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Israelis told to fight ‘holy war’ in Gaza

March 21, 2009

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem |The Independent, UK,  March 21, 2009

Many Israeli troops had the sense of fighting a “religious war” against Gentiles during the 22-day offensive in Gaza, according to a soldier who has highlighted the martial role of military rabbis during the operation.

The soldier testified that the “clear” message of literature distributed to troops by the rabbinate was: “We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the Gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land.”

The claim comes in the detailed transcript of a post-war discussion by soldiers, publication of which has triggered a military police inquiry into allegations about the use of lethal firepower against unarmed civilians.

The investigation was ordered by the military’s advocate general Avichai Mandleblit on Thursday after the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz published extracts from the transcript describing incidents in which Palestinian civilians were killed and property wantonly damaged.

In the fuller version of the transcript published yesterday, the soldier, a unit commander from the Givati brigade, says: “This was the main message and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.” He recalled that his own sergeant was from a hesder yeshiva, a college combining religious study and military service, who led the whole platoon in prayer before going into battle. The commander added that he had sought to talk to the men about Palestinian politics and society and, “about how not everyone in Gaza is Hamas and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us”.

After the offensive, Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group called for the dismissal of the military’s head chaplain, Rabbi Avichai Rontzki, a brigadier general. It said that he had distributed to troops a booklet saying that it was “terribly immoral” to show mercy to a “cruel enemy” and that the soldiers were fighting “murderers”.

The longer transcript conveys a fuller sense of the debate involving graduates from the Yitzhak Rabin military preparatory course. At one point Danny Zamir, the head of the course, says he would have questioned the killing of 180 traffic policemen during bombing on the first day of the operation. One pilot replies: “Tactically speaking you call them police. In any case they are armed and belong to Hamas … during better times they take Fatah people and throw them off the roofs and see what happens.”

The latest casualty figures published by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights list the names of 1,434 dead of whom they say 926 were civilians, 236 fighters and 255 police officers.

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US Flag-Burning Marks War Anniversary in Iraq

March 21, 2009

Sadr Supporters Rally for Release of Detainees

Antiwar.com

Posted March 20, 2009

Protesters marched through the streets, burning American flags and chanting “no, no for occupation.” It was yet another reminder of just how much resentment remains in Iraq over the American military presence.

The supporters of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr took to the streets in numerous Iraqi cities after Friday prayers, calling on US and Iraqi forces to release detained members of their faction who “were not involved in acts of violence against Iraqis in accordance with the directives of Sayyid Moqtada al-Sadr.”

The protests come in the wake of the six-year anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, at a time when many are wondering how much longer the American presence will continue and how much longer the Iraqi populace will have to wait for a return to normalcy.

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compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author

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Ex-Bush Admin Official: Many at Gitmo Are Innocent

March 20, 2009

Published on Thursday, March 19, 2009 by the Associated Press

by Andrew O. Selsky

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. “There are still innocent people there,” Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. “Some have been there six or seven years.”

[In this photo, reviewed by the U.S. Military, a guard stands near the shadow of a detainee at Guantanamo's Camp 5 detention center, at the U.S. Naval Base, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, January 21, 2009. (REUTERS/Brennan Linsley/Pool/Files)]In this photo, reviewed by the U.S. Military, a guard stands near the shadow of a detainee at Guantanamo’s Camp 5 detention center, at the U.S. Naval Base, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, January 21, 2009. (REUTERS/Brennan Linsley/Pool/Files)

Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a “mosaic” of intelligence.”It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance,” Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather “sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.”

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during the early stages of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent with no meaningful attempt to discriminate “who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.”

Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment on Wilkerson’s specific allegations but noted that the military has consistently said that dealing with foreign fighters from a wide variety of countries in a wartime setting was a complex process. The military has insisted that those held at Guantanamo were enemy combatants and posed a threat to the United States.

In his posting for The Washington Note blog, Wilkerson wrote that “U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.”

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney fought efforts to address the situation, Wilkerson said, because “to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership.”

Wilkerson told the AP in a telephone interview that many detainees “clearly had no connection to al-Qaida and the Taliban and were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pakistanis turned many over for $5,000 a head.”

Some 800 men have been held at Guantanamo since the prison opened in January 2002, and 240 remain. Wilkerson said two dozen are terrorists, including confessed Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was transferred to Guantanamo from CIA custody in September 2006.

“We need to put those people in a high-security prison like the one in Colorado, forget them and throw away the key,” Wilkerson said. “We can’t try them because we tortured them and didn’t keep an evidence trail.”

But the rest of the detainees need to be released, he said.

Wilkerson, who flew combat missions as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and left the government in January 2005, said he did not speak out while in government because some of the information was classified. He said he feels compelled to do so now because Cheney has claimed in recent press interviews that President Barack Obama is making the U.S. less safe by reversing Bush administration policies toward terror suspects, including ordering Guantanamo closed.

The administration is now evaluating what to do with the prisoners who remain at the U.S. military base in Cuba.

“I’m very concerned about the kinds of things Cheney is saying to make it seem Obama is a danger to this republic,” Wilkerson said. “To have a former vice president fearmongering like this is really, really dangerous.”

© 2009

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Hidden Wounds of Occupation

March 19, 2009

Ashley Smith reports on the devastating effects of the U.S. war and occupation on the civilian population of Iraq.

By Ashley Smith | ZNet, March 19, 2009

Ashley Smith’s ZSpace Page

THE ROMAN historian Tacitus denounced Roman imperialism for its plunder and destruction of its colonies, declaring, “They make a desert and call it peace.” No phrase is more apt in describing what the U.S. has done in Iraq.

Two new studies released by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Oxfam reveal the devastating toll on Iraq’s surviving population in the wake of the U.S. war and occupation.

The U.S. has besieged Iraq, a country of some 27 million people, for the last 20 years. The 1991 Gulf War killed hundreds of thousands. Sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein’s regime led to the deaths of over 1 million people. The 2003 invasion and occupation caused another 1 million deaths, drove in excess of 4 million from their homes and caused a civil war that tore apart the society. In sum, the U.S. has killed or displaced nearly a quarter of Iraq’s population.

According to the WHO’s Iraqi Mental Health Study, a survey of 4,332 Iraqis over the age of 18, about 17 percent of Iraqis admitted to suffering from some kind of mental disorder, the most common being depression, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.

The Associated Press described this horrific number as a “surprisingly low rate of mental disorders.” But as Dr. Saleh Al Hassnawi, who was involved in the study, stated, “In Iraq, there is considerable stigma attached to having a mental illness.” So while already high, the real numbers are no doubt greater.

Of course, given the horrors of the last 30 years of U.S. attacks on Iraq, Iraqis have developed nearly super-human coping mechanisms to survive. As Dr. Abdul al-Monaf al-Jadiry remarked, “Gradually, people seem to have become accustomed to enduring hard experiences.”

Of those who reported suffering mental illnesses, 70 percent considered committing suicide. If extrapolated to the entire population, over 3 million Iraqis have considered suicide as a result of their disorders.

Given the combination of social stigma and the destruction of the Iraqi health care system, only 2 percent of those suffering mental problems sought out treatment. Most hid their conditions, self-medicated with various drugs, or asked for Valium and sleeping pills from pharmacists.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THE STUDY released from Oxfam is even more devastating. A survey of 1,700 women from five of Iraq’s 18 provinces, it portrays the impact of the occupation on women since 2003. “Now that the overall security situation, although still very fragile, begins to stabilize,” Oxfam stated, “countless mothers, wives, widows and daughters of Iraq remain caught in the grip of a silent emergency.”

The scale of the crisis in Iraqi women’s lives is mind-boggling. Oxfam reported that 55 percent of the women they surveyed reported they had been the victims of violence since 2003. Researchers also found that 55 percent of women had been displaced or forced to abandon their homes.

Despite the media celebrations of growing security in Iraq, 40 percent of those surveyed stated that their security situation was worse in 2008 over 2007. Close to 60 percent of women said that security and safety remained their most pressing concern.

As result of displacement and violence, over a third of the respondents had now become the effective head of their households. There are an estimated 740,000 widows in Iraq, and the actual number could be far higher.

The U.S. attempt to dismantle the central government’s traditional role as the hub of the economy and principal provider of social services has devastated these women. Seventy-six percent of widows said they did not receive their husband’s pensions from the government. While 76 percent said that they relied government food rations, 45 percent reported receiving it intermittently. Thirty-three percent had received no humanitarian assistance since 2003, and a majority stated that their income was lower in 2008 than in 2007 and 2006.

Oxfam reported, “Beyond security, the overwhelming concern women voiced was extreme difficulty accessing basic services such as clean water, electricity and adequate shelter…Availability of essentials such as water, sanitation, and health care is far below national averages.”

A quarter of women stated that they did not have access to drinking water on a daily basis and nearly half declared that the water they get is not even potable. Nearly two-thirds reported that they had less than six hours of electricity each day.

Access to education for women and their children is, unsurprisingly, no better. Oxfam reported that, “a staggering 40 percent of mothers surveyed said that their children not attending school. This is not only because of economic hardship, discrimination against girls and insecurity; it is also a result of the destruction and deterioration of education facilities.”

While the media trumpets this horror as success, those who opposed the war and occupation must not fall under their siren song. The U.S. government has committed one of the great crimes against humanity in Iraq and owes its people an enormous debt. The antiwar movement must continue to demand the complete and immediate withdrawal of all occupying troops and we must compel the U.S. government to pay reparations to the people of Iraq so that they can rebuild their society.

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Mullen: US Attack on Iran Would Focus on Navy, Air Force

March 16, 2009

In PBS Interview, Admiral Warns Against Unilateral Israeli Attack

Antiwar.com

Posted March 15, 2009

In an interview today on the Charlie Rose show, Admiral Michael Mullen cautioned that a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran could endanger the stability entire region, leading to an escalation that could imperil American forces in the Gulf region.

Then Mullen spoke about a hypothetical US attack on Iran, declaring that it was in “a maritime part of the world, where the emphasis would certainly be on those two forces (the Air Force and Navy).” Mullen also insisted that there was no  disconnect between the United States and Israel on the question of Iran. Israel has repeatedly been reported as being on the cusp of launching an attack on Iran.

At the same time, there is evidence of a disconnect within the Pentagon itself about Iran. Mullen has repeatedly been on the same page as Israel, accusing Iran of moving quickly toward the creation of nuclear weapons (in spite of all the evidence to the contrary). Yet Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Mullen contradicted one another rather publicly just two weeks ago, when Gates declared that Iran was “not close to a weapon at this point.”

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compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]


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What are U.S. goals in Afghanistan?

March 14, 2009

Helen Thomas | The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 13, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is making a big mistake in escalating U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan where he already has acknowledged he doesn’t believe victory is possible.

We should ask: What are we doing there seven years after the 9/11 attacks by the al-Qaida network? Historically, the country has lacked a strong central government and has been governed by locally strong tribal leaders and warlords.

Al-Qaida was able to take advantage of this loose structure and turn Afghanistan into the plotting ground for the terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York.

But what are our goals there in 2009?

While the U.S. is supposed to wind down its presence in Iraq in 19 months (rather than the 16 months promised by Obama on the campaign trail), the president has ordered a military buildup in Afghanistan to more than 50,000 troops, both from the U.S. and other NATO members.

He would leave 50,000 Americans in Iraq to cope with the resistance there. Such was the folly of President George W. Bush, who invaded Iraq after his hawkish neoconservative advisers told him we would triumph in a few weeks.

To this day none of Bush’s reasons for attacking Iraq have held up to examination. There were no weapons of mass destruction, no Iraqi ties to al-Qaida and no threat to the United States.

There have been no apologies from Bush or his cohorts.

When Obama visited Afghanistan last summer as a presidential candidate, he joined several other senators in a get-tough statement that said: “We need a great sense of urgency because the threat from the Taliban and al-Qaida is growing and we must act. We need determination because it will take time to prevail. But with the right strategy and the resources to back it up, we will get the job done.”

What exactly is the job that he says needs to get done? What is the U.S. exit strategy? Does anyone in power remember the lessons we were supposed to have learned from Vietnam?

Afghanistan is known as the “graveyard of empires” because of the repeated failure of invaders over the centuries to achieve their goals in that rugged country.

U.S. prowling around in Afghanistan hasn’t aroused anti-war protests as did the March 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. I am puzzled about this. It seems to me we are leaping out of the frying pan into the fire!

American public aversion to our military adventures in Afghanistan has been fueled by our shock at the toll that U.S. planes and aerial drones have inflicted on Afghan civilians.

There have been indications that Obama may start diplomatic overtures to the Taliban at a time when the human and financial costs of the two wars are wearing down the U.S. as it struggles with an economic depression that has no end in sight.

According to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, the president is evaluating the situation in Afghanistan.

Obama would do well to study the trajectory that took us into the Vietnam War and the terrible price we paid there. We lost the war and fled by helicopters from Saigon.

Both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon thought that they could win in Vietnam, but they were brought down as much by the American people — who rebelled against the war — as they were by the North Vietnamese.

Obama could go deeper in history and check out President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s career for a lesson on how to end a war.

When running for the White House in 1952, when the American public was growing frustrated about the long U.S. involvement in the Korean War, Eisenhower told voters: “I shall go to Korea.”

And he did. The Korean War ended in a standoff in 1953 — much to the relief of the American people.

Despite some ensuing skirmishes in the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, a truce has endured ever since.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama indicated that he was willing to speak to all parties in the military or diplomatic disputes we were involved in. He was criticized for his plan for outreach to the militants in Afghanistan.

But there is no alternative.

Sooner or later American presidents should learn that people will always fight for their country against a foreign invader. And peace should be the only goal.

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2009 Hearst Newspapers.

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The Israel lobby tightens its stranglehold on American politics

March 14, 2009

Editorial

By Paul Woodward, War in Context, March 11, 2009

Nothing disturbs Washington’s political culture more than uninvited honesty.

Chas Freeman’s eloquent yet blunt explanation of why he has decided not to take up the post of chairman of the National Intelligence Council was described as “intemperate” by the ever-temperate James Fallows and as “a bit too hot, for my taste” by Joe Klein. (Both Klein and Fallows, I should note, were not among Freeman’s critics.)

To those who regard Freeman’s statement as somehow an affront to the decorum that Washington expects I would ask this: Is it better to apply make-up over a festering boil, or is it better to lance it?

Joe Klein, even now unwilling to acknowledge the existence of an “Israel lobby,” insists that Freeman was the victim of an attack by a mob — a largely Jewish neoconservative mob — but not a lobby. That strikes me as merely a semantic quibble. If Israel “lobby” sounds too dignified, I have no problem with calling it the “Israel mob” — it is indeed a kind of political mafia.

But however anyone wants to characterize or label the Israel lobby, no one can dispute that it is tenacious. Freeman’s assessment that were he to take up the intelligence position he would remain “under constant attack” is most likely accurate. His choice to remain in private life is understandable. If anything constructive is to come out of this episode — and I think it can — it is that the workings of the Israel lobby are now more transparent than ever.

The campaign against Freeman was led by the indicted former director of AIPAC, Steven Ros en. While the victory champagne was no doubt still flowing, the editors of the Washington Post saw fit — with amazing timing — to add their own toast by calling on the Attorney General to drop the case against Rosen in which he has been charged under the Espionage Act. The Post argues:

The government has the right to demand strict confidentiality from government officials and others who swear to protect its secrets. The Justice Department errs egregiously and risks profound damage to the First Amendment, however, when it insists that private citizens — academics, journalists, think tank analysts, lobbyists and the like — also are legally bound to keep the nation’s secrets. The prosecution in effect criminalizes the exchange of information.

I’m no legal expert, but it would seem that the case hinges not on whether individuals outside government can legally be the recipients of classified information. Rather, the case would seem to rest on a determination of AIPAC’s actual nature.

Even if it is not registered as an agent of a foreign government, if AIPAC can be demonstrated to have been functioning as such, then as an AIPAC official, Rosen could presumably be shown to have been acting on behalf of the Israeli government.

As Douglas M. Bloomfield, a former legislative director and chief lobbyist for AIPAC, writes: “The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its leaders could be the biggest losers in a case that threatens to expose the group’s inner secrets.”

He continues:

Although AIPAC claims it has nothing to do with the convoluted case, it is also on trial, in a way. The organization fired the pair [Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman] and said they were rogues acting beneath the group’s standards. That will be shot full of holes from all directions in court, whether in the criminal case or in a likely civil suit by the defendants claiming damage to their reputations and careers.

The mere threat of a multimillion-dollar civil suit could prompt a very generous settlement offer from AIPAC in exchange for a vow of silence from the former staffers. But don’t worry; AIPAC can easily afford it.

Soon after the FBI raided AIPAC offices, the organization launched a fund-raising campaign to defend against any charges, and the appeals for money didn’t stop when it fired the pair. Since the scandal broke in 2004, AIPAC’s fund-raising juggernaut has hauled in so much dough that one senior staffer told me that “it’s coming in faster than we know what to do with it.”

JTA quoted tax records showing AIPAC raised $86 million in 2007, doubling 2003’s $43 million. Not all of that money was a result of the espionage case, but many millions were.

In cutting loose the pair, AIPAC insisted it had no idea what they were doing. Not so, say insiders, former colleagues, sources close to the defense, and others familiar with the organization.

One of the topics AIPAC won’t want discussed, say these sources, is how closely it coordinated with Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, when he led the Israeli Likud opposition and later when he was prime minister, to impede the Oslo peace process being pressed by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.

That could not only validate AIPAC’s critics, who accuse it of being a branch of the Likud, but also lead to an investigation of violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Clearly, nothing worries AIPAC and its supporters more than the possibility that the organization — and by extension the Israel lobby as a political force — might face wider public scrutiny.

The campaign against Chas Freeman was not driven by an exaggerated estimation of his importance; it was a strategic battle in defense of the lobby’s deeply entrenched political authority. The importance of the fight was evident by the fact that it was fought in the open. But having come right out into the open, it is now that much more difficult for the lobby to retreat into the shadows.

And as Steven Rosen once wrote in an AIPAC internal memo: “A lobby is like a night flower. It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.”

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US Drone Strike Kills At Least 15 in Pakistan

March 13, 2009

Four Missiles Hit ‘Residential Building’

Antiwar.com

posted March 12, 2009

Last Updated 3/12/09 9:45 PM EST

At least 15 people were killed today when four missiles fired from US drones hit a residential building in Barjo, Kurram Agency. Local officials characterized the building as a “militant hideout” and said it had been completely destroyed.

One security official said that those killed were “mainly Afghan Taliban,” and that the facility was run “by local Taliban commander Fazal Saeed and training was underway at the time of the strike.” Militants cordoned off the area and have been retrieving bodies from the rubble. Officials say no “high-value” targets were believed to be among those killed

It was the second major US attack on the Kurram Agency in less than a month: in mid-February an attack killed 31 people including an alleged commander named Bahram Khan Kochi. The Obama Administration was reported earlier this week to be planning a dramatic escalation of the number and intensity of the US strikes into Pakistan.

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America wants Nato boost in Afghanistan

March 11, 2009
Al Jazeera, March 10, 2009

Western powers are increasingly concerned
by the Taliban’s growing influence[EPA]

Joe Biden, the US vice- president, has appealed to Nato to help Washington tackle worsening security in Afghanistan, saying the alliance was struggling to deal with a threat to the West as a whole.

Addressing representatives of the military alliance in Brussels on Tuesday, Biden said: “The deteriorating situation in the region poses a security threat not just to the United States but to every single nation round this table.

“We are not now winning the war, but the war is far from lost.”

Biden also said talking with Taliban moderates in Afghanistan was a tactic “worth exploring”.

Taliban advances

Western powers are increasingly concerned not only by the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan but also by its growing influence in Pakistan, where Muslim fighters have disrupted Nato’s supply convoys to Afghanistan and are securing concessions from the government in Islamabad.

Biden said Barack Obama, the US president, wanted to consult with allies on a strategy review for the region and that Washington would “expect everyone to keep whatever commitments were made in arriving at that joint strategy”.

The vice-president said the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US and the bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 were planned “from the very same mountains” along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

He said: “This is not a US-centric view. A terrorist attack in Europe is viewed as an attack on us.”

Regarding discussions with Taliban moderates, Biden said: “It’s worth exploring. The idea of what concessions would be made is well beyond the scope of my being able to answer.

“I do think it’s worth engaging and determining whether or not there are those who are willing to participate in a secure and stable Afghan state.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Biden held talks with Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Nato secretary- general.

De Hoop Scheffer, calling on Nato to boost efforts before Afghan elections due in August, said: “It is important that this alliance delivers in the short-term.”

Obama announcement

Last month, Obama approved the deployment of 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan as Washington and other Nato nations try to stabilise the country.

There are currently about 70,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, of which the US supplies 38,000.

Obama has said he will make announcements about US policy on Afghanistan before a Nato summit in France in April.

The policy review is expected to stress the need for better co-ordination of the international effort and enhanced efforts in areas like police training, governance and development as well as a regional approach involving Afghanistan’s neighbours.

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Amnesty International calls for transparency on Bagram detentions

March 10, 2009

Amnesty International USA, March 9, 2009

A US federal judge considering whether detainees held by the USA in Bagram airbase in Afghanistan may challenge their detention before courts in the USA has ordered the administration of President Barack Obama to provide him with updated information on the Bagram detainees, by 11 March.

Amnesty International has written to the US administration urging it to inject some much needed transparency into the Bagram detention regime, including by making fully available to the public the information requested by District Court Judge John Bates.

When the Bush administration was asked by Judge Bates in January 2009 to disclose the number of people being held in Bagram, how many of them were taken into custody outside of Afghanistan, and how many of them were Afghan nationals, it responded by classifying as secret the key details and redacted them from the unclassified version of the filing.

Judge Bates has now asked the Obama administration the same questions, noting that the details supplied to him by the government in January may be out of date. Amnesty International has urged the new administration not to repeat its predecessor’s use of secrecy to conceal from the public its response to the judge. Transparency, essential to accountability and detainee protection, must be central to US detention policy. As President Obama has himself instructed his administration, “transparency promotes accountability”.

Figures released in late February by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only organization with access to Bagram detainees, indicate that there were then about 550 detainees in the airbase. This was down from the figure of “about 615” provided by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to the Senate Armed Services Committee a month earlier.

New detentions by US and allied forces in Afghanistan continue. According to reports by the American Forces Press Service, at least 120 “militants” were taken into custody during January and February 2009. It is not known how many, if any, have been or will be transferred to Bagram. The US authorities should provide regular public information on the numbers and nationalities of those held in US custody in Bagram and elsewhere in Afghanistan, and where, when, and in what circumstances they were taken into detention.

The need for transparency was illustrated late last month when the UK government revealed that two individuals it handed over to the USA in Iraq in 2004 had subsequently been transferred to US custody in Afghanistan, where they remain five years later. Amnesty International has asked the US government to confirm whether the two are held in Bagram and to provide further information on their cases. The organization has raised the possibility that the USA’s transfer of these individuals to Afghanistan constituted a war crime.

Amnesty International continues to call for the Bagram detainees to be granted access to an independent court to challenge the lawfulness of their detentions, to effective remedies in relation to their treatment and conditions of detention, and to meaningful access to legal counsel for such purposes. At present, the detainees have no access to lawyers or courts.

On 7 March, President Obama said in an interview with the New York Times that “we ultimately provide anybody that we’re detaining an opportunity through habeas corpus to answer to charges”. However, presidential aides later said that he had not meant to suggest that everybody held in US custody would be able to challenge their detention in court.1

Two weeks earlier, on 20 February, responding to an invitation from Judge Bates to tell him whether it would take “a different approach” to its predecessor on the Bagram detainees, the Justice Department responded simply that “having considered the matter, the Government adheres to its previously articulated position”, that is, the position argued by the Bush administration. The latter had argued that the Bagram detainees could not challenge the lawfulness or conditions of their detention, that they had no rights under the US Constitution and no rights under international law enforceable in the US courts. Amnesty International regrets the new administration’s response to Judge Bates and hopes that it represents a very temporary stance taken as the government tackles the detention legacy it has inherited. The USA must swiftly bring all US detentions anywhere into compliance with international law.

The right to challenge the lawfulness of detention before a court is so fundamental that it cannot be diminished, even in situations of public emergency up to and including armed conflict. Judicial review is a basic safeguard against abuse of executive powers and a fundamental safeguard against arbitrary and secret detention, torture and other ill-treatment and unlawful transfers from one country or government to another. In the absence of judicial oversight, detainees in Bagram, as at Guantánamo, have been subjected to just such abuses.

Even children have not been spared. With this in mind, Amnesty International is calling on the US government to reveal, in addition to its responses to the questions posed by Judge Bates, how many of the detainees currently in Bagram were taken into custody when they were under 18 years old. A year ago, there were at least 10 children being held in the base.

In an executive order signed on 22 January 2009, President Barack Obama ordered the establishment of an interagency task force to review the “lawful options” available to the US government with respect to the “apprehension, detention, trial, transfer, release, or other disposition of individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts or counterterrorism operations”. In February, Amnesty International sent a briefing on the Bagram detentions to officials overseeing this review.2Last week it sent them an update to this report.3

1 Obama ponders outreach to elements of the Taliban, The New York Times, 8 March 2009.

2 See USA: Out of sight, out of mind, out of court? The right of Bagram detainees to judicial review, 18 February 2009, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/021/2009/en.

3 See USA: Urgent need for transparency on Bagram detentions, 6 March 2009, at http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/031/2009/en.

AI Index: AMR 51/033/2009 Amnesty International 09 March 2009

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