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.

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Iraq rules out extension of U.S. withdrawal dates

May 4, 2009

Reuters, May 3, 2009

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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)

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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.”

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Sri Lanka admits bombing safe zone

May 2, 2009
Al jazeera, May 2, 2009

The images appear to show clear signs of air raids in the ‘no-fire zone’ near Mullaitivu [Unosat]

The Sri Lankan government has admitted carrying out air raids in the so-called no-fire zone in the country’s northeast, where the army is battling Tamil Tiger fighters.

But Palitha Kohona, the Sri Lankan foreign ministry secretary, told Al Jazeera that the raids had been carried out weeks ago and that the military had focused only on the Tamil Tigers’ artillery guns, well away from civilians.

“As long as the retaliation is proportionate, it is perfectly legitimate and what we did exactly was located these guns and retaliated against those guns,” he said.

“I would challenge anybody to say that these shell holes were created once the civilians moved into the area and became occupied by civilians.”

The apparent admission follows the leaking of UN satellite images showing evidence of such attacks, supporting claims by Tamil groups that aircraft had bombed the area the government designated a safe zone in February.

President’s contradiction

But Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s president, has contradicted Kohona by categorically denying that the military had attacked civilian areas with heavy weapons.

In video

LTTE defector accuses group of civilian murder

“If you are not willing to accept the fact that we are not using heavy weapons, I really can’t help it,” he said.”We are not using heavy weapons. When we say no, it means no. If we say we are doing something, we do it. We do exactly what we say, without confusion.”

The government had for weeks repeatedly denied that its armed forces were using heavy artillery or conducting air raids in the safe zone where it says the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have been holding civilians as human shields.

Many who have managed to get out say the fighters were indeed holding them against their will, and fired on them to prevent their escape.

Tens of thousands of civilians, along with members of the LTTE, are believed to still be in the 10sq km area.

On April 19, Kohona told Al Jazeera there was no government shelling in the safe zone.

In depth


Interview: ‘Colonel Karuna’, a defector from the LTTE

“Absolutely not, because the government has issued instructions, very strict instructions, to the military not to use aerial bombing or shelling into this area.”But on Friday, confronted by the latest UN satellite imaging agency (Unosat) pictures showing craters which were formed inside the zone between February and April this year, Kohona at first challenged their authenticity before admitting targeting the Tigers’ heavy guns.

He said, however, that it was before civilians flooded the area and maintained that the government adhered to international law.

Detailed images

Unosat says the pictures show craters which were formed inside the zone between February 15 and April 19, the day before the army breached the Tigers’ defences and civilians started to pour out.

Einer Bjorge, head of the mapping unit at Unosat, told Al Jazeera the pattern of the craters would have required air power.

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

“The imagery is fairly clear and shows the time, so anybody can study and compare them,” he said.He said the images were also commercially available from the satellite operator.

“Anyone interested in verifying the images can purchase them if they want. It is commercially available to the public,” he said.

“You can’t get any more transparent than that.”

Meenakshi Ganguly, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch (HRW), told Al Jazeera that the pictures did give evidence that civilians were at risk, saying the government may have “deliberately deceived the international community when they expressed concern about the situation”.

“The pictures do prove that heavy weapons were used and indeed civilian casualties did occur, as shown by UN figures of the death toll since January,” she said.

“In fact, HRW once recorded the sound of shelling which was dropping near a hospital.”

Many civilians who fled the war zone said Tamil Tiger fighters used them as shields [AFP]

Yolanda Foster, an expert on Sri Lanka with Amnesty International, said “real fear” is growing for those trapped in the no-fire zone in light of the admission by Colombo that its forces had carried out raids.”We are very concerned that this flagrant disregard for civilians living inside the ‘safe zone’ has now been admitted [by the Sri Lankan government],” she said.

“The government earlier on in the year was making claims that there were not so many civilians in the safe zone as, for example, the figures that the UN and Red Cross were giving out.

“It is not clear that the government can be trusted on its promises.”

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‘Abu Ghraib US prison guards were scapegoats for Bush’ lawyers claim

May 2, 2009

The Times, UK, May 2, 2009

Charles Graner plans to appeal against his conviction for abusing prisoners

Charles Graner plans to appeal against his conviction for abusing prisoners

Tim Reid in Washington

Prison guards jailed for abusing inmates at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq are planning to appeal against their convictions on the ground that recently released CIA torture memos prove that they were scapegoats for the Bush Administration.

The photographs of prisoner abuse at the Baghdad jail in 2004 sparked worldwide outrage but the previous administration, from President Bush down, blamed the incident on a few low-ranking “bad apples” who were acting on their own.

The decision by President Obama to release the memos showed that the harsh interrogation tactics were approved and authorised at the highest levels of the White House.

Some of the guards who were convicted of abuse want to return to court and argue that the previous administration sanctioned the abuse but withheld its role from their trials.

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The latest reaction to the released memos came as it emerged that the two psychologists hired by the CIA to craft the techniques that were used on terror suspects were paid $1,000 (£673) a day. Neither had carried out nor overseen an interrogation.

Twelve guards at Abu Ghraib were convicted on charges related to the abuse, which included attaching leads to naked prisoners, terrifying them with dogs, beatings and slamming them into walls. The wall-slamming was a technique authorised by Justice Department officials at the time, who also said that the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding was not considered to be torture.

Charles Gittins, a lawyer who represents Charles Graner, the ringleader of the guards who is serving a ten-year sentence, said that the memos proved his long-held contention that Graner and the other defendants, including his former lover Lynndie England, could never have invented tactics such as stress positions and the use of dogs on their own.

“Once the pictures came out, the senior officials involved in the decision-making, they knew. They knew they had to have a cover story. It was the ‘bad apples’ led by Charles Graner,” Mr Gittins told The Washington Post.

Ms England, a poorly educated Army reservist, was pictured holding a dog leash attached to a naked detainee, and also pointing at another being forced to masturbate. She was convicted in September 2005 of abusing prisoners and one count of an indecent act. She was sentenced to three years in a military prison and was paroled after 521 days. Shortly after leaving Iraq she gave birth to a son fathered by Graner. She lives in her home state of West Virginia.

Mr Gittins said the refusal by the Bush Administration to acknowledge that it had authorised such techniques during the trials of the prison guards — and the judges’ refusal to call senior administration officials to testify — undermined their defences.

Mr Gittins wants to take the case of Graner, who is halfway through his sentence, to the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces to argue that top Bush Administration officials kept their complicity from the defence.

Gary Myers, a lawyer who represented Ivan L “Chip” Frederick on the abuse charges, said that he was going to try to use the memos to have his client’s dishonourable discharge removed from his record.

“What we know is that we had at the time a rogue government that created an environment where this sort of conduct was condoned, if not encouraged,” he said.

He added, however, that relying on illegal opinions or orders would probably not be a defence.

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Up to one million displaced in northwest Pakistan

May 1, 2009
dawn.com, Tuesday, 28 Apr, 2009 | 07:24 PM PST |

Local residents flee from a troubled area in northwest Pakistan where the military has launched an operation against the Taliban. -AFP Photo

GENEVA: Up to one million people are displaced in northwestern Pakistan where militants are feeding on local discontent and strife, humanitarian and local officials from Pakistan warned on Tuesday.

Officials from Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province appealed for international relief aid at an unprecedented meeting with relief agencies and donor countries in Geneva.

‘We are hearing a lot of pledges and promises made from the international community to Pakistan, and many of them are for security, for the police and the army, but the civilians are not getting what they are supposed to,’ said Sitara Ayaz, minister for social welfare and development in the province.

‘In our province we need more support and help from the international community,’ she said after the two-day meeting in Geneva.

The UN’s World Food Programme is working on an estimate of about 600,000 people for food aid in the area, spokewoman Emilia Casella told AFP.

Local officials put the figure at closer to one million, with about 80 per cent of them housed with friends or relatives, sometimes five or six families to a home.

‘It is a serious humanitarian situation of major magnitude,’ warned Dennis McNamara, an adviser at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, which organised the meeting.

‘The registered UN figure for displaced civilians is over half a million. The NWFP relief commissioner says if we get registration completed it may be closer to a million in total.’

‘It is a certainly a major displacement, one of the world’s biggest if these figures are right,’ added McNamara, a former senior UN refugee official.

A provincial minister said in Pakistan on Tuesday that around 30,000 people in the northwest have been displaced since the weekend by a military offensive to flush out Taliban militants.

Participants at the Geneva meeting said impoverished civilians were paying the price for the unrest and the humanitarian strife, and were easily wooed by militants such as the Taliban.

‘They can easily be recruited, because they are bitter and they have suffered,’ said one of the participants from North West Frontier Province.

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Sri Lanka forces bombed civilian safe haven: UN images

May 1, 2009

REPUBLICA, May 1, 2009

KATHMANDU, May 1:  Sri Lankan forces have bombed a safe haven for civilians while fighting against the Tamil Tigers, The Times reported Friday.

The London-based newspaper said that confidential UN satellite images leaked on Thursday appear to show that the Sri Lankan Air Force bombed a safe haven for up to 150,000 civilians.

The images contained in an internal UN report may constitute the strongest evidence yet of violations of international humanitarian law or war crimes, according to human rights activists. The report by Unosat, dated April 26, provides detailed images of the tiny strip of beach and coconut grove — now covering only 3.8sq miles (10sq km) — where the army has pinned down the Tigers along with thousands of civilians.

The Sri Lanka government declared the area a safe haven or “no-fire zone” on February 12, urging civilians to seek shelter there, and has repeatedly denied using heavy artillery or aerial bombs to attack it.

The Unosat report, based on images between February 5 and April 19, appears to back up the persistent verbal testimony to the contrary from doctors, aid workers and civilians fleeing the area. “Within the northern and southern sections of the civilian safe zone, there are new indications of building destruction and damages resulting from shelling and possible airstrikes,” the report said.

Francesco Pisano, manager of the Unosat program, told The Times that the report was compiled to assist UN agencies and aid organizations in Sri Lanka and was placed accidentally on one of their websites. He said that his analysts had concluded that some of the damage in the images could have been caused only by aerial bombing. “This kind of accuracy you acquire only with air power,” he said. “The craters beyond a certain size also make our analysts almost certain that these were air-dropped bombs.”

He declined to say which side was responsible. The army says that it destroyed the last of the Tigers’ small air wing when it shot down two of its planes over Colombo in February. Human rights activists said that the images required detailed analysis and further inquiries but could provide the hardest evidence yet that the army had shelled and bombed civilians.

“This is incontrovertible evidence that the Government has been lying for months,” Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, said. A Sri Lankan military spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

The images emerged as Sri Lanka rejected appeals for a ceasefire from David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister. “We have at no time gone for a ceasefire. We will not do so now,” President Rajapaksa said. “I don’t need lectures from Western representatives.”

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