published: April 22, 2009

The truth never suits Israel’s flag-wavers and stooges. They have to twist it or strangulate it.

When Mr Ahmadjinedad got up to speak at the UN racism conference the British Ambassador, Peter Gooderham, was among those who walked out in the worst show of diplomatic bad manners this century. Gooderham is reported to have said that “such inflammatory rhetoric has no place whatsoever in a United Nations conference addressing the whole issue of racism and how to address it.

“As soon as President Ahmadinejad, started talking about Israel, that was the cue for us to walk out. We agreed in advance that if there was any such rhetoric there would be no tolerance for it.” Referring to the Iranian leader’s accusation of Israeli racism he added: “That is a charge we unreservedly condemn and so we had no hesitation at that point in leaving the conference hall.”

TV inquisitor Jeremy Paxman asked Gooderham the difference between Zionism and racism, to which he replied that Zionism is a political movement and racism is something else – we recognise it when we see it.

The trouble is, these dummies don’t recognise it at all. Nor are they daily on the receiving end, as the Palestinians are, of Israel’s brutal racist policies. Nor were they under Israel’s genocidal blitzkrieg on Gaza that vaporized and incinerated women and children in their hundreds and blew their body-parts to kingdom-come.

Everyone knows that the Zionist project aims to create a Jewish state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea and from the Euphrates to the Nile by ethnically cleansing the Arab population from their homeland, stealing their lands and resources at gunpoint, and effectively wiping Palestine off the map. If that isn’t naked racism, what is it? Haven’t Mr Gooderham and his colleagues read the manifestoes of the Likud and Kadima parties?

The question is, why do supposedly moral and civilized people support it and seek to perpetuate it?

Right on cue David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, condemned President Ahmadinejad’s remarks about Israel being a ‘racist government’ as “offensive, inflammatory and utterly unacceptable.” He didn’t say why.

Indeed, nobody has explained what was offensive about the Iranian president’s speech. He presented the unvarnished truth. The offence was refusing to listen. But truth has been a major casualty at the UN for 60 years. It doesn’t help when its Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, whines about “this august platform” being used “to accuse, divide and even incite. This is the opposite of what this conference seeks to achieve.” And what exactly are the powers-that-be seeking to achieve, if not to whitewash the truth as usual?

Last November’s Bulletin Board of the Board of Deputies of British Jews – the equivalent in Britain of AIPAC – announced that Elizabeth Harris, their Director of Public Affairs, attended the “preparatory committee” meeting in Geneva for the Anti-racism Conference and used the opportunity to have “constructive” meetings with the British Ambassador and representatives of other European countries. No doubt that’s when the stooges received their orders.

So the walkout at the UN had long been premeditated and pre-planned. It was a stupid stunt.

The biggest disgrace is that racist thugs in Tel Aviv are able orchestrate such a thing. It is now self-evident that Zionists have infiltrated and embedded themselves in the political, financial, economic and social fabric of the western world to everyone else’s detriment.

Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation.

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Is Bin Laden Dead or Alive? US, Pakistan Not Sure

April 28, 2009

“No Trace” of al-Qaeda Leader, State Dept Vows to Keep Looking

by Jason Ditz | Antiwar.com, April 27, 2009

Since his March broadcast on al-Jazeera, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has seemingly vanished off the face of the earth, with neither US nor Pakistan spy agencies detecting a single trace of him. This has added to the speculation that he may have died.

“The question is whether he is alive or dead,” Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said, “there is no trace of him.” Zardari also said his advisers feel there is substance to the rumors of bin Laden’s failing health, and that “they obviously feel that he does not exist any more but that’s not confirmed.”

US State Department spokesman Robert Wood likewise admitted that they likewise “have no information that indicates that Osama bin Laden is … frankly dead or alive.” He insisted in the meantime the US would continue to operate under the assumption that he was alive and keep looking for him.

The enigmatic Saudi has been on the FBI’s ten most wanted list for over a decade, and US officials have repeatedly speculated that he is located somewhere along the mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. At this point though, that seems to be nothing more than a guess.

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Iraq: US raid broke security pact

April 27, 2009
Al Jazeera, April 27, 2009

The security pact says US troops in Iraq are no longer allowed to conduct military operations [AFP]

Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, has denounced a US raid on targets near Baghdad as “a crime”, saying that it violated the security pact between the two countries.

Two people were killed in the raid on a house in Kut, 150km southeast of Baghdad on Sunday, according to Iraqi officials said, but the US disputed the details of the attack.

The US military said that just one person, a women, was killed during the operation, which it said targeted the financier of Shia fighters funded and armed by Iran.

The military said that six suspected fighters were arrested, but Iraqi officials said the men were later released.

Mohammed al-Askari, the defence ministry spokesman, said “the committee has managed to get the six people detained by the Americans released”.

Security row

Al-Maliki has demanded that US forces hand over those responsible for the attack to the courts, an Iraqi official said.

“We condemn this horrific incident. It violates the agreements between US forces and the Iraqi government”

Latif al-Tarfa, governor of Wasit province

Under the US-Iraqi security pact, which came into force this year, the 137,000 US troops in Iraq are no longer allowed to conduct military operations without Iraqi approval and co-ordination.It also says that US soldiers are immune to prosecution in Iraqi courts unless they are suspected of grave crimes committed while off duty outside their bases.

The US military said that the operation was undertaken within the framework of the security pact and that “the operation was fully co-ordinated and approved by the Iraqi government”.

The row marks the most serious test of the security pact so far.

But efforts were quickly launched in an attempt to tone down the dispute and Colonel Richard Francey, from the US military, offered condolences to the family of the woman killed.

‘Horrific incident’

Baghdad’s condemnation of the raid came after hundreds of Iraqis protested in Kut against the US operation.

Hundreds of protesters shouted angry slogans as they carried two coffins through the streets of Kut.

“We condemn this horrific incident. It violates the agreements between US forces and the Iraqi government,” Latif al-Tarfa, governor of Wasit province, said.

“Innocent people were killed and the city is now very tense.”

Aziz al-Amara, an Iraqi police officer, who commands a rapid reaction force in Kut, said all of those targeted in the raid were innocent and that one of those arrested was a police captain.

“They were poor people. They do not cause any political or security problems,” he said.

Officials arrested

The Iraqi defence ministry ordered the arrest of two high-ranking Iraqi officers for their alleged roles in allowing US forces to operate in Kut.

It also sent a committee to Kut to investigate.

The raid came just months before US combat troops are due to withdraw from Iraqi cities.

Barack Obama, the US president, has ordered all US combat operations in Iraq to cease in August 2010 ahead of the full withdrawal by the end of 2011.

Kut, and the surrounding Wasit province, were the last area south of Baghdad to be handed over to Iraqi forces last October.

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US escalates threats against Pakistan

April 26, 2009

By Keith Jones | WSWS, 25 April 2009

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has warned Pakistani authorities that US-Pakistan relations will be imperiled unless Islamabad heeds Washington’s admonitions and bloodily suppresses a growing Islamacist insurgency that has been fueled by the US occupation of Afghanistan.

Speaking Thursday at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune, Gates declared, “It is important that they not only recognize it [the threat], but take appropriate actions to deal with it.” Action against the Islamacist militia, said Gates, is “central to our future partnership with the government in Islamabad.”

Gates’s remarks were part of a flurry of statements this week from Obama administration officials, Pentagon generals, and US Congressional leaders accusing Pakistan’s government and military of appeasing the Taliban.

The immediate trigger for the ratcheting up of pressure on Islamabad was the Pakistani government’s loss of control over the North-West Frontier Province district of Buner, which lies only 100 kilometers (70 miles) northwest of Islamabad, to four to five hundred Islamacist insurgents. But US officials, beginning with President Obama himself, have for months been pressing Pakistani authorities to do more to support the pacification of Afghanistan, claiming that Pakistan’s border regions constitute a “safe-haven” for the Taliban and that if the US is to prevail in the Afghan war, it must be extended into Pakistan. A key concern for the Pentagon is the mounting number of attacks on the Pakistani supply routes that carry 80 percent of the food, fuel and arms consumed by the US occupation force in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rebuked Pakistan’s government for “abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists.”

“(We) cannot underscore the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan by the continuing advances now within hours of Islamabad that are being made by a loosely confederated group of terrorists and others who are seeking the overthrow of the Pakistani state,” Clinton told the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee.

On Thursday morning, Obama held an emergency meeting attended by Clinton, Vice-President Joe Biden, and Richard Holbrooke, the US’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, to discuss US-Pakistan relations and recent developments in Pakistan.

Speaking to reporters following the meeting, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration was “extremely concerned,” adding that Pakistan “is something that takes a lot of the president’s time.” “What is happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” said Gibbs, “is the central foreign policy focus of this administration.”

Continuing a strategy of illegal, unilateral aggression begun under the Bush administration, Washington is regularly mounting drone missile strikes within Pakistan. Earlier this month, Holbrooke and the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, unsuccessfully pressed Islamabad to agree to joint operations with US forces inside Pakistan.

According to Holbrooke, Pakistan and not Afghanistan will now be at the top of the agenda when Obama hosts a trilateral summit of the presidents of the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan May 6-7. The summit, said Holbrooke, “was conceived in an atmosphere that has now changed significantly, and the focus is increasingly on Pakistan.

In recent weeks Obama administration insiders, Pentagon generals, and longtime strategists of US imperialism like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have been making increasingly apocalyptic statements about Pakistan’s future. It has been repeatedly suggested that the nuclear-armed state of 170 million could soon break up along national-ethnic lines or fall in large part, if not wholly, under the control of anti-US Islamic fundamentalists.

Born of the reactionary, British imperialist-instigated communal partition of the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan is indeed beset by multiple, interconnected crises—crises that the rapacious policies of US imperialism are enormously exacerbating.

Determined to prevail in the Afghan war, so as to assert US dominance in oil-rich Central Asia, Washington is demanding that Islamabad subordinate its interests ever-more completely to those of the US. To the Pakistani elite this represents a double threat: the policies the US has imposed on Pakistan are highly unpopular, further discrediting a corrupt and fundamentally undemocratic political system and fueling social unrest; they also are at odds with important elements of Pakistan’s strategy for contending with arch-rival India.

The occupation of Afghanistan is rightly opposed by the majority of the Pakistani people as a predatory war—they only have to remember the Bush administration’s enthusiastic support for the dictator General Prevez Musharraf. Yet Washington is insisting that the Pakistani military place the country’s border regions under an ever-tighter military occupation. The brutal, colonial-style pacification methods the Pakistani military has employed in repeated offensives in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have only inflamed the local populace, stoked Pashtun nationalism, and caused serious rifts within the ranks of the army, many of whose soldiers are drawn from the Pashtun peasantry.

Washington is also fully supporting IMF-dictated measures to “stabilize” the Pakistani economy, including the elimination of energy subsidies, social spending cuts, and privatization, which will only increase the suffering of the country’s toilers.

The US media is forced to concede that Washington is reviled by the Pakistani people, but of course they cannot and will not explain why: the US’s sponsorship of a succession of right-wing military dictatorships; its use of Pakistan as a pawn in its geo-political strategy, stretching back to the early days of the Cold War; its cynical manipulation of aid dollars, bullying and threats; and its relentless pressure for a large-scale counter-insurgency war in wide swathes of Pakistan.

Hillary Clinton in her testimony to the House Foreign Relations Committee last Wednesday did make oblique reference to the grossly unequal social order that the US has helped sustain in Pakistan and that is helping fuel the anti-US and anti-government insurgency in the country’s impoverished Afghan border region. “The government of Pakistan,” said Clinton, “… must begin to deliver government services, otherwise they are going to lose out to those who show up and claim that they can solve people’s problems …”

Pakistani authorities initially played down the “Talibanization” of Buner. Only last week, the Pakistani National Assembly voted unanimously in favor of a “peace deal” with Islamacist militia, which for two years had fought intermittently with Pakistani security forces in the adjacent Swat Valley. Under this agreement, in six districts of the Malkand Division of the North-West Frontier Province, including Buner, a strict, Islamic fundamentalist form of sharia law is to be enforced. The agreement calls for the Islamacist militiamen in the Swat Valley to hand their weapons over to authorities. Instead many moved into Buner beginning this Wednesday, forcing local policemen to seek refuge in police stations, and taking control of an important shrine.

In response, the Pakistani government dispatched less than 150 Frontier Constabulary. The first contingent was forced to retreat after coming under fire in an ambush that killed two constables.

But by Thursday, in response to the US pressure, the government and military were vowing that they would not allow the writ of the Pakistani government to be challenged. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said that Swat Valley agreement would be reviewed if the challenges to the government’s authority continued. “We reserve the right to go for other options if Talibanization continues,” said Gilani.

Army chief General Ashfaq Kiyani vowed that the military “will not allow the militants to dictate terms to the government or impose their way of life on the civil society of Pakistan” and said the pause in army operations against the Islamacist militia was aimed at giving “reconciliatory forces a chance [and] must not be taken for a concession to the militants.”

At the same time, Kiyani denounced the “pronouncements by outside powers raising doubts on [the] future of Pakistan.”

The Pakistani Taliban said Friday that it was withdrawing from Buner, and Pakistani television broadcast video of them pulling out.

There are reports that the Pakistani military will, nevertheless, soon be ordered to disarm the pro-Taliban militia or drive it out of the Swat Valley.

Tensions between the US and Pakistani elite will, however, continue to boil. The Obama administration’s “Afghan surge”—the near doubling to 65,000 of the US military in Afghanistan—will result in a massive escalation of the bloodletting in Afghanistan that will inevitably spill over into Pakistan and incite further opposition among the Pakistani people.

The Pakistani elite, meanwhile, bitterly resents the burgeoning strategic partnership between the US and India. This partnership has involved increasing sales of advanced military equipment to India and Washington’s lifting of an international embargo on international civilian nuclear trade with India, which will allow India to concentrate the resources of its indigenous nuclear program on weapons development.

Obama administration officials have repeatedly demanded that Islamabad shift troops from its eastern border with India to its Afghan border regions, while very publicly repudiating earlier suggestions that they might press India to make concessions to Pakistan over Kashmir.

To Islamabad’s chagrin, India, with Washington’s full support, has emerged as a key provider of economic aid and military training to the US-imposed Afghan government. In a statement that could only have enraged the Pakistani elite, Clinton asserted Wednesday that India has a pivotal role to play in assisting the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “The US,” she told the House Foreign Relations Committee, “is advancing its relationship with India as part of a wide-ranging diplomatic agenda to meet today’s daunting challenges topped by the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

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Dozens of CIA “Ghost Prisoners” Missing

April 26, 2009

By William Fisher | Inter Press Service News

NEW YORK, Apr 24 (IPS) – At least three dozen detainees who were held in the CIA’s secret prisons overseas appear to be missing – and efforts by human rights organisations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful.

The story of these “ghost prisoners” was comprehensively documented last week by Pro Publica, an online investigative journalism group.

In September 2007, Michael V. Hayden, then director of the CIA, said, “fewer than 100 people had been detained at CIA’s facilities.” One memo released last week confirmed that the CIA had custody of at least 94 people as of May 2005 and “employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these.”

Former President George W. Bush publicly acknowledged the CIA programme in September 2006, and transferred 14 prisoners from the secret jails to Guantanamo. Many other prisoners, who had “little or no additional intelligence value,” Bush said, “have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments.”

But Bush did not reveal their identities or whereabouts – information that would have allowed the International Committee for the Red Cross to find them – or the terms under which the prisoners were handed over to foreign jailers.

The U.S. government has never released information describing the threat any of them posed. Some of the prisoners have since been released by third countries holding them, but it is still unclear what has happened to dozens of others, and no foreign governments have acknowledged holding them.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, an attorney with the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represents Majid Khan, a former ghost detainee at Guantánamo, told IPS, “The Obama administration must change course from its ‘forward-looking’ path because it leaves too many critical questions unanswered, including those about the fate of ghost prisoners held by the United States.”

“The United States is strong enough to examine the CIA and other agencies’ activities, to punish individuals who violated our laws, and to ensure that our nation does not slip to the dark side again,” she said.

Pro Publica reported that former officials in the Bush administration said that the CIA spent weeks during the summer of 2006 – shortly before Bush acknowledged the CIA prisons and suspended the programme – transferring prisoners to Pakistani, Egyptian and Jordanian custody.

The organisation said the population inside the programme had been shrinking since the existence of the prisons was detailed in a Washington Post article in November 2005. Renewed diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Libya in May 2006 made it possible for the CIA to turn over Libyan prisoners to Moammar Gadhafi’s control.

Joanne Mariner, director of the Terrorism and Counterterrorism Programme at Human Rights Watch, said, “If these men are now rotting in some Egyptian dungeon, the administration can’t pretend that it’s closed the door on the CIA programme.”

“Making the Justice Department memos on the CIA’s secret prison programme public was an important first step, but the Obama administration needs to reveal the fate and whereabouts of every person who was held in CIA custody,” she said.

The Red Cross has had access to and documented the experiences of only the 14 so-called “high value detainees” who were publicly moved out of the CIA programme and into the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

In June 2007, human rights groups released the names of three dozen people whose fates remained unknown.

“Until the U.S. government clarifies the fate and whereabouts of these individuals, these people are still disappeared, and disappearance is one of the most grave international human rights violations,” said Margaret Satterthwaite, a law professor at New York University. “We clearly don’t know the story of everyone who has been through the programme. We need to find out where they are and what happened.”

In a related development, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has asked the Obama administration to make public records pertaining to the detention and treatment of prisoners held at the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records pertaining to the number of people currently detained at Bagram and their names, citizenship, place of capture and length of detention. The ACLU is also seeking records pertaining to the process afforded those prisoners to challenge their detention and designation as “enemy combatants.”

“The U.S. government’s detention of hundreds of prisoners at Bagram has been shrouded in complete secrecy. Bagram houses far more prisoners than Guantánamo, in reportedly worse conditions and with an even less meaningful process for challenging their detention, yet very little information about the Bagram facility or the prisoners held there has been made public,” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.

She told IPS, “Without transparency, we can’t be sure that we’re doing the right thing – or even holding the right people – at Bagram.”

Recent news reports suggest that the U.S. government is detaining more than 600 individuals at Bagram, including not only Afghan citizens captured in Afghanistan but also an unknown number of foreign nationals captured thousands of miles from Afghanistan and brought to Bagram.

Some of these prisoners have been detained for as long as six years without access to counsel, and only recently have been permitted any contact with their families. At least two Bagram prisoners have died while in U.S. custody, and Army investigators concluded that the deaths were homicides.

“When prisoners are in American custody and under American control, no matter the location, our values and commitment to the rule of law are at stake,” said Jonathan Hafetz, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “Now that President Obama has taken the positive step of ordering Guantánamo shut down, it is critical that we don’t permit ‘other Gitmos’ to continue elsewhere.”

The ACLU’s request is addressed to the Departments of Defence, Justice and State, as well as the CIA.

A federal judge recently ruled that three prisoners being held by the U.S. at Bagram can challenge their detention in U.S. courts, in habeas corpus suits brought by a group of human rights legal advocates.

The prisoners, who were captured outside of Afghanistan and are not Afghan citizens, have been held there for more than six years without charge or access to counsel. The Obama administration is appealing the ruling.

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