Pakistani army flattening villages as it battles Taliban

May 5, 2009

By Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers, ay 4, 2009

CHINGLAI, Pakistan — The Pakistani army’s assault against Islamic militants in Buner, in northwest Pakistan, is flattening villages, killing civilians and sending thousands of farmers and villagers fleeing from their homes, residents escaping the fighting said Monday.

“We didn’t see any Taliban; they are up in the mountains, yet the army flattens our villages,” Zaroon Mohammad, 45, told McClatchy as he walked with about a dozen scrawny cattle and the male members of his family in the relative safety of Chinglai village in southern Buner. “Our house has been badly damaged. These cows are now our total possessions.”

Mohammad’s and other residents’ accounts of the fighting contradict those from the Pakistani military and suggest that the government of President Asif Ali Zardari is rapidly losing the support of those it had set out to protect.

The heavy-handed tactics are ringing alarm bells in Washington, where the Obama administration is struggling to devise a strategy to halt the militants’ advances. Officials Monday talked about the need to train the Pakistani military, which has long been fixated on fighting armored battles with India, in counterinsurgency warfare, but it may be too late for that.

Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Monday that the Pakistani army in recent years has undertaken “bursts of fighting and engagement” fighting insurgents, but that its operations were “not sustained” by follow-up measures.

The army is now using force, but it also must hold and rebuild the area it conquers, he said. “There’s a military piece” to the operation, he said, “but there also needs to be a hold and build aspect of it.”

Another U.S. official, who closely tracks Pakistan developments, said the Pakistan army is “just destroying stuff. They have zero ability to deliver (aid) services.”

“They hold villages completely accountable for the actions of a few, and that kind of operation produces a lot of (internally displaced persons) and a lot of angst,” said a senior defense official. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

In Buner, the Pakistani military appears to be losing public support in a stridently anti-Taliban district whose residents had raised their own militia to defend themselves against the militants, who last month seized control of the district about 60 miles from Islamabad, the capital.

Mohammad, who’d walked for two days with his cattle to escape the offensive against the Taliban, and other farmers accused the military of using poorly directed artillery and air power to pound civilian areas.

“They shouldn’t use the army in this (indiscriminate) way. They should be targeted at the Taliban,” said Saed Afsar Khan, who was leaving Buner with 18 members of his family and two cows. He estimated that the army had destroyed 80 of the 400 houses in his village of Kawga, near the key battlefield of Ambela.

“I don’t think they’ve killed even one Taliban,” he said. “Only ordinary people.”

As the fighting raged in Buner, a bigger battle appears likely to erupt in neighboring Swat. Late Monday, fierce gun battles broke out between the army and Taliban in the streets of Mingora, the district’s main town, and a controversial three-month-old peace deal between the government and the Taliban in Swat is disintegrating.

The Taliban were reported to have surrounded 46 police officers at the local electrical grid station. Earlier in the day, they ambushed a military convoy in Swat, killing one soldier and wounding two others.

The Pakistani army waited some 25 days after the Taliban stormed into Buner from Swat before launching their response, which television pictures show involves tanks and helicopter gunships.

“Why did they not nip the evil in the bud? This is criminal negligence,” said Sahibzada, a college teacher, who goes by one name, in Palodand village, just south of Buner, where he helps organize relief to those fleeing from the fighting.

“They have caused huge financial losses for those who’ve been forced to flee and caused hatred among those people for their government.”

Locals said that a key grievance was an order given by the government commissioner for the Malakand area, which includes Buner, to disband the anti-Taliban militia soon after the insurgents entered Buner.

The delay in moving the armed forces against the extremists in Buner may have allowed them to entrench themselves and mass sufficient weapons and men to put up stiff resistance. The Taliban have managed to take hostage some 2,000 villagers in the Pir Baba area in the north of Buner, the army confirmed Monday.

The Pakistan army wouldn’t confirm civilian casualties or damage to civilian villages.

“There are no reports I have of any civilian casualties,” said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the army’s chief spokesman. “Or any collateral damage. We have made maximum efforts to avoid it.”

One reason why civilian casualties are likely is that government officials gave no instructions to ordinary people about how to leave the district, and many were confused about the timing of the curfew, those fleeing said. A cause of further frustration was that little or no preparation was made to accommodate those who’d inevitably be displaced by the fighting.

In southern Buner, in the Khudokhel area, on the road out to the nearest town of Swabi, there was no sign of any government-sponsored relief effort. Residents of villages along the road turned out instead, offering food and drink to weary travelers, and help with transportation onward. Those with spare rooms or buildings offered them to the displaced. Villagers in Chinglai, about an hour’s drive into Buner from Swabi, are housing 20 families.

There are no reliable figures so far for how many people have fled Buner. Evacuees describe the district, which had a population of some 500,000, as having practically been emptied.

According to the al Khidmat Foundation, an Islamic charity, more than 150,000 people have taken the road south to Swabi alone. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the refugee arm of the United Nations, has registered around 18,000 people, but counting is tricky because almost none of the displaced have gone into the camps that are being set up for them outside Buner.

(Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent. Jonathan S. Landay and Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Commentary, Pakistan, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Britain Tries to Block CIA Rendition Case

May 5, 2009
by William Fisher | Antiwar.com,  May 05, 2009

British High Court judges are expected to rule this week on whether a document by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency can be publicly disclosed, thus opening the courthouse door to a lawsuit charging that the British government was complicit in facilitating the rendition of a British resident by the CIA, which tortured and secretly imprisoned him at Guantánamo Bay.

Lawyers acting for David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, last week made a last-ditch attempt to block the release of the CIA information, which reportedly shows what British authorities knew about the mistreatment of British resident Binyam Mohamed.

The information is a seven-paragraph summary of CIA documents, described earlier by Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones as containing nothing which could “possibly be described as ‘highly sensitive classified U.S. intelligence.’”

In a ruling earlier this year, the High Court judges said: “Indeed we did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials … relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be.”

However, David Mackie, a senior government lawyer, told the two judges that Miliband had been told by Obama administration officials that the disclosure of the seven paragraphs “could likely result in serious damage to UK and U.S. national security.”

The claim was made despite Obama’s recent decision to release detailed information about CIA interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.

Lawyers for Mohamed say Obama’s action means it is highly unlikely that the president would object to the disclosure of the CIA summary.

This latest move in the long-running case in the High Court comes as a federal appeals court in the U.S. gave the legal green light to a case brought there by five men including Mohamed and another British resident, Bisher al-Rawi, who say they were tortured under the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program.

The five former Guantánamo Bay detainees are suing Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan for allegedly providing flights to secret prisons overseas, where the abuse is said to have happened.

In what may become a landmark decision, a federal appeals court recently ruled that the “state secrets privilege” – routinely used by the government to block lawsuits against its officials – can only be used to contest specific evidence, but not to dismiss an entire suit.

The ruling, which was hailed by human rights advocates, came in connection with a lawsuit against a company known as Jeppesen DataPlan for its role in the government’s “extraordinary rendition” program during the administration of former President George W. Bush.

“This is a tremendous step forward,” said Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of the Britain-based legal charity Reprieve, referring to the decision in the U.S. case.

“Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi [another plaintiff] and perhaps many others are one step closer to making the CEOs of these companies stop and think before they commit criminal acts for profit,” he told IPS.

Reprieve’s renditions investigator Clara Gutteridge said: “It is inconceivable that Jeppesen acted alone. People in the highest echelons of the U.S. – and in some cases the UK– governments have authorized illegal rendition flights and must also be held accountable.”

The U.S. suit charges that Jeppesen knowingly participated in the rendition program by providing critical flight planning and logistical support services to aircraft and crews used by the CIA to forcibly “disappear” the five men to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas where they were interrogated under torture. Jeppesen is a subsidiary of aerospace giant Boeing. The lawsuit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

During the Bush administration, the government intervened when the case first came before a lower court in 2007, successfully asserting the “state secrets” privilege to have the case thrown out in February 2008. On appeal, the administration of President Barack Obama followed the same road as its predecessor. The appeals court has now reversed that decision.

But lawyers for the men who brought the case also sounded a note of caution. “This historic decision marks the beginning, not the end, of this litigation,” Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, told IPS. Wizner argued the case for the plaintiffs.

The U.S. appeals court ruling means that the government can assert the “state secrets” privilege for specific pieces of evidence, but not to end a case before it begins.

That means that the privilege is primarily an evidentiary privilege, a definition civil libertarians have long sought. The State Secrets Protection Act, now pending in Congress, would turn that definition into law.

The Obama administration now has three options. It can do nothing, which will mean the case will finally go before a U.S. court. It can ask the entire Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the case. Or it can appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

If the case goes to trial, the government can still argue that disclosing anything about Jeppesen’s relationship with the United States government would jeopardize national security secrets. But now it can no longer simply “assert” that privilege; it will have to convince a judge by arguing the point in court.

(Inter Press Service)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Commentary, crime, Human rights, Muslims, USA | Leave a Comment »

Obama’s new wars

May 4, 2009

Rev. Richard Skaff | Global Research, May 2, 2009

It is essential to know history in order to understand the present. Nevertheless, knowing history has never precluded man from repeating it.

Historically, Every American president had his war. However, in the 60’s a change of policy or doctrine occurred during the Kennedy administration. The change was geared toward the deterrence of wars of national liberations, which in turn led to the McNamara revolution and to the creation of new mobile forces that will stealthily move smoothly and swiftly across the planet in the next 50 years establishing an invisible empire.

The following excerpts will clarify some of this history and will edify the reasons behind the conflicts we embarked on in the last 50 years.

Brief history:

Throughout the cold war era, American defense analysts believed implicitly in the proposition that military superiority was defined in terms of firepower, mobility, and other technological factors. Military doctrine is not formulated on the basis of abstract principles or unchanging laws. The armed forces of a nation are nothing more nor less than an instrument of national policy-an instrument that is, of those with the power to make that policy. In the United States, the making of foreign policy has been, for all practical purposes, the exclusive prerogative of the business elite that has dominated the Executive departments since the late nineteenth century. [5].

Of course, one cannot say that this elite constitutes a monolithic bloc with a unified policy orientation. Differences of outlook, competing short-and long-term interests, and conflicting power foci have always existed. But in the most general sense, the business community dominates the American foreign policy apparatus has shared a common interest in the continued growth of capitalism, the Open Door in world trade, and the expansion of our “invisible empire.” [6].

For over a century, the employment of U.S. forces abroad has been governed by the principle of business expansionism; again and again.  American troops have been sent to the Third World to guarantee our access to key markets and sources of raw materials, and to protect American properties from expropriation.

This pattern of military intervention is graphically documented in a chronology of the “instances of use of U.S. Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945,” prepared at the request of the late Senator Everett Dirksen and published in the Congressional record. Of the nearly 160 occasions on which American forces were employed abroad between 1798-1945, an overwhelming majority involved occupation of a Third World country.

Between 1900 and 1925, for instance, U.S. troops were dispatched overseas “to protect American interests” or “ to restore order” during “periods of revolutionary activities” in China (seven times), Colombia (three times), Cuba (Three times), The Dominican Republic (four times), Guatemala (twice), Haiti (twice), Honduras (seven times), Korea (twice), Mexico (three times), Morocco, Nicaragua (twice), Panama (six times), the Philippines, Syria and Turkey (twice). Of the longer interventions, American soldiers occupied Haiti from 1925 to 1934 “to maintain order during a period of chronic and threatened insurrection,” and Cuba from 1917 to 1933 “to protect American interests during an insurrection and subsequent unsettled conditions.” [1].

Following World War II, American military strategy was reshaped by the nation’s cold war leadership to accord the principal foreign policy goals of the era: The stabilization of Western European capitalism and the prevention of further Soviet advances in Europe and Asia .

The officers who assumed leadership of the military apparatus at this time had all risen to prominence during World War, and they naturally turned to their wartime experience for guidance in the formulation of combat doctrine. The strategies they adopted and the weapons they acquired were appropriate to what they perceived as the greatest threat to American national interests-a Third World War in Europe precipitated by an invasion by the Soviet Red Army.

By the late 1950’s, it had become apparent to some American strategists that the maintenance of nuclear supremacy secured at the expense of other military programs-had left us vulnerable to attacks by armed revolutionaries. The stability of our invisible empire in the Third World was shaken by the unexpected rebel successes at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, in Cuba in 1959, and in Algeria in 1962. These events, coming at a time when trade and investment in the Third World were becoming increasingly critical to metropolitan economy, forced a complete reevaluation of American military strategy.

If our invisible empire were to be preserved and American expansion in the Third World facilitated, it would be necessary to develop new strategies and techniques for defeat of guerilla armies in underdeveloped areas. U.S. troops would once again be sent abroad to “protect American interests” and to “restore order” during periods of chronic and threatened insurrection. Therefore, the American business elite will have us fight so persistently to suppress revolutions because they view this struggle as the only way to maintain their power and privilege. The rewards at stake are far too great. Only through revolution can the people of the Third World begin the process of development and acquire some measure of self-dignity; only through counterrevolution can the American business elite preserve its wealth and power. For the United States, the only possible outcome of this global conflict is participation in a long series of “limited” conflicts, police actions, and “stability operation”-the war without end.

US interest in limited war strategy first emerged in response to the Korean War which was largely fought with World War II weapons despite an overwhelming American superiority in nuclear armaments. The opponents of the Massive retaliation called the “strategic revisionist” who rejected the Eisenhower-Dulles thesis felt that the U.S. would spend itself into bankruptcy if it prepared to fight local aggression locally at places and with weapons of the enemy’s choosing. General Maxwell D. Taylor a former army chief of staff was one of these revisionists who proposed the strategy of “flexible response” capability that would enable the U.S. to respond to each crisis with precisely the degree of force required to assure success.

Taylor had the backing of academic strategist associated with the Council on Foreign Relations, Center for International Affairs of Harvard University, and the Center for international studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These views were given further elaboration in the following year when panel II of the special studies Project of the Rockefeller brothers fund delivered its report on “international security: the “Military Aspect.” Prepared under the direction of Henry A. Kissinger (ten years before he was to become President’s Nixon key foreign-policy adviser).

President Kennedy, on the other hand was deeply impressed by these arguments, and in 1961 the advocates of Flexible Response were invited to participate in the new administration. Thus, under Kennedy the policy of Flexible Response became established Pentagon doctrine. Sharing the president’s concern with the threat of revolutionary warfare was the new secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, who later on implements the doctrine and reorganizes the pentagon (described as the McNamara revolution) and endowed himself with the same of kind of management aids that were available to him as president of Ford.  Shortly, after, the blueprint for counterrevolution was created. The blueprint entailed the ability to rapid military deployment, the electronic battlefield, the Mercenary apparatus (developing secret local armies/mercenaries by the CIA), and social systems engineering (project Camelot) designed to determine the feasibility of developing a general social systems model which would make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing nations of the world. [1].

Today’s wars:

As we see the 60’s have set the stage for the future wars or otherwise called low intensity conflicts, or counterrevolution interventions.

  1. This strategy works very well militarily and politically. Presidents began to wage low intensity wars that they can easily win in order to increase their popularity, rally the public behind them, generate jobs in the Military Industrial Complex, and create a frenzy of flag wavers. People love to win wars and to wave flags; besides, the military helps the populace act out vicariously their rage and their anger toward a common enemy instead of focusing on their own empty lives, ineptness, and alienation, and give them instead a pseudo-sense of mightiness and godliness when their military win a conflict regardless how insignificant the opposition might be (i.e. Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Haiti, Afghanistan, etc…).

As a result, we maintain the illusion of a healthy economy that is based on debt, we deify war and warriors, foster vengeance, and create public fervor and zest for power and domination.

Here we are again today, another administration, rhetoric and newspeak and a prospective new war.  However, the same money masters who groomed, recruited, and put Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. in office also put Obama in this same office to do their bidding.

Interestingly, Mr. Obama has endorsed the Patriot Act, the spying on Americans, the terrorist watch list, and the expansion of big brother into new heights. He has also continued the bail outs and rescue of the corrupt and insolvent fractional reserve banking system, since many of these super banks have contributed to his campaign generous amounts of money that went unnoticed by the corrupt global medial outlets. The Obama campaign received by August 2008 huge sums of money, per example, JP Morgan Chase contributed to Obama’s campaign $398,021, Citibank $393,899,  UBS Swiss bank, $378,400, Goldman Sachs $627,730, [4], and the corporate list that Obama vowed not to take money from goes on and on.

Meanwhile, Obama predictably reneged on the rest of his campaign promises. Iraq became the forgotten war, or the new conflict due to the new escalation by alleged insurgents. Obama has kept the troops in Iraq and plans to shuffle and shuttle some of them to Afghanistan in order to start his new central Asian war. At the same time, the bloodshed continues in Babylon (in April 2009, 18 American soldiers died) and the dismantling of every aspect of this country persists.

However, economically speaking, Iraq was part of our economic and Wall Street Ponzi scheme. It was a blessing in disguise for the Bush administration, because it kept the economy tagging along and the unemployment levels under control due to the high contracting and government jobs that were engendered by the Iraq war, while over a million Iraqis have died. “War makes money.”

On April 9, 2009 Reuters reported that President Barack Obama asked the U.S. Congress for an additional $83.4 billion to fund the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan saying the security situation along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier was urgent. [7].

Ironically, the New York Times reported on May 1, 2009 that administration officials have stated that the American confidence in the Pakistani government has waned,  and the Obama administration is reaching out more directly than before to Nawaz Sharif, the chief rival of Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president. What is more odious is that American officials have long held Mr. Sharif at arm’s length because of his close ties to Islamists in Pakistan, but some Obama administration officials now say those ties could be useful in helping Mr. Zardari’s government to confront the stiffening challenge by Taliban insurgents. [6]. In other words, the Obama administration is flirting with the Islamists in Pakistan to support the current president, whom they will eventually assassinate in order to take over the throne of corruption. As a result, the U.S. will have created once again a new monster to slay, an ogre with nuclear weapons in which they have provided and supported with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.

Subsequently, Obama will also continue his predecessor’s policies in the region, and in Afghanistan, to protect the oil pipelines, and to resume the encircling of Russia and China under the guise of wanting to destroy the mythical Al Qaeda and its leader the late OBL (who was declared dead by Benazir Bhutto on her interview with David Frost before she was assassinated).

On the local front Obama will be battling the new swine flu, which combines genetic material from pigs, birds and humans in a way researchers have not seen before. However, the medical establishment apparently has already in place a pre-existing blood test that could detect this new and unusual stain of hybrid flu.

Fear must continue to be drummed up into the public’s psyche intermittently to maintain its effectiveness, either with created ogres that are lurking among us, or by a disease that threatens our existence and render us into primitive automatons seeking shelter and gratification in the arms of a father figure embodied in a corrupt elitist government.

What is it going to take for Mexicans to privatize their oil? A new plague?

The remaining question is whether Mr. Obama can remain popular throughout his term without engaging the military in a low intensity conflict?

Unfortunately, in his perch on the morning of 03-27-09 he elucidated his policy against the mythical and contrived war on terror, therefore, continuing the policy of the previous administration and of the money masters. Obama like every other president, chose expediency over truth and justice. He is after all another front man, namely a politician.

References:

1. M. T. Klare, (1972). War without end. American planning for the next Vietnam .  Random House Inc. New York .

  1. 2. Michael C. Conley, “The Military Value of Social Sciences in an Insurgent  Environment,” Army Research and Development Newsmagazine (November 1996).    P. 22.

3. Prolific magazine. August 8, 2008. Meet Obama’s Corporate Backers

4. See Kolko, The roots of American Foreign Policy, Chapter 2, pp.27-47

5. Magdoff, The age of Imperialism. pp. 20-1

6. New York Times (May 1, 2009). In Pakistan , U.S. Courts Leader of Opposition.

7. Reuters (April 9, 2009). Obama asks Congress for extra $83.4 bln for military

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Commentary, imperialism, USA, warmongers | Leave a Comment »

Don’t Be Fooled by the Taliban Hysteria in Pakistan: They Aren’t Going to Take Over

May 4, 2009

Pepe Escobar | Asia Times, May 1, 2009

Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media – from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.

But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won’t fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.

Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan’s 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There’s no evidence they are about to embrace

Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi’ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis – faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari’s centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People’s Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces – amounting to 85% of Pakistan’s population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class – are an infinitesimal minority.

The Pakistan-based Taliban – subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles – are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.

To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition.

Moreover, there’s no evidence the Taliban, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, have any capability to hit a target outside of “Af-Pak”(Afghanistan and Pakistan). That’s mythical al-Qaeda’s privileged territory. As for the nuclear hysteria of the Taliban being able to crack the Pakistani army codes for the country’s nuclear arsenal (most of the Taliban, by the way, are semi-literate), even Obama, at his 100-day news conference, stressed the nuclear arsenal was safe.

Of course, there’s a smatter of junior Pashtun army officers who sympathize with the Taliban – as well as significant sections of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But the military institution itself is backed by none other than the American army – with which it has been closely intertwined since the 1970s. Zardari would be a fool to unleash a mass killing of Pakistani Pashtuns; on the contrary, Pashtuns can be very useful for Islamabad’s own designs.

Zardari’s government this week had to send in troops and the air force to deal with the Buner problem, in the Malakand district of NWFP, which shares a border with Kunar province in Afghanistan and thus is relatively close to US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. They are fighting less than 500 members of the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP). But for the Pakistani army, the possibility of the area joining Talibanistan is a great asset – because this skyrockets Pakistani control of Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ever in accordance to the eternal “strategic depth” doctrine prevailing in Islamabad.

Bring me the head of Baitullah Mehsud
So if Islamabad is not burning tomorrow, why the hysteria? There are several reasons. To start with, what Washington – now under Obama’s “Af-Pak” strategy – simply cannot stomach is real democracy and a true civilian government in Islamabad; these would be much more than a threat to “US interests” than the Taliban, whom the Bill Clinton administration was happily wining and dining in the late 1990s.

What Washington may certainly relish is yet another military coup – and sources tell Asia Times Online that former dictator General Pervez Musharraf (Busharraf as he was derisively referred to) is active behind the hysteria scene.

It’s crucial to remember that every military coup in Pakistan has been conducted by the army chief of staff. So the man of the hour – and the next few hours, days and months – is discreet General Ashfaq Kiani, Benazir’s former army secretary. He is very cozy with US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen, and definitely not a Taliban-hugger.

Moreover, there are canyons of the Pakistani military/security bureaucracy who would love nothing better than to extract even more US dollars from Washington to fight the Pashtun neo-Taliban that they are simultaneously arming to fight the Americans and NATO. It works. Washington is now under a counter-insurgency craze, with the Pentagon eager to teach such tactics to every Pakistani officer in sight.

What is never mentioned by US corporate media is the tremendous social problems Pakistan has to deal with because of the mess in the tribal areas. Islamabad believes that between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and NWFP, at least 1 million people are now displaced (not to mention badly in need of food aid). FATA’s population is around 3.5 million – overwhelmingly poor Pashtun peasants. And obviously war in FATA translates into insecurity and paranoia in the fabled capital of NWFP, Peshawar.

The myth of Talibanistan anyway is just a diversion, a cog in the slow-moving regional big wheel – which in itself is part of the new great game in Eurasia.

During a first stage – let’s call it the branding of evil – Washington think-tanks and corporate media hammered non-stop on the “threat of al-Qaeda” to Pakistan and the US. FATA was branded as terrorist central – the most dangerous place in the world where “the terrorists” and an army of suicide bombers were trained and unleashed into Afghanistan to kill the “liberators” of US/NATO.

In the second stage, the new Obama administration accelerated the Predator “hell from above” drone war over Pashtun peasants. Now comes the stage where the soon over 100,000-strong US/NATO troops are depicted as the true liberators of the poor in Af-Pak (and not the “evil” Taliban) – an essential ploy in the new narrative to legitimize Obama’s Af-Pak surge.

For all pieces to fall into place, a new uber-bogeyman is needed. And he is TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud, who, curiously, had never been hit by even a fake US drone until, in early March, he made official his allegiance to historic Taliban leader Mullah Omar, “The Shadow” himself, who is said to live undisturbed somewhere around Quetta, in Pakistani Balochistan.

Now there’s a US$5 million price on Baitullah’s head. The Predators have duly hit the Mehsud family’s South Waziristan bases. But – curioser and curioser – not once but twice, the ISI forwarded a detailed dossier of Baitullah’s location directly to its cousin, the Central Intelligence Agency. But there was no drone hit.

And maybe there won’t be – especially now that a bewildered Zardari government is starting to consider that the previous uber-bogeyman, a certain Osama bin Laden, is no more than a ghost. Drones can incinerate any single Pashtun wedding in sight. But international bogeymen of mystery – Osama, Baitullah, Mullah Omar – star players in the new OCO (overseas contingency operations), formerly GWOT (“global war on terror”), of course deserve star treatment.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Pakistan, Uncategorized, USA | Leave a Comment »

Israeli Military Exercise Over Gibraltar Raises Specter of Iran Strike

May 4, 2009
Report of 3,800 km Drills Undermine FM’s Denial of Attack Plans
by Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com, May 03, 2009

French-language news magazine L’Express reports that the Israeli Air Force recently held air refueling drills between Israel and the small British held territory of Gibraltar, a 3,800 km flight which is leading some to speculate the the nation is making “concrete preparations” for a potential attack against rival Iran.

The report comes just days after Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Austria’s Kleine Zeitung that Israel would not attack Iran, even if the US-led sanctions against the nation failed to get them to abandon their civilian nuclear program.

Speculation about a potential Israeli attack against Iran has been fueled for years by repeated threats by Israeli officials to do exactly that. The revelation of the preparatory drills, coupled with comments by Israel’s incoming Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, are resurrecting concern about the attack despite Lieberman’s attempt to quell concern, inconveniently enough as the controversial Israeli FM heads to Europe.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Iran, Uncategorized, warmongers, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »

Iraq rules out extension of U.S. withdrawal dates

May 4, 2009

Reuters, May 3, 2009

Photo
1 of 1Full Size

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq will not extend withdrawal deadlines for U.S. troops set out in a bilateral accord, ending months of speculation about whether U.S. combat troops would stay beyond June in bases in the restive northern city of Mosul.

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Iraq was committed to adhering to the withdrawal schedule in the pact, which took effect on January 1, including the requirement to withdraw U.S. combat troops from towns and cities by the end of June and a full withdrawal by the end of 2011.

“These dates cannot be extended and this is consistent with the transfer and handover of responsibility to Iraqi security forces,” Dabbagh said in a statement.

Violence has dropped sharply in Iraq, but suicide bombs and other attacks continue to rock the northern city of Mosul, seen as a final stronghold for Sunni Islamist al Qaeda and other insurgent groups.

The ongoing violence in the city, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, had prompted speculation that Iraq might grant a waiver for U.S. combat troops to stay in urban bases in Mosul.

Last month, five U.S. soldiers were killed in a suicide attack in Mosul, the single most deadly attack on American forces in more than a year.

Major-General David Perkins, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said last week that Mosul might be the one place where U.S. combat troops might stay on beyond June if requested to do so by the Iraqi government.

“It is quite honestly … the one area where you are most likely to possibly see a decision for U.S. forces to remain there, probably more so than any other place, just based on the activity there (and) the capability of Iraqi security forces,” Perkins said.

Even after June, U.S. forces can conduct combat and other operations within cities if authorized by the Iraqi government. A major U.S. base on the outskirts of Mosul, for example, will not be affected.

“There will still be joint patrols in the city — the difference is that now we will ‘drive’ to work so to speak since we won’t be living in the city any longer,” Colonel Gary Volesky, a senior U.S. official in Mosul, said last week.

(Additional reporting by Tim Cocks)

Tags: , , ,
Posted in imperialism, Iraq, USA, War Criminals | Leave a Comment »

Problem of Guantánamo detainees returns to haunt Barack Obama

May 4, 2009

The Times, UK, May 4, 2009

U.S. President Barack Obama wipes his face

Tim Reid in Washington

President Obama is on the verge of breaking two key campaign promises in his troubled attempt to shut Guantánamo Bay — with plans to revive the military tribunal system set up by George Bush and to continue the indefinite detention of up to 100 inmates.

The moves, which have not yet been signed off by Mr Obama but look increasingly likely, are a result of his promise on his second day in office to shut the Guantánamo Bay prison within a year.

Since then, officials charged with working out how to shut down the prison concede that up to 100 of the 241 detainees remaining are either too dangerous to release or cannot be tried in a military or civilian court. The evidence against many of them is tainted because they were tortured, or involves sensitive issues of national security that cannot be revealed.

The latest Administration thinking has been decried by human rights groups who point out that as a presidential candidate, Mr Obama called the military tribunal system an enormous failure and condemned the indefinite detention of detainees as a gross breach of the US Constitution.

In addition to his pledge to shut Guantánamo, Mr Obama ordered a 120-day suspension of the military tribunal system, pending a review. Officials say that they now want a three-month extension, and have indicated that the hearings are likely to be restarted, with some modifications.

On the campaign trail, Mr Obama criticised the military tribunals because they drastically reduced the rights of defendants, with hearsay evidence permitted and even testimony produced under the harsh interrogation techniques the new Administration says amounted to torture.

Now Mr Obama’s lawyers are worried that they will struggle to try many detainees in federal court because a civilian judge could throw out much of the evidence, allowing allegedly dangerous men to walk free. Plans being worked on are to modify the tribunal system to increase the rights of defendants, but without giving them the full protections provided by the American legal system.

At a recent House hearing, Eric Holder, Mr Obama’s Attorney General, said that military tribunals could still be used but “would be different from those previously in place”.

Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, who was asked last week if the Administration would abandon the Guantánamo tribunal system, said: “Not at all.” He added: “The commissions are still very much on the table.”

Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said: “To revive a fatally flawed system that was designed to evade due process and the rule of law would be a grave error and a huge step backward.” Just as dismaying for such groups is the admission by Mr Gates to Congress last week that up to 100 detainees will probably have to be detained without trial, possibly in facilities on the US mainland.

Mr Gates said that 50 to 100 inmates “who we cannot release and cannot try” could end up being held without trial, probably on US soil. When asked about Mr Obama’s pledge to shut Guantánamo by January, Mr Gates said: “I think that question is still open.” Mr Gates did not specify whether such detentions would be temporary or indefinite, but acknowledged that congressmen and senators in all 50 states would oppose taking such detainees into their regions.

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, said: “President Obama’s decision to close Guantánamo will be betrayed if we simply replace it with another detention centre on US soil that disregards the law.”

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Commentary, Human rights, imperialism, Uncategorized, USA | Leave a Comment »

Wallerstein: Cuba and the United States: The Slow Thaw

May 2, 2009
Immanuel Wallerstein, Commentary No. 256, May 1, 2009

After nearly 50 years of unremitting hostility to Cuba’s revolutionary government, the United States has taken its first steps towards a thaw in relations. The Cuban government has responded cautiously and skeptically, but has kept the door open to this possibility.

Some commentators have attributed this new situation to a change in leadership in both countries. The real explanation lies much more in the changed geopolitical situation – in the world-system as a whole and in Latin America in particular.

The Cuban revolutionaries came to power in January 1959. Relations with the United States deteriorated badly within a year. In March of 1960, President Eisenhower ordered the preparation of an invasion by Cuban exiles to overthrow the Cuban government. Shortly after John F. Kennedy became president, he approved a revised version of the Eisenhower plan in March of 1961. One month later, the plan was implemented. It is known as the Bay of Pigs (Playa de Girón) invasion. It lasted a very few days and was a military fiasco for the U.S.-supported invaders.

In January of 1962, the United States proposed at the meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) that Cuba be suspended from membership. The United States proposal was supported by 14 of 21 members, the bare two-thirds needed to pass it. Cuba voted no and six Latin American countries abstained. The principal ground for the suspension was the fact that Cuba had announced its adherence to Marxism-Leninism, which was deemed incompatible with membership. The United States in addition launched a total embargo on trade relations with Cuba and sought to get acquiescence in this boycott from its NATO allies in western Europe and from Latin American states.

October of 1962 marked the very dramatic Cuban missile crisis. The Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles in Cuban sites. The United States demanded they be withdrawn. The world feared it was on the brink of a nuclear war. In the end, the Soviet Union withdrew the missiles, presumably against a secret pledge by the United States that they would not support a further invasion of Cuba. The Cuban government indicated its disagreement with the Soviet Union’s decision, but maintained its good relations with that government.

As is evident, the main element in U.S. hostility to the Cuban government was Cold War considerations. From that point on, the U.S. government placed constant pressure on its NATO allies and Latin American states to cut all links with Cuba, which one by one most of them did.

At the same time, there were an increasing number of Cuban exiles in the United States. These exiles were determined to overthrow the Cuban government, and organized politically to ensure very strong support for this idea by the U.S. Congress and government. Over the first thirty years, this effort was increasingly successful.

Against this hostility, the Cuban government sought alliances not only with countries in the so-called socialist bloc but with revolutionary governments and movements in the so-called Third World. It “exported” to Third World countries its human capital in the form of well-trained physicians and schoolteachers. It offered crucial military assistance to the government of independent Angola, when it was fighting against invaders from the apartheid government of South Africa. Cuban troops helped defeat the South Africans at the crucial battle of Cuito Carnavale in 1988.

The entire situation changed in the 1990s in three crucial ways. The first new element was the collapse of the Soviet Union. This meant that Cold War considerations had now become irrelevant. It meant also that Cuba suffered great economic hardship in the 1990s because of the ending of Soviet/Russian economic assistance, and had to adjust its internal program.

The second new element, especially evident under the presidency of George W. Bush, was the acute decline of U.S. geopolitical power. This unleashed a serious reversal of Latin American politics, with the coming to power, in one country after another, of left-of-center governments. One by one, these countries all began to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba and to call for both the ending of the U.S. boycott and Cuba’s reintegration into the OAS.

The third element was a marked transformation of the U.S. political scene. For the first time, there began to be serious talk about the “failure” of U.S. policy towards Cuba. There was pressure from farm interests to gain the right to sell their products in Cuba. This gained support from many Republican senators, including notably Richard Lugar, the senior Republican on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Even more important perhaps was the fact that, after fifty years, the Cuban exile community had evolved in its political views. Large numbers of younger Cuban-Americans began to argue for the right to travel to Cuba, to send money there, and to have free and open exchange.

When Barack Obama became president, he was thus under some pressure to launch a “thaw” in Cuban-American relations. He did this by various initial gestures, undoing the restrictions on family remittances and travel imposed by his predecessor. How far Obama is ready to go to improve relations is as yet unknown. But whereas a mere ten years ago, the internal U.S. political pressure was overwhelmingly in favor of the economic boycott, the public and the politicians are now divided. And given the evolution of Latin American opinion and the growing size of the Latino population in the United States, it is likely that U.S. public opinion will evolve further in the coming year or two.

Cuba’s reaction has been prudent. Fidel Castro explained it well on April 5. He said that Obama’s gestures and statements were destined primarily to a U.S. public and expressed the view of a U.S. president. He then said two things: “Undoubtedly he is much better than Bush and McCain” (something many left critics of Obama are unwilling to admit) but Obama is constrained by the realities: “The empire is much stronger than he and his good intentions are.”

So, Cuba is tentatively exploring how far the United States is ready to go. There are “low-level” diplomatic discussions currently going on. The Obama government is under internal pressures towards a “thaw.” The Castro government is under Latin American pressures in favor of a “thaw.” If geopolitical realities continue to evolve in the direction they have been heading in the last few years, it is not impossible that Cuba and the United States can achieve “normal” diplomatic relations. No doubt, both would continue to have different perspectives on the world, and pursue somewhat different objectives, but that is true of most bilateral relations. A situation in which the relations between Cuba and the United States were ones of dignity and mutual respect would be a great improvement over the relations of the past fifty years.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in imperialism, US policy | Leave a Comment »

Children as Unlamented Victims of Bush’s War Crimes

May 2, 2009

By Michael Haas | Information Clearing House, May 1, 2009

Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of the Bush administration. But those who support Bush’s pursuit of the “war on terror” have not been impressed by recriminations over torture. Worse than torture are the murders of at least 50 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, but again the hard-hearted are unimpressed when those whom they perceive as terrorists receive illegal extrajudicial capital punishment.

The case for abusing children, however, is more difficult to support. The best kept secret of the Bush’s war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime. In the Islamic world, however, there is no such silence. Indeed, the prophet Mohammed was the first to counsel warriors not to harm innocent children.

The first example of war crimes against children, which are well documented, occurred during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when the children’s hospital in Kabul was bombed, its patients thereby murdered, contrary to the Red Cross Convention of 1864. Other children were killed as “collateral damage” during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, contrary to the Geneva Convention ban on indiscriminate killing in wartime, though numbers of dead are unknown. During spring 2004, during the assault on Falluja, Iraq, some 300 children, including peaceful demonstrators, were killed. Their dead bodies were filmed live on al-Jazeera Television throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

In 2008, the Bush administration reported to the UN-assisted Committee on the Rights of the Child that the United States from 2002 had detained 2,400 children in Iraq and 100 in Afghanistan, though another source claims that the figure for Afghanistan is at least 800 boys, aged 10 to 15, from whom as many as 64 were sent to Guantánamo, of which there were 21 as of May 2008. That month, the Committee upbraided the United States for charging minors with war crimes instead of treating underage persons as victims of war. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s two children, aged 7 and 9, were separately detained to intimidate him to confess.

While detained, several children have been brutalized and tortured. At Abu Ghraib, American guards videotaped Iraqi male prisoners raping young boys but took no action to stop the offenses. Perhaps the worst incident at Abu Ghraib involved a girl aged 12 or 13 who screamed for help to her brother in an upper cell while stripped naked and beaten. Iraqi journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, who heard the girl’s screams, also witnessed an ill 15-year-old who was forced to run up and down Abu Ghraib with two heavy cans of water and beaten whenever he stopped. When he finally collapsed, guards stripped and poured cold water on him. Finally, a hooded man was brought in. When unhooded, the boy realized that the man was his father, who doubtless was being intimidated into confessing something upon sight of his brutalized son.

While General Hamid Zabar was being questioned in Iraq, his interrogators decided to arrest his frail 16-year-old son in order to produce a confession. After soldiers found the boy, he was stripped, drenched with mud and water, and exposed to the cold January night while bound and driven about in the open back of a truck. When presented naked to his father, he was shivering due to hypothermia, clearly needing medical attention.

At least 25 war crimes refer specifically to child prisoners. Among the crimes are the arbitrary transfer out of their home countries, leaving their parents to wonder whether they were dead. When their locations were later revealed, parents were not allowed to contact them, even through the mail. And family members knew nothing of Hassin Bin Attash’s extraordinary rendition experience in Jordan or Ahmad Bashir’s disappearance for two years in a secret prison.

Children have been incarcerated in the same quarters as adults, contrary to the Geneva Convention. Subjected to solitary confinement, they are denied educational and recreational opportunities. Indeed, one attorney was not allowed to give his client (Omar Khadr) a copy of “Lord of the Rings” or play dominoes with him; another has been forbidden to supply his client (Mohammed Jawad) articles from the Internet. After Captain James Yee left Guantánamo on September 10, 2003, no Muslim chaplain has ever replaced him, so they have not been provided appropriate religious education.

Meanwhile, the authorities have refused to investigate or prosecute those who have abused children, and there have been no programs established to prevent prison mistreatment or to assist in their resulting post-traumatic stress. They have been denied legal counsel and a statement of reasons for their confinement upon arrival in prison, held far beyond the “speedy trial” requirement under the Geneva Conventions, coerced into confessions that may be false, and denied available exculpatory evidence, including witnesses.

In 2003, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao gave a speech on behalf of the need to rehabilitate child soldiers from Burundi, Colombia, El Salvador, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Uganda. While she spoke, several children were being abused at Guantánamo. The most famous, Mohammed Jawad and Omar Khadr, are still being held for trial at Guantánamo.

Omar Khadr’s videotaped plea for his mommy and claims of torture has been seen on television worldwide. While still wounded from battle in Afghanistan, Omar was interrogated many times, sometimes while hooded with dogs barking near him, so he confessed to stop the pain from his wounds. During interrogation at Guantánamo, Omar was shackled to the floor in stress positions until he soiled himself. His bound body was twice used as a mop to wipe his own urine mixed with pine oil after which he was refused a shower and a change of clothing. He has also been administered a brutal beating while on a hunger strike, threatened with rape, and denied pain medication.

There is some puzzlement over the reason for imprisoning Mohammad Jawad. Is it because, while at an American-run prison in Afghanistan in 2002, he has claimed that he saw Americans murdering inmates? At Guantánamo, to deprive him of sleep in order to force some sort of confession, he was shifted from one cell to another more than 100 times during two weeks in May 2004, and he remains in solitary confinement today. When he showed up in court in 2008, he was the first to wear leg shackles. During his arraignment, the judge asked him whether he accepted the assigned military defense attorney as his lawyer. After replying in the negative, the judge asked whether he knew another lawyer. His reply to the Kafkaesque inquiry was “Since I don’t know any lawyer, how can I have them represent me? . . . I should be given freedom so that I can find a lawyer.” His request to hunt for a lawyer was then denied.

The mistreatment of children is something not so funny that has been neglected on the road to investigations of and calls for prosecution of those responsible for torture. George W. Bush has never been asked about the abuse of children in American-run prisons in the “war on terror.” It is high time for Bush and others to be held accountable for what is arguably the most egregious of all their war crimes—the abuse and death of children, who should never have been arrested in the first place.

Michael Haas’s book George W. Bush, War Criminal? – The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes is available here

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Commentary, crime, Human rights, Iraq, Uncategorized, USA | Leave a Comment »

Robert Fisk: A historic day for Iraq – but not in the way the British want to believe

May 2, 2009

The Independent, UK, May 1, 2009 

Brigadier Tom Beckett (right) hands over to Colonel Henry A Kievenaar III at Basra Airbase yesterday

PA

Brigadier Tom Beckett (right) hands over to Colonel Henry A Kievenaar III at Basra Airbase yesterday

One hundred and seventy-nine dead soldiers. For what? 179,000 dead Iraqis? Or is the real figure closer to a million? We don’t know. And we don’t care. We never cared about the Iraqis. That’s why we don’t know the figure. That’s why we left Basra yesterday.

I remember going to the famous Basra air base to ask how a poor Iraqi boy, a hotel receptionist called Bahr Moussa, had died. He was kicked to death in British military custody. His father was an Iraqi policeman. I talked to him in the company of a young Muslim woman. The British public relations man at the airport was laughing. “I don’t believe this,” my Muslim companion said. “He doesn’t care.” She did. So did I. I had reported from Northern Ireland. I had heard this laughter before. Which is why yesterday’s departure should have been called the Day of Bahr Moussa. Yesterday, his country was set free from his murderer. At last.

History is a hard taskmaster. In my library, I have an original copy of General Angus Maude’s statement to the people of Baghdad – $2,000, it cost me, at a telephone auction a few days before we invaded Iraq in 2003, but it is worth every cent. “Our military operations have as their object,” Maude announced, “the defeat of the enemy… our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” And so it goes on. Maude, I should add, expired shortly afterwards because he declined to boil his milk in Baghdad and died of cholera.

Related articles

There followed a familiar story. The British occupation force was opposed by an Iraqi resistance – “terrorists”, of course – and the British destroyed a town called Fallujah and demanded the surrender of a Shiite cleric and British intelligence in Baghdad claimed that “terrorists” were crossing the border from Syria, and Lloyd George – the Blair-Brown of his age – then stood up in the House of Commons and said that there would be “anarchy” in Iraq if British troops left. Oh dear.

Even repeating these words is deeply embarrassing. Here, for example, is a letter written by Nijris ibn Qu’ud to a British intelligence agent in 1920: “You cannot treat us like sheep… it is we Iraqi who are the brains of the Arab nation… You are given a short time to clear out of Mesopotamia. If you don’t go you will be driven out.”

So let us turn at last to T E Lawrence. Yes, Lawrence of Arabia. In The Sunday Times on 22 August 1920, he wrote of Iraq that the people of England “had been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information… Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows.” Even more presciently, Lawrence had written that the Iraqis had not risked their lives in battle to become British subjects. “Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no justification for freedom.”

Alas not. Iraq, begging around Europe now that its oil wealth has run out, is a pitiful figure. But it is a little bit freer than it was. We have destroyed its master and our friend (a certain Saddam) and now, with our own dead clanking around our heels, we are getting out yet again. Till next time…

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper.  He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in crime, imperialism, Iraq, War Criminals | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »