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RIGHTS-US: Senate Report Casts Grim Light on Bush Era

April 24, 2009

By William Fisher | Inter Press Service News

NEW YORK, Apr 22 (IPS) – Pentagon interrogators continuously ramped up their abusive techniques against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq and Afghanistan in a vain attempt to establish a link between the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. on Sep. 11, 2001.

This is among the principal conclusions of a long-awaited report released Tuesday by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

The report also concluded that health professionals played a key role in helping the U.S. Defence Department to introduce waterboarding and other illegal interrogation techniques months before these practices were “justified” by Justice Department lawyers and approved by their superiors in the administration of former President George W. Bush.

The report says that the Defence Department was using harsh interrogation techniques long before they were “justified” by Justice Department lawyers and approved by their Bush administration superiors.

The report quotes a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist as saying that the Bush administration put “relentless pressure” on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence an al Qaeda-Hussein link.

This kind of information would have provided a foundation for one of Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003, the report says. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Hussein’s regime.

The report says that senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, were all aware of the development and use of the abusive interrogation techniques.

Despite warnings from military personnel that the use of these techniques on Guantanamo detainees could backfire, 15 specific techniques were sanctioned by Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002, the report said.

What followed was “an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely”, it said.

The report said, “That these techniques had been endorsed became known by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, setting the stage for the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.”

The report also notes that the use of brutal interrogation techniques started in early 2002, up to eight months before Justice Department lawyers approved the use of waterboarding and nine other harsh methods, Senate investigators found.

Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin, the committee chairman, said, “The report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse – such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan – to low-ranking soldiers.”

Claims that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorised acts of a “few bad apples” were simply false, he said.

“A few bad apples” is how Rumsfeld described the low-level soldiers shown in photos around the world abusing detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Several of these military personnel were convicted and sentenced to prison terms, but a series of Pentagon investigations found no evidence that prisoner abuse was a policy that came from the Pentagon’s civilian leadership.

“The paper trail on abuse leads to top civilian leaders, and our report connects the dots.” He said it shows a paper trail going from Rumsfeld’s authorisation of abusive interrogation techniques “to Guantánamo to Afghanistan and to Iraq.”

Human rights advocates hailed the Levin report. Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said, “Once again, we are presented with clear-cut evidence that the Bush administration’s highest ranking officials were not only complicit in the use of torture, but were actively engaged in its implementation. It is now time to act on this evidence.”

The report also documents how a secretive military training programme called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) became the foundation of the interrogations by both the Pentagon and the CIA.

SERE was developed many years ago as a way to give U.S. military personnel some sense of the treatment they might face if they were captured by China, the Soviet Union or other Cold War adversaries.

The committee’s report notes that the CIA also drew on the SERE programme for harsh methods it used in secret overseas jails for Qaeda suspects. The CIA has said it used waterboarding, a method of near-drowning used in the SERE programme, on three captured terrorism suspects in 2002 and 2003.

Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions, and waterboarding insist they were legal. On Tuesday, Cheney asked the Justice Department to declassify and release documents he says will show that these techniques produced valuable intelligence.

Media accounts also report that a secretive government contractor played a key role in developing the Bush administration’s interrogation methods. The company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, is named after the two military psychologists who founded it, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Beginning in 2002, they trained interrogators in brutal techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and pain. The psychologists, based near Spokane in the state of Washington, reportedly “reverse-engineered” the tactics taught in SERE training for use on prisoners held by the U.S.

The declassified torture memos released last week reportedly relied heavily on their advice. In one memo, Justice Department attorney Jay Bybee wrote, “Based on your research into the use of these methods at the SERE school and consultation with others with expertise in the field of psychology and interrogation, you do not anticipate that any prolonged harm would result from the use of the waterboard.”

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a not for profit advocacy group, is calling for the psychologists who justified, designed, and implemented torture for the CIA and Department of Defense to” lose their professional licenses and to face criminal prosecution.”

“Long before Justice Department lawyers were tasked to justify torture, U.S. psychologists were busy actually perpetrating it,” said Steven Reisner, PhD, advisor on psychological ethics at PHR. “These individuals must not only face prosecution for breaking the law, they must lose their licenses for shaming their profession’s ethics.”

He told IPS, “The conclusion that these interrogation techniques cause no lasting harm is the equivalent of psychological malpractice.” He said the proponents of these techniques “cherry-picked the research to reach a foregone conclusion. How can you compare U.S. soldiers who volunteered for SERE training, and could have stopped their interrogations at any time, with the effects on a prisoner who has been ‘disappeared’, is in fear for his life, and believes he will never see his family again?”

He added that the CIA’s own research into the effects of SERE training showed that it produced “extreme and lasting effects to the point of psychosis.”

In October 2008, the American Psychological Association approved a landmark measure banning members from taking part in interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan and all of the secret CIA black sites. The American Medical Association has passed a similar measure.

The Armed Services Committee report was released amid growing calls for an independent inquiry into abusive interrogation techniques and the people responsible for them. Proposals range from a “truth commission” to the appointment of an independent prosecutor by the Obama Justice Department.

President Obama has consistently said he is more inclined to look forward rather than backward. Earlier this week, he visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and told agency employees there would be no prosecutions of operatives who carried out the abusive interrogation techniques because they believed they were acting in accordance with legal rulings from the Justice Department.

But a day later, he said he would not oppose either an independent commission investigation or appointment of a special prosecutor. He left these decisions to Congress and to the Attorney General, Eric Holder.

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US Drone Strike Kills Eight Civilians in South Waziristan

April 20, 2009
Women, Children Killed in Series of Explosions Set Off by Air Strike

by Jason Ditz | Antiwar.com,  April 19, 2009

This morning, a US drone attacked an apparent militant hideout in Pakistan’s South Waziristan Agency, triggering a massive series of explosions which local residents eight civilians, including women and children, and injuring at least two others.

Reports on the attack are still not totally clear, with local police insisting first that no one was killed at all in the attack, which evidently started a fire which spread to two explosive-laden vehicles.  Militants cordoned off the area, but it does not appear that any of them were present at the time of the attack.

The attack came just one day after the local Ahmedzai Wazir tribe managed to negotiate a ceasefire across the troubled agency. The Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the government forces in the agency agreed to stop attacks, and certain demands of the TTP, including the removal of checkpoints, were reportedly being considered. It is unclear what impact the US attack will have on this deal.

Related Stories

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Iraq in Fragments

April 18, 2009

By Dahr Jamail | ZNet, April 18, 2009

Source: Foreign Policy In Focus

“[W]hat lengths men will go in order to carry out, to their extreme limit, the rites of a collective self-worship which fills them with a sense of righteousness and complacent satisfaction in the midst of the most shocking injustices and crimes.”
-Love and Living, by Thomas Merton

On Wednesday, March 25, Major General David Perkins of the U.S. military, referring to how often the U.S. military was being attacked in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad, “Attacks are at their lowest since August 2003.” Perkins added, “There were 1,250 attacks a week at the height of the violence; now sometimes there are less than 100 a week.”

While his rhetoric made headlines in some U.S. mainstream media outlets, it was little consolation for the families of 28 Iraqis killed in attacks across Iraq the following day. Nor did it bring solace to the relatives of the 27 Iraqis slain in a March 23 suicide attack, or those who survived a bomb attack at a bus terminal in Baghdad on the same day that killed nine Iraqis.

Having recently returned from Iraq, I experienced living in Baghdad where people were dying violent deaths on a daily basis. Nearly every day of the month I spent there saw a car bomb attack somewhere in the capital city. Nearly every day the so-called Green Zone was mortared. Every day there were kidnappings. On good days there were four hours of electricity on the national grid, in a country now into its seventh year of being occupied by the U.S. military, and where there are now over 200,000 private contractors.

Upon returning home, I experienced the disconnect between that reality, lived by roughly 25 million Iraqis, and the surreal experience of living in the United States – where most media pretend the occupation of Iraq is either not happening, or uses the yardstick of decreased U.S. military personnel deaths in Iraq as a measure of success. In the words of Major General Perkins, “If you take a look at military deaths, which is an indicator of violence and lethality out there, U.S. combat deaths are at their lowest levels since the war began six years ago.” But it’s a less useful metric when one looks at the broader picture inside of Iraq: the ongoing daily slaughter of Iraqis, the near total lack of functional infrastructure, the fact that one in six Iraqis remains displaced from their homes, or that at least 1.2 million Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of their country.

Seventy-two months of occupation, with over $607 billion spent on the war (by conservative estimates), has resulted in 2.2 million internally displaced Iraqis, 2.7 million refugees, 2,615 professors, scientists, and doctors killed in cold blood, and 338 dead journalists. Over $13 billion was misplaced by the current Iraqi government, and another $400 billion is required to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure. Unemployment vacillates between 25-70%, depending on the month. There are 24 car bombs per month, 10,000 cases of cholera per year, 4,261 dead U.S. soldiers, and over 70,000 physically or psychologically wounded soldiers.

There ‘s no normal life in Baghdad. While it’s accurate and technically correct to say there is less violence compared to 2006, when between 100 and 300 Iraqis were slaughtered on a daily basis, Iraq resembles a police state more than ever. U.S. patrols consisting of huge, lumbering mine-resistant vehicles rumble down streets congested with traffic. It’s impossible to travel longer than five minutes without encountering an Iraqi military or police patrol – usually comprised of pickup trucks full of armed men, horns and/or sirens blaring. Begging women and children wander between cars at every intersection. U.S. military helicopters often rumble overhead, and the roar of fighter jets or transport planes is common. There’s no talk of reparations for Iraqis for the death, destruction and chaos caused by the occupation.

Neighborhoods, segregated between Sunni and Shia largely as a result of the so-called “surge” strategy, provide a blatant view of the balkanization of Iraq. Neighborhoods of 300,000 people are completely surrounded by 10-foot high concrete blast walls, rendering normal life impossible. The fear of a resurgence of violence weighs heavy on Iraqis, as the current so-called lull in violence feels tenuous, unstable, and possibly fleeting. Nobody there can predict the future, and to hope for a sustained improvement in any aspect of life feels naive, even dangerous.

The title of the film “Iraq in Fragments” by James Longley, which was nominated for Best Documentary Oscar at the 2007 Academy Awards, best describes Iraq today. The country has been destroyed by decades of U.S. policy that has plagued Iraqis. Looking back only to 1980, we see the U.S. government supporting both Iraq and Iran during their horrible eight-year war. In 1991 we see George H. W. Bush’s war against Iraq, and his, Bill Clinton’s, and George W. Bush’s oversight of 12-and-a-half years of genocidal economic sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children. Today, under President Barack Obama, what is left of Iraq smolders in ruins, with no real end of the occupation in sight.

All of the recent talk of withdrawal from Iraq is empty rhetoric indeed to most Iraqis, who see the giant “enduring” U.S. military bases spread across their country, or the U.S. “embassy,” the size of the Vatican City, in Baghdad. The gulf between the rhetoric of withdrawal and the reality on the ground spans the distance between Iraq and the United States, while the reality is pressed in the face of the Iraqi people each day the occupation continues.

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Torture: Holding America to account

April 18, 2009

To read the four newly released Bush-era memos on America’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” for terror suspects is to enter a very dark moral world indeed. It is the Orwellian world of the concealed global detention network set up by the CIA on President Bush’s authority after 9/11 in which suspected terrorists – many of whom may have had a lot of blood on their hands – were secretly held in US bases from Afghanistan to Romania and systematically tortured. A world in which Britain is implicated too, do not forget.

The memos do not admit torture, of course. The United States, Mr Bush famously claimed in 2006, “does not torture”. The memos embody a cynical bureaucratic attempt to align what went on in the secret prisons with that claim. Yet no one who reads their argument that the threat of imminent drowning caused by waterboarding does not reach the level of “prolonged mental harm” which the Bush lawyers argue is necessary to constitute torture, can doubt that torture is precisely what the CIA had been permitted and encouraged to carry out. The truth, as the new US attorney general Eric Holder has said, is clear: “Waterboarding is torture.”

Jaw-dropping though they are, the memos are not the only evidence of the Bush administration’s embrace of torture. Two years ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was given access to 14 Guantánamo detainees who had been through the “alternative procedures”. Their experiences, retold in two recent essays by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books (one of which we republish inside our own Review today), tell of the relentless abuse of detainees who were kept naked in low temperatures for weeks, forced to live in permanent bright light (or total darkness), required to wear nappies, deprived of solid food, blindfolded, shackled, forcibly shaved, and compelled to wear earphones through which loud music was repeatedly played.

The “procedures” discussed in the memos – grasping, slapping, holding, banging against walls, confinement in boxes (sometimes with insects), sleep deprivation, prolonged confinement in “stress positions” and waterboarding – were additional to these. The ICRC heard accounts of most of them from the detainees. These accounts are far more graphic (and even credible) than the cold lawyerish prose of the memos. The ICRC conclusion was emphatic: “The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA programme, either singly or in combination, constituted torture.”

America should hang its head at methods that Dick Cheney still defends (and which, importantly, may not have yielded much good intelligence). Barack Obama did the right thing by ending the abuses within hours of taking office. He did well to publish the legal memos too. In such ways Mr Obama makes clear that his administration is making a clean break with the discredited past, while at the same time graphically reminding the world why that past (and Britain’s role in it) was so disgraceful.

On balance Mr Obama may also be right to assure CIA personnel that they will not face prosecution if they carried out their work in good faith based on the old legal advice. But an essential part of the rule of law is that those who break it must be answerable for their actions. The Bush administration crossed a fateful threshold after 9/11. Its officials, including its lawyers, must be accountable for that. It is understandable that Mr Obama does not want his first term to be dominated by a reliving of the past. Yet America will only ensure it does not embrace torture again by getting to the bottom of why it did so this time. A full congressional inquiry is in order, as Speaker Pelosi has hinted. One way or another, those who ordered the abuses, from the president and vice-president down, must answer for them.

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How Bush’s Tortured Legal Logic Won

April 17, 2009

Robert Parry | Consortiumnews.com, April 17, 2009

Almost as disturbing as reading the Bush administration’s approved menu of brutal interrogation techniques is recognizing how President George W. Bush successfully shopped for government attorneys willing to render American laws meaningless by turning words inside out.

The four “torture” memos, released Thursday, revealed not just that the stomach-turning reports about CIA interrogators abusing “war on terror” suspects were true, but that the United States had gone from a “nation of laws” to a “nation of legal sophistry” – where conclusions on law are politically preordained and the legal analysis is made to fit.

You have passages like this in the May 10, 2005, memo by Steven Bradbury, then acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel:

“Another question is whether the requirement of ‘prolonged mental harm’ caused by or resulting from one of the enumerated predicate acts is a separate requirement, or whether such ‘prolonged mental harm’ is to be presumed any time one of the predicate acts occurs.”

As each phrase in the Convention Against Torture was held up to such narrow examination, the forest of criminal torture was lost in the trees of arcane legal jargon. Collectively, the memos leave a disorienting sense that any ambiguity in words can be twisted to justify almost anything.

So, a “war on terror” prisoner could not only be locked up in solitary confinement indefinitely based on the sole authority of President Bush but could be subjected to a battery of abusive and humiliating tactics, all in the name of extracting some information that purportedly would help keep the United States safe – and it would not be called “torture.”

Some tactics were bizarre, like feeding detainees a liquid diet of Ensure to make “other techniques, such as sleep deprivation, more effective.” The memo’s sleep deprivation clause, in turn, allowed interrogators to shackle prisoners to an overhead pipe (or in some other uncomfortable position) for up to 180 hours (or seven-and-a-half days).

While shackled, the prisoner would be dressed in a diaper that “is checked regularly and changed as necessary.” The memo asserted that “the use of the diaper is for sanitary and health purposes of the detainee; it is not used for the purpose of humiliating the detainee, and it is not considered to be an interrogation technique.”

Beyond the painful disorientation from depriving a person of sleep while chained in a standing position for days, the Justice Department memos called for prisoners to be forced into other “stress positions” for varying periods of time to cause “the physical discomfort associated with muscle fatigue.”

Tiny Boxes

The detainees also could be put into small, dark boxes where they could barely move (and in the case of one detainee, Abu Zubaydah, could have an insect slipped into his box as a way of playing on his fear of bugs), according to the Aug. 1, 2002, memo.

“The duration of confinement varies based upon the size of the container,” the May 10, 2005, memo added, with the smaller space (sitting only) restricted to two hours at a time and a somewhat larger box (permitting standing) limited to eight hours at a time and 18 hours a day.

Then, there were various slaps, grabs and slamming a prisoner against a “flexible” wall while his neck was in a sling “to help prevent whiplash.”

Prisoners also were subjected to forced nudity, sometimes in the presence of women, according to the May 10 memo.

“We understand that interrogators are trained to avoid sexual innuendo or any acts of implicit or explicit sexual degradation,” the memo said. “Nevertheless, interrogators can exploit the detainee’s fear of being seen naked.

“In addition, female officers involved in the interrogation process may see the detainees naked; and for purposes of our analysis, we will assume that detainees subjected to nudity as an interrogation technique are aware that they may be seen naked by females.”

Another approved technique was “water dousing” in which a detainee is sprayed with water that can be as cold as 41 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 20 minutes. Slightly warmer water could be used to douse a prisoner for longer periods of time.

Both the 2002 and 2005 memos permitted the “waterboard,” a technique that involves covering a prisoner’s face with a cloth and pouring water on it to create the panicked sensation of drowning. The interrogators also were authorized to prevent a detainee from trying to “defeat the technique” by thrashing about or trying to breathe from the corner of his mouth.

“The interrogator may cup his hands around the detainee’s nose and mouth to dam the runoff, in which case it would not be possible for the detainee to breathe during the application of the water,” the May 10 memo reads. “In addition, you have informed us that the technique may be applied in a manner to defeat efforts by the detainee to hold his breath by, for example, beginning an application of water as the detainee is exhaling.”

At least since the days of the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding has been regarded as torture. The U.S. government prosecuted Japanese soldiers who used it against American troops in World War II. But the legal reasoning of the Bush administration’s memos transformed waterboarding into an acceptable method of interrogation.

Lawyer-Shopping

Although the four released memos included the most famous one – from Aug. 1, 2002, which provided the initial legal cover for abusive interrogations – the three others from May 2005 may be more significant in destroying the legal cover that President Bush and his senior aides have hidden behind.

Their claim has been that they were simply operating within legal parameters set by lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is responsible for advising Presidents on the limits of their authority. In other words, professional lawyers provided objective legal advice and the administration simply followed it.

But that claim now collides with the reality that other Justice Department lawyers – from 2003 to 2005 – overturned the initial memo and resisted its reimplementation until they were ousted. In effect, the Bush administration appears to have gone lawyer-shopping for attorneys who would craft opinions that the White House wanted.

Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee signed the original Aug. 1, 2002, “torture” memo and other opinions granting expansive presidential powers (drafted by his deputy John Yoo).

However, Bybee quit in 2003 to accept President Bush’s appointment of him as a federal appeals court judge in San Francisco, and his successor as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, withdrew many Bybee-Yoo memos as legally flawed.

Goldsmith’s actions angered the White House, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington. In a 2007 book, The Terror Presidency, Goldsmith described one White House meeting at which Addington pulled out a 3-by-5-inch card listing the OLC opinions that Goldsmith had withdrawn.

“Since you’ve withdrawn so many legal opinions that the President and others have been relying on,” Addington said sarcastically, “we need you to go through all of OLC’s opinions and let us know which ones you will stand by.”

Though supported by Deputy Attorney General James Comey, Goldsmith succumbed to the White House pressure and quit in 2004. Still, despite Goldsmith’s departure, Comey and the new acting head of the OLC, Daniel Levin, resisted restoring the administration’s right to use the harsh interrogation techniques.

That didn’t occur until White House counsel Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General in 2005 and made Bradbury the acting chief of the OLC. After signing the three “torture” memos in May, Bradbury was rewarded with Bush’s formal nomination in June to be Assistant Attorney General for the OLC (although he never gained Senate confirmation).

Comey Departs

With the OLC reaffirming the administration’s interrogation techniques, Comey’s days were numbered.

Though having been a successful prosecutor on past terrorism cases, such as the Khobar Towers bombing which killed 19 U.S. servicemen in 1996, Comey had earned the derisive nickname from Bush as “Cuomey” or just “Cuomo,” a strong insult from Republicans who deemed former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo to be excessively liberal and famously indecisive.

On Aug. 15, 2005, in his farewell speech, Comey urged his colleagues to defend the integrity and honesty of the Justice Department.

“I expect that you will appreciate and protect an amazing gift you have received as an employee of the Department of Justice,” Comey said. “It is a gift you may not notice until the first time you stand up and identify yourself as an employee of the Department of Justice and say something – whether in a courtroom, a conference room or a cocktail party – and find that total strangers believe what you say next.

“That gift – the gift that makes possible so much of the good we accomplish – is a reservoir of trust and credibility, a reservoir built for us, and filled for us, by those who went before – most of whom we never knew. They were people who made sacrifices and kept promises to build that reservoir of trust.

“Our obligation – as the recipients of that great gift – is to protect that reservoir, to pass it to those who follow, those who may never know us, as full as we got it. The problem with reservoirs is that it takes tremendous time and effort to fill them, but one hole in a dam can drain them.

“The protection of that reservoir requires vigilance, an unerring commitment to truth, and a recognition that the actions of one may affect the priceless gift that benefits all. I have tried my absolute best – in matters big and small – to protect that reservoir and inspire others to protect it.”

Though the full import of Comey’s comments was not apparent at the time, it now appears that he was referring to the legal gamesmanship that Bradbury and others had used to circumvent American laws and traditions to enable the Bush administration to engage in torture.

In releasing the four memos on Thursday, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder repeated their rejection of the Bybee-Yoo-Bradbury legal theories, but also stipulated that they would oppose any legal action against the CIA interrogators who abused detainees under the Bush administration’s legal guidance.

Neither Obama nor Holder spoke specifically about possible legal accountability for Bush’s compliant lawyers — or for Bush and his top aides who oversaw the torture policies and picked the lawyers. However, Obama recommended a focus on the future, not the past.

Calling the period covered by the four memos a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” Obama added that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

The lack of accountability for Bush and his lawyers, however, may mean that future Presidents will follow Bush’s lead and assign some clever legal wordsmiths the job of finding ways around criminal statutes, international treaties and the U.S. Constitution.

If legal language can be interpreted any way that a President wishes – and if the U.S. Supreme Court is stocked with like-minded judges – then laws will no longer protect anyone, whether a suspected Middle Eastern terrorist or an American citizen.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

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Obama exonerates CIA torturers

April 17, 2009
By Patrick Martin |wsws.org, April 17, 2009

President Barack Obama announced Thursday that CIA agents who engaged in torture of prisoners over the past seven years will not be prosecuted or punished. As the Justice Department released memos documenting in grisly detail the interrogation guidelines set down by the Bush administration, the White House made it clear that neither those who ordered the torture nor those who carried it out would face justice.

The four memos released Thursday were written by the Office of Legal Counsel, an arm of the US Department of Justice, in 2002 and 2005. Their release was compelled by a court-established deadline in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The ACLU denounced the Obama White House statement barring any prosecution of torturers. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said the memos “provide yet more incontrovertible evidence that Bush administration officials at the highest level of government authorized and gave legal blessings to acts of torture that violate domestic and international law.”

The memos document in detail the methods employed against as many as 30 prisoners—a much larger number than previously admitted—including waterboarding, beating and kicking, slamming a prisoner’s head into the wall, slapping, forced standing, forced nakedness, prolonged shackling, sleep deprivation, deprivation of food and threats against a detainee’s family members.

Attorney General Eric Holder, chief US law enforcement officer, defended the decision not to enforce the laws against torture, saying, “At a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta, a former Democratic congressman and former White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, sent a message to CIA employees which declared that the CIA under the Bush administration had “repeatedly sought and repeatedly received written assurances from the Department of Justice that its practices were fully consistent with the laws and legal obligations of the United States. Those operations were also approved by the president and the National Security Council principals, and were briefed to the congressional leadership.”

Panetta’s statement underscores one of the principal considerations of the Obama White House. Any serious effort to prosecute torture at the CIA “black sites”—the secret prisons established as part of the Bush administration’s “war on terror”—would inevitably expose leading congressional Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to criminal sanctions, because they knew of and approved the brutal methods ordered by Bush and Cheney.

Not only will the Obama administration refuse to prosecute CIA officers, Panetta said, but the Department of Justice will provide free legal counsel to anyone “subject to investigations relating to these operations.” This means that the US government will represent and defend CIA torturers if they face congressional investigation, civil lawsuits by their victims, or prosecution under international law, such as the International Convention on Torture, to which the United States is a signatory. The US government will also pay any judgment against CIA agents if they lose a suit for damages.

Obama himself sent a letter to all CIA employees explaining his decision to release the torture memos, an action that was opposed by Panetta and former CIA Director Michael Hayden. He wrote, “the release of these memos is required by our commitment to the rule of law.” This commitment extends only to producing pieces of paper—released with names and other incriminating details redacted—but not to any actual sanctions against those who committed horrific crimes.

The text of the statement Obama issued from the White House is typical of the mix of hypocrisy, demagogy and lying that characterizes the major pronouncements of the new president. Obama never uses the word torture, substituting a series of euphemisms that were then parroted in media coverage, where the word “torture” appears only in quotations from critics of the White House decision.

Obama claims that “In one of my very first acts as president, I prohibited the use of these interrogation techniques by the United States because they undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer.” In fact, this prohibition is not absolute and is essentially a cosmetic gesture, aimed at restoring the “moral authority” of an imperialist power which has carried out massive war crimes.

Profusely apologizing to the CIA for releasing the documents, Obama hastens to reassure the intelligence agencies that he still supports them, declaring, “in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security. I have already fought for that principle in court and will do so again in the future.”

Obama describes the CIA torturers as people “who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.” This echoes the “just-following-orders” defense that was rejected by the Nuremberg Tribunal when Nazi war criminals sought to use it.

No one needed a memo to tell them that the methods employed in the CIA “black sites” were brutal, repugnant and criminal. That is why the CIA and its protectors have stonewalled the courts, long after the details have become public through leaks to the press based on the accounts of those who survived the interrogations, as well as the findings of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The bulk of the Obama statement is devoted to glorifying the “intelligence community,” in language that would be echoed word for word by Bush and Cheney: “The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer. We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs.”

The truth is that US intelligence agencies carry out assassinations, torture, subversion and provocation in the interests, not of the American people, but of the American corporate-financial ruling elite. The CIA is reviled all over the world as the American “Murder Inc.,” which has overthrown governments targeted by Washington, instigated civil wars and established military dictatorships in country after country.

Obama’s statement combines abject cowardice, as he bows before the power of the military/intelligence apparatus, and an embrace of its history of violence and counterrevolution, as he pledges in the statement, “I will always do whatever is necessary to protect the national security of the United States.”

In closing, the US president declares, “This is a time for reflection, not retribution … nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.”

What cynical rubbish! As if torture can be stopped by exonerating the torturers and concealing their crimes from the public!

The message is clear: anyone who demands accountability for the crimes committed under the Bush administration (and continued under the Obama administration) is acting to “divide” the nation.

By declaring an amnesty for those who carried out actions that—even according to the Obama administration—constituted torture and were illegal, the White House is sanctioning criminal activity by the state. This amounts to a carte blanche to the military and intelligence apparatus to utilize whatever illegal methods they choose to employ.

Obama’s kowtowing to the most reactionary forces within the state underscores the vast and ever-growing power that this “state within a state” exerts over all aspects of government policy. It is one more demonstration of the terminal decay of American democracy.

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Bush Administration authorized use of insects in interrogations

April 17, 2009
John Byrne | The Raw Story
Published: Thursday April 16, 2009
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The Bush Administration Office of Legal Counsel authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to put insects inside a confinement box as part of the Administration’s “harsh interrogation” practice, as well as throwing detainees into walls, according to memos released by President Barack Obama on Thursday.

Read the full memos here.

“You would like to place Zubadayah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us he has a fear of insects,” the Bush White House said.

“As we understand it, no actually harmful insect will be placed in the box. Thus, though the introduction of an insect may produce trepidation in Zubaydah (which we discuss below), it certainly does not cause physical pain.”

But, the memo cautioned, to comply with the law, the CIA “must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain.”

Part of the text beneath a description of the insect torture was redacted.

Time‘s Michael Scherer notes, “The insect interrogation technique, as it turned out, was never used by the CIA, according to a second declassified memo released Thursday. ‘We understand that — for reasons unrelated to any concerns that it might violate the [criminal] statute — the CIA never used the technique and has removed it from the list of authorized interrogation techniques,’ wrote Steven Bradbury, a principal deputy assistant attorney general, in the footnote to a on May 10, 2005 document.”

Detailed description of ‘walling’ detainees

It also provides a detailed description of “walling,” a practice in which detainees were thrown against walls as part of the interrogation process (one detainee said his neck was tied with a towel and thrown against a plywood wall in a recently leaked Red Cross report).

“For walling, a flexible false wall will be constructed. The individual is placed with his heels touching the wall. The interrogator pulls the individual forward and then quickly and firmly pushes the individual into the wall. It is the individual’s shoulder blades that hit the wall.

“During this motion, the head and neck are supported with a rolled hood or towel that provides a c-collar effect to help prevent whiplash. To further reduce the probability of injury, the individual is allowed to rebound from the flexible wall. You have orally informed us that the false wall is in part constructed to create a loud sound when the individual hits it, which will further shock or surprise in the individual. In part, the idea is to create a sound that will make the impact seem far worse than it is and that will be far worse than any injury that might result from the action.”

The White House lawyers characterized this practice as “rough handling.”

“While walling involves what might be characterized as rough handling, it does not involve the threat of imminent death or, as discussed above, the infliction of severe physical pain. Moreover, once again we understand that use of this technique will not be accompanied by any specific verbal threat that violence will ensue absent cooperation. Thus, like the facial slap, walling can only constitute a threat of severe physical pain if a reasonable person would infer such a threat from the use of the technique itself. Walling does not in and of itself inflict severe pain or suffering.”

As part of the release of the memos Thursday, the Justice Department said they would provide attorneys to any CIA interrogator who engaged in the practice thinking it was lawful under the aegis of the memo.

According to Newsweek‘s Michael Isikoff, writing earlier this year, former Bush officials may find themselves in hot water over one of the memos released Thursday.

“An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials,” Isikoff wrote. “H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department’s ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos ‘was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.’ According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials—Jay Bybee and John Yoo—as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said. (Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)”

“The matter is under review,” Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller is quoted as saying.

Read the full memos here.

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Errant Drone Attacks Spur Militants in Pakistan

April 17, 2009

By Gareth Porter* | Inter Press Service News

WASHINGTON, Apr 15 (IPS) – The U.S. programme of drone aircraft strikes against higher-ranking officials of al Qaeda and allied militant organisations, which has been touted by proponents as having eliminated nine of the 20 top al Qaeda leaders, is actually weakening Pakistan’s defence against the insurgency of the Islamic militants there by killing large numbers of civilians based on faulty intelligence and discrediting the Pakistani military, according to data from the Pakistani government and interviews with senior analysts.

Some evidence indicates, moreover, that the top officials in the Barack Obama administration now see the programme more as an incentive for the Pakistani military to take a more aggressive posture toward the militants rather than as an effective tool against the insurgents.

Although the strikes have been sold to the U.S. public as a way to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda, which is an explicitly counter-terrorist objective, al Qaeda is not actually the main threat to U.S. security emanating from Pakistan, according to some analysts. The real threat comes from the broader, rapidly growing insurgency of Islamic militants against the shaky Pakistani government and military, they observe, and the drone strikes are a strategically inappropriate approach to that problem.

“Al Qaeda has very little to do with the militancy in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” said Marvin Weinbaum, former Afghanistan and Pakistan analyst at the Bureau of Intelligence Research at the U.S. Department of State and now scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute.

John McCreary, a senior intelligence analyst for the Defence Intelligence Agency until his retirement in 2006, agrees with Weinbaum’s assessment. “The drone programme is supposed to be all about al Qaeda,” he told IPS in an interview, but in fact, “the threat is much larger.”

McCreary observes that the targets in recent months “have been expanded to include Pakistani Pashtun militants.” The administration apparently had dealt with that contradiction by effectively broadening the definition of al Qaeda, according to McCreary

Ambassador James Dobbins, the director of National Security Studies at the Rand Corporation, who maintains contacts with a range of administration national security officials, told IPS in an interview that the drone strikes in Pakistan are aimed “in the short and medium term” at the counter-terrorism objective of preventing attacks on Washington and other capitals.

But as they have shifted to Pakistani Taliban targets, Dobbins said, “To degree the targets are insurgents and are Pakistanis not Arabs it would be correct to assess that they are part of an insurgency.” That raises the question, he said, whether the drone programme “is feeding the insurgency and popular support for it.”

The drone program cannot even be expected to be a decisive factor in al Qaeda’s ability to operate, according to McCreary. “All you can do with drones is decapitate leadership,” McCreary told IPS in a recent interview. “Even in relation to al Qaeda’s organisational dynamics, it has only limited, temporary impact.”

McCreary warned that the drone strikes will cause much more serious problems when they increase and expand into new parts of Pakistan as the administration is now seriously considering, according to a New York Times article Apr. 7. “Now al Qaeda is fleeing to other cities, “said McCreary. “The programme is escalating and having ripple effects that are incalculable.”

McCreary said one of the longer-term consequences of the attacks is “the public humiliation of the Pakistan Army as a defender of the national patrimony”. That effect of striking Pakistani targets with U.S. aircraft is “the least understood dimension of the attacks, the most discounted and most dangerous”. McCreary said the attacks’ “ensure that successive generations of Pakistani military officers will be viscerally anti-American.”

Administration officials have defended the drone strikes programme as necessary to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda to prevent terrorist attacks, and officials have leaked to the media in recent weeks the fact that the programme has killed nine of 20 top al Qaeda leaders.

But the Pakistani government leaked data last week to The News in Lahore showing that only 10 drone attacks out of 60 carried out from Jan. 29, 2009 to Apr. 8, 2009 actually hit al Qaeda leaders, while 50 other strikes were based on faulty intelligence and killed a total of 537 civilians but no al Qaeda leaders.

The drone strikes have been even less accurate in their targeting in 2009 than they had been from 2006 through 2008, according to the detailed data from Pakistani authorities. Of 14 drone strikes carried out in those 99 days, only one was successful, killing a senior al Qaeda commander in North Waziristan and its external operations chief. The other 13 strikes had killed 152 people without netting a single al Qaeda leader.

Dobbins, speaking to IPS before the Pakistani data on drone strikes was released, said it was difficult for an outsider to evaluate the benefits of the programme but that “we can assess that there is a significant price that is being paid” in terms of the impact on Pakistani opinion toward U.S. efforts to stem the tide of the insurgency.

Dobbins said one of the reasons for the continuing drone attacks, despite the high political price, is that “it is an incentive aimed prodding the Pakistani government.” He said he believes the United States would be happy to trade off the strikes in return for a more effective counterinsurgency campaign by the Pakistani government.

Further bolstering that interpretation of the objective of continued drone strikes is a report, in the same story in The News, that the most recent strike took place only hours after U.S. officials had reportedly received a rejection by Pakistani authorities Apr. 8 of a proposal for joint military operations against militant organisations in the tribal areas from U.S. South Asia envoy Richard Holbrooke and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, who were visiting Islamabad.

Other analysts suggest that the programme has acquired bureaucratic and political momentum because it a politically important symbol that the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are against al Qaeda and because the United States has no other policy instrument to demonstrate that it is doing something about the growth of Islamic groups that share al Qaeda’s extremist Islamic militancy.

McCreary believes that the programme is related to the fear of the Obama administration that it would be unable to get support for operations in Afghanistan if it didn’t focus on al Qaeda. “I think it was a way to link Afghanistan operations to al Qaeda,” he said.

“That suggests to me that the tactic for motivating domestic support is influencing the policy,” said McCreary. The former senior DIA analyst added that the drone strike programme “has acquired its own momentum, which is now having immense consequences.”

Weinbaum told IPS in an interview that the drone attacks are being continued, “primarily because we’re enormously frustrated, and they represent the only thing we really have.”

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

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Castro: Cuba Will Continue to Resist

April 15, 2009

By Fidel Castro | ZNet, April 15, 2009

Fidel Castro’s ZSpace Page

The U.S. administration announced through CNN that Obama would be visiting Mexico this week, in the first part of a trip that will take him to Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, where he will be within four days taking part in the Summit of the Americas. He has announced the relief of some hateful restrictions imposed by Bush to Cubans living in the United States regarding their visits to relatives in Cuba. When questions were raised on whether such prerogatives extended to other American citizens the response was that the latter were not authorized.

But not a word was said about the harshest of measures: the blockade. This is the way a truly genocidal measure is piously called, one whose damage cannot be calculated only on the basis of its economic effects, for it constantly takes human lives and brings painful suffering to our people.

Numerous diagnostic equipment and crucial medicines –made in  Europe, Japan or any other country– are not available to our patients  if they carry U.S. components or software.

The U.S. companies producing goods or offering services anywhere  in the world should apply these restrictions to Cuba, since they are extraterritorial measures.

An influential Republican Senator, Richard Lugar, and some others from his same party in Congress, as well as a significant number of his Democratic peers, favor the removal of the blockade. The conditions exist for Obama to use his talents in a constructive policy that could put an end to the one that has failed for almost half a century.

On the other hand, our country, which has resisted and is willing to resist whatever it takes, neither blames Obama for the atrocities of other U.S. administrations nor doubts his sincerity and his wishes to change the United States policy and image. We understand that he waged a very difficult battle to be elected, despite centuries-old prejudices.

Taking note of this reality, the President of the State Council of Cuba has expressed his willingness to have a dialogue with Obama  and to normalize relations with the United States, on the basis  of the strictest respect for the sovereignty of our country.

At 2:30 p.m., the head of the Interests Section of Cuba in Washington, Jorge Bolaños, was summoned to the State Department  by Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Shannon. He did not say  anything different from what had been indicated by the CNN.

At 3:15 p.m. a lengthy press conference started. The substance of what was said there is reflected in the words of Dan Restrepo, Presidential Adviser for Latin America.

He said that today President Obama had instructed to take certain measures, certain steps, to reach out to the Cuban people in  support of their wishes to live with respect for human rights and to determine their own destiny and that of the country.

He added that the president had instructed the secretaries of State, Commerce and Treasury to undertake the necessary actions to  remove all restrictions preventing persons to visit their relatives in the Island and sending remittances. He also said that the president had issued instructions for steps to be taken allowing the free flow of information in Cuba, and between those living in Cuba and the  rest of the world, and to facilitate delivering humanitarian resources directly to the Cuban people.

He also said that with these measures, aimed at closing the gap between divided Cuban families and promoting the free flow of information and humanitarian assistance to the Cuban people, President Obama was making an effort to fulfill the objectives  he set out during his campaign and after taking on his position.

Finally, he indicated that all those who believe in the basic democratic values hope for a Cuba where the human, political, economic and basic rights of the entire people are respected.  And he added that President Obama feels that these measures  will help to make this objective a reality. The president, he said,  encourages everyone who shares these wishes to continue to  decidedly support the Cuban people.

At the end of the press conference, the adviser candidly confessed that ?all of this is for Cuba?s freedom.?

Cuba does not applaud the ill-named Summits of the Americas, where our nations do not debate on equal footing. If they were of any use, it would be to make critical analyses of policies that divide our peoples, plunder our resources and hinder our development.

Now, the only thing left is for Obama to try to persuade all of the Latin American presidents attending the conference that the  blockade is harmless.

Cuba has resisted and it will continue to resist; it will never beg for alms. It will go on forward holding its head up high and cooperating with the fraternal peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean; with or without Summits of the Americas; whether or not the president of the United States is Obama, a man or a woman, a black or a white citizen.

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US airstrike kills six civilians in Afghanistan

April 15, 2009

By Bill Van Auken | wsws.org, 15 April 2009

US attack helicopters killed six civilians Monday in Afghanistan’s mountainous eastern Kunar province near the Pakistan border. The attack follows by less than a week a raid by US troops in nearby Khost province that killed five innocent civilians, four of them relatives of an Afghan army officer.

While US military officials claimed that all those killed in Monday’s attack were “enemy fighters” and that the target had been picked based on “multiple intelligence sources,” Afghan officials on the ground told a very different story.

The governor of the Watapor district in Kunar Province, Zalmay Yousfzai, reported that the helicopters demolished one house and inflicted heavy damage on several others. In addition to the six civilians killed in the raid, another 14 were wounded, four of them seriously, he said.

The district police chief also affirmed that all of those killed and wounded were civilians. Among the dead were a three-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy. The wounded included a one-year-old.

The Agence France-Presse news agency interviewed two of the wounded at the local hospital, including a 14-year-old boy who said that four members of his family had died in the US air strike.

“We were asleep, and all of a sudden the roof collapsed,” the boy, who identified himself as Zakirullah, told AFP. “I don’t remember anything. I got to know here that my father, my mother, my brother and my younger sister have all been killed, and I am wounded.”

A woman, named Shahida, told the news agency: “We were asleep and heard a strange noise and then the roof and walls collapsed. The people took me out of the rubble and there are many still there. I was told nine people from my family were killed and wounded. I don’t know who is dead, who is wounded and who is alive in my family.”

A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said that it would investigate the reported civilian casualties. The spokesman, Capt. Mark Durkin, added that if there were deaths, the occupation forces would “provide assistance to support the law-abiding people affected.”

Such blood money does little to assuage the popular outrage provoked by the killing of innocent men, women and children by foreign occupiers. Even President Hamid Karzai, whose corrupt and feeble regime remains in power solely thanks to the US troop presence, has felt compelled to repeatedly condemn such attacks and demand that the occupation force stop killing civilians.

The initial claims that only insurgents were killed, followed by the promise of an investigation is the standard response of the US military. Just four days earlier, after making virtually identical statements, a spokesman for the US-led occupation was forced to acknowledge that those killed in the April 8 attack on the home of the Afghan officer, Col. Awal Khan, had not been “enemy fighters.”

Among the dead were Khan’s wife, who was a local school teacher, two children, and his brother. The wife of the Khan’s cousin, who lived next door, came out of her house during the raid. The US troops shot the woman, who was nine months pregnant, five times in the abdomen.

“She survived but her child died. The child was hit by bullets,” Khost province health director Abdul Majeed told AFP.

In a report released in February, the United Nations said that the civilian death toll in Afghanistan had risen to over 2,100 in 2008, a 40 percent increase over the previous year. It said that US and NATO troops were responsible for at least 828 of these deaths, the majority of them inflicted by air strikes.

According to data compiled by the Afghan Victims Memorial Project, between 156 and 160 civilians have been killed by the US-led occupation forces since President Barack Obama took office on January 21. Of these victims, 56 were children, 15 women, between 41 and 43 men and another 38 to 40 whose age and gender were unknown.

A similar steady escalation of the civilian death toll has been recorded across the border in Pakistan, which the Obama administration is now treating as part of a broader regional theater of war. According to figures compiled by Pakistani authorities, in the course of 60 missile attacks by pilotless Predator drones carried out since 2006, 701 people have been killed, 687 of them civilians. At least 152 people have died in these attacks in the first 99 days of 2009, according to the Pakistani authorities—only two of them linked to al Qaeda.

The most recent Predator attack was launched on April 8, just hours after Pakistani military and civilian leaders met with Obama’s envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen and registered a formal protest over the missile strikes.

The killing of both Afghans and Pakistanis is only going to escalate as some 21,000 more US troops are deployed in Afghanistan in the coming weeks, the Pentagon’s top uniformed officer warned Tuesday.

Admiral Mullen told ABC television that the US escalation would mean a surge of violence.

“I look forward to a very active year,” said Mullen. “I want to be clear that my expectations are as we add more troops, the violence level in Afghanistan is going to go up.”

The military chief said that 17,000 more US combat troops and 4,000 military trainers will soon be deployed in Afghanistan and would ultimately have “the right impact.”

There are already 38,000 US troops in the country. Washington plans to boost that number to 68,000 by autumn, and the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, has asked for 10,000 more. Other NATO countries have approximately 32,000 troops in the country.

The US military escalation will serve to intensify resistance to the American occupation on both sides the border, while further destabilizing the government in Pakistan. After more than seven years of military violence, the US is facing a rapidly disintegrating security and political situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, driven out of government by the October 2001 invasion, now controls large swaths of the country.

Across the border in western Pakistan—including the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan, which, like southeastern Afghanistan, are inhabited largely by Pashtuns—the US presence has fueled a growing insurgency that has only been strengthened by popular anger over the drone attacks and Pakistani army repression, which in addition to killing civilians, have driven some 550,000 people from their homes.

While Washington has demanded that Pakistan take even more repressive measures to deny the Taliban “safe havens” from which they can launch attacks in neighboring Afghanistan, President Asif Ali Zardari is anxious to damp down the conflict for fear that it will threaten his government’s survival.

Thus, on Monday, to Washington’s consternation, Zardari signed legislation that imposes Islamic law in the Swat Valley, which had been the scene of protracted and bloody fighting between government forces and local Islamist militants. The measure essentially amounts to a peace agreement with the local Taliban, whose ranks have reportedly doubled over the past year.

While the deal was supposed to secure the disarming of the Islamists, last week Taliban fighters advanced out of Swat and moved southeast into the Bruner district, defeating local police and militia in armed clashes and establishing their domination of the valley, which is barely 60 miles from the Pakistani capital.

The Obama administration is desperately attempting to salvage the war launched by President Bush in the name of fighting terrorism, but with the strategic objective of securing US hegemony in Central Asia, with its vast energy resources. Its escalation and extension into Pakistan, however, will have the effect of spreading instability and armed conflict with potentially catastrophic results.

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