UK Gov’t Accused of Cover-Up over Iraq War Minutes

February 26, 2009

Published on Wednesday, February 25, 2009 by Agence France Presse

LONDON  – The government said Tuesday it would veto publication of minutes from ministerial discussions about the legality of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, immediately drawing accusations of a cover-up.

[Tony Blair (C) disembarks from a hellicopter after arriving at Basra airport in Iraq, in 2004]Tony Blair (C) disembarks from a hellicopter after arriving at Basra airport in Iraq, in 2004

Anti-war campaigners believe the minutes may conceal damaging information about how then prime minister Tony Blair’s government reached the decision to support the US-led invasion. However, current Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s administration fears publishing the minutes may hinder ministers’ ability to speak freely at confidential weekly Cabinet meetings.

“Confidentiality serves to promote thorough decision-making,” Justice Secretary Jack Straw told parliament’s lower House of Commons.

“Disclosure of the Cabinet minutes in this case jeopardises that space for thought and debate at precisely the point where it has its greatest utility.

“In short, the damage that disclosure of the minutes in this instance would far outweigh any corresponding public interest in their disclosure.”

Some lawmakers greeted his announcement with cries of “shame!”

One who supported his decision was Lord Robin Butler, once Britain’s highest ranking civil servant, who said Cabinet minutes should be exempted from the freedom of information rules under which the government had faced calls to release the minutes.

“There will always be an inhibition to candour in important discussions in government because those taking part in them will be uncertain whether what they are going to say is going to be revealed under the Freedom of Information Act or not,” said Butler, who led a 2004 inquiry on government intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in the lead up to the invasion.

The government’s unprecedented move came after the Information Tribunal watchdog last month ordered the release of minutes from Cabinet meetings on March 13 and 17, 2003, when ministers had discussed whether war was allowed under international law.

Campaigners are particularly keen to get hold of the minutes due to concerns about advice given to Blair’s Cabinet by Peter Goldsmith, then the attorney general, or senior legal adviser.

In advice published on March 17 of that year, Goldsmith stated that military action against Iraq was legal. But Goldsmith’s earlier, more equivocal counsel was not disclosed at that stage and eventually leaked out.

Goldsmith then denied that ministers had pressured him into changing his mind to rule that invading Iraq would be legal under international law, even without a second United Nations Security Council resolution.

Blair faced heavy criticism from many for backing former US president George W. Bush in invading Iraq to oust dictator Saddam Hussein despite failing to secure a second UN resolution.

Kate Hudson, chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, called the veto “disgraceful,” adding it was “yet another attempt to suppress public debate on the biggest political scandal in decades.”

“The use of the veto cannot be justified in any way — there is no risk to candid discussions in Cabinet as such minutes do not single out those making each point,” she said.

“The disgrace of the attorney general ‘changing his mind’ on whether the war could be justified must be exposed in all its detail.”

Straw’s move was backed by the main opposition Conservative Party, although justice spokesman Dominic Grieve urged a public inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war.

Copyright © 2009 AFP

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Guantánamo: we need the truth

February 26, 2009

Without transparency about Binyam Mohamed’s torture, the damage done will linger for years after the camp’s closure

With a stoic grace, Binyam Mohamed has described his return to the UK today after seven long years of detention in Guantánamo Bay as “more in sadness than in anger”.

I have met that sense of emptiness and loss before. I have worked with two constituents who returned to the UK after a long incarceration in Guantánamo. In both cases the men had been illegally taken, in the process known as extraordinary rendition, by the CIA from an African country; and in both cases there were allegations of torture and degrading treatment. The journey to rebuild a life and to reconnect with family has been long, slow and fraught with pain. How do you come to terms with the lost years, the shame of allegations you cannot refute, or to witnessing humanity at its very darkest? Binyam Mohamed will need his friends and family around him, and the time and space to move on. It will therefore fall to others to ask the vital questions he is too weary to ask for himself.

We must not be squeamish or turn a blind eye to what has happened to him. Over seven years he has been shackled and blindfolded, flown to dark prisons across the world and kept incommunicado. He has made allegations of systematic torture, and says he had up to 20 or 30 cuts made into his penis and genitalia, with chemicals poured on the wounds for extra pain. In Guantánamo, reports suggest he was routinely humiliated and abused, resulting in long periods on hunger strike in protest. In all this time, Mohamed was never charged with a crime.

We might have expected the government to protect a UK resident from such barbaric treatment. Instead, their fingerprints are all over his case file.

Torture is wrong, pure and simple. Civilised and democratic governments, including Britain, should have absolutely no role in a practice that is both ineffective and inhumane, and there is no excuse to put our so-called special relationship with the US before the rule of law. It is not enough to simply speak out against torture: the foreign secretary has a duty to help root out and end such practices.

We cannot stamp out torture unless we know why and how it was allowed to happen in the first place. Barack Obama’s commitment to close Guantánamo is a huge leap forward, but we need a full investigation to make sure that such fundamental basic principles can never be flouted again. Without this openness and transparency, the damage done by Guantánamo will linger on long after the detention camp is closed.

The Labour government should be standing up to the United States, not colluding in a cover-up. If British residents have been subjected to torture, and if our own government have turned a blind eye, then we have a right to know. If the British government is sitting on vital evidence then it should immediately release it to the public.

Binyam Mohamed has said that, when he asked a camp guard why he was being tortured, the guard replied, “It’s just to degrade you, so when you leave here, you’ll have the scars and you’ll never forget.”

We should not forget either. The wounds and scars inflicted on Mohamed are not just a personal tragedy for him, they also represent a vicious assault on the values and humanity of our country. Labour’s already bruised and battered human rights record lies in tatters. President Obama has promised a fresh start but, before the slate can be wiped clean, we have to be told the truth.

Sarah Teather is Liberal Democrat MP for Brent East and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Guantánamo Bay

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Tony Cliff: Rosa Luxemburg – Imperialism and War

February 25, 2009

The fight against imperialism and war

Marxists.org

During the two decades preceding the outbreak of the First World War support for imperialism grew steadily, within the Socialist International.

The Stuttgart Congress of the International in 1907 showed this clearly. The colonial question was placed on the agenda because at this time the jostling of imperialist powers in Africa and Asia was becoming fierce. The socialist parties did indeed speak out against the rapacity of their own governments, but as the discussion at the Stuttgart Congress showed, a consistent anti-colonialist position was far from the thoughts of many leaders of the International. The Congress appointed a Colonial Commission, the majority of which drafted a report stating that colonialism had some positive aspects. Its draft resolution stated, “[The Congress] does not reject on principle and for all time every colonial policy.” Socialists should condemn the excesses of colonialism, but should not renounce it altogether. Instead:

… they are to advocate reforms, to improve the lot of the natives … and they are to educate them for independence by all possible means.

To this purpose the representatives of the socialist parties should propose to their governments to conclude an international treaty, to create a Colonial Law, which shall protect the rights of the natives and which would be guaranteed by all the signatory States.

This draft resolution was in fact defeated, but by a rather slim majority – 127 against 108. Thus practically half the Congress sided openly with imperialism.

When the First World War, which was essentially a fight between the imperialist powers for the division of the colonies, broke out in 1914, its support by the majority leaders of the Socialist International did not come out of the blue.

At the Stuttgart Congress Rosa Luxemburg came out clearly against imperialism, proposing a resolution which outlined the policy necessary to meet the threat of imperialist war:

In the event of a threat of war it is the duty of the workers and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved to do everything possible to prevent the outbreak of war by taking suitable measures, which can of course change or be intensified in accordance with the intensification of the class struggle and the general political situation.

In the event of war breaking out nevertheless, it is their duty to take measures to bring it to an end as quickly as possible, and to utilise the economic and political crisis brought about by the war to arouse the masses of the people and accelerate the overthrow of capitalist class rule.

This resolution made it clear that socialists should oppose imperialism and its war, and that the only way to put an end to both is through the overthrow of capitalism, of which both are the outgrowth.

This resolution was passed, but even so it was becoming more and more evident that, of those leaders who were not openly supporting colonialism, many did not conceive of the fight against imperialism in revolutionary terms.

These leaders, whose main spokesman was Kautsky, adopted the view that imperialism was not a necessary outgrowth of capitalism, but an abscess which the capitalist class as a whole would more and more wish to get rid of. Kautsky’s theory was that imperialism was a method of expansion supported by certain small but powerful capitalist groups (the banks and the armament kings), which was contrary to the needs of the capitalist class as a whole, as expenditure on armaments reduced available capital for investment in the country and abroad, and therefore affected the majority of the capitalist class which would progressively increase its opposition to the policy of armed imperialist expansion. Echoing the same ideas, Bernstein, as late as 1911, argued confidently that the desire for peace was becoming universal and that it was out of the question that war should break out. The armaments race, according to the Kautsky-led “Marxist Centre”, was an anomaly that could be overcome by general disarmament agreements, international arbitration courts, peace alliances, and the formation of the United States of Europe. In short, the “Marxist Centre” relied on the powers-that-be to bring peace on earth.

Rosa Luxemburg brilliantly tore to shreds this capitalist pacifism:

… the belief that capitalism is possible without expansion, is the theoretical formula for a certain definite tactical tendency. This conception tends to regard the phase of imperialism not as a historical necessity, not as the final bout between capitalism and socialism, but rather as the malicious invention of a group of interested parties. It tries to persuade the bourgeoisie that imperialism and militarism are deleterious even from the standpoint of bourgeois interests, in the hope that it will then be able to isolate the alleged handful of interested parties and so form a block between the proletariat and the majority of the bourgeoisie with a view to “curbing” imperialism, starving it out by “partial disarmament”, and “removing its sting”. Just as a bourgeois Liberalism in its period of decay appealed from the “ignorant” monarchs to the “enlightened” monarchs, now the “Marxist Centre” proposes to appeal from the “unreasonable” bourgeoisie to the “reasonable” bourgeoisie with a view to dissuading it from a policy of imperialism with all its catastrophic results to a policy of international disarmament treaties; from an armed struggle for world dominance to a peaceable federation of democratic national States. The general settling of accounts between the proletariat and capitalism, the solution of the great contradiction between them, resolves itself into an idyllic compromise for the “mitigation of imperialist contradictions between the capitalist States”. [29]

How apt these words are, not only for the bourgeois pacifism of Kautsky and Bernstein, but for all those who adhered to the League of Nations, the United Nations, “collective security”, or Summit talks!

Rosa Luxemburg showed that imperialism and imperialist war could not be overcome within the framework of capitalism, as they grow out of the vital interests of capitalist society.

The Guiding Principles of the Spartakus League drawn up by Rosa Luxemburg stated:

Imperialism, the last phase and highest development of the political rule of capitalism, is the deadly enemy of the workers of all countries … The struggle against imperialism is at the same time the struggle of the proletariat for political power, the decisive conflict between Capitalism and Socialism. The final aim of Socialism can be achieved only if the international proletariat fights uncompromisingly against imperialism as a whole, and takes the slogan “war against war” as a practical guide to action, summoning up all its strength and all its capacity for self-sacrifice. [30]

Thus the central theme of Rosa Luxemburg’s anti-imperialist policy was that the fight against war is inseparable from the fight for socialism.

With great passion Rosa Luxemburg ends her most important anti-war pamphlet, The Crisis of Social Democracy (better known as the Junius Brochure, as she wrote under the pseudonym Junius):

Imperialist bestiality has been let loose to devastate the fields of Europe, and there is one incidental accompaniment for which the “cultured world” has neither the heart nor conscience – the mass slaughter of the European proletariat … It is our hope, our flesh and blood, which is falling in swathes like corn under the sickle. The finest, the most intelligent, the best-trained forces of international Socialism, the bearers of the heroic traditions of the modern working-class movement, the advanced guard of the world proletariat, the workers of Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia, are being slaughtered in masses. That is a greater crime by far than the brutish sack of Louvain or the destruction of Rheims Cathedral. It is a deadly blow against the power which holds the whole future of humanity, the only power which can save the values of the past and carry them on into a newer and better human society. Capitalism has revealed its true features; it betrays to the world that it has lost its historical justification, that its continued existence can no longer be reconciled with the progress of mankind …

Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles! Long live Democracy! Long live the Tsar and Slavdom! Ten thousand blankets, guaranteed in perfect condition! A hundred thousand kilos of bacon, coffee substitutes – immediate delivery! Dividends rise and proletarians fall. And with each one sinks a fighter for the future, a soldier of the Revolution, a liberator of humanity from the yoke of capitalism, and finds a nameless grave.

The madness will cease and the bloody product of hell come to an end only when the workers of Germany and France, of Great Britain and Russia, awaken from their frenzy, extend to each other the hand of friendship, and drown the bestial chorus of imperialist hyenas with the thunderous battle cry of the modern working-class movement: “Workers of the World Unite!” [31]

With visionary power Rosa Luxemburg states:

Bourgeois society faces a dilemma; either a transition to Socialism, or a return to barbarism … we face the choice: either the victory of imperialism and the decline of all culture, as in ancient Rome – annihilation, devastation, degeneration, a yawning graveyard; or the victory of Socialism – the victory of the international working class consciously assaulting imperialism and its method: war. This is the dilemma of world history, either – or; the die will be cast by the class-conscious proletariat. [32]

And we who live in the shadow of the H-bomb …

Notes

29. R. Luxemburg, Gesammelte, vol.III, p.481.

30. Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin, 1957), vol.I, pp.280-281.

31. R. Luxemburg, Ausgewählte, vol.I, pp.391-394.

32. R. Luxemburg, Ausgewählte, vol.I, p.270

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Leon Trotsky: Lenin on Imperialism

February 25, 2009

By Leon Trotsky, February 1939

From the 1942 introduction by the Editors of Fourth International

The 18th anniversary of Lenin’s death (he died January 21, 1924) find our planet engulfed in the second World War.

In the midst of the first world slaughter Lenin had predicted this second slaughter. Still more, he predicted that so long as imperialism survived world conflicts would unfailingly follow. Should imperialism also survive this present war, there will come a third, and a fourth …

By means of the same scientific method which enabled him to predict the course of events under the continued rule of imperiaism, Lenin arrived at a realistic program of struggle – the only progam which offers society a way out from its impasse.

Lenin reached his maturity in the period of the First World War. His analysis of the imperialist wars and the conclusions he drew from this analysis are among the greatest triumphs of Marxism. It was the Leninist program against imperialism that paved the way for the victory of the Russian masses in October 1917. And this victory in its turn resulted in the termination of the first imperialist world war.

No program other than Lenin’s offers today salvation to mankind.

We can think of nothing more appropriate for 1942 than the publication of Trotsky’s brilliant summary of the Leninist conclusions from the war 1914-1918. The document was written by Leon Trotsky early in 1939. This is the first time it appears in English. – The Editors (Fourth International)

———————————————————-

“It has always been the case in history,” Lenin wrote in 1916, “that after the death of revolutionary leaders popular among the oppressed classes, their enemies try to assume their names in order to deceive the oppressed classes.” With no one has history performed this operation so cruelly as with Lenin himself. The present official doctrine of the Kremlin and the policies of the Comintern on the question of imperialism and war ride roughshod over all the conclusions that Lenin came to and brought the party to from 1914 through 1918.

With the outbreak of the war in August 1914 the first question which arose was this: Should the socialists of imperialist countries assume the “defense of the fatherland”? The issue was not whether or not individual socialists should fulfill the obligations of soldiers – there was no other alternative; desertion is not a revolutionary policy. The issue was: Should socialist parties support the war politically? vote for the war budget? renounce the struggle against the government and agitate for the “defense of the fatherland”? Lenins answer was: No! the party must not do so, it has no right to do so, not because war is involved but because this is a reactionary war, because this is a dogfight between the slave owners for the redivision of the world.

The formation of national states on the European continent occupied an entire epoch which began approximately with the Great French Revolution and concluded with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. During these dramatic decades the wars were predominantly of a national character. War waged for the creation or defense of national states necessary for the development of productive forces and of culture possessed during this period a profoundly progressive historical character. Revolutionists not only could but were obliged to support national wars politically.

From 1871 to 1914 European capitalism, on the foundation of national states, not only flowered but outlived itself by becoming transformed into monopoly or imperialist capitalism. “Imperialism is that stage of capitalism when the latter, after fulfilling everything in its power, begins to decline.” The cause for decline lies in this, that the productive forces are fettered by the framework of private property as well as by the boundaries of the national state. Imperialism seeks to divide and redivide the world. In place of national wars there come imperialist wars. They are utterly reactionary in character and are an expression of the impasse, stagnation, and decay of monopoly capital.

The Reactionary Nature of Imperialism

The world, however, still remains very heterogeneous. The coercive imperialism of advanced nations is able to exist only because backward nations, oppressed nationalities, colonial and semicolonial countries, remain on our planet. The struggle of the oppressed peoples for national unification and national independence is doubly progressive because, on the one side, this prepares more favorable conditions for their own development, while, on the other side, this deals blows to imperialism. That, in particular, is the reason why, in the struggle between a civilized, imperialist, democratic republic and a backward, barbaric monarchy in a colonial country, the socialists are completely on the side of the oppressed country notwithstanding its monarchy and against the oppressor country notwithstanding its “democracy.”

Imperialism camouflages its own peculiar aims – seizure of colonies, markets, sources of raw material, spheres of influence – with such ideas as “safeguarding peace against the aggressors,” “defense of the fatherland,” “defense of democracy,” etc. These ideas are false through and through. It is the duty of every socialist not to support them but, on the contrary, to unmask them before the people. “The question of which group delivered the first military blow or first declare war,” wrote Lenin in March 1915, “has no importance whatever in determining the tactics of socialists. Phrases about the defense of the fatherland, repelling invasion by the enemy, conducting a defensive war, etc., are on both sides a complete deception of the people.” “For decades,” explained Lenin, “three bandits (the bourgeoisie and governments of England, Russia, and France) armed themselves to despoil Germany. Is it surprising that the two bandits (Germany and Austria-Hungary) launched an attack before the three bandits succeeded in obtaining the new knives they had ordered?”

The objective historical meaning of the war is of decisive importance for the proletariat: What class is conducting it? and for the sake of what? This is decisive, and not the subterfuges of diplomacy by means of which the enemy can always be successfully portrayed to the people as an aggressor. Just as false are the references by imperialists to the slogans of democracy and culture. “… The German bourgeoisie … deceives the working class and the toiling masses by vowing that the war is being waged for the sake of … freedom and culture, for the sake of freeing the peoples oppressed by czarism. The English and French bourgeoisies … deceive the working class and the toiling masses by vowing that they are waging war … against German militarism and despotism.” A political superstructure of one kind or another cannot change the reactionary economic foundation of imperialism. On the contrary, it is the foundation that subordinates the superstructure to itself. “In our day … it is silly even to think of a progressive bourgeoisie, a progressive bourgeois movement. All bourgeois democracy … has become reactionary.” This appraisal of imperialist “democracy” constitutes the cornerstone of the entire Leninist conception.

Since war is waged by both imperialist camps not for the defense of the fatherland or democracy but for the redivision of the world and colonial enslavement, a socialist has no right to prefer one bandit camp to another. Absolutely in vain is any attempt to “determine, from the standpoint of the international proletariat, whether the defeat of one of the two warring groups of nations would be a lesser evil for socialism.” In the very first days of September 1914, Lenin was already characterizing the content of the war for each of the imperialist countries and for all the groupings as follows: “The struggle for markets and for plundering foreign lands, the eagerness to head off the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and to crush democracy within each country, the urge to deceive, divide, and crush the proletarians of all countries, to incite the wage slaves of one nation against the wage slaves of another nation for the profits of the bourgeoisie – that is the only real content and meaning of the war.” How far removed is all this from the current doctrine of Stalin, Dimitrov, and Co.!

It is impossible to fight against imperialist war by sighing for peace after the fashion of the pacifists. “One of the ways of fooling the working class is pacifism and the abstract propaganda of peace. Under capitalism, especially in its imperialist stage, wars are inevitable.” A peace concluded by imperialists would only be a breathing spell before a new war. Only a revolutionary mass struggle against war and against imperialism which breeds war can secure a real peace. “Without a number of revolutions the so-called democratic peace is a middle-class utopia.”

The struggle against the narcotic and debilitating illusions of pacifism enters as the most important element into Lenin’s doctrine. He rejected with especial hostility the demand for “disarmament as obviously utopian under capitalism.”

The Roots of Social-Chauvinism

Most of the labor parties in the advanced capitalist countries turned out on the side of their respective bourgeoisies during the war. Lenin named this tendency as social chauvinism: socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds. The betrayal of internationalism did not fall from the skies but came as an inevitable continuation and development of the policies of reformist adaptation. “The ideological-political content of opportunism and of social chauvinism is one and the same: class collaboration instead of class struggle, support of ones own government when it is in difficulties instead of utilizing these difficulties for the revolution.”

The period of capitalist prosperity immediately prior to the last war – from 1909 to 1913 – tied the upper layers of the proletariat very closely with imperialism. From the superprofits obtained by the imperialist bourgeoisie from colonies and from backward countries in general, juicy crumbs fell to the lot of the labor aristocracy and the labor bureaucracy. In consequence, their patriotism was dictated by direct self-interest in the policies of imperialism. During the war, which laid bare all social relations, “the opportunists and chauvinists were invested with a gigantic power because of their alliance with the bourgeoisie, with the government and with the general staffs.”

The intermediate and perhaps the widest tendency in socialism is the so-called center (Kautsky et al.) who vacillated in peace time between reformism and Marxism and who, while continuing to cover themselves with broad pacifist phrases, became almost without exception the captives of social chauvinists. So far as the masses were concerned they were caught completely off guard and duped by their own apparatus, which had been created by them in the course of decades. After giving a sociological and political appraisal of the labor bureaucracy of the Second International, Lenin did not halt midway. “Unity with opportunists is the alliance of workers with their own national bourgeoisie and signifies a split in the ranks of the international revolutionary working class.” Hence flows the conclusion that internationalists must break with the social chauvinists. “It is impossible to fulfill the tasks of socialism at the present time, it is impossible to achieve a genuine international fusion of workers without decisively breaking with opportunism …” as well as with centrism, “this bourgeois tendency in socialism.” The very name of the party must be changed. “Isn’t it better to cast aside the name of Social Democrats, which has been smeared and degraded, and to return to the old Marxist name of Communists?” It is time to break with the Second International and to build the Third.

* * *

What has changed in the twenty-odd years that have since elapsed? Imperialism has assumed an even more violent and oppressive character. Its most consistent expression is fascism. Imperialist democracies have fallen several rungs lower and are themselves evolving into fascism naturally and organically. Colonial oppression becomes all the more intolerable the sharper is the awakening and eagerness of oppressed nationalities for national independence. In other words, all those traits which were lodged in the foundation of Lenin’s theory of imperialist war have now assumed a far sharper and more graphic character.

To be sure, communo-chauvinists refer to the existence of the USSR, which supposedly introduces a complete overturn into the politics of the international proletariat. To this one, can make the following brief reply: before the USSR arose, there existed oppressed nations, colonies, etc., whose struggle also merited support. If revolutionary and progressive movements beyond the boundaries of ones own country could be supported by supporting ones own imperialist bourgeoisie then the policy of social patriotism was in principle correct. There was no reason, then, for the founding of the Third International. This is one side of the case, but there is also another. The USSR has now been in existence for twenty-two years. For seventeen years the principles of Lenin remained in force. Communo-chauvinist policies took shape only four-five years ago. The argument from the existence of the USSR is therefore only a false cover.

If a quarter of a century ago Lenin branded as social chauvinism and as social treachery the desertion of socialists to the side of their nationalist imperialism under the pretext of defending culture and democracy, then from the standpoint of Lenin’s principles the very same policy today is all the more criminal. It is not difficult to guess how Lenin would have designated the present-day leaders of the Comintern who have revived all the sophistries of the Second International under the conditions of an even more profound decomposition of capitalist civilization.

There is a pernicious paradox in this, that the wretched epigones of the Comintern, who have turned its banner into a dirty rag with which to wipe away the tracks of the Kremlin oligarchy, call those “renegades” who have remained true to the teachings of the founder of the Communist International. Lenin was right: The ruling classes not only persecute great revolutionists during their lifetime but revenge themselves upon them after they are dead by measures even more refined, trying to turn them into icons whose mission is to preserve “law and order.” No one is, of course, under compulsion to take his stand on the ground of Lenin’s teachings. But we, his disciples, will permit no one to make mockery of these teachings and to transform them into their very opposite!

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Obama urged to halt Israel demolitions

February 25, 2009

From correspondents in Ramallah

Herald Sun, February 24, 2009 04:42am

THE Palestinian Authority has urged the US president to press Israel to scrap a plan to raze almost 90 homes in annexed Arab east Jerusalem.

“We call on President Barack Obama to intervene personally to have this project stopped,” Yasser Abed Rabbo, one of the main aides of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, said overnight.

The Palestinian owners of 88 houses in the Silwan neighbourhood have received eviction notices saying the structures will be destroyed because they were built or expanded without the necessary permits. The move would affect about 1500 people.

“It is a massacre that Israel will commit in this Holy City,” Abed Rabbo said, calling for “urgent Arab and international action to halt this dangerous project”.

He said some of the houses affected by the orders had been built before Israel captured east Jerusalem from Jordan during the 1967 Six-Day War.

He called for a day-long strike in east Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied West Bank to protest against the plan.

The Gulf Cooperation Council, which groups the six Gulf Arab states, backed the call for US intervention to stop what it called these “racist acts that defy human rights and international law”.

“This is a dangerous step taken within the Zionist entity’s strategy to change the demographic reality in Jerusalem, signalling the occupier’s attempts to turn the city Jewish,” the grouping’s secretary-general Abdulrahman al-Attiya said according to the official Saudi Press Agency.

Silwan, which abuts the Old City of Jerusalem, is home to 10,000 Palestinians.

Sixty Jewish families also live in the neighbourhood around the City of David archaeological park which Israeli authorities say was the capital of the ancient Israelite kingdom.

Israel, which considers the whole of Jerusalem its “eternal, undivided” capital, rarely grants building permits to Arab residents of east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want to make the capital of their promised state.

According to the Israeli B’Tselem human rights organisation, Israeli authorities have demolished about 350 houses in east Jerusalem since 2004, saying they were built without permits.

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Obama expands US military intervention in Pakistan

February 25, 2009
by Barry Grey
Global Research, February 23, 2009
World Socialist Web Site

The Obama administration is significantly expanding the US military role in Pakistan beyond that pursued by the Bush administration, directly employing US military force against anti-government Pakistani guerrillas involved only marginally, if at all, in attacks on US forces in neighboring Afghanistan, according to a recent article in the New York Times.

The article, entitled “Obama Expands Missile Strikes Inside Pakistan” and authored by Mark Mazzetti and White House correspondent David E. Sanger, cites two separate missile strikes inside Pakistan carried out February 14 and February 16 as evidence that “the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government.”

The Times reports that the strikes, carried out by drone aircraft, are the first to target alleged training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud, an Islamist insurgent leader identified early last year by both American and Pakistani officials as the orchestrator of the assassination of then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the wife of Pakistan’s current president and Pakistan People’s Party leader Asif Ali Zardari.

“Under President Bush,” the article states, “the United States frequently attacked militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban involved in cross-border attacks in Afghanistan, but had stopped short of raids aimed at Mr. Mehsud and his followers, who have played less of a direct role in attacks on American troops.”

As the article indicates, the missile strikes on Mehsud’s forces represent a qualitative expansion of the US war in the region, with the American military now directly intervening into internal Pakistani conflicts to bolster Washington’s client regime in Islamabad.

The strikes against Mehsud came in the same week that Obama announced a major military escalation in Afghanistan, ordering an additional 17,000 US troops into the country. They also came within days of talks in Pakistan between top political, military and intelligence officials there and Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke also met with officials in Afghanistan and India.

The Times notes that in a telephone interview last Friday, Holbrooke declined to comment on the strikes against Mehsud, and that the White House and the CIA similarly refused to comment.

The newspaper reports that Bush had included Mehsud’s name “in a classified list of military leaders whom the CIA and American commandos were authorized to capture or kill.” It says the February 14 strike was aimed “specifically” at Mehsud, but failed to kill him. The February 16 raid, it states, targeted a camp run by a top aide to Mehsud. Earlier reports said each of the strikes killed 30 people.

The article continues: “For months, Pakistani military and intelligence officials have complained about Washington’s refusal to strike at Baitullah Mehsud, even while CIA drones struck at Qaeda figures and leaders of the network run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a militant leader believed responsible for a campaign of violence against American troops in Afghanistan.”

The article suggests that the US has initiated attacks on Mehsud and his followers, in part, to induce the Pakistani regime to intensify its military operations against Taliban, Al Qaeda and other Islamist insurgent groups based in Pakistani tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan. “By striking at the Mehsud network,” it states, “the United States may be seeking to demonstrate to Mr. Zardari that the new administration is willing to go after the insurgents of greatest concern to the Pakistani leader.”

It then alludes to the deteriorating military and security situation of the Pakistani regime, which faces growing insurgencies in tribal regions that border on Afghanistan as well as the Taliban takeover of the Swat Valley in the more settled North West Frontier Province, and suggests that “American officials may also be prompted by growing concern that the militant attacks are increasingly putting the civilian government of Pakistan, a nation with nuclear weapons, at risk.”

The Times article also states that the US is continuing to carry out Special Forces operations on the ground inside Pakistan, in addition to its stepped-up missile attacks. Last September, US Special Forces troops attacked a Pakistani village in South Waziristan, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the Pakistani northwest border region with Afghanistan, killing between 15 and 20 people, including women and children.

That assault, the first clear case of an attack by US ground troops inside Pakistani territory, evoked condemnations from the government in Islamabad. According to the February 21 Times article however, “American Special Operations troops based in Afghanistan have also carried out a number of operations into Pakistan’s tribal areas since early September, when a commando raid that killed a number of militants was publicly condemned by Pakistani officials. According to a senior American military official, the commando missions since September have been primarily to gather intelligence.”

Additional evidence of a major extension of the US war into Pakistan is the revelation that at least some of the US drones used to fire missiles into Pakistani border regions, killing scores of civilians are inflaming local anger, are operating from a base inside Pakistan itself. Earlier this month, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, spoke of the existence of the base at a Senate hearing. The Pakistani government has denied the existence of the base, but the London Times and the Pakistani News have both published Google Earth images of three drones parked at the Shamsi air field in southwestern Pakistan.

Obama has made it clear that his administration’s response to the growth of insurgent Afghan forces and the worsening security situation facing the US and its puppet regime in Afghanistan, as well as the growing strength of anti-US and anti-government insurgents in Pakistan, is an expansion of American military violence both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The White House and the military are treating both countries as part of a single military theater.

The administration is conducting a review of its strategy in the region, which is to be completed by the beginning of April. This week, the US is hosting a high-level conference in Washington on the Afghan-Pakistan border region, which will be attended by Gates, Holbrooke, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Pakistan is sending its foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, its army chief, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and the head of its military intelligence service, Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha. Afghanistan is sending foreign minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta.

However, Obama, Gates and the military chiefs have already outlined a policy shift away from any pretense of democratic reform or “nation-building” in favor of a more concentrated focus on counter-insurgency operations aimed at wiping out popular resistance in both Afghanistan and Pakistan to US neo-colonial aims.

One issue to be discussed at the Washington conference this week is US concerns over a cease-fire agreement announced last week by the Pakistani government with Taliban insurgents in the Swat Valley.

As indicated by the actions taken in the five weeks since Obama’s inauguration, the US in embarked on a military escalation that will involve an even greater toll in Afghan and Pakistani lives as well as US casualties. So far, 26 American soldiers and 13 from other “coalition” countries have been killed in Afghanistan this year, almost twice as many as in the first two months of 2008, according to the web site iCasualties.org.

Last Wednesday, the day after Obama announced the dispatch of 17,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan, the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, held a press conference in which he called for 10,000 more troops beyond the 17,000 ordered so far by Obama. McKiernan said the additional troops did not represent a “temporary force uplift” but part of an expanded war that will continue for at least “three to four to five years.” Some foreign policy analysts are predicting that US troop levels in the region will eventually rise to 100,000.

In 2001, Washington used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to put into action long-developed plans to conquer Afghanistan and use it as a base to establish US hegemony in Central Asia, home to some of the richest deposits of oil and natural gas in the world. The inevitable result was a military disaster and the destabilization of the entire region.

Now, in pursuit of the same imperialist aims, the Obama administration is launching a major escalation that will only further destabilize the region, intensify tensions with rival power such as China and Russia, and cause untold death and destruction. There is a growing danger of a military conflagration throughout Central Asia and beyond.

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Who is Binyam Mohamed?

February 25, 2009

By Andy Worthington | Counterpunch, Feb 24, 2009

As British resident Binyam Mohamed stepped off a plane at RAF Northolt on Monday February 23, six years and ten months since he was first abducted by the Pakistani authorities at Karachi airport, it was impossible not to sympathize with the words written in a statement made by the tall, thin, slightly-stooped 30-year old, and delivered by his lawyers at a press conference.

“I hope you will understand that after everything I have been through I am neither physically nor mentally capable of facing the media on the moment of my arrival back to Britain,” the statement read. “Please forgive me if I make a simple statement through my lawyer. I hope to be able to do better in days to come, when I am on the road to recovery.”

For the last three and half years, since Binyam Mohamed’s lawyers (at Reprieve, the legal action charity) first released his harrowing account of his torture in Morocco at the hands of the CIA’s proxy torturers, the British resident’s story has, understandably, had few bright episodes. As Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s director, explained in his book Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side, during the three days in Guantánamo that Binyam related the story of his horrendous ordeal — for 18 months in Morocco, and then for another five months at the CIA’s own “Dark Prison” near Kabul, until he finally made false confessions that he was involved with al-Qaeda and had planned to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in New York — he explained, “I’m sorry I have no emotion when talking about the past, ‘cause I have closed. You have to figure out the emotion part — I’m kind of dead in the head.”

And yet, as Binyam embarks on his long “road to recovery” — attended by his lawyers, and, mercifully, by his sister Zuhra, who flew from her home in the United States to meet him, and to fill what would otherwise have been an aching void, as Binyam has no family in the UK — it is unlikely that the media will, in general, manage to report much of the man behind the myth that has grown up around him.

To that end, I thought it appropriate to relate a few anecdotes that bring Binyam the human being, rather than Binyam the prisoner, to life. The first comes from Stafford Smith’s book, where he describes his first meeting with Binyam as follows:

“Binyam was twenty-seven. He was tall and gangling, dark-skinned, originally from Ethiopia. He smiled and immediately told me how glad he was to see me. He spoke quietly, with a particular dignity. Some prisoners would take many hours of convincing that I was not from the CIA, but Binyam immediately opened up.”

Of particular interest is an extraordinary chapter, “Con-mission,” which relates the farcical story of Binyam’s first hearing for his proposed trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo, in 2006, just before the Commissions were declared illegal by the US Supreme Court. It’s worth buying the book for this chapter alone, as it explains in extraordinary detail quite how farcical Guantánamo’s rigged trial system was, and how it was exploited mercilessly by Binyam, who arranged for Stafford Smith to get him “a proper type of Islamic dress,” dyed orange (he wanted a Dutch football shirt, but Reprieve couldn’t find one), to make a clear visual statement in court that he was no ordinary defendant and this was no ordinary trial. He also asked for a marker pen and a piece of card, and, during the hearing, after he had thrown the judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kolhmann, off his stride by launching into a rambling monologue about justice that Kohlmann found himself unable to interrupt, he took the marker pen, scrawled “CON-MISSION” on it, showed it to the gathered journalists, and declared, “this is not a commission, this is a con-mission, is a mission to con the world, and that’s what it is, you understand.”

Warming to his theme, as Col. Kohlmann “ was staring into the headlights of Binyam’s speech and could see no way to cut him off,” he continued,

“When are you going to stop this? This is not the way to deal with this issue. That is why I don’t want to call this place a courtroom, because I don’t think it is a courtroom.”

“I am sure you wouldn’t agree with it, because if you was arrested somewhere in Arabia and Bin Laden says, ‘You know what, you are my enemy but I am going to force you to have a lawyer and I give you some bearded turban person,’ I don’t think you will agree with that. Forget the rules, regulations and crap … you wouldn’t deal with that. That is where we are. This is a bad place. You are in charge of it.”

Stafford Smith then proceeded to explain:

“It was an extraordinary lecture. Binyam finally came to a firm conclusion. ‘I am done. You can stop looking at the watch,’ he said. He then turned away from Kohlmann, as if to ignore any response. He was holding up his sign, ‘CON-MISSION,’ and waving it to the journalists behind him, just in case they had missed it the first time.”

The other story was related by another British resident held at Guantánamo, Bisher al-Rawi, who was released in March 2007, and his words capture how Binyam’s concern for justice permeated his entire approach to his imprisonment, and, in Bisher’s opinion, also reflected a very British approach that he had learned during the seven years he had lived in the UK before his capture:

“He is so British — I mean so British! The way he stands, the way he talks, his painstaking use of logic. He’s such a gentleman. And he is knowledgeable and he stands up for his rights in a really British way. Like with S.O.P. This is something the guards have. It is called Standard Operating Procedure — S.O.P. And the funny thing about this Standard Operating Procedure is that it changes every day. Every day you have new Standard Operating Procedure. And Binyam, he draws attention to this and insists on his entitlement to be treated the same way as the Standard Operating Procedure dictated the day before. And they hate him for this. But he’s just being British.”

Perhaps the media snipers who are asking why Binyam should be allowed back into the UK would like to dwell on this as they ignore both the seven years that he lived in Britain, when, as MI5 confirmed, he was “a nobody,” and was not wanted in connection with any crime, and the seven years that he spent in the custody of the United States — or its proxy torturers — when, as David Miliband, the foreign secretary, has conceded, he had “established an arguable case” that “he was subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by or on behalf of the United States,” and was also “subject to torture during such detention by or on behalf of the United States.”

In addition, as the British government struggles with claims that it has regularly fed intelligence information about British “terror suspects” seized in Pakistan to Pakistani agents, knowing full well that the Pakistanis regularly use torture, those same critics might want to recall the words of the judges who reviewed Binyam’s case in the High Court last summer. The judges explained that the British government’s involvement in Binyam’s case, and its relationship to the US — which involved sending agents to interview him in Pakistan, even though he was being held illegally, and providing and receiving intelligence about him while he was being tortured in Morocco — “went far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.”

There are more revelations to come about torture policies that involve — or involved — the US, the UK, Morocco, Pakistan and a host of other countries, but for now I’m content to let one of its victims try to rebuild his life in peace. As Binyam also explained in his statement after his release,

“I have been through an experience that I never thought to encounter in my darkest nightmares. Before this ordeal, ‘torture’ was an abstract word to me. I could never have imagined that I would be its victim. It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways — all orchestrated by the United States government.”

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of ‘The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison’ (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk
He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk

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Can Gaza Be Rebuilt Through Tunnels?

February 25, 2009

The Blockade Continues—No Supplies, No Rebuilding

by Ann Wright | CommonDreams.org, Feb 24, 2009

How do you rebuild 5,000 homes, businesses and government buildings when the only way supplies come into the prison called Gaza is through tunnels.  Will the steel I-beams for roofs bend 90 degrees to go through the tunnels from Egypt?   Will the tons of cement, lumber, roofing materials, nails, dry wall and paint be hauled by hand, load after load, 70 feet underground, through a tunnel 500 to 900 feet long and then pulled up a 70 foot hole and put into waiting truck in Gaza?

The gates to Gaza slammed shut again on Thursday, February 5, the day our three person group departed Gaza, having been allowed in for only 48 hours.  The Egyptian government closed the border crossing into Gaza continuing the sixteen month international blockade and siege.  The crossing had been briefly open to allow medical and humanitarian supplies into Gaza following the devastating 22 day attack by the Israeli military.  The attacks killed 1330 Palestinians and injured over 5,500.  The Israeli government said the attacks were to punish Hamas and other groups for firing unguided rockets into Israeli, rockets that over the past two years have killed about 25 Israelis.  Most international observers have called the Israeli response to the rocket attacks disproportionate and collective punishment, elements of war crimes.

Today, seventeen days after the gates swung closed on Gaza, they remain firmly locked.  Ceasefire talks in Cairo between the Israeli government and Hamas are stalled.  Opening the border with Egypt is a contentious point in the ceasefire negotiations.

For the people of Gaza, rebuilding their homes, businesses, factories is on hold.  Over 5,000 homes and apartment buildings were destroyed and hundreds of government buildings, including the Parliament building, were smashed. Building supplies, cement, wood, nails, glass will have to be brought in from outside Gaza.  Two cement factories in northern Gaza were completely destroyed by Israeli bombs.  Prime Minister Olmert’s spokesperson Mark Regev said reconstruction supplies like steel and cement can be used by Hamas to build more bunkers and rockets. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090218/wl_nm/us_palestinians_israel_5

Dissension in the Palestinian ranks between Fatah and Hamas continues, even after the brutal Israeli attack on Gaza.  Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad wants aid (perhaps as high as $2 billion) for rebuilding Gaza to be sent directly to each homeowner in Gaza, allowing donors to avoid the elected Hamas government.  The U.S., Israeli and other countries have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, and do not want international aid in Gaza administered by Hamas, even though the people of Gaza elected the Hamas government.  On March 2, an international donor conference will be held in Egypt to discuss the costs of rebuilding Gaza. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090218/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_palestinians_rebuilding_gaza_2)

Who Profits from War and Occupation?

Building supplies will have to be brought from outside Gaza.  Israel controls 90 percent of the land borders to Gaza-the northern and eastern borders and 100 percent of the ocean on the west side of Gaza.  Egypt controls the southern border with Gaza.

The Israelis who bombed Gaza will be the primary financial beneficiaries of the rebuilding of Gaza.  They bombed it and now will sell construction materials to rebuild what they have bombed, exactly like the United States has done in Iraq.  Egyptians too will benefit financially from the reconstruction-high priced small construction materials that will fit into the tunnels are no doubt have been transiting through the tunnels for the past 6 weeks.  Israeli women had created a website detailing who profits from occupation (http://www.whoprofits.org/)

No doubt a second website is under construction that will track which Israeli, Egyptian and American companies will benefit from the bombing of Gaza

Prisoner Exchanges as a Part of the Ceasefire

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his security cabinet said this week that no border crossings will be open until the Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit is returned to Israel.  Schalit was captured by Hamas in 2006 in an Israeli cross border raid into Gaza. Hamas has demanded the release of up to 1,400 Palestinian soldiers in exchange for Shalit

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said Hamas “had no objection” to Shalit’s release if Israel would release 1,400 of 11,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, including Parliamentarians elected in Gaza in 2006. In the past, Israel has agreed to exchanges of large numbers of Palestinian prisoners for a few captured troops or their bodies.  But Israeli and Palestinian officials had not agreed where the released prisoners would be sent after the swap. Israeli wants the prisoners expelled out of the country and Hamas wants them returned to their homes in Gaza or the West Bank. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090218/wl_nm/us_palestinians_israel_5)

“Open the Borders” International Delegation to Gaza

On March 5, I will be part of a 30-member international delegation that will travel to the Gaza border with Egypt in solidarity with the women of Gaza for International Women’s Day.  Israeli women will be at the Israeli border crossing into Gaza.   Groups all over the world will join in with pressure on the Israeli, Egyptian and American governments to open the border to Gaza and let the people of Gaza rebuild their lives.  For more information about the international delegation, see http://www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?id=4675

Ann Wright is a 29 year US Army/Army Reserves veteran who retired as a Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq.  She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia.  In December, 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.  She is the co-author of the book “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”  (www.voicesofconscience.com)

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POLITICS-US: Democrats Divided Over “Reckoning” for Bush

February 25, 2009

Analysis by William Fisher | Inter Press Service

NEW YORK, Feb 16 (IPS) – With growing public support for a public investigation of crimes that may have been committed by the administration of former president George W. Bush in waging its “global war on terror”, policy makers and legal experts are deeply divided on how to proceed – and President Barack Obama seems ambivalent about whether to proceed at all.

The president has said his view is that “nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.”

Before his nomination to be Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder appeared to take a stronger view.

He said, “Our government authorised the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution… We owe the American people a reckoning.”

But at his confirmation hearing before the Senate, Holder tempered his responses to adhere more closely to Obama’s position.

The president initially refrained from commenting on a proposal from the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, for a “truth commission” to investigate abuses of detainees, politically inspired moves at the Justice Department, and a whole range of decisions made during the Bush administration. At the time, Obama said he had not seen the Leahy proposal, although he has not explicitly ruled it out.

Such a “truth commission” is one of several ideas being offered by those who see a comprehensive look-back as essential to cleansing the U.S. justice system and restoring the U.S.’s reputation in the world.

Leahy said the primary goal of the commission would be to learn the truth rather than prosecute former officials, but said the inquiry should reach far beyond misdeeds at the Justice Department under Bush to include matters of Iraq prewar intelligence and the Defence Department.

The panel he envisions would be modeled after one that investigated the apartheid regime in South Africa. It would have subpoena power but would not bring criminal charges, he said.

Among the matters Leahy wants investigated by such a commission are: the firings of U.S. attorneys, treatment and torture of terror suspect detainees, and the authorisation of warrantless wiretapping. He said that witnesses before such a commission might have to be granted limited immunity from prosecution to obtain their testimony.

Other Democrats have called for criminal investigations of those who authorised certain controversial tactics in the war on terror. Republicans have countered that such decisions made in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks should not be second-guessed.

An arguably stronger measure has been proposed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, and nine other lawmakers. The measure would set up a National Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties, with subpoena power and a reported budget of around 3.0 million dollars.

It would investigate issues ranging from detainee treatment to waterboarding and extraordinary rendition. The panel’s members would come from outside the government and be appointed by the president and congressional leaders of both parties.

This body would be much like the 9/11 Commission, set up after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, to examine failures within government anti-terror efforts. The commission’s investigation did not lead to any prosecutions.

Human rights advocacy groups and many legal experts have been more forceful in their proposals.

For example, Amnesty International is urging its supporters to press lawmakers to investigate the U.S. government’s abuses in the war on terror and hold accountable those responsible. The organisation is calling on Obama and Congress to create an independent and impartial commission to examine the use of torture, indefinite detention, secret renditions and other illegal U.S. counterterrorism policies.

But the organisation does not necessarily see a conflict between a 9/11-type body and a “truth and reconciliation” commission. In answer to a question from IPS, Amnesty International’s Tom Parker said, “I don’t think the two approaches are mutually exclusive. Both could go forward at the same time. The immunities that may have to be granted by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission would not be absolute.”

Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, does not favour the “truth and reconciliation” approach.

She told IPS, “As President Obama said, ‘No one is above the law.’ His attorney general should appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute Bush administration officials and lawyers who set the policy that led to the commission of war crimes. Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are used for nascent democracies in transition. By giving immunity to those who testify before them, it would ensure that those responsible for torture, abuse and illegal spying will never be brought to justice.”

A similar view was expressed by Peter M. Shane, a law professor at Ohio State University. He told IPS, “The immunities that might be granted in connection with a congressional or commission investigation of the Bush administration could well compromise the prospects for criminal prosecution, as our experience with the Iran-Contra affair demonstrates. There is likewise reason to fear that justice cannot be completely served without recourse to prosecution.”

“On the other hand,” he said, “I believe our paramount need as a country is for a full and fair airing of the historical record; democracies depend, I think, on an unblinking understanding of their past.”

“One would hope that immunity might be granted as narrowly as possible and that efforts would be undertaken to allow the Justice Department to preserve its investigative integrity based on independently developed evidence. Should push come to shove, however, I think history is more important than prosecution,” he added.

Brian J. Foley, visiting associate professor at Boston University law school, takes a harder line. He told IPS, “Until we have Truth and Reconciliation Commissions rather than prosecutions for drug offenders and others accused of non-violent crimes whom we promiscuously throw into our overcrowded prisons, we should not bestow ‘justice lite’ on our political leaders. It appears that laws designed with government actors in mind were broken. There should be prosecutions.”

And Georgetown University’s David Cole, one of the country’s preeminent constitutional lawyers, believes the Obama administration or Congress “should at a minimum appoint an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States’ adoption of coercive interrogation policies.”

It should have “a charge to assess responsibility, not just to look forward”, he said.

This divergence of viewpoints – from doing nothing to appointing a special prosecutor – is putting President Obama in an uncomfortable position. The most recent Gallup Poll shows that a sizable majority of citizens favours an investigation into Bush-era misconduct.

But Obama appears reluctant to take any action that might further divide the country. Moreover, he may be loath to antagonise Republicans, whose support he may need on many other issues in the future.

The Democratically-controlled Congress does not need the president in order to act – it can hold extensive hearings, grant itself subpoena power and in effect take whatever action it desires short of legislation, which would require the president’s signature. But Congressional Democrats may well be reluctant to overtly defy the wishes of the president, who is the leader of their party.

So the form of the Bush-era retrospective – if there is to be one – is yet very much a work in progress that will continue to put pressure on the young Obama administration.

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Robert Fisk on Gaza and the media

February 24, 2009
By Stefan Christoff | Rabble.ca, February 23, 2009

Reporting independently from the front lines of war is an increasingly rare engagement for journalists working for major international media outlets. From Iraq to Afghanistan, reporters are increasingly embedded with Western military forces, operating without independence.

When Israeli military forces launched an invasion into the Gaza Strip, international journalists were barred entry into the territory by the Israeli government for the majority of the conflict, despite a ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court that called on the government to allow international reporters into the territory. Major international media outlets, including CNN and the BBC, ended up reporting from hilltops in Israeli-controlled territory kilometres away from the actual conflict.

British journalist Robert Fisk has offered fiercely independent accounts of conflicts throughout the Middle East for decades. Stationed in Beirut, Lebanon, Fisk reports for the UK-based Independent newspaper and is widely read around the world. Fisk spoke with community activist and journalist Stefan Christoff about the media response to the recent war on Gaza.

Stefan Christoff: Historical context is often not included in daily reporting on the Middle East. Could you offer some historical perspectives to the recent war in Gaza?

Robert Fisk: In 1948 when the Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes — 750,000 is the figure widely accepted — those in the north in the Galilee area of what became Israel fled into Lebanon, those in the Jerusalem area fled east toward what we now call the West Bank and those in the south fled into what we now call the Gaza Strip.

For example, in 2000, after the Israelis finished their final withdrawal after 22 years of occupation and went across the border back into Israel, many Palestinians in Lebanon went down to the border and looked across, not because they were looking at northern Israel but because they were looking at the northern part of Palestine as they had known it – some could actually see the villages that their parents or grandparents had come from in 1948.

So there is this whole Diaspora around the state of Israel who can’t go home because their home is on the other side of the border. This reality revolves around the whole issue of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 on the right of return, [which stipulates that] these Palestinian refugees have the right to return to their homes.

Well over half the people living in Gaza are families, either survivors or descendants of Palestinians who lived only 10 or 12 miles into what is today Israel. So when you hear the Israelis say the terrorists are firing rockets into Israel, the Palestinians in Gaza can say in many cases, ‘Well, my grandson is firing a rocket at my town because before 1948 these areas would have been Palestinian property.’

SC: Can you talk about your perceptions of media coverage on the latest war in Gaza?

RF: There were two things that happened. First, the international press allowed for their own humiliation: Israel told the press that they couldn’t go into Gaza and they didn’t really try to, so the press sat outside Gaza and pontificated from two miles away. Israel wanted to keep the international press out of Gaza and they were kept out, that was that.

It is instructive to note that no major Western media outlet had a reporter based inside Gaza who would have been there when it started. Clearly, after the kidnapping of a BBC reporter, who was based in Gaza, it is not surprising that the international news agencies were hesitant to base reporters there. However, it is also instructive to note that it was the Hamas government that had the BBC reporter released, which is not often mentioned now.

SC: So what kind of more widespread effect did the reporters who were left in Gaza have on Western media?

RF: Faced with the fact that the only journalists left inside Gaza were Palestinian reporters, the major networks were forced to hand over their reporting to Palestinian Arabs, who in many cases were refugees inside Gaza. This meant that you had Palestinian reporters on the ground talking about their own people, unencumbered by Western reporters cross-questioning them or trying to put 50 per cent of the story on one side and 50 per cent of the story on the other side.

Al Jazeera came out as the heroes of journalism because they had their international service, their English service and also their Arabic service fully operational from offices inside Gaza. Individual Palestinians working for Western news organizations showed that they could be competent journalists, and the Western journalists who sat outside Gaza looked as pathetic as their reporting on the Middle East is becoming.

Palestinian reporters were telling their own stories, in the case of [the Independent‘s] Palestinian reporter inside Gaza, his father was killed in an air strike, his father, who was a pro-Palestinian Authority, English-speaking, well-educated judge, was killed in his orchard. So the Independent had on our front page this terrible and tragic story of this innocent man destroyed, atomized into pieces of flesh by an Israeli air strike on his orchard, a story reported by his own son in our newspaper.

So this was the kind of journalism from Palestine that we hadn’t seen in the major [Western] press, so there was an upside to the [international] press being banned from Gaza. However, the work of the international reporters was truly pathetic.

Stefan Christoff is a community organizer and journalist based in Montreal.

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