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In final letters, Saddam Hussein complained of being tortured

May 5, 2009

BY James Gordon Meek
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

NY Daily News, Tuesday, May 5th 2009, 9:18 AM

Solic / Getty Images

Saddam Hussein at trial in Baghdad in December 2006.

WASHINGTON – Immediately after U.S. troops captured Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iraq‘s brutal ex-dictator turned into a crybaby over “beatings” by a “detention gang” and sleepless nights amid screams of torture victims.

Saddam poured out his complaints “to whom it may concern” in two Christmas 2003 letters, handwritten in Arabic, which he gave to his U.S. military jailers, the Daily News has learned.

In one letter, he alleged “beatings that I have received following my capture,” in which “not a single part of my body was spared of the severe harm that was inflicted by the detention gang,” adding, “some of the traces are still visible on my body.”

The tyrant and his family, who maintained their 24-year reign over Iraq by torturing and executing thousands, complained that his lockup – believed to be at Baghdad International Airport – was an American-made chamber of horrors.

“My opportunity to sleep in this place is limited and almost scarce,” Saddam wrote. “I don’t think there is anyone with a sensitive and humanitarian heart who can sleep amidst the screams of the tortured and the many blows of the doors and the squeaking sounds of the chairs.”

Saddam whined that his “total hours of sleep did not exceed four to five hours.”

The letters were among 352 pages in his declassified FBI file, which The News requested after his December 2006 execution for crimes against humanity.

Although it is known that other notorious members of his regime were imprisoned nearby, Saddam’s allegations of torture at that facility were not addressed in the heavily redacted FBI file – and are not considered credible by U.S. experts.

His first letter – written nine days after being pulled from a Tikrit spider hole on Dec. 15, 2003 – demanded an accounting of over $1 million in U.S. cash he had with him in an iron safe and “a Samsonite case.”

The prolific poet and novelist also asked for the return of “a number of simple necessities, the most important are notebooks with chapters from a story.”

The U.S. wanted Saddam to figuratively drape the noose around his own neck, ordering the FBI “to overwhelm Hussein with the volume of evidence against him and others regarding human rights violations, mass murders and the use of chemical weapons.”

A brilliant FBI man, George Piro, was Saddam’s sole interrogator. But the Arabic-speaking Lebanese-American agent didn’t have to resort to CIA waterboarding techniques to elicit Saddam’s confessions of massacring fellow Iraqis. Instead, Piro’s now-legendary interrogations relied on another ancient method – conversation.

Saddam became so fond of the G-man, who he thought was a top aide to President George W. Bush, that he spilled his guts. He even ended a hunger strike “for the benefit of Supervisory Special Agent Piro,” a 2004 FBI memo said.

The files also show that the agency tracked Saddam and his family since the early 1970s by building dossiers on the dictator.

Saddam was a teetotaling health nut who “enjoys a good Havana cigar” and, though a Muslim, “is not frequently seen in the mosque [but] prays five times daily,” a 1990 FBI file stated.

His son Uday – slain by U.S. troops in 2003 – was a “ruthless egotist” and a “sadist” who had a “distant relationship” with his dad and enjoyed torturing and murdering his own friends.

“He would shave [their] hair and subject them to fierce guard dogs and electric cattle prods,” the FBI file noted.

jmeek@nydailynews.com

Saddam Hussein’s letter complaining of torture keeping him awake

English translation of Saddam Hussein letter

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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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‘Abu Ghraib US prison guards were scapegoats for Bush’ lawyers claim

May 2, 2009

The Times, UK, May 2, 2009

Charles Graner plans to appeal against his conviction for abusing prisoners

Charles Graner plans to appeal against his conviction for abusing prisoners

Tim Reid in Washington

Prison guards jailed for abusing inmates at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq are planning to appeal against their convictions on the ground that recently released CIA torture memos prove that they were scapegoats for the Bush Administration.

The photographs of prisoner abuse at the Baghdad jail in 2004 sparked worldwide outrage but the previous administration, from President Bush down, blamed the incident on a few low-ranking “bad apples” who were acting on their own.

The decision by President Obama to release the memos showed that the harsh interrogation tactics were approved and authorised at the highest levels of the White House.

Some of the guards who were convicted of abuse want to return to court and argue that the previous administration sanctioned the abuse but withheld its role from their trials.

Related Links

The latest reaction to the released memos came as it emerged that the two psychologists hired by the CIA to craft the techniques that were used on terror suspects were paid $1,000 (£673) a day. Neither had carried out nor overseen an interrogation.

Twelve guards at Abu Ghraib were convicted on charges related to the abuse, which included attaching leads to naked prisoners, terrifying them with dogs, beatings and slamming them into walls. The wall-slamming was a technique authorised by Justice Department officials at the time, who also said that the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding was not considered to be torture.

Charles Gittins, a lawyer who represents Charles Graner, the ringleader of the guards who is serving a ten-year sentence, said that the memos proved his long-held contention that Graner and the other defendants, including his former lover Lynndie England, could never have invented tactics such as stress positions and the use of dogs on their own.

“Once the pictures came out, the senior officials involved in the decision-making, they knew. They knew they had to have a cover story. It was the ‘bad apples’ led by Charles Graner,” Mr Gittins told The Washington Post.

Ms England, a poorly educated Army reservist, was pictured holding a dog leash attached to a naked detainee, and also pointing at another being forced to masturbate. She was convicted in September 2005 of abusing prisoners and one count of an indecent act. She was sentenced to three years in a military prison and was paroled after 521 days. Shortly after leaving Iraq she gave birth to a son fathered by Graner. She lives in her home state of West Virginia.

Mr Gittins said the refusal by the Bush Administration to acknowledge that it had authorised such techniques during the trials of the prison guards — and the judges’ refusal to call senior administration officials to testify — undermined their defences.

Mr Gittins wants to take the case of Graner, who is halfway through his sentence, to the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces to argue that top Bush Administration officials kept their complicity from the defence.

Gary Myers, a lawyer who represented Ivan L “Chip” Frederick on the abuse charges, said that he was going to try to use the memos to have his client’s dishonourable discharge removed from his record.

“What we know is that we had at the time a rogue government that created an environment where this sort of conduct was condoned, if not encouraged,” he said.

He added, however, that relying on illegal opinions or orders would probably not be a defence.

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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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Iraq insists US troops leave urban areas by June 30

April 29, 2009

Morning Star Online, Tuesday 28 April 2009

THE Iraqi government insisted on Monday that all US troops must pull out of urban areas by June 30, as specified under a deal agreed between Baghdad and Washington in January.

Top US commander in Iraq General Raymond Odierno has talked of possible “exceptions” to the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in light of the spate of deadly suicide bombings that have rocked Baghdad and Mosul in recent weeks.

But Iraqi Defence Ministry spokesman Major General Mohammed al-Askari emphasised that US troops must leave all cities by then and could only return with the permission of the Iraqi government.

“The general position of the Iraq Defence Ministry is to adhere to the timings in the SOFA,” he said.

Since the SOFA went into effect at the beginning of this year, the US military is obliged to get the green light from the Iraqi government before mounting operations.

And it states that US soldiers are liable to face Iraqi justice if they commit crimes off base.

The SOFA faced its first major test on Sunday, when US troops staged a pre-dawn raid in Kut, killing two civilians and detaining six.

After local residents took to the streets in outrage, Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki branded the raid a “crime” and a “violation of the security pact.”

The US military released the six detainees and apologised, but that did not placate Sheikh Ahmed Abdul-Munim, who lost his wife and brother in the raid.

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Truth commission to proceed despite Obama’s wishes

April 29, 2009

By John Byrne  | The Raw Story,
Published: April 28, 2009

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) plans to proceed with a special commission to investigate alleged Bush administration abuses of power, despite lacking President Barack Obama’s support, according to a report Tuesday.

Sen. Leahy called for a “Truth Commission” in February to probe Bush administration policies on torture, interrogation and surveillance and to — as he puts it — “get to the bottom of what went wrong.” Such an idea would be modeled around truth commissions established in South Africa and Chile, which offered immunity to officials who committed abuses in exchange for the truth.

“Many Americans feel we need to get to the bottom of what went wrong,” Leahy said when announcing his idea in February. “I agree. We need to be able to read the page before we turn the page.”

President Obama, meanwhile, has expressed disinterest in investigating the activities of his predecessor, saying it’s time for the country to move on. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), says he doesn’t want the commission to begin until an inquiry headed by Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) examines the Bush administration’s legal defenses of torture techniques.

But Leahy plans to proceed despite lacking the approval of party leaders, sources familiar with the proposal told Politico’s John Bresnahan Tuesday.

“Leahy plans to move ahead with his proposal anyway,” Bresnahan writes. “While he has not found a GOP co-sponsor for legislation creating a truth commission, Leahy is expected to begin circulating a draft soon.”

In a statement, Leahy said his commission will ultimately jibe with the President’s wishes.

“When I first proposed establishing a nonpartisan commission of inquiry in February, I thought then, as I do now, that it was the best approach to conducting a thorough review of national security policies on detention, interrogation and rendition since Sept. 11,” Leahy said in a statement to Bresnahan. “Whether such a comprehensive review happens immediately or in the weeks and months ahead, the evidence that our country committed torture demands a review of the process by which these flawed policies were developed and implemented. President Obama was correct when he said that any review should be done outside of politics. A nonpartisan commission will accomplish just that.”

Speaking in February, Leahy applauded Obama Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to rule out prosecutions during his confirmation hearing.

“There are some who resist any effort to investigate the misdeeds of the recent past,” he said. “Indeed, during the nomination hearing of Eric Holder, some of my fellow Senators on the other side of the aisle tried to extract a devil’s bargain from him in exchange for the votes — a commitment that he would not make… That is a pledge no prosecutor should give and Eric Holder did not give it. But because he did not it accounts for some of the votes against him.”

Some liberals have critiqued the proposal, asserting that Bush officials shouldn’t be granted immunity from prosecution even if they’re forthcoming in a congressional investigation. Conservatives have attacked the proposed commission as a political

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Straight to the Top

April 27, 2009

By Scott Horton | Harper’s Magazine, April 27, 2009

Correction, April 29, 2009:

This post requires correction in two respects. First, as already noted, Ed Whelan, former Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, has categorically denied attending the July 2003 meeting mentioned there. Second, I wrongly described his writing at the National Review as “defenses of torture enablers.” This phrase is both vague and inaccurate, and I apologize for any misunderstanding it may have caused. Whelan has never written anything for the National Review in defense of torture or torture enablers.

The torture trail starts and ends in the White House. That is perhaps the most inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the flurry of documents released in the last week—first the OLC memoranda, then a newly declassified report of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and finally an amazing document that Attorney General Eric Holder released yesterday, which has still gained little attention. The Holder note presents a summary of CIA interaction with the White House in connection with the approval of the torture techniques that John Yoo calls the “Bush Program.” Holder’s memo refers to the participants by their job titles only, but John Sifton runs it through a decoder and gives us the actual names. Here’s a key passage:

“[The] CIA’s Office of General Counsel [this would include current Acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo] met with the Attorney General [John Ashcroft], the National Security Adviser [Condoleezza Rice], the Deputy National Security Adviser [Stephen Hadley], the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [John Bellinger], and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods [on Abu Zubaydah] that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S. military and intelligence community. At this meeting, the CIA proposed particular alternative interrogation methods, including waterboarding.”

The report continues to implicate more Bush officials: “On July 13, 2002, according to CIA records, attorneys from the CIA’s Office of General Counsel [including Rizzo] met with the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [Bellinger], a Deputy Assistant Attorney General from OLC [likely John Yoo], the head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice [Michael Chertoff], the chief of staff to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation [Kenneth Wainstein], and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] to provide an overview of the proposed interrogation plan for Abu Zubaydah.”

It makes clear that sign-off for torture comes from Condoleezza Rice, acting with the advice of her ever-present lawyer, John Bellinger. Another figure making a key appearance is an Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel named M. Edward Whelan III–presumably the same Ed Whelan who is presently melting his keyboard with defenses of the torture-enablers (Update, April 29, 2009: See correction.) at National Review. (Update: Andrew Sullivan also reported on the appearance of Whelan in the memo, but Whelan responded with a categorical denial that he was involved. This suggests that the memo’s chronology is incorrect and requires some clarification.) The central role played by Rice and Bellinger helps explain the State Department’s abrupt about-face on international law issues related to torture immediately after Rice became Secretary of State and Bellinger became Legal Adviser. It also makes clear that Vice President Cheney and President Bush were fully informed of what has happened and approved.

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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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