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Can Congress Save Obama from Afghan Quagmire?

March 11, 2009

by Robert Naiman | CommonDreams.org, March 10, 2009

A progressive Presidency is a terrible thing to waste. It only comes around once every so often. Wouldn’t it be a shame if Americans’ hopes for the Obama Administration were squandered in Afghanistan?

Members of Congress who want the Obama Administration to succeed won’t do it any favors by keeping silent about the proposed military escalation in Afghanistan. The actions of the Obama Administration so far clearly indicate that they can move in response to pressure: both good pressure and bad pressure. If there is only bad pressure, it’s more than likely that policy will move in a bad direction. In announcing an increase in U.S. troops before his Afghanistan review was complete, Obama partially acceded to pressure from the military. If we don’t want the military to have carte blanche, there needs to be counterpressure.

Some Members of Congress are starting to speak up. Rep. Murtha recently said he’s uncomfortable with Obama’s decision to increase the number of troops in the country by 17,000 before a goal was clearly defined, AP reports. Sen. Nelson is calling for clear benchmarks to measure progress in Afghanistan, and said he may try to add benchmarks to the upcoming war supplemental bill this spring, CQ Today reports.

But these individual expressions of discomfort will likely not be enough to stop the slide towards greater and greater military escalation.

Eight Members of Congress (Walter Jones, Neil Abercrombie, Roscoe Bartlett, Steve Kagen, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Ed Whitfield, and Lynn Woolsey) have initiated a letter to President Obama urging him to reconsider his support for military escalation. The letter argues that military escalation may well be counterproductive towards the goal of creating a stable government that can control Afghanistan, noting that a recent Carnegie Endowment study concluded that “the only meaningful way to halt the insurgency’s momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban.” [You can find the letter – and ask your Representative to sign it – here.]

There is political space for challenging the logic of escalation.

Forty-two percent of Americans think troops in Afghanistan should be increased, up from 34 percent in January, CBS News reports, no doubt reflecting the largely uncritical press treatment that the proposal for military escalation has received. But the same CBS News/New York Times poll still found that more people thought that U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan should be decreased (24%) or kept the same (23%) – i.e. 47% thought troop levels should be decreased or stay the same, rather than increased.

If we want the US government to seriously pursue diplomacy, there must be serious counterpressure against sending more troops without end. If you want recycling, you have to discourage the establishment of new landfills. If you want economic development and human rights to be at the center of trade policy, you have to jam up corporate trade deals. If you want diplomacy, there has to be a significant political pushback to military escalation.

Robert Naiman is Senior Policy Analyst at Just Foreign Policy.

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US: Criticize Israel and lose your job

March 9, 2009

US academic freedom in peril

Paul J. Balles | Redress, March 8, 2009


Paul J. Balles considers how Zionists in positions of authority at academic institutions in the United States are persecuting and defaming anyone who dares to criticize Israel or even mention Palestinian rights.

About the worst thing one can do in America or Europe is to criticize Israel. “Freedom” even in academia doesn’t allow critical comments about Israel or Zionism. Those who risk it can lose their jobs and be labelled anti-Semitic bigots.

Joel Kovel was terminated from Bard College after 20 years of service because of “differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism”. The president of Bard, Leon Botstein, didn’t consider Kovel’s critiques of Zionism to be protected academic freedom.

The worst of the critic bashers is Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. He spearheaded a campaign against Norman Finkelstein’s tenure for writing Beyond Chutzpah, documenting in detail the falsifications in Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel.

After being denied tenure, Finkelstein said: “I met the standards of tenure DePaul required, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the political opposition to my speaking out on the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

In his 2008 book, The Case Against Israel’s Enemies, Dershowitz defamed many who have been critical of Israel, calling them bigots or labelling them anti-Semitic. Dershowitz has led the pack attacking Israel’s critics.

On former President Jimmy Carter, Dershowitz wrote: “Whatever the reason or reasons for Jimmy Carter’s recent descent into the gutter of bigotry, history will not judge him kindly.”

Attacking University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer and Harvard University Professor Stephen M. Walt, who together authored The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (2007), Dershowitz wrote: “They are hate-mongers who have given up on scholarly debate and the democratic process in order to become rock-star heroes of anti-Israel extremists.”

Writing about the British University and College Union (UCU) boycott of Israeli educators and academic institutions, Dershowitz explained how he and others “wrote an op-ed piece for the Times of London, in which we demonstrated parallels between this boycott and previous anti-Jewish boycotts that were undoubtedly motivated by anti-Semitism”.

On another front, Roosevelt University of Chicago at Illinois fired a philosophy and religion professor for allowing students in his class to ask questions about Judaism and Islam. The chair of the department, Susan Weininger, fired the professor, Douglas Giles, saying that students should not be allowed to ask whatever questions they want in class.

Weininger said that free discussion in world religions could “open up Judaism to criticism”. Any such material, she said, was not permissible to be mentioned in class discussion, textbooks or examinations. Further, she ordered Giles to forbid any and all discussion of the “Palestinian issue”, any mention of Palestinian rights, the Muslim belief in the holiness of Jerusalem, and Zionism. When Professor Giles refused to censor his students, Weininger fired him.

One of the worst types of Zionist harassment involves cases of Muslims generally and Palestinians in particular for speaking out on behalf of their favourite causes. The US government has often been complicit in these cases.

One such case involves Dr Sami Al-Aryan who taught computer engineering at the University of South Florida before his arrest in 2004. Al-Arian was charged with raising money and otherwise assisting Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group the US government declared a terrorist organization in 1995. At trial in 2005, he was acquitted on eight of 17 counts, and the jury deadlocked on the other counts.

All counts were trumped up by Zionist prosecutors who wanted to silence Al-Aryan. If anything could vaguely approach justice in this case, the Israelis who have been slaughtering Palestinians for half a century would have been labelled terrorists and brought to trial for committing much worse deeds than Al-Aryan.

The gravest injustice allows Zionists to silence honest critics for violating the Zionist taboo.

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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Obama administration backs immunity for author of Bush torture memos

March 9, 2009
By Patrick Martin | WSWS,  March 9,  2009

In legal arguments before a federal court in San Francisco Friday, the Obama administration stepped in to defend one of most notorious figures in the Bush administration, John Yoo, author of legal memoranda used to justify torture and indefinite detention without trial as part of the “war on terror.”

The intervention makes clear that the Obama administration opposes any serious effort to shed light on the attacks against democratic rights carried out by its predecessor or to hold any officials of the previous administration accountable for their actions. Moreover, its court interventions amount to a defense of the Bush administration’s assertions of quasi-dictatorial presidential powers.

Friday’s court hearing before US District Judge Jeffrey White concerned a civil suit brought by Jose Padilla, the US citizen who was imprisoned without charges for more than three years in a US Navy brig after Bush designated him an “enemy combatant.”

Padilla is now in federal prison, serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted on trumped-up conspiracy charges that had nothing to do with the sensationalized claims of the Bush administration that he was the leader of a plot to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in an American city.

He has filed suit against numerous Bush administration officials, charging that his detention at the Navy brig, during which he was held in isolation and tortured, violated his constitutional rights. Yoo is being sued as the author of the legal opinion that upheld the arbitrary presidential authority under which Padilla was being held.

The Bush administration vigorously defended Yoo and the legal opinions he issued and sought to have the case thrown out on the grounds that US government employees cannot be sued for actions taken in the course of their official duties.

Immunity from lawsuits over official acts is an accepted US legal principle, but there is a broad exception for known criminal acts and abuses of power. Under the precedent set by the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, “just following orders” is not an adequate legal defense, particularly for those who were in a position to give the orders or define how they were to be interpreted. Yoo’s position in 2001 as an attorney at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which produces the official legal rationale for executive actions, clearly fits that description.

Padilla is not seeking either release from his current imprisonment or significant monetary damages. His claim against Yoo, for instance, is for $1, but his suit seeks a declaration from the federal government that his three-year ordeal in the Navy brig was illegal. “Plaintiffs seek to vindicate their constitutional rights,” his lawyers argue, “and ensure that neither Mr. Padilla nor any other person is treated this way in the future.”

Justice Department lawyers told the court Friday that despite the changeover from Bush to Obama, there would be no change in the legal position of the government in this case. Their declarations came in response to written questions issued by Judge White the day before, asking whether the position taken by Yoo’s attorneys had been “fully vetted” by the new administration.

One government lawyer, Mary Mason, told Judge White that permitting the lawsuit against Yoo to go forward could make government employees unwilling to do their jobs. These employees might decide that “I’m not designating you an enemy combatant, and I’m not going to interrogate you, because I might get sued,” she argued.

Several memos drafted by Yoo in 2001 and 2002 were released by the Justice Department earlier this week as part of discovery in the lawsuit. The memos include extraordinary assertions of presidential authority to override the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the name of the “war on terror,” including suspension of the First and Fourth amendments and the use of the military against civilian targets within the United States. [See “US Justice Department memos: the specter of military dictatorship”]

Judge White, appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush, took Yoo’s assertion of quasi-dictatorial presidential authority far more seriously than the Justice Department lawyers who appeared before them. He called Yoo’s arguments in one 2001 memorandum “a pretty scary position,” and seemed reluctant to throw out Padilla’s suit, despite Mason’s argument that the torture memorandums had been largely withdrawn before the end of the Bush administration.

The following exchange gives the flavor of the arguments: “We’re not saying we condone torture,” Mason said. But whether a government lawyer could be sued for condoning torture “is for the executive to decide, in the first instance, and for Congress to decide,” not the courts.

Judge White asked, “You’re not saying that if high public officials commit clearly illegal acts, a citizen subject to those acts has no remedy in this court?” Mason responded by citing the position take by the Bush Justice Department last year that the courts should not interfere in wartime decision-making by the executive branch.

Heather Metcalf, an attorney for Padilla, noted that Yoo had served on the “war council” that set Bush administration policy for the treatment of prisoners, and that one of the specific purposes of his memorandums was to shield officials from future liability for their encroachments on constitutional rights. “Defendant Yoo,” she said, “must not take refuge in the legal no man’s land that he helped to create.”

After the court session, a Justice Department spokesman, Matt Miller, sought to downplay the political significance of the intervention. “This administration has made no secret that we disagree with many of the previous administration’s legal policies on national security issues,” he said. “Nevertheless, we generally defend employees or former employees of the department in litigation filed in connection with their official duties.”

Yoo himself is a completely unrepentant defender of both torture and unchecked executive authority. In an interview with the Orange County Register, he said that he doesn’t “think he would have made the basic decisions differently,” adding that he would have polished the arguments more if he had known the memorandums would be made public. “When you are in the government, you have very little time to make very important decisions,” he said. “You don’t have the luxury to research every single thing and that’s accelerated in war time.”

Apparently his legal “research” did not include the text of the Constitution, which clearly gives Congress decision-making power over “captures” in wartime, and entirely ignored the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

The position taken by the Obama administration in the Yoo lawsuit is consistent with its efforts in a whole series of court cases involving national security and democratic rights, where the Obama Justice Department has essentially adopted the Bush administration’s standpoint as its own. This includes assertion of the “state secrets” privilege to suppress lawsuits against illegal kidnappings by the CIA (“rendition”) and illegal surveillance by the National Security Agency.

Last week government lawyers opposed a request for US District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco to consider whether legislation passed last year by Congress goes too far in authorizing blanket legal immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperated in warrantless surveillance of US citizens. A spokesman for the Justice Department declared the 2008 legislation—for which Senator Barack Obama voted—is “the law of the land, and, as such, the Department of Justice defends it in court.”

So clear is the continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations in this area that the Wall Street Journal published an editorial Friday, headlined, “Obama Channels Cheney,” hailing the new administration’s stand on warrantless wiretapping. “The Obama Justice Department has adopted a legal stance identical to, if not more aggressive than, the Bush version,” the newspaper’s right-wing editorial board gloated.

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Hell Hath No Fury Like an Imperialist Scorned

March 7, 2009

By William Blum | Information Clearing House, March 5, 2009

Hugo Chávez’s greatest sin is that he has shown disrespect for the American Empire. Or as they would say in America’s inner cities — He’s dissed the Man. Such behavior of course cannot go unpunished lest it give other national leaders the wrong idea. Over the years, the United States has gotten along just fine with brutal dictators, mass murderers, torturers, and leaders who did nothing to relieve the poverty of their population — Augusto Pinochet, Pol Pot, the Greek Junta, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, Duvalier, Mobutu, the Brazil Junta, Somoza, Saddam Hussein, South African apartheid leaders, Portuguese fascists, etc., etc., terrible guys all, all seriously supported by Washington at one time or another; for none made it a regular habit, if ever, to diss the Man.

The latest evidence, we are told, that Hugo Chávez is a dictator and a threat to life as we know it is that he pushed for and got a constitutional amendment to remove term limits from the presidency. The American media and the opposition in Venezuela often make it sound as if Chávez is going to be guaranteed office for life, whereas he of course will have to be elected each time. Neither are we reminded that it’s not unusual for a nation to not have a term limit for its highest office. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, if not all of Europe and much of the rest of the world, do not have such a limit. The United States did not have a term limit on the office of the president during the nation’s first 162 years, until the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951. Were all American presidents prior to that time dictators?

In 2005, when Colombian President Alvaro Uribe succeeded in getting term limits lifted, the US mainstream media took scant notice. President Bush subsequently honored Uribe with the American Presidential Medal of Freedom. But in the period leading up to the February 15 referendum in Venezuela, the American media were competing with each other over who could paint Chávez and the Venezuelan constitutional process in the most critical and ominous terms. Typical was an op-ed in the Washington Post the day before the vote, which was headlined: “Closing in on Hugo Chávez”. Its opening sentence read: “The beginning of the end is setting in for Hugo Chávez.”12

For several years now, the campaign to malign Chávez has at times included issues of Israel and anti-Semitism. An isolated vandalism of a Caracas synagogue on January 30th of this year fed into this campaign. Synagogues are of course vandalized occasionally in the United States and many European countries, but no one ascribes this to a government policy driven by anti-semitism. With Chávez they do. In the American media, the lead up to the Venezuelan vote was never far removed from the alleged “Jewish” issue.

“Despite the government’s efforts to put the [synagogue] controversy to rest,” the New York Times wrote a few days before the referendum vote, “a sense of dread still lingers among Venezuela’s 12,000 to 14,000 Jews.”13

A day earlier, a Washington Post editorial was entitled: “Mr. Chávez vs. the Jews – With George W. Bush gone, Venezuela’s strongman has found new enemies.”14 Shortly before, a Post headline had informed us: “Jews in S. America Increasingly Uneasy – Government and Media Seen Fostering Anti-Semitism in Venezuela, Elsewhere”15

So commonplace has the Chávez-Jewish association become that a leading US progressive organization, Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) in Washington, DC, recently distributed an article that reads more like the handiwork of a conservative group than a progressive one. I was prompted to write to them as follows:

Dear People,

I’m very sorry to say that I found your Venezuelan commentary by Larry Birns and David Rosenblum Felson to be remarkably lacking. The authors seem unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between being against Israeli policies from anti-semitism. It’s kind of late in the day for them to not have comprehended the difference. They are forced to fall back on a State Department statement to make their case. Is that not enough said?

They condemn Chávez likening Israel’s occupation of Gaza to the Holocaust. But what if it’s an apt comparison? They don’t delve into this question at all.

They also condemn the use of the word “Zionism”, saying that “in 9 times out of 10 involving the use of this word in fact smacks of anti-Semitism.” Really? Can they give a precise explanation of how one distinguishes between an anti-Semitic use of the word and a non-anti-semitic use of it? That would be interesting.

The authors write that Venezuela’s “anti-Israeli initiative … revealingly transcends the intensity of almost every Arabic nation or normal adversary of Israel.” Really. Since when are the totally gutless, dictator Arab nations the standard bearer for progressives? The ideal we should emulate. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan are almost never seriously and harshly critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Therefore, Venezuela shouldn’t be?

The authors state: “In a Christmas Eve address to the nation, Chávez charged that, ‘Some minorities, descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ … took all the world’s wealth for themselves’. Here, Chávez was not talking so much about Robin Hood, but rather unquestionably dipping into the lore of anti-Semitism.” Well, here’s the full quote: “The world has enough for all, but it turns out that some minorities, descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ, descendants of the same ones who threw Bolivar out of here and also crucified him in their own way at Santa Marta there in Colombia …” Hmm, were the Jews so active in South America?

The ellipsis after the word “Christ” indicates that the authors consciously and purposely omitted the words that would have given the lie to their premise. Truly astonishing.

After Chávez won the term-limits referendum with about 55% of the vote, a State Department spokesperson stated: “For the most part this was a process that was fully consistent with democratic process.” Various individuals and websites on the left have responded to this as an encouraging sign that the Obama administration is embarking on a new Venezuelan policy. At the risk of sounding like a knee-reflex cynic, I think this attitude is at best premature, at worst rather naive. It’s easy for a State Department a level-or-so above the Bushies, i.e., semi-civilized, to make such a statement. A little more difficult would be accepting as normal and unthreatening Venezuela having good relations with countries like Cuba, Iran and Russia and not blocking Venezuela from the UN Security Council. Even more significant would be the United States ending its funding of groups in Venezuela determined to subvert and/or overthrow Chávez.

You’ve got to be carefully taught

I’ve been playing around with a new book for awhile. I don’t know if I’ll find the time to actually complete it, but if I do it’ll be called something like “Myths of U.S. foreign policy: How Americans keep getting fooled into support”. The leading myth of all, the one which entraps more Americans than any other, is the belief that the United States, in its foreign policy, means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are honorable, if not divinely inspired. Of that most Americans are certain. And as long as a person clings to that belief, it’s rather unlikely that s/he will become seriously doubtful and critical of the official stories.

It takes a lot of repetition while an American is growing up to inculcate this message into their young consciousness, and lots more repetition later on. Think of some of the lines from the song about racism from the Broadway classic show, “South Pacific” — “You’ve got to be taught” …

You’ve got to be taught
from year to year.
It’s got to be drummed
in your dear little ear.
You’ve got to be taught
before it’s too late.
Before you are 6 or 7 or 8.
To hate all the people
your relatives hate.
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

The education of an American true-believer is ongoing, continuous. All forms of media, all the time. Here is Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military officer in the United States, writing in the Washington Post recently:

“We in the U.S. military are likewise held to a high standard. Like the early Romans, we are expected to do the right thing, and when we don’t, to make it right again. We have learned, after seven years of war, that trust is the coin of the realm — that building it takes time, losing it takes mere seconds, and maintaining it may be our most important and most difficult objective. That’s why images of prisoner maltreatment at Abu Ghraib still serve as recruiting tools for al-Qaeda. And it’s why each civilian casualty for which we are even remotely responsible sets back our efforts to gain the confidence of the Afghan people months, if not years. It doesn’t matter how hard we try to avoid hurting the innocent, and we do try very hard. It doesn’t matter how proportional the force we deploy, how precisely we strike. It doesn’t even matter if the enemy hides behind civilians. What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it. In the end, all that matters is that, despite our best efforts, sometimes we take the very lives we are trying to protect. … Lose the people’s trust, and we lose the war. … I see this sort of trust being fostered by our troops all over the world. They are building schools, roads, wells, hospitals and power stations. They work every day to build the sort of infrastructure that enables local governments to stand on their own. But mostly, even when they are going after the enemy, they are building friendships. They are building trust. And they are doing it in superb fashion.”16

How many young servicemembers have heard such a talk from Mullen or other officers? How many of them have not been impressed, even choked up? How many Americans reading or hearing such stirring words have not had a lifetime of reinforcement reinforced once again? How many could even imagine that Admiral Mullen is spouting a bunch of crap? The great majority of Americans will swallow it. When Mullen declares: “What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it”, he’s implying that there was no way to avoid it. But of course it could have been easily avoided by not dropping bombs on the Afghan people.

You tell the true-believers that the truth is virtually the exact opposite of what Mullen has said and they look at you like you just got off the Number 36 bus from Mars. Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights in a row. His military and political policies destroyed one of the most progressive countries in Europe. And he called it “humanitarian intervention”. It’s still regarded by almost all Americans, including many, if not most, “progressives”, as just that.

Now why is that? Are all these people just ignorant? I think a better answer is that they have certain preconceptions; consciously or unconsciously, they have certain basic beliefs about the United States and its foreign policy, most prominent amongst which is the belief that the US means well. And if you don’t deal with this basic belief you’ll be talking to a stone wall.

Notes

· Washington Post, February 14, 2009, column by Edward Schumacher-Matos

· New York Times, February 13, 2009

· Washington Post, February 12, 2009

· Washington Post, February 8, 2009

· Washington Post, February 15, 2009, p. B7

William Blum is the author of:

  • Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
  • Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
  • West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
  • Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

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CIA Confirms a Dozen Destroyed Interrogation Tapes Depicted Torture

March 7, 2009

By Jason Leopold | The Public Record, March 6, 2009

Heavily redacted government documents filed in a New York federal court Friday afternoon state the CIA destroyed 12 videotapes that specifically showed two detainees being tortured by interrogators, the first time the agency has disclosed the exact number of .

The documents were filed in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking documentary evidence on the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees. In December 2007, the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt for destroying the videotapes, alleging the agency violated a court order requiring the immediate production or identify all records requested by the ACLU related to detainee treatment. That motion is still pending.

The videotaped interrogations, which were also withheld from the 9/11 Commission, were destroyed in November 2005 after The Washington Post published a story exposing the CIA’s use of so-called “black site” prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects with techniques that were not legal on U.S. soil.

On Monday, the Justice Department revealed for the first time in court documents the CIA destroyed 92 videotapes – far more than previously known – to prevent disclosure of evidence revealing how the agency’s interrogators subjected “war on terror” detainees to waterboarding and other brutal methods.

The tape destruction has been the subject of a year-long criminal investigation by John Durham, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who was appointed special prosecutor last year by Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

According to Friday’s court documents, 90 tapes relate to one detainee and two tapes relate to another detainee. The detainees are said to be al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 and flown to a secret CIA prison site in Thailand where he was tortured in what has been called the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program. The other so-called “high-value” detainee whose interrogation was videotaped was identified as al-Nashiri. It is believed that all of the videotaped interrogations took place at secret CIA detention center in Thailand. (Please see this investigative report on how a newly published Justice Department legal memo authorizing extraordinary renditions was drafted exactly two weeks before Zubaydah’s capture).

In a letter filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin said a complete list of summaries, transcripts or memoranda related to the videotapes would be filed with the court by March 20. The CIA requested an extra two weeks, Dassin said, “because it is still searching and identifying the records at issue.”

However, “to date, the CIA is not aware of any transcripts of the destroyed videotapes,” Dassin wrote. An unredacted version of the inventory of the destroyed videotapes will only be made available for the ACLU to view behind closed doors in court.  “This inventory identifies the tapes and includes any descriptions that were written on the spine of the tapes.”

Dassin said much of the information the ACLU is seeking remains classified and still cannot be released publicly. Dassin said an unredacted version of the inventory of videotapes the CIA destroyed can be viewed “in camera” by the judge presiding over the case. Additionally, the identities of individuals who viewed the videotapes also remains classified.

Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU, said Friday the “government is needlessly withholding information about these tapes from the public, despite the fact that the CIA’s use of torture – including waterboarding – is no secret.”

“This new information only underscores the need for full and immediate disclosure of the CIA’s illegal interrogation methods,” Singh said. “The time has come for the CIA to be held accountable for flouting the rule of law.”

Dassin added that the CIA turned over to the ACLU additional unredacted pages of a highly-classified CIA inspector general’s report from 2004 that concluded the techniques used on the prisoners “appeared to constitute cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, as defined by the International Convention Against Torture.”

In a little known Jan. 10, 2008 declaration in response to the ACLU’s contempt motion, the CIA provided some insight into the inspector general John Helgerson’s report and revealed that he viewed the torture tapes, which formed the basis for his still classified report on the CIA’s methods of interrogation.

“In January 2003, [Office of Inspector General] OIG initiated a special review of the CIA terrorist detention and interrogation program. This review was intended to evaluate CIA detention and interrogation activities, and was not initiated in response to an allegation of wrongdoing,” the declaration says. “During the course of the special review, OIG was notified of the existence of videotapes of the interrogations of detainees. OIG arranged with the NCS to review the videotapes at the overseas location where they were stored.

“OIG reviewed the videotapes at an overseas covert NCS facility in May 2003. After reviewing the videotapes, OIG did not take custody of the videotapes and they remained in the custody of NCS. Nor did OIG make or retain a copy of the videotapes for its files. At the conclusion of the special review in May 2004, OIG notified DOJ and other relevant oversight authorities of the review’s findings.”

Although the report remains classified, previously published news reports and books provided some insight into the report’s contents.

“In his report, Mr. Helgerson also raised concern about whether the use of the techniques could expose agency officers to legal liability,” according to a November 9, 2005, story in The New York Times published the same month the tapes were destroyed. “They said the report expressed skepticism about the Bush administration view that any ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment under the treaty does not apply to CIA interrogations because they take place overseas on people who are not citizens of the United States.”

“The officials who described the report said it discussed particular techniques used by the CIA against particular prisoners, including about three dozen terror suspects being held by the agency in secret locations around the world,” The New York Times reported.”They said it referred in particular to the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is said to have organized the Sept. 11 attacks and who has been detained in a secret location by the CIA since he was captured in March 2003. Mr. Mohammed is among those believed to have been subjected to waterboarding, in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and made to believe he is drowning.”

According to New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, it is also believed that the tapes were destroyed because Democratic members of Congress who were briefed about the tapes began asking questions about whether the interrogations were illegal.

“Further rattling the CIA was a request in May 2005 from Senator Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, to see over a hundred documents referred to in the earlier Inspector General’s report on detention inside the black prison sites,” Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side.” “Among the items Rockefeller specifically sought was a legal analysis of the CIA’s interrogation videotapes.

“Rockefeller wanted to know if the intelligence agency’s top lawyer believed that the waterboarding of [alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu] Zubayda and [alleged 9/11 mastermind] Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as captured on the secret videotapes, was entirely legal. The CIA refused to provide the requested documents to Rockefeller. But the Democratic senator’s mention of the videotapes undoubtedly sent a shiver through the Agency, as did a second request the made for these documents to [former CIA Director Porter] Goss in September 2005.”

According to Mayer, ex-Vice President Dick Cheney stopped Helgerson from fully completing his investigation. That proves, Mayer contends, that as early as 2004 “the Vice President’s office was fully aware that there were allegations of serious wrongdoing in The [interrogation] Program.”

“Helgerson was summoned repeatedly to meet privately with Vice President Cheney” before his investigation was “stopped in its tracks.” Mayer said that Cheney’s interaction with Helgerson was “highly unusual.”

Cheney has admitted in several interviews before he exited the White House that he personally “signed off” on waterboarding three terrorist detainees and approved the “enhanced interrogation” of 33 detainees.

In October 2007, former CIA Director Michael Hayden ordered an investigation into Helgerson’s office, focusing on internal complaints that the inspector general was on “a crusade against those who have participated in controversial detention programs.”

Dassin said the additional pages from the inspector general’s report that were turned over the ACLU identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed.

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U.S. Military Aid to Israel

March 6, 2009

By Kathleen and Bill Christison | Counterpunch, March 5, 2009

In these days of economic crisis, budget overruns, earmarks, and multi-billion dollar bailouts, when Americans are being forced to tighten their own belts, one of the most automatic earmarks—a bailout by any measure—goes to a foreign government but is little understood by most Americans.  U.S. military aid to Israel is doled out in annual increments of billions of dollars but remains virtually unchallenged while other fiscal outlays are drastically cut.

The United States and Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding in August 2007 committing the U.S. to give Israel $30 billion in military aid over the next decade.  This is grant aid, given in cash at the start of each fiscal year.  The only stipulation imposed on Israel’s use of this cash gift is that it spend 74 per cent to purchase U.S. military goods and services.

The first grant under this agreement was made in October 2008, for FY2009, in the amount of $2.55 billion.  To bring the total 10-year amount to $30 billion, amounts in future years will gradually increase until an annual level of $3.1 billion is reached in FY2013.  This will continue through FY2018.

Israel is by far the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.  Since 1949, the United States has provided Israel with $101 billion in total aid, of which $53 billion has been military aid.  For the last 20-plus years, Israel has received an average of $3 billion annually in grant aid;, until now the grant has been a mix of economic and military aid.

Israel receives its aid under vastly more favorable terms than any other recipient.  Egypt, for instance, receives $2 billion a year in economic aid, but this is a loan and must be repaid.  Saudi Arabia also has U.S. military equipment in its arsenal, but it buys and pays for this equipment and is not given it, as Israel is.

Aid to Israel can be said to benefit the United States because it is spent to purchase equipment manufactured here.  But this recycling of federal monies into the arms industry is not the wisest way to spur general economic recovery.  In fact, in the midst of a financial crisis, incurring a long-term obligation of this magnitude is highly irresponsible.

When Israel attacks Palestinians, as during the recent assault on Gaza, its instruments of destruction are U.S. fighter jets and attack helicopters, U.S. missiles, U.S.-made white phosphorus, U.S.-made Caterpillar bulldozers.  All of this American-made destruction is clearly identifiable to television audiences throughout the Arab and Muslim world, where viewers receive a steady diet of news showing Palestinian civilians being killed by weapons made in the USA.  It is from this vast population, which feels kinship with Palestinians and feels itself to be under assault from the United States, that terrorists such as Osama bin Laden are able to find recruits.

The U.S. Foreign Assistance Act stipulates that no aid may be provided to a country that engages in a consistent pattern of violations of international human rights laws.  Israel has been charged by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch with precisely such violations during the Gaza assault and in past attacks.  Israel also violates the Arms Export Control Act, which stipulates that U.S. weapons must be used only for “internal security.”

This arms package, furthermore, seriously undermines the mission of U.S. peace mediators such as former Senator George Mitchell, recently appointed by President Obama as envoy to the Middle East.  As long as Israel can rest assured that it is guaranteed an annual arms package in the billions, it will have no incentive whatsoever to heed Mitchell’s mediation efforts, to make the territorial concessions necessary to reach a peace agreement, to stop building settlements and other infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian territories, or to stop its attacks on Palestinians.

By committing itself to this arms package, the United States is undermining with one hand the very peace agreement it is trying to promote with the other hand.

These distortions of U.S. national interests must stop.

Kathleen and Bill Christison have been writing on Palestine and Israel for several years. Kathleen is the author of two books on the Palestinian situation and U.S. policy on the issue, while Bill has written numerous articles on U.S. foreign policies, mostly for CounterPunch. They have co-authored a book, forthcoming in June from Pluto Press, on the Israeli occupation and its impact on Palestinians, with over 50 of their photographs. Thirty years ago, they were analysts for the CIA. They are members of the Stop $30 Billion Coalition in Albuquerque, NM.  They can be reached at kb.christison@earthlink.net.

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George Bush could be next on the war crimes list

March 6, 2009

RINF.com,Thursday, March 5, 2009

THE HAGUE – George W. Bush could one day be the International Criminal Court’s next target.

David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University, said the principle of law used to issue an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir could extend to former US President Bush over claims officials from his Administration may have engaged in torture by using coercive interrogation techniques on terror suspects.

Crane is a former prosecutor of the Sierra Leone tribunal that indicted Liberian President Charles Taylor and put him on trial in The Hague.

Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Programme at Human Rights Watch, said the al-Bashir ruling was likely to fuel discussion about investigations of possible crimes by Bush Administration officials.

Congressional Democrats and other critics have charged that some of the harsh interrogation techniques amounted to torture, a contention that Bush and other officials rejected.

The prospect of the court ever trying Bush is considered extremely remote, however.

The US Government does not recognise the court and the only other way Bush could be investigated is if the Security Council were to order it, something unlikely to happen with Washington a veto-wielding permanent member.

– AP

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The Israel donors conference

March 5, 2009

Amira Haas | Haaretz, Israel, March 4, 2009

The extent of the funding pledged to the Palestinian Authority by donor countries reflects the extent of their support for Israel and its policies. The American taxpayers’ contribution to the Ramallah government’s bank account is dwarfed by the large sums the U.S. government donates to Israel every year. It’s impossible to get excited over the American pledge of $900 million (two-thirds of it for strengthening Salam Fayyad’s government and the rest for Gaza’s recovery) and forget the $30 billion the United States has promised Israel in defense aid by the end of 2017, as last week’s Amnesty International report noted.

The $900 million pledged to the Palestinians in Sharm el-Sheikh should be seen as part of the regular American aid to Israel. As an occupying power, Israel is obligated to assure the well-being of the population under its control. But Israel is harming it instead, after which the United States (like other countries) rushes to compensate for the damage.

The Clinton and Bush administrations – and Barack Obama appears to be following in their footsteps – erased the phrase “Israeli occupation” from their dictionaries and collaborated with Israel in ignoring its commitments as enshrined in international law. The billions of dollars that Israel receives from the United States for weapons and defense development – which played a significant role in the destruction in the Gaza Strip – are part of Israel’s successful propaganda, which presents the Rafah tunnels and Grad rockets as a strategic threat and part of the Islamic terror offensive against enlightened countries.

The West has blown the Hamas movement out of proportion, exaggerating its military might to the point of mendacity; this allowed for an extended siege and three weeks of Israeli military intractability. In the Palestinian and larger Arab world, this embellishment helps Hamas depict itself as the real patriotic force.

The hundreds of millions of euros that have been donated or pledged to help Gaza, as though it were beset by natural disasters, are overshadowing the trade ties between Europe and Israel. The Western countries concerned about humanitarian aid for the Palestinians also buy from Israel arms and defense knowledge developed under the laboratory conditions of the occupation, that serial creator of humanitarian crises.

And the 1 billion petrodollars? First of all, they were generated from a natural resource that logic dictates should benefit the Arab peoples. Second, they were pledged at a conference that boycotted Gaza (neither Hamas nor business people or social activists from the Strip participated in the donors conference). This is how Saudi Arabia lends its hand to the American and Israeli veto of inter-Palestinian reconciliation.

Every cent paid to the Palestinians – whether for the Ramallah government’s budget or medical treatment of children wounded by Israeli pilots or soldiers – lets Israel know that it can continue its efforts to force a capitulation deal on the Palestinian elite. Only by recognizing that surrender is the goal can one understand that 16 years after Oslo, no Palestinian state was established. When did Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon and Tzipi Livni begin talking about two states? Only after their bulldozers and military bureaucrats crushed the realistic physical basis of a Palestinian state. And this basis is: June 4, 1967 land (including East Jerusalem), Gaza – an inseparable part of the state – and zero settlements (and that applies to Gilo and Ma’aleh Adumim).

During the 1990s it was still possible to describe donations to the Palestinians as an expression of confidence and hope in Israel’s readiness to free itself of the occupation regime it had created. But not in 2009. Support for Israeli policy – this is the only way to understand the fact that other countries keep pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars meant to put out the fires set by this policy, without extinguishing the source of the blaze.

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If this becomes Obama’s war, it will poison his presidency

March 5, 2009

Pakistan is being ripped apart by the fallout from the Afghan occupation. If the US escalates, the impact will be devastating

The armed assault on Sri Lanka’s cricket team in Lahore has been a brutal demonstration, if any more were needed, that the war on terror is devouring itself and the states that have been sucked into its slipstream. Pakistan is both victim and protagonist of the conflict in Afghanistan, its western and northern fringes devastated by a US-driven counter-insurgency campaign, its heartlands wracked by growing violence and deepening poverty. The country now shows every sign of slipping out of the control of its dysfunctional civilian government – and even the military that has held it together for 60 years.

Presumably, that was part of the intended message of the group that carried out Tuesday’s terror spectacle. But the outrage also fits into a well-established pattern of attacks carried out in revenge for the army’s devastation of the tribal areas on the Afghan border, where thousands have been killed and up to half a million people forced to flee from the fighting with the Pakistani Taliban. Hostility to this onslaught has been inflamed by the recent revelation that US aerial drone attacks on supposed terrorist hideouts have in fact been launched from a base in Pakistan itself, with the secret connivance of president Asif Zardari, as well as across the border from occupied Afghanistan.

Attempts to paint Pakistan’s convulsions as a conflict between moderates and extremists obscure the reality that elements of the Pakistani state are operating on both sides, whatever their nominal allegiance. Now that Pakistan faces its own blowback from the Afghan war and the Taliban it helped create, its military intelligence is trying to redirect its wayward offspring back to fight what are supposed to be Pakistan’s own US and British allies in Afghanistan on the other side of the border. The Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s call on his Pakistani followers this week to stop attacks on the Pakistani army and join the battle to “liberate Afghanistan from occupation forces” reflects that pressure.

On the face of it, the situation could hardly be more bizarre. But it is only one byproduct of the systematically counterproductive nature of western policy across the wider region since 2001. After seven years of lawless invasion and occupation, the war on terror is everywhere in ruins. The limits of American military power have been laid bare in the killing fields of Iraq; Iran has been transformed into the pre-eminent regional power; Hezbollah and Hamas have become the most important forces in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories; a resurgent Taliban is leading an increasingly effective guerrilla war in Afghanistan; and far from crushing terror networks, the US and its allies have spread them to Pakistan.

Barack Obama’s rise to power is a product of that record of failure: without his opposition to the Iraq war he would not be president. And since his inauguration, he has signalled potentially important shifts in US foreign policy, while ditching the rhetoric of the war on terror. Obama’s moves to open a dialogue with Syria and Iran, his apparent willingness to trade missile defence in eastern Europe for Russian support on Iran’s nuclear programme and his statement about “how the war in Iraq will end” all suggest real movement.

But although the belligerent language has gone, what is striking is the continuity, rather than the breach, with the main elements of George Bush’s war on terror. Obama’s timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq mirrors last November’s status of forces agreement between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government, including in his stated “intention” to pull out all troops by the end of 2011. And, as after last year’s deal, that was quickly qualified by the continuity US defence secretary, Robert Gates, who said he would like to see a “modest” US military presence stay on thereafter – if the Iraqi government requested it, of course.

Mercifully, Obama’s announcement that the occupation of Iraq would continue for at least three more years was accompanied by none of the attempts to whitewash the war offered by Britain’s Lieutenant-General John Cooper, who told the Guardian that UK troops would leave Iraq this year “in a better position” – after hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and four million made refugees. But in the crucible of conflict in the Middle East, between Israel and the Palestinians, there is also little sign as yet of any substantive change in US policy: whether on lifting the continuing siege of Gaza or talking to the Palestinians’ elected representatives, let alone using US leverage to bring an end to illegal Israel colonisation of the West Bank or end its occupation.

However, it is in Afghanistan that the new US administration is on the point of compounding, rather than reversing, the failures of the war on terror. Obama has already committed himself to sending 17,000 more US troops, an increase of almost 50%, with the prospect of a similar number again later in the year. He did at least promise escalation in his election campaign, which is more than can be said for British ministers when they despatched thousands of extra troops to Helmand in 2006.

But there is not the remotest prospect that a “surge” of this scale – aimed at propping up a corrupt Afghan administration the US and its allies openly despise – can pacify the country or crush Taliban-led Pashtun resistance – though it will surely boost the civilian death toll, running at more than 2,000 last year. It’s also not what Afghans or Americans want, according to opinion polls, and it will certainly increase the destabilisation of an already precarious Pakistan, which will be the sanctuary for even more Taliban fighters as they are harried by American occupation forces.

The grip of conservative Islamism on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is the legacy not just of George Bush, of course, but decades of US meddling in the region, and its sponsorship of the anti-Soviet mujahideen in the 1980s in particular. What Obama has inherited from Bush’s war on terror is an arc of US and western-backed occupation from Palestine to Pakistan. If the administ-ration’s current review of “Afpak” policy were to lead to the negotiations with the Taliban Obama has hinted at and a wind-down of the occupation, that would cut the ground from under Pakistan’s own insurgency. But if Afghanistan becomes Obama’s war, it risks poisoning his presidency – just as Vietnam did for Lyndon Johnson more than 40 years ago.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

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Bush’s executive tyranny

March 4, 2009
We need a citizens commission to investigate how far the Bush White House wanted to take executive power after 9/11.

Tim Rutten | Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2009

Just how close to the brink of executive tyranny did the United States come in the panic that swept George W. Bush’s administration after 9/11? The answer, it now seems clear, is that we came far closer than even staunch critics of the White House believed.

On Monday, the Obama administration released nine legal opinions produced for the Bush White House by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That heretofore obscure office essentially serves as the president’s arbiter of what’s legal and what isn’t. Among other things, the memorandums issued by the office in 2001 asserted that Bush had the power to order the military to capture suspected terrorists on U.S. soil and to treat them as enemy combatants without any rights to due process.

In the course of such operations, according to the Office of Legal Counsel, the military was free to ignore 4th Amendment prohibitions on illegal search and seizure and to engage in warrantless wiretapping. 1st Amendment protections of free speech also could be suspended at the chief executive’s directive, according to these opinions, and the president has the power to abrogate any international treaty at will.

Other opinions asserted that the president, acting under his inherent powers as commander in chief, is free to ignore laws passed by Congress and cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, particularly on the treatment of “detainees.”

An opinion sent to the White House on Oct. 23, 2001, flatly stated that 1st Amendment “speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully. … The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.” Less than a year later, this same office advised Bush that he was free to authorize the torture of suspected terrorists.

These opinions were largely the work of John Yoo — the UC Berkeley legal scholar who currently is a visiting professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange County — and a relatively small cadre of like-minded conservative lawyers. Many were passionate advocates of a marginal constitutional theory called “unitary executive,” which holds that — when it comes to matters of national security — the president is free to exercise virtually unfettered powers as an inherent aspect of his constitutional duty to act as commander in chief.

Suffice it to say that the arguments and precedents marshaled on behalf of this notion about the balance of powers give new weight to the adjective “attenuated.” In fact, what comes most readily to mind is the style of Talmudic argument called pilpul, in which texts and precedents are tortured out of context to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.

That, however, never bothered then-Vice President Dick Cheney and his ally, then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who brought to the Bush administration an abiding conviction that, since the Ford administration in which they both had served, U.S. presidents had suffered a disastrous erosion of executive power. Though neither man is a lawyer, both had become enthusiastic proponents of the unitary executive theory during their years out of power.

What Cheney and Rumsfeld understood better than most was that a few well-placed zealots with hands on critical levers — such as those in the Office of Legal Counsel — can send even the federal government spinning in new directions.

They came perilously close to doing that in the frantic and fearful months after 9/11, though the record must reflect that their first and firmest opponents were other conservative lawyers who found what was being proposed horrifying. Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel after Yoo was gone and who repudiated many of the office’s earlier opinions, was one of those. So too was then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, nobody’s idea of a civil libertarian.

Understanding how all this occurred, as well as how the CIA came to destroy 92 videotapes of the torture and incarceration it carried out under the authority of the Yoo memos, is vital. The problem is that ordinary congressional hearings would inevitably be attacked as partisan. And we don’t need a witch-hunt or a series of prosecutions of CIA officers who were following orders they’d been told were based on legal opinions from the Department of Justice.

That’s why Congress should take up the suggestion of Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and establish a bipartisan citizens commission to investigate and report on exactly what occurred. We need to understand just how close fear and over- weening ambition took us to executive tyranny.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

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