Obama’s Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan

May 11, 2009
By Graham E. Fuller | The Huffington Post, May 11, 2009

For all the talk of “smart power,” President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of U.S. strategic thinking.

— Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.

— The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban — like them or not — as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

— It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The “Durand Line” is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan’s 28 million Pashtuns.

— India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan — in the intelligence, economic and political arenas — that chills Islamabad.

— Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.

— Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the U.S. is learning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally themselves at home with al-Qaida against the U.S. military.

— The U.S. had every reason to strike back at the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fight another day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible — with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives — to force the Taliban to yield up al-Qaida over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.

— The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations — the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?

— The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.

— Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.

Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.

But U.S. policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis.

The Pakistani army is more than capable of maintaining state power against tribal militias and to defend its own nukes. Only a convulsive nationalist revolutionary spirit could change that — something most Pakistanis do not want. But Washington can still succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present hard-line strategies. A new chapter of military rule — not what Pakistan needs — will be the likely result, and even then Islamabad’s basic policies will not change, except at the cosmetic level.

In the end, only moderate Islamists themselves can prevail over the radicals whose main source of legitimacy comes from inciting popular resistance against the external invader. Sadly, U.S. forces and Islamist radicals are now approaching a state of co-dependency.

It would be heartening to see a solid working democracy established in Afghanistan. Or widespread female rights and education — areas where Soviet occupation ironically did rather well. But these changes are not going to happen even within one generation, given the history of social and economic devastation of the country over 30 years.

Al-Qaida’s threat no longer emanates from the caves of the borderlands, but from its symbolism that has long since metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national voice in Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once the incitement of the U.S. presence is gone. Nobody on either side of the border really wants it.

What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of state structures.

If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.

Graham E. Fuller is a former CIA station chief in Kabul and a former vice-chair of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. He is author of numerous books on the Middle East, including The Future of Political Islam.

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American Torture: No Knowledge of History, No Sense of Tragedy

May 11, 2009

By William J. Astore | History News Network, May 11, 2009

Mr. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. A TomDispatch.com regular, his articles have appeared in The Nation, Asia Times, Salon.com, Le Monde diplomatique, and elsewhere.

Recently in the New York Times, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti showed that the Bush Administration, the CIA, and the Senate and House Intelligence Committees failed to ask for any historical context before approving so-called “harsh interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, in 2002.  No one apparently knew, or wanted to know, that the U.S. had defined waterboarding as torture and prosecuted it as a war crime after World War II.  Did our leaders think the events of 9-11 constituted an entirely new reality, one in which historical precedent was rendered nugatory?

Perhaps so, but their failure to ask historically-based questions also highlights the narrowness of their intellectual training.  Like the accused Nazi judges before the bar in the movie Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), they asked themselves only what the law is (or what it became under John Ashcroft and John Yoo), not whether it is just.  If a legal brief authorized brutal methods such as waterboarding, who were they to question, let alone challenge, the (freshly minted) legal opinion?

Clearly, the leaders making and implementing decisions on torture constituted a single, self-referencing, self-identified Washington elite almost entirely divorced from thinking historically, let alone tragically.  And because they could think neither historically nor tragically, they found false comfort in picturing themselves as stalwart defenders of the nation, not recognizing the mesmerizing power of vengeance and hate.

Our elected officials who find history books too onerous would do well to invest three hours of their time to watch Judgment at Nuremberg.  They might learn that a compromised judiciary will uphold any action — discriminatory race laws, involuntary sterilization, even mass murder — all in the name of defending the people from supposedly apocalyptic threats.

Indeed, defending the country from apocalyptic threats is a popular line for those wishing to uphold the Bush Administration’s policy on torture.  After the tragedy of 9/11, and subsequent panic in the wake of Anthrax attacks, our leaders were compelled to “take the gloves off” in our defense, even compelled to exact vengeance as a way of deterring future attacks — or so these torture apologists claim.

In their haste to make America safe, Bush and Company effectively declared vengeance was theirs and not the Lord’s.  But the human lust for vengeance is blinding, even more so when it’s perceived as righteous.  Here our wrathful lawyers/politicians might consider the lessons of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, Rigoletto.  The hunchbacked court jester, Rigoletto, delights in other people’s misfortune, and for this he is cursed by a cuckolded husband.  Soon, his own daughter, Gilda, the joy of his life, is kidnapped and despoiled, the first bitter fruits of the curse.  Despite Gilda’s pleas to forgive the transgressor, Rigoletto, blinded by his own murderous desire for vengeance, sets in motion a chain of events that ends with the sacrificial death of his beloved Gilda and the annihilation of any vestige of goodness in his tortured soul.

In Rigoletto, the desire for total vengeance produces total tragedy.  In Judgment at Nuremberg, man’s ability to justify the worst crimes in the name of “safeguarding the people” is memorably exposed and justly condemned.

What we need today in Washington are fewer leaders who base their decisions on vengeance empowered by legal briefs and more who are willing to embrace the toughest lessons to be gleaned from history and tragedy.  What we need today as well is our own version of Judgment at Nuremberg — our own special prosecutorial court — one that is unafraid to elevate justice, truth, and the value of a single human being above all other concerns — especially political ones.

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India: Harvest of Suicides

May 11, 2009
By Vandana Shiva | Project Syndicate, May 11, 2009

Vandana ShivaVandana  Shiva

NEW DELHI – An epidemic of farmers’ suicides has spread across four Indian states – Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Punjab – over the last decade. According to official data, more than 160,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997.

These suicides are most frequent where farmers grow cotton, and appear directly linked to the presence of seed monopolies. For the supply of cotton seeds in India has increasingly slipped out of the hands of farmers and into the hands of global seed producers like Monsanto. These giant corporations have begun to control local seed companies through buyouts, joint ventures, and licensing arrangements, leading to seed monopolies.

When this happens, seed is transformed from being a common good into being the “intellectual property” of companies such as Monsanto, for which the corporation can claim limitless profits through royalty payments. For farmers, this means deeper debt.

Seed is also transformed in this way from being a renewable regenerative resource into a non-renewable resource and commodity. Seed scarcity is directly caused by seed monopolies, which have as their ultimate weapon a “terminator” seed that is engineered for sterility. This means that farmers can’t renew their own supply but must return to the monopolist for new seed each planting season. For farmers, this means higher costs; for seed corporations, higher profits.

The creation of seed monopolies is based on the deregulation of seed corporations, including giving them oversight over bio-safety. With the coming of globalization, seed companies were allowed to sell seeds for which the companies had certified their safety.  In the case of genetically engineered seed, these companies are again seeking self-regulation for bio-safety.

State regulation does continue to exist where seeds are concerned, but nowadays it is aimed at farmers, who are being pushed into dependency on patented, corporate seed. Such compulsory licensing is a big cause of the global destruction of biodiversity. The creation of seed monopolies, and with them crushing debts to a new species of moneylender – the agents of the seed and chemical companies – has taken a high human toll as well.

The farm suicides first started in the district of Warangal in Andhra Pradesh. Peasants in Warangal used to grow millets, pulses, and oilseeds. Overnight, Warangal was converted to a cotton-growing district based on non-renewable hybrids that require irrigation and are prone to pest attacks. Small peasants without capital were trapped in a vicious cycle of debt. Some saw only one way out.

This was a period when Monsanto and its Indian partner, Mahyco, were also carrying out illegal field experiments with genetically engineered Bt cotton. All imports and field trials of genetically engineered organisms in India are governed by a provision of the Environment Protection Act called the “Rules for the Manufacture Use, Import, Export, and Storage of Hazardous Microorganisms, Genetically Engineered Organisms, or Cells.” We at the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology used the law to stop Monsanto’s commercialization of Bt cotton in 1999, which is why approval was not granted for commercial sales until 2002.

Rising production costs and falling prices for their products is a recipe for indebtedness, and debt is the main cause of farmers’ suicides. This is why the suicides are most prevalent in the cotton belt on which the seed industries’ claim is rapidly becoming a stranglehold.

At the start, the technology for engineering Bt genes into cotton was aimed primarily at controlling pests. However, new pests have emerged in Bt cotton, leading to higher use of pesticides. In the Vidharbha region of Maharashtra, which has the highest number of suicides, the area under Bt cotton has increased from 0.2 million hectares in 2004 to 2.88 million hectares in 2007. The cost of pesticides for farmers has increased 13-fold in the same period.

A pest control technology that fails to control pests might be good for seed corporations that are also agrichemical corporations. For farmers, it translates into suicide.

Technologies are tools. When the tool fails, it needs to be replaced. Bt cotton technology has failed to control pests or secure farmers lives and livelihoods. It is time to replace GM technology with ecological farming. It is time to stop the killing.

Vandana Shiva is an Indian feminist and environmental activist.  She is the founder/director of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.

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U.S. Lawmakers Try to Block New Abuse Photos

May 11, 2009

By William Fisher | Inter Press Service

NEW YORK, May 11 (IPS) – Civil libertarians are condemning a call by two influential U.S. senators for the White House to block the impending release of photographs showing detainees being abused by U.S. military personnel at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at other U.S. detention facilities in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The plea to intervene to stop the expected May 28 release of the photos came in a letter to President Barack Obama from Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham.

“The release of these old photographs of past behavior that has now been clearly prohibited will serve no public good, but will empower al Qaeda propaganda operations, hurt our country’s image, and endanger our men and women in uniform,” the Senators wrote.

Release of the photos is expected in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“We urge you in the strongest possible terms to fight the release of these old pictures of detainees in the war on terror, including appealing the decision of the Second Circuit in the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] lawsuit to the Supreme Court and pursuing all legal options to prevent the public disclosure of these pictures,” the senators wrote.

Their letter said, “We know that many terrorists captured in Iraq have told American interrogators that one of the reasons they decided to join the violent jihadist war against America was what they saw on al Qaeda videos of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.”

As a result of the ensuing actions by Congress, “America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines have made great progress in improving detention and interrogation procedures,” they wrote.

Senator Graham is a conservative Republican from South Carolina, a member of the Armed Services Committee, and a military lawyer in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

Lieberman was a lifelong Democrat until he lost his party’s primary contest in 2006, after which he ran and won as an Independent from Connecticut. He is chairman of the powerful Senate Homeland Security Committee. The two senators were among the most ardent supporters of the recent unsuccessful presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.

Civil libertarians were virtually unanimous in their opposition to withholding the photographs.

Gabor Rona, international legal director of Human Rights First, told IPS, “Sen. Lieberman and Graham’s claims might carry more weight had the U.S. government been consistently honest about the mistreatment it authorised.”

“But as long as the American people are kept in the dark about what crimes were committed in their name, they cannot intelligently exercise their democratic right and obligation to call for corrective measures,” he said.

Rona added, “To elevate fear of al Qaeda’s reactions over faith in our democratic ideals and structures is unfortunate and counterproductive.”

Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, told IPS, “The more evidence that emerges to document the Bush policy of torture and abuse, the more likely that investigations and prosecutions will take place.”

Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School told IPS, “The release of these photos will further document torture, abuse and other war crimes inflicted by U.S. military personnel in Iraq, the orders for which go all the way up the military chain of command to the Commander in Chief President Bush, the Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, none of whom has yet been held accountable.”

He said, “Senators Lieberman and Graham are simply running interference for all three of them. Yet under the terms of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Convention against Torture, the Obama administration has an obligation to open an investigation and to prosecute them. Failure to do so is a war crime in its own right.”

“These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib,” said attorney Amrit Singh of the ACLU, the organisation that originally brought the lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

“Their disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorising or permitting such abuse,” she said.

Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, now retired, served as the V Corps commander of coalition forces in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004. When he retired in November 2006, he called his career a casualty of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The disagreement over release of the photos reflects conflicting assessments of which is more dangerous and objectionable – the release of the photographs or the abusive behaviour that they depict.

It also turns on unresolved questions concerning the scale of prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel, and the nature of the public accounting that can or should be required.

The original Abu Ghraib photos were first exposed to the public in a 2006 segment of the television program, “Sixty Minutes,” and shortly thereafter in an extensive article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine.

The images showed Iraqi prisoners hooded, with electrodes attached to their bodies, being menaced by dogs, forced to walk with dog collars around their necks, and made to form pyramids of naked bodies. Existence of the images was first reported by a low-level U.S. Army soldier.

The military conducted more than a dozen investigations of the abusive practices, which then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attributed to the aberrations of “a few bad apples.” A number of low-level soldiers were convicted and sentenced to terms in military prisons, a few others were given official reprimands, and the brigadier general who was in charge of the prison was demoted to colonel.

The Defence Department investigations concluded that no one higher up in the military or civilian leadership of the Pentagon bore any responsibility for the abuses.

While the contents of the new photos have not been made public, it is known that members of Congress viewed them in a classified setting when the original Abu Ghraib images were released. Some have said publicly that the new photos paint an even grimmer picture of prisoner abuse, not only at Abu Ghraib but also at other U.S.-controlled prisons in the Middle East.

It is unclear whether the new crop of photos includes those taken by psychologist Philip Zimbardo. As an expert witness in the defense of an Abu Ghraib guard who was court-martialed, he had access to many of the images of abuse that were taken by the guards themselves.

Zimbardo assembled some of these pictures into a short video. Many of the images are explicit and gruesome, depicting nudity, degradation, simulated sex acts, and guards posing with decaying corpses.

The original Abu Ghraib photos were broadcast around the world long before it became known that U.S. authorities, including the Central Intelligence Agency, were using waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” at the Navy detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Afghanistan, and at secret prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

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UN: Sri Lankan attack a ‘bloodbath’

May 11, 2009
Al Jazeera, May 11, 2009

The pro-LTTE website Tamilnet released what they said were pictures of the shelling [AFP]

The UN has described the alleged killing of hundreds of Sri Lankan civilians in the country’s offensive against the separatist Tamil Tigers as a “bloodbath”.

The comments on Monday followed a weekend military attack on the last remaining stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s (LTTE), in the northeast, that is said to have killed at least 378 civilians.

“We have consistently warned of a bloodbath scenario, and the large-scale killing of civilians over the weekend including at least more than 100 children shows that that bloodbath has now become a reality,” Gordon Weiss, the UN spokesman for Sri Lanka, told Al Jazeera.

The UN, like all international organisations and journalists, is banned from the war zone by the government.

However, Weiss said he was confident that the report of the deaths and more than 1,000 others wounded from a doctor working at a makeshift state-hospital in the area were correct.

“[Ban Ki-moon], the UN secretary-general, has consistently asked that we be allowed into the area to assess for ourselves the true condition of people there … we are relying on the only sources we have,” Weiss said.

“The government doctors reporting from that zone, to the best of our knowledge, have proved consistently reliable.”

LTTE accusations

Thileepan Parthipan, an LTTE spokesman, blamed the government for the deaths.

“In that area, there has been continuous shelling. Many Tamil civilians were killed,” he said.

Focus: Sri Lanka

Q&A: Sri Lanka’s civil war

The history of the Tamil Tigers

Timeline: Conflict in Sri Lanka

‘High cost’ of victory over Tigers

Caught in the middle

“More than 3,500 people were injured. A nearby hospital received 378 dead bodies.”Some bodies are still on the streets. There were people inside bunkers which collapsed in the shelling.”

Anton Stephan, a Catholic priest inside the zone, also spoke of heavy military bombardment.

“They are fighting civilians. They’re using cluster bombs, cannons. They’re shooting towards people,” he said.

However, the government accused the LTTE of killing civilians in order to blame the deaths on the military.

Gotobaya Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s defence secretary, told Al Jazeera on Monday that the government is not to blame for the civilian deaths “at all”.

“It is very easy to find out who is killing the civilians because there are 200,000 people who have escaped from the LTTE area to government-controlled areas and anybody can talk to these people,” he said.

“The day before yesterday, a thousand people tried to cross to a government-controlled area and the LTTE fired directly at these people.”

Reduced territory

The government announced on Friday new borders for the region it calls a civilian safety zone in the northeast where the fighting is happening. The coastal area is now 3sq km in size.

The UN called for fighting to halt and for the government to help civilians.

Tens of thousands of civilians have fled the northeastern war zone in recent weeks [AFP]

“The UN has repeatedly said to the government that they must not use aerial attacks and heavy ordnance in a tiny patch of land that is about the size of Central Park in New York and we have also said to the LTTE that they need to separate their forces from the civilians who are trapped in this area,” Weiss said.”There are about 50,000 to 100,000 civilians in this area and they need to let these civilians escape from this zone.”

Paul Castella, the head of International Committee of the Red Cross in Sri Lanka, told Al Jazeera that those trapped “have very little to eat, almost no medicines and very little way to protect themselves from the sun.

“In practice, at any time of the day or night, people can be hit by a shell or a stray bullet. And this is making life for the people extremely difficult.”

‘Very difficult position’

Weiss aqcknowledged that the Sri Lankan government was in “a very difficult position” regarding civilians’ safety.

“They are well within their rights to be taking the Tamil Tigers head on. The Tamil Tigers have proven themselves to be a brutal and intractable foe, and they are responsible for keeping civilians inside this zone.

“The onus is really principally on the government at this stage because they are the sovereign government of this territory”

Gordon Weiss,
UN spokesman

“But that being said, the onus is really principally on the government at this stage because they are the sovereign government of this territory. They have a higher degree of responsibility.”They are signed up to international treaties and protocols that protect civilians in precisely these circumstances and that’s why international humanitarian law and the wars law exist.”

The LTTE is believed to be close to defeat in its 26-year battle for a separate homeland in the northeast of the island for the country’s minority Tamils.

The group used to control a wide swath of Sri Lanka’s north, but the territory they hold has been reduced to the 3km strip of coastline following military advances this year.

In recent weeks fierce fighting has forced tens of thousands of civilians to flee to state-run refugee camps outside the zone, but more remain trapped by the conflict.

The government has refused to continence a humanitarian ceasefire saying it would allow the LTTE to regroup.

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Christian by name and by nature

May 11, 2009

Morning Star Online, Sunday 10 May 2009

By Stuart Littlewood

Father Manuel Musallam, the Catholic priest in Gaza, has finally retired at 71. His will be a hard act to follow.

Many thought that ill health had forced Musallam to hang up his cassock last year, but he returned to the fray to be with his community during its darkest hour when Israel, with a nod and a wink from the US and the EU, unleashed its lethal assault intended to finally crush the isolated and half-starved Gazans.

I was privileged to meet the crusty old churchman in 2007, when things in Gaza were already unbearable after 18 months of blockade and savage sanctions.

For nine years, Musallam had been unable to leave the strip to see his family in the West Bank for fear that the Israelis would block his return and leave his church and school without a priest. We were the first visitors from the outside world he had seen for many months.

Musallam has frequently spoken out about the torment and hardship inflicted on the Gazan people. He has said in plain language what other churchmen – and politicians and diplomats – are afraid to.

He told reporters that, after 14 years as the parish priest, he had seen the humanitarian situation get drastically worse. And he warned that the people were becoming more aggressive. “There is a lot more hate towards the situation they are in – especially among the young.”

Musallam was also greatly troubled by the exodus of Christians to escape the never-ending Israeli oppression and seek a better life elsewhere, reflecting the worry expressed by many others that Christendom is allowing itself to be “religiously cleansed” from the Holy Land with scarcely a murmur of protest.

He has seen Gaza’s Christian contingent dwindle to just 5,000 souls out of a tight-packed population of 1.5 million.

Musallam also speaks with anguish of the 1,400 Gazans killed in the latest blitz, the many thousands left homeless and the hundreds of thousands without running water, sanitation, a proper diet or medical care – thanks to the already overburdened infrastructure having been blasted to smithereens by US-supplied weaponry and explosives.

In January, at the height of Israel’s killing spree, Fr Manuel sent this message from the smoking ruins to anyone who would listen.

“Our people in Gaza … eat but remain hungry, they cry, but no-one wipes their tears. There is no water, no electricity, no food, only terror and blockade … Our children are living in a state of trauma and fear. They are sick from it and for other reasons such as malnutrition, poverty and the cold … The hospitals did not have basic first aid before the war and now thousands of wounded and sick are pouring in and they are performing operations in the corridors. The situation is frightening and sad.”

A few days later, he wrote: “Hundreds of people have been killed and many more injured in the Israeli invasion. Our people have endured the bombing of their homes, their crops have been destroyed, they have lost everything and many are now homeless.

“We have endured phosphorus bombs which have caused horrific burns, mainly to civilians. Like the early Christians our people are living through a time of great persecution, a persecution which we must record for future generations as a statement of their faith, hope and love.”

Yet the leaders of the West turned their backs while their “ally,” with whom they claim to share so many values, committed these and other atrocities. It was their duty to intervene but they didn’t. As if this infamy weren’t enough, humanitarian aid and reconstruction materials for Gaza are still obstructed by Israel and the international community is too spineless to ensure that they flow.

Musallam’s Catholic school in Gaza is highly regarded by Muslim families and many send their children there.

The only official tribute I’ve seen to Musallam says that he “has done great work over the many years he has been in Gaza where he has given a lot to support the Christian community and many others.”

Is that it? Is that all the church can find to say about one of its most remarkable representatives, who has served his God and community for many perilous years in the world’s most notorious hell-hole?

Let us hope the Pope, during his trip to the holy land this week, manages to find time between visits to the Yad Vashem memorial and the Wailing Wall and hob-nobbing with the great and good of the zionist regime, to say hello to Musallam and acknowledge the dedication and courage of this extraordinary man.

The Vatican describes the Pope’s visit as a pilgrimage, which usually suggests a journey of high purpose and moral significance. Will his holiness be joining the queue of Palestinians at the Bethlehem crossing into Jerusalem and waiting in line for the three humiliating hours it often takes before being allowed to shuffle through the steel-barred cattle pens to start a full day’s work?

He has decided to skip Gaza so he will miss the state-of-the-art dehumanisation process at the Erez crossing and the experience of being forced to strip to his underwear like so many others.

It’s a shame he won’t see Gaza. He’d weep like he has never wept before. Then at least he would have had something morally significant to say to Israel’s dignitaries.

As for Musallam, I doubt if his God has finished with him just yet. There’s a mountain of work to be done and good men are hard to find.

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Phosphorus claim after fatal U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan

May 11, 2009

Afghanistan‘s leading human rights ­organisation is investigating claims that white phosphorus was used during a deadly battle between US forces and the Taliban last week in which scores of civilians may have died.

Nader Nadery, a senior officer at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said the organisation was concerned that the chemical, which can cause severe burns, might have been used in the firefight in Bala Baluk, a district in the western province of Farah.

Dr Mohammad Aref Jalali, the head of an internationally funded burns hospital in Herat, said villagers taken to hospital after the incident had “highly unusual burns” on their hands and feet that he had not seen before. “We cannot be 100% sure what type of chemical it was and we do not have the equipment here to find out. One of the women who came here told us that 22 members of her family were totally burned. She said a bomb distributed white power that caught fire and then set people’s clothes alight.”

US forces in Afghanistan denied they had used the chemical, and have also said claims that up to 147 civilians were killed were grossly exaggerated.

As with previous such tragedies, both sides have made wildly different claims, with the Taliban seeking to exploit ­popular fury and US officials attempting to limit the damage and blame the Taliban for allegedly using civilians as human shields.But members of the human rights department at the UN mission in Afghanistan have been appalled by witness testimony from people in the village, according to one official in Kabul who talked anonymously to the Guardian.

He said bombs were dropped after militants had quit the battlefield, which appeared to be backed up by the US air force’s own daily report, which is published online. “The stories that are emerging are quite frankly horrifying,” the official said. “It is quite apparent that the large bulk of casualties were called in after the initial fighting had subsided and both the troops and the Taliban had withdrawn.

“Local villagers went to the mosque to pray for peace. Shortly after evening prayers the air strikes were called in, and they continued for a couple of hours whilst the villagers were frantically calling the local governor to get him to call off the air strikes.”

He said that women and children hid inside their homes while their men went on to the roofs with guns. US forces say these men were militants, but the UN official said they were simply villagers and “it is totally normal for them to have guns”. Also contested is an incident immediately after the battle when people from the village took piles of corpses to the governor’s compound in the provincial capital.

The UN official said their willingness to ignore the Islamic custom of organising burial within 24 hours of death showed the level of anger. A statement by US forces said insurgents forced tribal elders to parade the corpses through neighbouring villages to “incite outrage”.

It said that a joint US-Afghan investigation team confirmed that “a number of civilians were killed in the course of the fighting but is unable to determine with certainty which of those causalities were Taliban fighters and which were non-combatants”. Last week Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, called for all air strikes in villages to be stopped, a view privately backed by many in the UN. Yesterday Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Gen James Jones, ruled out such a change in policy, saying “we can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back”.

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Pakistan faces biggest human flood since 1947

May 10, 2009

Half a million people are being displaced by Pakistan’s military operations against the Taliban

By Andrew Buncombe |  The Independent, UK, May 10, 2009

Refugees queue for food at a camp in northern Pakistan

ap

Refugees queue for food at a camp in northern Pakistan

Her name was Sahin and in a matter of hours her world had been broken. As fighting raged in their hometown of Mingora – fighter jets screaming overhead and mortar fire pounding – she and her husband tried to escape with their 10 children. Amid the chaos, her husband was killed by an artillery shell. There was hardly time to bury him in the courtyard of a neighbour’s house before Sahin was forced to think of the children and of somehow leading them to safety by herself. They walked for “hours and hours” before, in a neighbouring town, they found a bus. That bus brought them to a camp for the displaced, a place for the beleaguered, for those with nowhere else to go.

Now huddled with her six girls and four sons – three of whom are disabled – Sahin, in her early 50s, can barely think of the future. “Even if the conflict stops we cannot go back as the house has been destroyed,” she said. Her family has barely more than the clothes they were wearing when they fled.

Across a 50-mile swathe of north-west Pakistan, countless stories similar to Sahin’s could be told. Pakistan’s military has mounted what appears to be a major operation against Taliban fighters who have seized control of several districts little more than 60 miles from the capital, Islamabad. “This is not a normal war. This is a guerilla war,” Pakistan’s prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani said yesterday. “This is our own war. This is war for the survival of the country.” The army said 55 militants were killed in clashes around Swat yesterday.

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Aid groups have warned of a human tide of up to 500,000 people fleeing their homes. The UN said an estimated 200,000 have fled the Swat valley and its main town, Mingora, in the past few days alone, while another 300,000 are poised to flee if they get the chance. This would create a total of one million people forced from their homes by fighting in the past 12 months. It represents the biggest internal displacement of people in Pakistan since independence more than 60 years ago.

“People are in shock. In some cases their homes have been destroyed by mortar shells. They are wondering when they’ll be able to go back. Others say they will not be able to go back,” said Antonia Paradela, an official with Unicef who interviewed Sahin and other refugees in the Sheikh Shehzad refugee camp near Mardan, a city in the south of the Swat valley. “This is the place where the families are coming. They are tired, sweaty, dusty. There are whole families crying because they have lost someone. But there is also a sense of relief to be out of the danger.”

Under mounting international pressure, the government of Asif Ali Zardari and Pakistan’s military launched this week’s operation to drive the Taliban from the former tourist destination of Swat after a controversial, three-month ceasefire with the militants fell apart. After a previous military effort failed to dislodge the militants who had extended their violent influence throughout the valley over a two year period, the government in February signed a peace deal which included an agreement to establish Sharia courts in Swat and some neighboring areas.

The Taliban, however, failed to meet its end of the agreement and lay down its arms. Indeed, emboldened by the government’s acquiescence, the militants then spread from Swat into the neighbouring and strategically important Buner valley. The army is also battling to drive the Taliban from Buner and nearby Lower Dir.

While journalists are, in effect, prevented from reaching the war zone, the military’s operation – which involves more than 5,000 troops pitched against an estimated 5,000 Taliban fighters – appears unexpectedly firm, and officials said that 140 militants had already been killed in the past two days. Some observers had wondered whether the army, trained and prepared to fight a conventional war against India, had the will or the capability to take on a well-trained guerrilla enemy.

There was also speculation whether, in the week that Barack Obama outlined his new “Af-Pak” strategy to Mr Zardari and the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, in Washington, there may have been a reluctance to fight what could have been seen as another battle in America’s war. The Obama administration’s policy of using missiles fired from unmanned drones at suspected militant targets and the subsequent civilian “collateral damage” this causes is hugely unpopular in Pakistan.

Yet this time, several things appear different. From the start, the battle for Swat has been pitched as a battle for the future of the Pakistan – and one that has been directed by the Pakistani authorities rather than Americans. In a televised address on Thursday as the military operation was formally announced, the Prime Minister, Yousaf Gilani, said: “In order to restore honour and dignity of the country, the armed forces have been called in to eliminate militants and terrorists. We will eliminate those who have tried to destroy the peace of the country.”

The seemingly widespread support for this operation, as opposed to Washington’s drone strikes, appears based in large part on growing public dismay with the Taliban. With the Taliban having embarked on a policy of burning girls’ schools and beheading their opponents, only to be “rewarded” with a deal that saw Sharia law enacted, the Pakistani public is growing more anxious as the militants’ threat has increased rather than reduced.

Those involved in brokering the ceasefire say the Taliban have now exposed their true colours and must be dealt with by force. “What the people know is that we tried everything possible. The Taliban had their own agenda and that has become clear to people,” said Bushra Gohar, the vice-president of the Awami National Party, which heads the regional government in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). “We hope this will be a clearly targeted operation that will go after the training camps and the leadership.”

Analysts say the operation to drive the militants from Swat and then hold the ground to allow the return of a civilian administration could take months. With the militants having established themselves across Swat’s mountainous terrain over the past two years, even if the military succeeds in forcing them from Mingora and other towns, the Taliban could retreat to smaller adjacent valleys and strike back with bomb attacks on convoys, checkpoints and military camps. It is also likely that the militants could increase suicide strikes on targets outside Swat to act as a diversion.

Some commentators have speculated that in such circumstances, an inconclusive but bloody campaign with a large number of civilian casualties would undermine public support for the operation. The army says it is determined to succeed. “The army is now engaged in a full-scale operation to eliminate the militants, miscreants and anti-state elements from Swat,” said the army’s spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas. “They are on the run and trying to block the exodus of civilians from the area.”

As a result, hundreds of thousands more people like Sahin are likely to be rushing desperately out of Swat and towards the refugee camps at the southern end of the valley in the coming days. At the moment, only a tiny fraction of the displaced are being housed in the camps – the majority being able to stay with relatives or in rented rooms – but in the coming weeks that could change.

Sahin, her children and some other members of her family have nowhere else to go. Five months ago, when an earlier spike in violence drove them from Swat, they were able to stay with relatives in Peshawar. This time, that option was not available to them, she said. For now the family must sit amid the tents of the camp at Sheikh Shehzad, waiting and wondering.

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U.S. Foreign Policy Caused the Taliban Problem

May 10, 2009

The Future of Freedom Foundation, May 10, 2009

by Jacob G. Hornberger

U.S. officials are now concerned not only with a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan but also a Taliban takeover in Pakistan. These problems, however, were caused by the U.S. Empire itself.

While most Americans now view President Bush’s Iraq War as a “bad war,” the common perception is that Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan was a “good war” (despite the fact that he went to war without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war). The notion is that the U.S. government was justified in invading Afghanistan and ousting the Taliban regime from power because the Taliban and al-Qaeda conspired to commit the 9/11 attacks.

There’s just one big problem with that belief: it’s unfounded.

The reason that Bush ousted the Taliban from office was that the Taliban regime refused to comply with his unconditional demand to deliver Osama bin Laden to U.S. officials after the 9/11 attacks.

The Taliban responded to Bush’s demand by asking him to furnish evidence of bin Laden’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Upon receipt of such evidence, they offered to turn him over to an independent tribunal instead of the United States.

Bush never explained why the Taliban’s conditions were unreasonable. After all, as federal judges in the Jose Padilla case, the Zacarias Moussaoui case, and many others have confirmed, terrorism is a federal criminal offense. Thus, while it’s not unusual for one nation to seek the extradition of a foreigner to stand trial for a criminal offense, it’s just as reasonable for the nation receiving the request to be provided evidence that the person has, in fact, committed the crime.

Venezuela is currently seeking the extradition from the United States of a man named Luis Posada Carriles, who is accused of bombing a Cuban airliner over Venezuelan skies, a terrorist act that succeeded in killing everyone on board.

Venezuela and the United States have an extradition agreement. Nonetheless, the U.S. government is refusing to extradite Posada to Venezuela. The reason? It says that it fears that Venezuelan authorities will torture Posada. (Another reason might be that Posada was a CIA operative.)

But if fear of torture is a valid reason for refusing an extradition request from Venezuela, then why wouldn’t the same reason apply with respect to the Taliban’s refusal to extradite bin Laden to the United States? I think everyone would agree that if bin Laden had been turned over to the CIA or the Pentagon, he would have been brutally tortured, perhaps even executed, without ever being brought to trial before a fair and independent judicial tribunal.

What about the Taliban’s request that Bush provide evidence of bin Laden’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks? That request is precisely what is done in extradition proceedings. When one nation seeks the extradition of a foreigner, the rules of extradition require it to provide evidence to support the request.

What was remarkable about the Taliban offer was that there wasn’t even an extradition agreement between Afghanistan and the United States. The Taliban was offering to deliver bin Laden to an independent tribunal even though international law did not require it, so long as U.S. officials provided the same type of evidence that is ordinarily required in an extradition proceeding.

Yet Bush refused to consider either the Taliban’s offer or its request for evidence. His position was effectively this: “We are the world’s sole remaining empire. We have the most powerful military on the planet. We have the capability of smashing you and removing your regime from power. You will comply with our demand, unconditionally and immediately.”

But the Taliban refused to comply with Bush’s unconditional demand. Consequently, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, it not only went after bin Laden, it also took sides in Afghanistan’s civil war, taking the side of the Northern Alliance. Ousting the Taliban from power in a classic regime-change operation, U.S. officials installed Hamid Karzai into office, who has been a loyal, friendly, and compliant member of the empire ever since, but one whose regime is now under constant attack by those who were ousted from power by the U.S. Empire.

While Bush and other U.S. officials promised to disclose evidence that the Taliban regime had conspired with al-Qaeda to commit the 9/11 attacks, that promise was never fulfilled and it was ultimately forgotten. The likely reason for that is that they never had such evidence. After all, if they had evidence of such complicity, they would never have wasted time demanding that the Taliban turn bin Laden over. They would have simply declared war against Afghanistan for having attacked the United States.

What would have been the ideal way of handling bin Laden? The same way that the United States handled Ramzi Yousef, one of the terrorists who committed the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Treating that attack as a criminal offense, U.S. officials simply waited Yousef out, relied on good police work, and finally were able to effect his arrest in Pakistan. He is now residing in a U.S. federal penitentiary. No bombs, no missiles, no destruction, no killing of Pakistani wedding parties, and no needless production of new enemies for the United States.

Instead, treating the capture of bin Laden as a military problem, U.S. officials invaded the country, killed and maimed countless innocent people, wreaked untold destruction on Afghanistan, effected regime change, created new enemies for the United States … and failed to capture bin Laden.

But even given the military invasion of Afghanistan, the aim of that invasion could have been limited to going after bin Laden rather than being used as an opportunity to effect regime change at the same time.

Indeed, that’s precisely what happened after Pancho Villa killed several Americans in a raid on Columbus, New Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. After the raid, U.S. officials sent an expeditionary force into Mexico to capture him and bring him back to justice. While the expedition was unsuccessful, what was noteworthy about it was that the expedition force limited itself to trying to capture Villa, not taking sides in Mexico’s civil war.

We would be remiss if we failed to keep in mind the role that U.S. foreign policy played in bringing into existence and supporting the Taliban. In a November 5, 2001, article, Congressman Ron Paul pointed out:

We should recognize that American tax dollars helped to create the very Taliban government that now wants to destroy us. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the CIA was very involved in the training and funding of various fundamentalist Islamic groups in Afghanistan, some of which later became today’s brutal Taliban government. In fact, the U.S. government admits to giving the groups at least 6 billion dollars in military aid and weaponry, a staggering sum that would be even larger in today’s dollars.

Bin Laden himself received training and weapons from the CIA….

Incredibly, in May the U.S. announced that we would reward the Taliban with an additional $43 million in aid for its actions in banning the cultivation of poppy used to produce heroin and opium. Taliban rulers had agreed to assist us in our senseless drug war by declaring opium growing “against the will of God.”…

Once the Taliban regime refused to comply with Bush’s unconditional order to turn over bin Laden, the U.S. Empire did what it had done and tried to do in so many other countries — Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, and others — bring about regime change by ousting a recalcitrant regime that refused to comply with the unconditional orders of the U.S. Empire — a regime that the U.S. Empire itself had helped to create — and replacing it with a submissive pro-empire regime. In the process, the empire succeeded in embroiling the United State into one more foreign conflict, one that has now spread to nuclear-armed Pakistan.

It’s just another “success story” in the life of the U.S. Empire and its interventionist foreign policy.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

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Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

May 10, 2009

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS  | Counterpunch, May 10, 2009

On October 16, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Israel Lobby’s bill, the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act.  This legislation requires the US Department of State to monitor anti-semitism world wide.

To monitor anti-semitism, it has to be defined.  What is the definition?  Basically, as defined by the Israel Lobby and Abe Foxman, it boils down to any criticism of Israel or Jews.

Rahm Israel Emanuel hasn’t been mopping floors at the White House.
As soon as he gets the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 passed, it will become a crime for any American to tell the truth about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and theft of their lands.

It will be a crime for Christians to acknowledge the New Testament’s account of Jews demanding the crucifixion of Jesus.

It will be a crime to report the extraordinary influence of the Israel Lobby on the White House and Congress, such as the AIPAC-written resolutions praising Israel for its war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza that were endorsed by 100 per cent  of the US Senate and 99 per cent  of the House of Representatives, while the rest of the world condemned Israel for its barbarity.

It will be a crime to doubt the Holocaust.

It will become a crime to note the disproportionate representation of Jews in the media, finance, and foreign policy.

In other words, it means the end of free speech, free inquiry, and the First Amendment to the Constitution. Any facts or truths that cast aspersion upon Israel will simply be banned.

Given the hubris of the US government, which leads Washington to apply US law to every country and organization, what will happen to the International Red Cross, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and the various human rights organizations that have demanded investigations of Israel’s military assault on Gaza’s civilian population?  Will they all be arrested for the hate crime of “excessive” criticism of Israel?

This is a serious question.

A recent UN report, which is yet to be released in its entirety, blames Israel for the deaths and injuries that occurred within the United Nations premises in Gaza.  The Israeli government has responded by charging that the UN report is “tendentious, patently biased,”  which puts the UN report into the State Department’s category of excessive criticism and strong anti-Israel sentiment.

Israel is getting away with its blatant use of the American government to silence its critics despite the fact that the Israeli press and Israeli soldiers have exposed the Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the premeditated murder of women and children urged upon the Israeli invaders by rabbis.  These acts are clearly war crimes.

It was the Israeli press that published the pictures of the Israeli soldiers’ T-shirts that  indicate that the willful murder of women and children is now the culture of the Israeli army.  The T-shirts are horrific expressions of barbarity.  For example, one shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a crosshairs over her stomach and the slogan, “One shot, two kills.”  These T-shirts are an indication that Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians is one of extermination.

It has been true for years that the most potent criticism of Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians comes from the Israeli press and Israeli peace groups.  For example, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Jeff Halper of ICAHD have shown a moral conscience that apparently does not exist in the Western democracies where Israel’s crimes are covered up and even praised.

Will the American hate crime bill be applied to Haaretz and Jeff Halper?  Will American commentators who say nothing themselves but simply report what Haaretz and Halper have said be arrested for “spreading hatred of Israel, an anti-semitic act”?

Many Americans have been brainwashed by the propaganda that Palestinians are terrorists who threaten innocent Israel.  These Americans will see the censorship as merely part of the necessary war on terror.  They will accept the demonization of fellow citizens who report unpalatable facts about Israel and agree that such people should be punished for aiding and abetting terrorists.

A massive push is underway to criminalize criticism of Israel.  American university professors have fallen victim to the well organized attempt to eliminate all criticism of Israel.  Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at a Catholic university because of the power of the Israel Lobby.  Now the Israel Lobby is after University of California  (at Santa Barbara,) professor Wiliam Robinson.  Robinson’s crime:  his course on global affairs included some reading assignments critical of Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

The Israel Lobby apparently succeeded in convincing the Obama Justice (sic) Department that it is anti-semitic to accuse two Jewish AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, of spying.  The Israel Lobby succeeded in getting their trial delayed for four years, and now Attorney General Eric Holder has dropped charges.  Yet, Larry Franklin, the DOD official accused of giving secret material to Rosen and Weissman, is serving 12 years and 7 months in prison.

The absurdity is extraordinary.  The two Israeli agents are not guilty of receiving secrets, but the American official is guilty of giving secrets to them!  If there is no spy in the story, how was Franklin convicted of giving secrets to a spy?

Criminalizing criticism of Israel destroys any hope of America having an independent foreign policy in the Middle East that serves American rather than Israeli interests.  It eliminates any prospect of Americans escaping from their enculturation with Israeli propaganda.

To keep American minds captive, the Lobby is working to ban as anti-semitic any truth or disagreeable fact that pertains to Israel.  It is permissible to criticize every other country in the world, but it is anti-semitic to criticize Israel, and anti-semitism will soon be a universal hate-crime in the Western world.

Most of Europe has already criminalized doubting the Holocaust.  It is a crime even to confirm that it happened but to conclude that less than 6 million Jews were murdered.

Why is the Holocaust  a subject that is off limits to examination? How could a case buttressed by hard facts possibly be endangered by kooks and anti-semitics?  Surely the case doesn’t need to be protected by thought control.

Imprisoning people for doubts is the antithesis of modernity.

Dr Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

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