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Judge Rules Some Prisoners at Bagram Have Right of Habeas Corpus

April 4, 2009

by Charlie Savage | The New York Times, April 3, 2009

WASHINGTON – A federal judge ruled on Thursday that some prisoners held by the United States military in Afghanistan have a right to challenge their imprisonment, dealing a blow to government efforts to detain terrorism suspects for extended periods without court oversight.

[Attiqullah 10, son of Hafizullah Shahbaz Khiel, an Afghan detainee shows documents proclaiming Hafizullah's innocence during an interview with Associated Press at his uncle's house on the outskirts of Kabul,Afghanistan, Tuesday, Jan 20, 2009. He is being held at Bagram Air Base.(AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool) ]Attiqullah 10, son of Hafizullah Shahbaz Khiel, an Afghan detainee shows documents proclaiming Hafizullah’s innocence during an interview with Associated Press at his uncle’s house on the outskirts of Kabul,Afghanistan, Tuesday, Jan 20, 2009. He is being held at Bagram Air Base.(AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

In a 53-page ruling that rejected a claim of unfettered executive power advanced by both the Bush and Obama administrations, United States District Judge John D. Bates said that three detainees at the United States’ Bagram Air Base had the same legal rights that the Supreme Court last year granted to prisoners held at the American naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.The three detainees – two Yemenis and a Tunisian – say that they were captured outside Afghanistan and taken to Bagram, and that they have been imprisoned for more than six years without trials. Arguing that they were not enemy combatants, the detainees want a civilian judge to review the evidence against them and order their release, under the constitutional right of habeas corpus.

The importance of Bagram as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq has increased under the Obama administration, which prohibited the Central Intelligence Agency from using its secret prisons for long-term detention and ordered the military prison at Guantánamo closed within a year. The administration had sought to preserve Bagram as a haven where it could detain terrorism suspects beyond the reach of American courts, telling Judge Bates in February that it agreed with the Bush administration’s view that courts had no jurisdiction over detainees there.

Judge Bates, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2001, was not persuaded. He said transferring captured terrorism suspects to the prison inside Afghanistan and claiming they were beyond the jurisdiction of American courts “resurrects the same specter of limitless executive power the Supreme Court sought to guard against” in its 2008 ruling that Guantánamo prisoners have a right to habeas corpus.

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said that the administration was reviewing the decision and that it had made no decision about whether to appeal.

Judge Bates emphasized that his ruling was “quite narrow.” He said that it did not apply to prisoners captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, and that a determination of whether prisoners might challenge their detention in court would depend on a case-by-case analysis of factors like their citizenship and location of capture.

“It is one thing to detain those captured on the surrounding battlefield at a place like Bagram, which respondents correctly maintain is in a theater of war,” the judge wrote. “It is quite another thing to apprehend people in foreign countries – far from any Afghan battlefield – and then bring them to a theater of war, where the Constitution arguably may not reach.”

Moreover, the judge has put off ruling that a fourth prisoner – also captured outside Afghanistan, but holding Afghan citizenship – had a right to challenge his detention. He said any order to release the detainee could lead to frictions with the Afghan government, and asked for additional briefings on that case.

The United States is holding about 600 people at Bagram without charges and in spartan conditions. United States officials have never provided a full accounting of the prison population, but an American government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because it is against policy to discuss details of the Bagram prison, said that fewer than a dozen detainees fell into the category affected by the ruling – non-Afghans captured beyond Afghan borders.

Judge Bates has been involved in several high-profile executive power cases. In 2002, he sided with the Bush administration in a lawsuit over whether Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force records were required to be disclosed. But in 2008, he sided with Congress in an executive-privilege dispute over whether top aides to Mr. Bush were immune from subpoenas related to the firing of federal prosecutors.

David Rivkin, an associate White House counsel in the administration of the first President Bush, predicted that Judge Bates’s ruling would be overturned on appeal. He warned that the ruling “gravely undermined” the country’s “ability to detain enemy combatants for the duration of hostilities worldwide.”

But Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network, which is representing the four Bagram detainees, praised Judge Bates’s decision as “a very good day for the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Ms. Foster said that the Bagram ruling meant that changes to the Bush detention policies would go beyond merely closing Guantánamo and extend “to any place where the United States seeks to hold individuals in a legal black hole.”

The power of federal judges to review decisions by the executive branch to imprison a terrorism suspect was among the most contentious legal issues that arose after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The Bush administration began a policy of holding prisoners indefinitely and without trials, arguing that federal judges had no authority to second-guess its decisions about whom to name an “enemy combatant.”

But human-rights lawyers challenged those policies, winning Supreme Court decisions in 2004, 2006 and 2008 that gradually expanded the reach of the American legal system over detainees.

After taking office, Mr. Obama ordered a review of the evidence against each of the roughly 240 prisoners at Guantánamo as a first step toward closing the prison within a year.

He did not extend the steps he was taking to resolve the fate of the Guantánamo prisoners to those held at Bagram, although a comprehensive review of detainee policies is due to be completed in July. Ms. Foster said that the Bagram case may force the administration to speed up its decisions.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

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Fake Faith and Epic Crimes

April 3, 2009

By John Pilger | Information Clearing House, Apri 2, 2009

These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, “if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves.”

That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have long had “universal jurisdiction” statutes, which allow their national courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against “ourselves,” or “our” allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the West, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity. Home Secretary Jack Straw let him escape back to Chile.

The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January last, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W. Bush with that of Pinochet. “Outside [the United States] there is not the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime,” he said. “So if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as ‘former President George Bush’ [but] as a current war criminal.” For this reason, Bush’s former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture techniques in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26 January, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said, “We have clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but nevertheless he ordered torture.”

The Spanish high court is currently investigating a former Israeli defence minister and six other top Israeli officials for their role in the killing of civilians, mostly children, in Gaza. Henry Kissinger, who was largely responsible for bombing to death 600,000 peasants in Cambodia in 1969-73, is wanted for questioning in France, Chile and Argentina. Yet, on 8 February, as if demonstrating the continuity of American power, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, said, “I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger.”

Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions related to Blair’s wars. Spain’s celebrated Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W. Bush, Blair and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq — “one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history: a devastating attack on the rule of law” that had left the UN “in tatters.” He said, “There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay.”

This is not to say Blair is about to be collared and marched to The Hague, where Serbs and Sudanese dictators are far more likely to face a political court set up by the West. However, an international agenda is forming and a process has begun which is as much about legitimacy as the letter of the law, and a reminder from history that the powerful lose wars and empires when legitimacy evaporates. This can happen quickly, as in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of apartheid South Africa — the latter a spectre for apartheid Israel.

Today, the unreported “good news” is that a worldwide movement is challenging the once sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde R.L. Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter … I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete.”

Blair, too, is safe — but for how long? He and his collaborators face a new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that are amassing “an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges,” according to international law authority Richard Falk, who cites the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush and others. Currently, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for Blair’s prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, former Judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court E.W. Thomas wrote: “My pre-disposition was to believe that Mr. Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr. Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled Cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate.”

Protected by the fake sinecure of Middle East Envoy for the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), Blair operates largely from a small fortress in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where he is an apologist for the US in the Middle East and Israel, a difficult task following the bloodbath in Gaza. To assist his mortgages, he recently received an Israeli “peace prize” worth a million dollars. He, too, is careful where he travels; and it is instructive to watch how he now uses the media. Having concentrated his post-Downing Street apologetics on a BBC series of obsequious interviews with David Aaronovitch, Blair has all but slipped from view in Britain, where polls have long revealed a remarkable loathing for a former prime minister — a sentiment now shared by those in the liberal media elite whose previous promotion of his “project” and crimes is an embarrassment and preferably forgotten.

On 8 February, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer’s former leading Blair fan, declared that “this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply buried.” He demanded, “Did Blair never ask what was going on?”  This is an excellent question made relevant with a slight word change: “Did the Andrew Rawnsleys never ask what was going on?” In 2001, Rawnsley alerted his readers to Iraq’s “contribution to international terrorism” and Saddam Hussein’s “frightening appetite to possess weapons of mass destruction.” Both assertions were false and echoed official Anglo-American propaganda. In 2003, when the destruction of Iraq was launched, Rawnsley described it as a “point of principle” for Blair who, he later wrote, was “fated to be right.” He lamented, “Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short.” In the subsequent six years at least a million people have been killed. According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans. Yes, war is nasty and brutish, but never for the Blairs and the Rawnsleys.

Far from the carping turncoats at home, Blair has lately found a safe media harbour — in Australia, the original murdochracy. His interviewers exude an unction reminiscent of the promoters of the “mystical” Blair in the Guardian of than a decade ago, though they also bring to mind Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times during the 1930s, who wrote of his infamous groveling to the Nazis: “I spend my nights taking out anything which will hurt their susceptibilities and dropping in little things which are intended to sooth them.”

With his words as a citation, the finalists for the Geoffrey Dawson Prize for Journalism (Antipodes) are announced. On 8 February, in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Geraldine Doogue described Blair as “a man who brought religion into power and is now bringing power to religion.” She asked him: “What would the perception be that faith would bring towards a greater stability …[sic]?” A bemused and clearly delighted Blair was allowed to waffle about “values.” Doogue said to him that “it was the bifurcation about right and wrong that what I thought the British found really hard” [sic], to which Blair replied that “in relation to Iraq I tried every other option [to invasion] there was.” It was his classic lie, which passed unchallenged.

However, the clear winner of the Geoffrey Dawson Prize is Ginny Dougary of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times. Dougary recently accompanied Blair on what she described as his “James Bondish-ish Gulfstream” where she was privy to his “bionic energy levels.” She wrote, “I ask him the childlike question: does he want to save the world?” Blair replied, well, more or less, aw shucks, yes. The murderous assault on Gaza, which was under way during the interview, was mentioned in passing. “That is war, I’m afraid,” said Blair, “and war is horrible.” No counter came that Gaza was not a war but a massacre by any measure. As for the Palestinians, noted Dougary, it was Blair’s task to “prepare them for statehood.” The Palestinians will be surprised to hear that. But enough gravitas; her man “has the glow of the newly-in-love: in love with the world and, for the most part, the feeling is reciprocated.” The evidence she offered for this absurdity was that “women from both sides of politics have confessed to me to having the hots for him.”

These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a “prayer breakfast” with President Obama, the yes-we-can-man now launching more war. “We pray,” said Blair, “that in acting we do God’s work and follow God’s will.” To decent people, such pronouncements about Blair’s “faith” represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profanation on the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part — or, like Alistair Campbell, his “communications director,” offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some — might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: “Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, 4 million refugees, countless maiming and traumas.”

These are indeed extraordinary times.

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Beyond Afghanistan: Choosing Nonviolence

April 3, 2009

Published on Thursday, April 2, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

War Resisters League

As we approach the April 4 anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s great 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech in New York City’s Riverside Church, the War Resisters League reiterates King’s urgent cry for nonviolence­ and nonviolent resistance. The parallels between the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. war against Vietnam fill us with foreboding. While we adamantly oppose continued U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we also call upon people of conscience to think beyond Afghanistan and challenge, as King did, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

Others have laid out reasons­from Afghanistan’s topography to the U.S. economic crisis­ that would make an expanded war in Afghanistan “unwinnable.” But WRL does not base our opposition on such arguments. While they may be correct, we challenge the very idea of a “winnable” war and oppose this one as we oppose all war: not solely for practical and strategic reasons, but because of our, and King’s, decades-long commitment to nonviolence.

Purveyor of Violence

Much has changed in the 40-plus years since King made that speech, yet the United States remains, as he named it then, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” WRL stands, as he did, against that violence, which is not only wrong in itself, but cures nothing and rebounds on its perpetrators.

King declared that the people of Vietnam “must see Americans as strange liberators.” The assessment applies today to the people of Afghanistan. Afghanistan has lost more than two million civilian lives to war in the last 30 years alone, and the toll is rising again, in a dreadful example of the ways in which violence boomerangs and warfare begets only devastation and more warfare (including attacks by groups like Al Qaeda). For centuries that battered land has been subject to imperial aggression and intervention. The Taliban rose to power with the support of the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services, intervening against the USSR’s invasion. Today, Afghanistan’s infrastructure is destroyed. Each year, pregnancy and childbirth kill 25,000 women, and diarrhea kills 85,000 children. Landmines planted in turn by troops of the Soviet Union, the Northern Alliance, and the Taliban kill 600 people per year and maim so many that manufacturing artificial limbs is a major industry. The infamous U.S. “detention center” at Bagram continues to hold more prisoners than Guantánamo. Rather than bombing and shelling Afghanistan­and maintaining a prison there ­the United States could promote economic development, public health, education, food security, women’s empowerment, and de-mining efforts.

The Enemy of the Poor

War wreaks its devastation within our own country as well. In this period of increased global instability and recession, the world is undergoing a tectonic shift in its assumptions about the institutions of capitalism. That re-evaluation must include its assumptions about the institution of war.

“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube,” King said in 1967. Substitute “Iraq and Afghanistan” for Vietnam, and the sentence is equally, terribly true today.

Here as abroad, war remains, as King called it, the “enemy of the poor.” While the Pentagon pours billions of tax dollars into implements of destruction and rains down bombs on poor civilians in Afghanistan, our own infrastructure crumbles, and our own people are struggling without decent schools, healthcare, and employment. The funds that we need to provide housing and care at home end up diverted into killing people thousands of miles away, and people of color, immigrants, and lower-income whites are targeted by military recruiters to do the killing. Massive bailouts line the pockets of bankers, unemployment skyrockets, and military recruiters are having the easiest time meeting their quotas in years.

Nonviolence in Afghanistan and at Home

Despite the monumental obstacles they face, many in Afghanistan and Pakistan are working nonviolently for peace and to repair the ravages of war and warmaking. In Afghanistan, Parliamentarian Malalai Joya­despite illegal suspension from Parliament and assassination attempts ­has continued to denounce the warlords and call for human rights, women’s rights, and governmental accountability. Thousands of peace advocates in northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have met in the assemblies called jirgas to imagine and formulate peace and reconstruction initiatives. The lawyers’ campaign in Pakistan has mobilized thousands, despite beatings and arrests, to reverse the military’s control over the courts. Others are building schools and countering the bitter legacy of violence against women. U.S. peace advocates should be promoting and publicizing these nonviolent actions to rebuild Afghan and Pakistani society in the midst of war, devastation, warlordism, and patriarchal control.

In our own country as well, there are increasingly loud voices against war and for a reordering of our priorities­for affordable housing, universal healthcare, gender justice, disability rights, clean energy, quality education, restorative justice, fair food, and an anti-racist society. Among these allies are newcomers to the United States, people who have survived and resisted wars and challenged immigration policies that facilitate the extraction of profits from cheap labor, even while being criminalized, imprisoned, deported, and denied citizenship. Some of those most forsaken by the U.S. government have continued to build organizations and networks for those with no safety net.

The Choice

The War Resisters League urges everyone to join us in organizing, protesting, and demanding the closing of Bagram prison (and all such “detention centers”) and an end to military actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan and across the globe. Organizing against military recruitment is as important as ever now that ­the military is preying on those most affected by the battered economy. Support the voices and actions of the survivors of war. Listen to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; create space for their heartbreaking stories of remorse and harrowing accounts of the worst kinds of violence and dehumanization. Stop funding war – ­become a war tax resister. Instead of paying to train men and women to kill, foster ways to help all of us rebuild our communities.

The so-called “war on terrorism,” with its occupations and detentions, its torture and carnage, has failed because military action can never lead to security. We don’t have easy answers, but we know that the cycle of violence has to end, and we have to help end it. While thousands of people in Afghanistan and Pakistan are finding the courage to risk their lives to work for nonviolent solutions, we have a responsibility to lift our voices. We must reject the notions of good wars and bad wars, legal or illegal wars, winnable and unwinnable wars. We must decide whether our identity as a nation will be based on a culture of cultivating life or dealing death. As King declared, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. … We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.” Together, let’s choose the path of nonviolence.

For suggestions for actions opposing war in Afghanistan, see United for Peace and Justice, the antiwar coalition to which WRL belongs, www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=4044..

The United States’ oldest secular pacifist organization, the War Resisters League has been resisting war at home and war abroad since 1923. Our work for nonviolent revolution has spanned decades and has been shaped by the new visions and strategies of each generation’s peacemakers.

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U.S. Weighs Putting 70,000 Troops in Afghanistan

April 2, 2009

By Yochi J. Dreazen | The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is weighing whether to deploy 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan but lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are questioning an increased commitment and seeking specific measures of progress against the deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

When President Obama took office, the U.S. had about 38,000 troops in Afghanistan. The White House has announced plans to send 21,000 reinforcements in coming months, increasing the tally to almost 60,000.

Mr. Obama will decide this fall whether to order 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan next year, senior Pentagon officials told a Senate panel Wednesday, bringing the total to almost 70,000.

[A U.S. Marine patrols with his squad past destoyed houses in Now Zad in Helmand province Afghanistan on Wednesday.] Getty Images

A U.S. Marine patrols with his squad past destoyed houses in Now Zad in Helmand province Afghanistan on Wednesday.

Lawmakers sought benchmarks on U.S. efforts in the area. “How will we know if we’re winning?” asked Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine).

The hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee came days after the Obama administration rolled out its new strategy for Afghanistan. The strategy is designed to counter the Taliban’s resurgence as an effective fighting force capable of exerting day-to-day control over many rural parts of the country.

The White House plan calls for deploying 4,000 troops and hundreds of civilian officials, expanding U.S. counternarcotics efforts in southern Afghanistan, and giving billions of dollars in development aid to Pakistan.

Lawmakers from both parties expressed skepticism about Pakistan’s willingness — or ability — to take effective measures against its militants.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the panel’s ranking Republican, faulted Pakistan for striking a peace treaty with Taliban militants in the Swat Valley that allows for the implementation of strict Islamic law there.

Sen. McCain also said the Pakistani government and military need to exert greater control over the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence arm, which has long been suspected of providing covert assistance to the Taliban and other Islamist extremists.

Gen. David Petraeus, who runs the military’s Central Command, and Michele Flournoy, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for policy, said Pakistan hadn’t yet fully committed to the counterterrorism fight.

“Many Pakistani leaders remain focused on India as Pakistan’s principal threat, and some may even continue to regard Islamist extremist groups as a potential strategic asset,” Gen. Petraeus said.

The Pentagon officials said they think their new strategy is the best way to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Gen. Petraeus said the Afghan Taliban are “growing in strength” and expanding their influence over portions of the country. Militants in Pakistan pose a serious risk to that country’s survival, he added.

“The Pakistani state faces a rising — indeed, an existential — threat,” he said. “In Afghanistan, the situation is deteriorating.”

In a reminder of the Taliban’s resurgence, militants from the group assaulted a government office in the southern city of Kandahar, killing at least 13 people.

The attack began when a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at the gates to a provincial council building, clearing the way for a trio of heavily armed militants in Afghan army uniforms to storm the compound. The four militants also died in the assault.

A senior Pentagon official said in an interview that commanders in Afghanistan want to deploy the 10,000 additional forces to southern Afghanistan, a Taliban stronghold that is also one of the largest drug-producing regions in the world. The extra forces would provide an additional brigade of combat troops as well as a new American division headquarters in southern Afghanistan, the official said.

—Peter Spiegel contributed to this article.

Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com

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Tribute to Peter DeMott, an antiwar activist

April 2, 2009

Socialist Worker, March 31, 2009

Peter DeMottPeter DeMott

ON TUESDAY, March 17, antiwar and social justice activists in Ithaca, N.Y., gathered to watch the documentary film The Trial of the St. Patrick’s Four.

The film was screened to mark the sixth anniversary of an action of civil disobedience by four Ithaca Catholic Workers at an army recruiting center days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The gathering also served as a mournful tribute to one of the four activists who participated in the action, Peter DeMott, who died February 19 in a tragic accident.

To a room packed with 200 people, the documentary illustrated the nonviolent yet courageous ways that Peter DeMott confronted the U.S. war machine for over two decades. Peter’s commitment to opposing U.S. imperialism since his days in the Vietnam war has served as a source of inspiration to current Iraq Veterans Against the War members, as well as to community activists.

What you can do

To send condolences or donations to the DeMott-Grady family please contact: Ithaca Catholic Worker, 133 Sheffield Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850.

Peter’s relentless commitment and personal sacrifice left the audience committed to building the antiwar movement. Through the documentary, one gets a glimpse of the inspiring and conscientious person that he was, and how his political firmness led him to oppose not only one war in Iraq, but the whole for-profit system that is behind it.

Peter DeMott will be remembered as a gentle husband, father, brother, uncle, friend and a firm civil objector. His brave example will live on to inspire present and future antiwar activists.
Héctor Tarrido-Picart and Nevin Sabet, Ithaca, N.Y.

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Beware Those Treacherous Afpakis

April 2, 2009

By Eric Margolis | Lew Rockwell, April 1, 2009

President Barack Obama has now taken full ownership of the Afghanistan War. Gone are Washington’s pretenses that a western “coalition” was waging this conflict. Gone, too, is the comic book term, “war on terrorism,” replaced by the Orwellian sobriquet, “overseas contingency operations.”

Obama’s announcement last week of deeper US involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan – now officially known in Washington as “Afpak” – was accompanied by a preliminary media bombardment of Pakistan for failing to be sufficiently responsive in advancing US strategic plans.

The New York Times in a front-page story last week that was clearly orchestrated by the Obama administration charged that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), has been secretly aiding Taliban and its allies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In 2003, the NY Times severely damaged its once stellar reputation by serving as a primary conduit for fake war propaganda put out by the Bush administration over Iraq. The Times has been beating the war drums for more US military operations against Pakistan.

Even so, these latest angry charges being hurled by Washington at Pakistan’s spy agency ring true. Having covered ISI for almost 25 years, and been briefed by many of its director generals, I would be very surprised if ISI was not quietly working with Taliban and other Afghan resistance movements.

Protecting Pakistan’s interests, not those of the United States, is ISI’s main job.

According to Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Washington threatened war against Pakistan after 9/11 if it did not fully cooperate in the US invasion of Afghanistan. Pakistan’s bases and ports were and remain essential for the US occupation of Afghanistan.

Pakistan was forced at gunpoint to accept US demands though most of its people supported Taliban as nationalist, anti-Communist freedom fighters and opposed the US invasion. Taliban, mostly composed of Pashtun tribesmen, had been nurtured and armed by Pakistan.

Many of Pakistan’s generals and senior ISI officers are Pashtun, who make up 15–18% of that nation’s population and form its second largest ethnic group after Punjabis. ISI routinely used Taliban and militant Kashmiri groups Lashkar-i-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

Pakistan was enraged to see its traditional Afghan foes, the Communist-dominated Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks, put into power by the Americans. The Northern Alliance was strongly backed by India, Iran, Russia, and the Central Asian post-Communist states.

Pakistan has always considered Afghanistan it “strategic hinterland” and natural sphere of influence. The 30-million strong Pashtun people straddle the artificial Pak-Afghan border, known as the Durand Line, drawn by Imperial Britain as part of its divide and rule strategy.

Pakistan supports the Afghan Pashtun, who have been excluded from power in US-occupied Afghanistan. But Pakistan also fears secessionist tendencies among its own Pashtun. The specter of an independent Pashtun state – “Pashtunistan” – uniting the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan has long been one of Islamabad’s worst nightmares.

Pakistanis are outraged by US bombing attacks against their own rebellious Pashtun tribes in the frontier agencies. Most also strongly oppose Washington’s “renting” 130,000 Pakistani troops and aircraft to attack pro-Taliban Pashtun tribesmen. A majority believe the increasingly unpopular and isolated government of President Asif Zardari serves the interests of the US rather than Pakistan.

Pakistan is bankrupt and now lives on American handouts.

Its last two governments have been forced to do Washington’s bidding though most Pakistanis are opposed to such policies.

The US has ignored intensifying efforts by India, Iran, and Russia to expand their influence in Afghanistan. India, in particular, is arming and supplying Afghan foes of Pakistan.

Washington sees Pakistan only as a way of advancing its own interests in Afghanistan, not as a loyal old ally. Obedience, not cooperation, is being demanded of Islamabad.

President Barack Obama announced that more US troops and civilian officials will go to Afghanistan, and more billions will be spent sustaining a war against the largely Pashtun national resistance in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

None of this will benefit Pakistan. In fact America’s deepening involvement in “Afpak” brings the threat of growing instability and violence, even the de facto breakup of Pakistan as the US tried to splinter fragile Pakistan just as it did Iraq.

It is ISI’s job to deal with these dangers, to keep in close touch with Pashtun on both sides of the border, and to counteract the machinations of other foreign powers in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal belt.

Many Pakistanis also know that one day the US and its allies will quit Afghanistan, leaving a bloody mess behind them. Pakistan’s ISI will have to pick up the pieces and deal with the ensuing chaos. Pakistan’s strategic and political interests are quite different from those of Washington. But few in Washington seem to care in the least.

ISI is not playing a double game, as Washington charges, but simply assuring Pakistan’s strategic and political interests in the region. The Obama administration is making an historic mistake by treating Pakistan with imperial arrogance and ignoring the concerns and desires of its people. We seem to have learned nothing from the Iranian revolution.

Eric Margolis [send him mail], contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada. He is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.

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No to War, No to NATO

April 2, 2009

by Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation, March 31, 2009

With President Obama announcing his new strategy for US/NATO escalation in Afghanistan, the April 3-4 NATO Summit in Baden-Baden and Kehl, Germany, and in Strasbourg, France, takes on added urgency — as will the demonstrations by thousands of protestors from over 20 European countries and the US.

Member states will attempt to use the summit as an occasion to celebrate the alliance’s 60th anniversary, France’s return to NATO, and perhaps offer a new “Strategic Concept” as an interventionist force around the world. Activists will articulate an alternative vision focused on securing global peace and confronting domestic challenges at home, including a call for the dissolution of NATO.

Beginning April 1, a diverse coalition of activists will participate in training camps, demonstrations, conferences, workshops, and non-violent blockades. At a moment when international cooperation on economic and human security interests is needed more than ever, the protestors view a US-led, expansionist NATO as destabilizing and dangerous. What was originally designed as a defense alliance against the Warsaw Pact has taken on a very different post-Cold War, global interventionist role.

Activists see a NATO with bases on every continent; a military force that organizers say accounts for more than 75 percent of global military expenditures and drains resources that might otherwise address needs like education, job creation, and poverty; “out of area” operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, the Mediterranean Sea, and a training mission in Iraq; a destabilizing presence pushing a “missile defense” system, ignoring international law, expanding to Russia’s doorstep, and maintaining a first-strike option — all fueling a renewed arms race. (Recently, popular opposition to the proposed Czech-based radar system for US missile defense was a key factor in bringing down the ruling government there. Peace activist Jan Tamas led a hunger strike that galvanized opposition and he will be speaking at the “counter summit” in Strasbourg.)

Elsa Rassbach, a US citizen and filmmaker who has lived much of the time in Berlin since the mid-1990s, is a member of the International Coordinating Committee that is planning many of the activities of this broad coalition. She said that the need to respond to the occasion of NATO’s 60th anniversary has brought “a lot of different strands” together to collaborate since last June. “For example,” she said, “in the German peace movement — not only the large peace organizations and some Members of the German Parliament, but also smaller groups concerned about military bases used to conduct US/NATO wars, people concerned about atomic weapons…the social movements — the fact that militarization is costing too much. German youth and people concerned with soldier resistance and conscientious objector issues…. We’re bringing disparate movements and organizations together — both large and small — for the NATO action.”

Participants will include national and international groups representing the peace, human rights and anti-globalization movements, as well as students and youth groups. Also represented are trade unions, parliamentary Left and Green parties, and Attac. In all, 600 organizations from 33 countries — including Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan, Georgia, Brazil, Guinea, the Philippines and Turkey — have endorsed the campaign’s “No to War, No to NATO” appeal.

US participants include United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), Code Pink, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Iraq Veterans against the War (IVAW), Peace Action, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and others.

Perhaps no issue will be more prominent at the Summit and the protests than the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan. EU and NATO troops and resources are key to President Obama’s new plan for escalation, and most Europeans are strongly opposed to the war (though many favor humanitarian aid, reconstruction projects, etc.) In Germany, for example, surveys suggest opposition as high as 70 percent.

Andreas Speck, member of the International Coordination Committee, and also the War Resisters’ International which is participating in non-violent, civil disobedience, said: “This Summit is really important to NATO for taking its next step in becoming a global intervention force — obviously, NATO’s operation in Afghanistan will be an important topic. We want to show that Afghanistan is no better than Iraq — it’s a war that is not justified and we are completely opposed to this military operation.”

Rassbach agreed. “We want Americans to understand that the reason this opposition to NATO is emerging is that NATO — originally supposed to be a defensive alliance — is being converted into a very aggressive force to intervene around the world, and Afghanistan is a prime example,” she said. “Afghanistan is a key test for the ‘out of area’ intervention concept.”

The current schedule calls for: a camp near Strasbourg April 1-5; a conference on NATO and Human Rights on April 1; a hearing on the War in Afghanistan in Karlsruhe, Germany on April 2; a congress/counter summit of leading intellectuals, activists, and representatives of European political parties in Strasbourg on April 3 and April 5; actions in Baden-Baden on April 3 in conjunction with German Chancellor Merkel’s dinner for the heads of state; and also on the morning of April 4 in Strasbourg when a photo-op is scheduled at the pedestrian bridge Passerelle des deux Rives, and the NATO Summit begins in the Palais De La Musique Et Des Congres; the climactic international demonstration in Strasbourg on the afternoon of April 4.

The organizing challenges are enormous.

Just for the civil disobedience coalition — “Block NATO“, which is smaller than the broader coalition — Speck said there will be thousands of people coming in from Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Britain “and a few other countries.”

“It’s a big challenge for us in terms of communication — during the actions, the trainings, and the conference” he said. “Because we will need translation for a lot of these things.”

The coalition has also reached out to the French police to let them know they will be protesting non-violently. They will meet with them on the morning of April 1.

“We fear that the police will not act non-violently against us, so we want them to know that there’s no threat from our side,” Speck said. “The problem is we never know what the police will do and also if they will use agent provocateurs to create the images that they want.”

Perhaps even more pressing is the proposed route for the larger demonstration. The French authorities have relegated it to the outskirts far from the cordoned off Strasbourg city center where the Summit will be held. (The security within the city is extreme and controversial. The French court is currently hearing complaints from residents who are already being asked by police to take down peace flags hanging from their balconies, and who will be forced to wear badges during the summit to move about the city.) Under French law, there are no opportunities to appeal the demonstration route but organizers continue to press their case.

“Nobody’s demanding that we demonstrate very close to the Summit, just something reasonably close,” Speck said. “My fear is that if it’s very far out then people will not accept this…. And maybe that’s what [the authorities] want — a confrontation. Because then you have people upset, trying to make their way to the center of the city, and that will give the police the opportunity to provoke some violent confrontation. I hope that’s not going to happen, we don’t want this to happen.”

(Speck said people in the US can help by writing the French Embassy and speaking out against this infringement on the human right to freedom of expression and assembly.)

Of course, there will be no such negotiations regarding time and place for acts of civil disobedience. “The aim is… to effectively blockade the NATO summit venue basically with our bodies… And to obstruct the functioning of the summit by cutting off the leaders from the infrastructure that they need. There will be no material-blockades or actions which, for example, attack the police.”

Joanne Landy, co-director of the Campaign for Peace and Democracyin the US, said these events and the fervor surrounding them are something the US should be paying attention to. “NATO is very much part and parcel to how the US tries to marshal other countries to do some of the heavy-lifting for an imperial policy,” she said. “This imperial policy is catastrophic for us…. it completely distorts our resources, and it’s just fundamentally the wrong relationship to have with the rest of the world. I would like to have a world in which we could actually be in solidarity with labor movements and women’s movements and so forth. But right now whatever the US does is suspect and for good reason. So you really need a very different foreign policy all together in which the military wouldn’t play the role that it does now, and where the US could really support the needs of ordinary people everywhere.”

“American activists can see this anti-NATO protest as how Europe is protesting the Afghanistan War,” Rassbach said. “But it’s also more than that. It’s against all the military costs and the military bases in Europe and NATO’s nuclear first-strike policy that includes the proposed missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Cold War is over, so why should NATO continue?”

There is another important achievement here that the American peace movement is working towards as well.

“For many people it’s new to work in such a broad coalition,” Speck said. “Sometimes there is quite a bit of tension in the international committee. But on the other hand, everyone wants to work together, with our differences, to counter what NATO is doing, what the EU is doing, and all the militarization that we see going on…. That’s what our work in diverse movements is about, to deal with the differences. We want to create a much more diverse and democratic society so we need to learn to live with these kinds of differences.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation.

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Kenney can’t censor this interview: George Galloway speaks

March 31, 2009
By Am Johal | Rabble, March 31, 2009
One way or another, George Galloway will be heard in Canada — he is scheduled to speak in Toronto on Monday, Mar. 30 — despite the ban on him entering the country. On Sunday, a diverse range of groups supporting free speech will challenge his ban in a court hearing.

Even if this fails, Galloway’s speech will be broadcast live to audiences across the country; by his own estimation, the British Member of Parliament will be heard by “audiences probably a hundred times greater” than if Minister Jason Kenney had not upheld the decision to keep him out of Canada on “security grounds.” Am Johal caught up with Galloway, who is currently on a speaking tour in the United States.

Am Johal: The Harper government in Canada seems to have politicized the bureaucracy in making this highly irrational decision to ban you from Canada. It’s an unprecedented attack on free speech in Canada given you are an elected MP from Britain. What do you make of the Harper government’s motivation for doing this?

George Galloway: You know you can be more Catholic than the Pope, more discredited than George Bush but you can’t be more anti-terrorist than the U.S.A. Yet the Canadian government has managed it. I’m allowed into the United States to move freely and talk to massive audiences — swelled I’m sure by the Canadian ban — but I can’t get into your country. At least that’s the state of play now. Our court case challenging this ban is due to be heard on Sunday.

I’m a Scotsman and Canada and my country have such historical links that it’s a bit like being turned away from your own home. This is obviously a political move by an ultra-right wing government at the fag end of its term and I can only think that this is some attempt by Jason Kenney to stake out the far-right territory — so far-right they’re just a tiny angry blip in the distance for himself. What he has done is to boost the audiences for my speeches and I will be heard, either in person or by interactive video link. At the last count 20 cities wanted the feed.

The irony in this whole affair is that I have never been a supporter of Hamas. But they are the elected government of Palestine and no country can attempt to impose the kind of government they favour on another people in the way that my country, yours and the United States want to.

AJ: It is strange that you are allowed in to the U.S., but not in to Canada. This really undermines Canada’s reputation in the world as an enlightened nation. The Conservatives have proven that they are troglodytes. What message would you like to send to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney?

GG: There’s nothing I could say to either of them that wouldn’t be coruscating and deeply insulting. But I’d only do that face-to-face, so that must remain private. I rather suspect, though, that when I do meet up with them they will be much diminished politicians — is that possible? — and in opposition.

AJ: You have remarked in your recent speeches about the right-wing turn in Israeli politics, particularly the rise of Avigdor Lieberman who openly supports the ethnic transfer of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. What are the implications of this in the region and what role can the EU play in brokering a peace process, if any?

GG: I think that if Barack Obama cannot broker a deal between Palestine and Israel there’s no point in closing Guantanamo. Indeed he’ll have to open a hundred Guantanamos because the region will erupt.

The previous Israeli government launched the 22-day offensive on Gaza to win the election and still the Israeli people reject them for others who want even bloodier torment visited on the people. I’m deeply pessimistic. Only Obama can reign-in these blood-crazed politicians. The EU has not and never will have influence. America keeps Israel afloat financially and militarily. Winning the war for the mind of Obama is the principal task.

AJ: What do you make of Tony Blair in his role as a Mideast envoy for the Quartet?

GG: Not since Caligula made his horse pro-consul of Rome has there been such a ridiculous choice as Tony Blair, the war criminal, as Quartet envoy.

AJ: There are legal challenges moving forward and numerous campaigns to support your upcoming visit to Canada. If you are not allowed in, how do you intend to keep fighting the Harper government?

GG: I will be allowed in. If not now in the near future because I’ve visited Canada many times and I have faith in the eminent good sense of Canadian citizens. If not this time then I will broadcast by satellite link to audiences probably a hundred times greater than I would have down there. So I suppose I should be grateful to Kenney.

AJ: What do you think of Canada’s role in Afghanistan?

GG: The Canadian people with their magnificent shows of strength prevented Canada becoming embroiled in the Iraq catastrophe. I’m afraid that there is no winning in Afghanistan, not militarily certainly, many have tried and none succeeded. I’m afraid many wives, mothers and children will be grieving in the months to come. We have no right intervening in another country’s affairs and that will be my message in my speeches.

Am Johal is a Vancouver-based independent writer.

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The Absurdity of Spending US Tax Dollars on Israel

March 31, 2009

Paul J. Balles argues that if enough ordinary Americans “feel the pinch and connect the dots between their own financial losses and America’s continued unbridled support of Israel’s devastating war machine, Israel could be forced to make peace with the Palestinians”.

By PAUL J. BALLES | South Lebanon, March 31, 2009

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once quipped that a person is not conscious of his or her little toe until the shoe pinches. Likewise, one typically is not conscious of an event or situation that can have great impact on one’s life until it has a direct affect.

In an article I wrote in September 2007 on “Overcoming the apathy, fear and listlessness of Americans“, I pointed out that, “liberties and freedoms may be squeezed … but until ‘the shoe pinches’, the squeezing won’t hurt most people enough to get them to act”. In short, most people pay little, if any, attention to politics, social issues, environmental problems, economic concerns or military events until they hurt directly.

The things that are now painfully connected to the recent financial crisis in America include health care costs that people are unable to meet, home foreclosures, job losses, excessive credit debt and loss of pay.

Is it possible that an economic catastrophe in America might have a surprisingly positive effect? An article by Jane Stillwater entitled “Our dual-citizenship Congress” suggested an unforeseen result that could be very good for the whole world.

First, Jane’s article reveals that the shoe is pinching ordinary Americans. She writes:

I turned on the television last night and listened to the local news anchor tell me, “The State of California is currently facing bankruptcy.” I live in California.

This is not good news. Plus California’s jobs are drying up, homes are being foreclosed on, stores are going out of business, schools are laying off teachers, banks are eliminating branches. The eighth-largest economy in the world is about to tank. Boy could we use some financial help from the feds.

Then, after asking, “But will we get it?” she concludes, “Probably not.” While California and other states are not receiving bailouts like the banks that will help ordinary people, Jane concludes:

But Congress still continues to enthusiastically pour billions of our taxpayers’ dollars into the Israeli economy each year. What’s with that? Do our Congressional representatives hold dual citizenship with the United States and Israel or what? When are they going to stop voting pork for Israel and start voting bailout money for CA?

Are we Californians going to have to start firing Qassam rockets at Washington to get their attention or what?

After getting Jane’s permission, I sent her article to my Congressman and cc’d it to everyone I know in California. The next day, I received several comments that echoed Jane’s complaint. Why are we continuing to send US taxpayer money to support Israel’s slaughter of innocents in Gaza while we don’t have enough money to support our own economy?

My daughter wrote, “It infuriates me to think that they are spending our tax $$$ for Israel instead of our own country and state. Yes, we are feeling the pain of it too!”

Her husband, a fire captain in Southern California, has just lost 10 per cent of his pay due to the governor’s budget cuts.

How can this possibly have a positive outcome? The economic crisis in both state and federal budgets has already pinched many shoes. Americans are very upset at the damage done to their financial conditions.

If enough people feel the pinch and connect the dots between their own financial losses and America’s continued unbridled support of Israel’s devastating war machine, Israel could be forced to make peace with the Palestinians.

How could that happen? Israel would no longer be able to ignore the Arab peace initiative first proposed in 2002 that offers pan-Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from lands captured in 1967.

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

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Pentagon war spending hits $685.7 billion – GAO

March 31, 2009

Reuters, March 30, 2009

WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) – Pentagon spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to fight terrorism elsewhere has reached $685.7 billion since 2001, a U.S. government watchdog agency said on Monday.

The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, said the Iraq war accounted for $533.5 billion in Defense Department spending obligations through last December, while spending on operations in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and the Philippines totaled $124.1 billion.

The remaining $28.1 billion was for operations to defend the U.S. mainland, the GAO said in a letter to Congress dated March 30.

The spending total equals about 85 percent of the $808 billion that Congress has appropriated for military operations in the global war on terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the GAO said.

The $122.3 billion difference reflects multiyear contracts for procurement, military construction, research, development and other programs, the watchdog agency said.

GAO figures show the rise in Pentagon obligations slowing from 40 percent hikes between 2005 and 2007 to a 33 percent increase in 2008. Obligations for 2008 totaled $162.4 billion.

Congress has appropriated $65.9 billion for 2009 so far and the Obama administration is seeking another $75.5 billion, suggesting $141.4 billion in total appropriations for the year, down from 2008.

Pentagon spending in the first three months of fiscal year 2009 — from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, 2008 — equaled about $31 billion, of which $25 billion went to the war in Iraq and nearly $6 billion to operations in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and the Philippines.

The Army accounted for $21.5 billion of war on terrorism obligations during the same period, followed by the Air Force at $3.7 billion. (Reporting by David Morgan, editing by Patricia Zengerle)

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