Half of Afghan prisoners have not faced trial-U.N.

December 2, 2008
AlertNet, 01 Dec 2008 12:18:37 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Jonathon Burch
KABUL, Dec 1 (Reuters) – More Afghans are being detained without trial, with poor people or those without powerful connections, the most common victims, unable to pay bribes to secure their release, the United Nations said on Monday.
Afghanistan is emerging from nearly 30 years of war and its judicial and law enforcement systems are still very much in their infancy. Corruption is endemic at all levels of the police force, experts say, who often milk the populace for bribes.
“Pre-trial detention is supposed to be the exception and not the rule, but in this country it is more the rule, especially if you are poor and without powerful friends,” said Christina Oguz, head of the U.N.’s drug and crime agency in Afghanistan.
Speaking at a news conference in Kabul on Monday, Oguz talked about the prevalence of what she called, “telephone justice”, whereby a phonecall to the right police officer or judge was sometimes all that was needed to be released.
“If you have powerful friends and commit a crime you may not even face a trial because a phonecall to the police or to the prosecutor can be made to release you,” said Oguz.
“If you don’t have these powerful friends you may end up behind bars even if you are a child,” she said.
While the number of prisoners in Afghanistan remains relatively low, the figure has has more than doubled in the last three years, says the U.N., with 12,500 prisoners in the country compared with 6,000 in January 2006.
In December 2007, the U.N. estimated that around 50 percent of prisoners were pre-trial detainees.
Another problem facing prisoners in Afghanistan, said Oguz, is that many often remain in jail long after their sentence has expired, in effect serving “double” sentences as they are unable to pay the additional fine.
“If you are poor, again, you may end up staying in prison even though your prison sentence has ended because you cannot pay your fund or you cannot bribe yourself out,” said Oguz. “We have found many cases of people who are still in prison after their time has been served,” she said. Oguz said that Afghanistan needed to look to alternatives to imprisonment, such as suspended sentences, house arrests and fines but not on top of any prison sentence.
“Prison should not be the first sentence that comes to your mind for the majority of cases,” she said. “Prison is often a very expensive way of making a bad situation worse.” (Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

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Israel Turns Back Gaza Aid Boat

December 2, 2008

Antiwar.com,  December 1, 2008

A Libyan cargo vessel weighed down with 3,000 tonnes of food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods, was barred from entering the Gaza Strip yesterday by the Israeli navy. Palestinian officials say they expect the vessel to attempt to reach the Gaza Strip again.

Andy David, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, defended to move, saying Israel’s policy on the naval blockade was “very clear,” He said Israeli naval ships approached the aid boat and ordered it via radio to turn back, adding “Anyone wishing to transfer humanitarian aid into Gaza is welcome to do it in coordination with Israel and through the regular crossings.”

Yet this has not been the case in recent days,  after an Israeli raid on the strip earlier this month sparked an exchange of strikes and a full closure on the strip. Since then, Israel has only occasionally allowed small amounts of humanitarian aid across the border, and has expressed public outrage at the suggestions of UN officials that refusing to allow food (and officially barring the importation of shoes) into a small region inhabited by 1.5 million people was a “direct contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law.”

Israeli officials condemned concern over the humanitarian situation in Gaza as “utterly shortsighted” and have insisted that their refusal to allow basic humanitarian aid into the strip is entirely the fault of the Hamas government. The crossings were expected to open briefly last Thursday (coincidentally Thanksgiving in the United States), but the government decided against it after a rocket landed in an empty field in southern Israel, doing no damage and causing no injuries. Since then no aid has been permitted to enter Gaza by land or, as witnessed today, by sea.

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compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]

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Clinton’s India ties may complicate Obama policy

December 2, 2008

MATTHEW LEE and PETE YOST
AP News

Dec 01, 2008 18:30 EST

The close ties with India that Secretary of State-nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton forged during her years as a U.S. senator and presidential candidate could complicate diplomatic perceptions of her ability to serve as a neutral broker between India and its nuclear neighbor, Pakistan.

With tensions rising between India and Pakistan after last week’s deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Hillary Clinton faces an early test of her influence in South Asia, where President-elect Barack Obama on Monday said that instability and the rise of militants pose “the single most important threat against the American people.”

Both Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have maintained warm relations for years with India and the Indian-American community. As New York’s senator for eight years and as a 2008 presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton toured India and visited with Indian officials and entrepreneurs, and her campaigns profited from the largesse of Indian-American fundraisers. Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation has been funded by some of the same well-heeled Indian businessmen who backed his wife’s campaigns.

In her new role as the nation’s top diplomat, Hillary Clinton would project Obama’s policies, not her own. But even foreign affairs experts who wave off suggestions that Hillary Clinton would lean toward either Asian power acknowledge that the perception of such a tilt could cause suspicions in Pakistan. South Asia experts reject the assertion of bias, but they acknowledge it exists.

“There are some who believe it, but I think most people think she is an objective observer with a good understanding of South Asia,” said Walter Andersen, Associate Director of the South Asia Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies. Andersen insisted perceptions of Hillary Clinton’s bias toward India are “based on inaccuracy.”

Karin Von Hippel, a South Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, agreed, saying Hillary Clinton is “very balanced” and “understands almost better than anybody how delicate the situation is between these two countries.”

Still, perceptions matter, especially in the region. “There are concerns that she is seen as pro-India, she and her husband both,” said one Washington-based foreign diplomat with extensive experience in South Asia. “The Pakistanis definitely see them as closer and friendlier to India.”

The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue of India and Pakistan, which have fought three wars — two of them over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir — since winning independence from Britain.

Influential members of the Indian-American community have rejoiced in Hillary Clinton’s selection as secretary of state.

“Sen. Clinton will continue the close relationship between the United States and India that started with the Clinton administration and has progressed in the Bush years,” said Varun Nikore, founder of the Indian-American Leadership Initiative, an independent political organization supporting Democratic candidates.

“You cannot expect that any nominee for secretary of state would have a special relationship going into this job, but we’re very lucky that we have in Sen. Clinton someone who is already well-versed on one of the more important countries and emerging economies in the world,” said Nikore.

A current State Department official allowed that Bill Clinton had substantially boosted engagement with India, but noted that any administration would likely have done so. The official stressed that President George W. Bush has continued that course, most recently signing a civilian nuclear pact with New Delhi.

“None of this has been meant to exclude Pakistan, but it is a zero-sum game when you are dealing with these two countries,” the official said. “You can’t do something with one without it affecting the other.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration thinking.

Ties between the United States and India improved dramatically, as did Pakistani suspicions of pro-India bias in Washington, during Bill Clinton’s administration, which embraced India as a major power and market as it opened its economy in the 1990s.

The administration’s disparate treatment of India and Pakistan was most apparent during a 2000 Asian trip, with the president spending five days in India and seven hours in Pakistan.

The Clinton White House barred media coverage of the Pakistan stop and released only an official photo of Bill Clinton and Gen. Pervez Musharraf seated among aides, 12 feet across from each other. Bill Clinton admonished Pakistan’s military government to retreat from its nuclear weapons course and to lower dangerous tensions with India.

In a speech to India’s Parliament on that trip, Bill Clinton said he shared many of New Delhi’s concerns about “the course Pakistan is taking; your disappointment that past overtures have not always met with success; your outrage over recent violence. I know it is difficult to be a democracy bordered by nations whose governments reject democracy.”

Early during her presidential campaign in 2008, the former first lady pointed to the “strong partnership” that Bill Clinton forged between India and the U.S. As New York’s senator, Hillary Clinton also touted her role as co-chair of the Senate India Caucus.

“As president I will work with India to make our strong friendship even stronger,” Hillary Clinton promised earlier this year.

During the presidential campaign, Indian-Americans reciprocated Hillary Clinton’s long-standing embrace of India by giving generously — $2 million at a single fundraiser in New York in 2007.

At one point, the Obama camp prepared, but then disavowed, a campaign memo that carried the headline “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab),” a mocking play on the standard reference to a candidates’ party and constituency.

The memo, which created a furor in India and the Indian-American community, also referred to the Clintons’ investments in India, Sen. Clinton’s fundraising among Indian-Americans and the former president’s $300,000 in speech fees from Cisco, a company that has moved U.S. jobs to India.

Obama called the memo “a dumb mistake” and “not reflective of the long-standing relationship I have had with the Indian-American community.”

Now as president-elect, Obama has chosen Hillary Clinton to be his chief diplomat and highlighted India and Pakistan as priorities for his administration.

“The situation in South Asia as a whole and the safe havens for terrorists that have been established there represent the single most important threat against the American people,” he told reporters at a news conference Monday as he unveiled his foreign policy and national security team, including Hillary Clinton.

___

Associated Press writer Devlin Barrett contributed to this report.

Source: AP News

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Trial into the murder of human rights journalist Anna Politkovskay

December 2, 2008

Livewire.amnesty.org

Friederike Behr blogs from Russia on the Anna Politkovskaya murder trial

Anna Politkovskaya - murdered on 6 October 2006. ©Katja Tähjä

Anna Politkovskaya – murdered on 6 October 2006. ©Katja Tähjä

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered on 6 October 2006 in Moscow. She was shot on a Saturday afternoon, when she walked into the lift in the apartment building she lived in.

I had met her several times, one time right after Russian special forces had stormed a theatre in Moscow, where a group of men and women had taken over 800 people hostage. Anna Politkovskaya had tried to intervene and help to save the lives of those in the theatre. Subsequently, the theatre was stormed and about 150 people died.

Another time, in the Caucasus, she had just returned from meeting then Chechen prime minister Ramzan Kadyrov. He and his assistant had issued quite serious threats against her. Both times I was very much impressed by the way she responded to such experiences, not stepping back an inch, determined to continue her work.

Anna Politkovskaya had reported about the human rights situation in Chechnya since 1999 for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta . Her fearless and dedicated coverage of the conflict had been acknowledged through numerous awards including the Global Award for Human Rights Journalism from Amnesty International UK in 2001. She had also written extensively about abuses in other parts of Russia such as violence in the army, corruption in state structures, and police brutality.

Anna Politkovskaya faced intimidation and harassment from the Russian and Chechen authorities due to her outspoken criticism of government policy and action. She had been detained and threatened with serious reprisals for her reporting on several occasions.

Amnesty International campaigned throughout the period of investigation into her murder for the investigation to be full, thorough and impartial and for everyone involved in her murder to be brought to justice in procedures in line with international fair trial standards. Amnesty International members around the world have campaigned for this for the last two years.

The trial into her murder started with a preliminary hearing in October 2008, the first public hearing took place on 17 November.

Amnesty International was deeply concerned about the decision of the judge at Moscow’s District Military Court on 19 November to close the hearing based on expressions of fear from the side of the jury. No member of the jury had received any threats and as it turned out later, when one of the jury members went public and gave an interview to the Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy, the jury had not requested for the trial to be held in camera.

At the next hearing, on 25 November, it was decided to open the trial again. The office of the prosecutor general questioned the judges impartiality but at the moment, he will continue to preside over the trial.

These twists and changes in the trial procedures make it even more important for Amnesty International to monitor the trial and to try to inform its membership as much as possible about it. Monitoring the trial and reporting about it may help to combat impunity and that’s why I’ll be there.

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Robert Fisk: ‘Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government’

December 2, 2008

“Robert Fisk: ‘Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government'”;

As he leaves Afghanistan, our correspondent reflects on a failed state cursed by brutal fundamentalism and rampant corruption

The Independent, Thursday, 27 November 2008

Taliban fighters in Maydan Shahr, west of Kabul

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Taliban fighters in Maydan Shahr, west of Kabul

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The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai’s deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad’s “Green Zone”; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.

The Red Cross has already warned that humanitarian operations are being drastically curtailed in ever larger areas of Afghanistan; more than 4,000 people, at least a third of them civilians, have been killed in the past 11 months, along with scores of Nato troops and about 30 aid workers. Both the Taliban and Mr Karzai’s government are executing their prisoners in ever greater numbers. The Afghan authorities hanged five men this month for murder, kidnap or rape – one prisoner, a distant relative of Mr Karzai, predictably had his sentence commuted – and more than 100 others are now on Kabul’s death row.

This is not the democratic, peaceful, resurgent, “gender-sensitive” Afghanistan that the world promised to create after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Outside the capital and the far north of the country, almost every woman wears the all-enshrouding burkha, while fighters are now joining the Taliban’s ranks from Kashmir, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and even Turkey. More than 300 Turkish fighters are now believed to be in Afghanistan, many of them holding European passports.

“Nobody I know wants to see the Taliban back in power,” a Kabul business executive says – anonymity is now as much demanded as it was before 2001 – “but people hate the government and the parliament which doesn’t care about their security. The government is useless. With so many internally displaced refugees pouring into Kabul from the countryside, there’s mass unemployment – but of course, there are no statistics.

“The ‘open market’ led many of us into financial disaster. Afghanistan is just a battlefield of ideology, opium and political corruption. Now you’ve got all these commercial outfits receiving contracts from people like USAID. First they skim off 30 to 50 per cent for their own profits – then they contract out and sub-contract to other companies and there’s only 10 per cent of the original amount left for the Afghans themselves.”

Afghans working for charitable organisations and for the UN are telling their employers that they are coming under increasing pressure to give information to the Taliban and provide them with safe houses. In the countryside, farmers live in fear of both sides in the war. A very senior NGO official in Kabul – again, anonymity was requested – says both the Taliban and the police regularly threaten villagers. “A Taliban group will arrive at a village headman’s door at night – maybe 15 or 16 of them – and say they need food and shelter. And the headman tells the villagers to give them food and let them stay at the mosque. Then the police or army arrive in the day and accuse the villagers of colluding with the Taliban, detain innocent men and threaten to withhold humanitarian aid. Then there’s the danger the village will be air-raided by the Americans.”

In the city of Ghazni, the Taliban ordered all mobile phones to be switched off from 5pm until 6am for fear that spies would use them to give away guerrilla locations. The mobile phone war may be one conflict the government is winning. With American help the Interior Ministry police can now track and triangulate calls. Once more, the Americans are talking about forming “tribal militias” to combat the Taliban, much as they did in Iraq and as the Pakistani authorities have tried to do on the North West Frontier. But the tribal lashkars of the Eighties were corrupted by the Russians and when the system was first tried out two years ago – it was called the Auxiliary Police Force – it was a fiasco. The newly-formed constabulary stopped showing up for work, stole weapons and turned themselves into private militias.

“Now every time a new Western ambassador arrives in Kabul, they dredge it all up again,” another NGO official says in near despair. “‘Oh,’ they proclaim, ‘let’s have local militias – what a bright idea.’ But that will not solve the problem. The country is subject to brigandage as well as the cruelty of the Taliban and the air raids which Afghans find so outrageous. The international community has got to stop spinning and do some fundamental thinking which should have been done four or five years ago.”

What this means to those Westerners who have spent years in Kabul is simple. Is it really the overriding ambition of Afghans to have “democracy”? Is a strong federal state possible in Afghanistan? Is the international community ready to take on the warlords and drug barons who are within Mr Karzai’s own government? And – most important of all – is development really about “securing the country”? The tired old American adage that “where the Tarmac ends, the Taliban begins” is untrue. The Taliban are mounting checkpoints on those very same newly-built roads.

The Afghan Minister of Defence has 65,000 troops under his dubious command but says he needs 500,000 to control Afghanistan. The Soviets failed to contain the country even when they had 100,000 troops here with 150,000 Afghan soldiers in support. And as Barack Obama prepares to send another 7,000 US soldiers into the pit of Afghanistan, the Spanish and Italians are talking of leaving while the Norwegians may pull their 500 troops out of the area north of Heart. Repeatedly, Western leaders talk of the “key” – of training more and more Afghans to fight in the army. But that was the same “key” which the Russians tried – and it did not fit the lock.

“We” are not winning in Afghanistan. Talk of crushing the Taliban seems as bleakly unrealistic as it has ever been. Indeed, when the President of Afghanistan tries to talk to Mullah Omar – one of America’s principal targets in this wretched war – you know the writing is on the wall. And even Mullah Omar didn’t want to talk to Mr Karzai.

Partition is the one option that no one will discuss – giving the southern part of Afghanistan to the Taliban and keeping the rest – but that will only open another crisis with Pakistan because the Pashtuns, who form most of the Taliban, would want all of what they regard as “Pashtunistan”; and that would have to include much of Pakistan’s own tribal territories. It will also be a return to the “Great Game” and the redrawing of borders in south-west Asia, something which – history shows – has always been accompanied by great bloodshed.

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Mumbai attackers were ‘non-state actors’: Ambassador Haqqani

December 1, 2008

By Khalid Hasan | Daily Times, December 1, 2008

WASHINGTON: Pakistan’s ambassador Husain Haqqani told ABC in an interview on Sunday that those who staged the Mumbai attacks were ‘non-state actors’ and this is no time for India and Pakistan to blame each other but to work together to fight terroism.

In answer to a question, Haqqani said if India moves its forces to the border with Pakistan, it will leave his country no option but to take steps to defend itself. Troops will have to be pulled back from the border with Afghanistan “and nobody wants that”. He said the democratic government in Pakistan led by President Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani had “gone the extra mile” in reassuring the Indians that both countries being victims of terrorism, this was the time to forget past history and get together. In answer to another question about the initial Pakistani offer of dispatching the ISI chief to India, the ambassador said that the ‘rhetoric’ right now is such that it would not be the right time for a high-level meeting of that sort, but Pakistan has offered high-level intelligence cooperation to India. He added, “We will cooperate with the Indians in every detail if there is evidence that there is any link to anybody.” He said everyone in the world had come round to the view that the government and state of Pakistan and the military and intelligence services of Pakistan “are not directly involved” and that is the good news. If there are individuals, then there are individuals in the United States too, but that does not mean the United States is at fault. Haqqani said his government has gone the extra mile to reassure the Indian government that “we feel their pain”. He said there was ‘intelligence failure’ and “I think people have to look closer to home for that”.

Haqqani said the Mumbai attacks must not be viewed through the prism of past bitter Islamabad-New Delhi relations. “As two democracies we need to strengthen each other rather than fall into the trap of the terrorists who want us to fight with each other so that they can get greater strength,” he added.

Giving background, he said, “Pakistan and Afghanistan became the focus of jihad central many many years ago when they were all fighting the Soviets. So these people have roots in some remote parts of our country. They have spread those roots. Some of the efforts in the war on terror have not been successful. Our dictator, General Musharraf did not do the right thing to eliminating the terrorists but the new government is making its effort and our intelligence services are far better prepared. Pakistan is a victim of terrorism. India is a victim of terrorism. The victims need to get together. Forget about our bitter history,” he said.
Asked whether a member of President-elect Barack Obama’s team would be welcome to broker a compromise on the disputed area of Kashmir, Haqqani said Sen Hillary Clinton, Obama’s likely pick for Secretary of State, or anyone else would be welcome. “I think it’s about time that people put those arguments behind us and if anyone can help us do that that would definitely be a good thing,” he added.

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Iraq: The Thirteenth Hour

December 1, 2008
Immanuel Wallerstein | Commentary No. 246, December 1, 2008

The Iraq Parliament on November 27 voted 149-35 to ratify the Status-of-Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the United States. As the vote was being taken, the Deputy Prime Minister, Barham Salih, is quoted as saying: “I remind you that in Iraq things have not happened at the eleventh hour, but at the thirteenth hour.” In other words, the key moment is yet to come.

What actually happened? The Iraqi Parliament has 275 members. Those present for the vote were only 198. Those who voted in favor of the text were 149, or a bare majority of the members. The 149 included the members from the two mainstream Shi’a parties (SCIRI and the Prime Minister’s party, Dawa), the two Kurdish parties and, crucially, members of the Sunni-based Iraqi Accord Front (IAF).

The favorable vote of the IAF was crucial because Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani had said he would not endorse the agreement unless it had “wide” support, by which he meant substantial Sunni support. So the Sunni had great bargaining power with Prime Minister al-Maliki, whose political future hinged on getting the SOFA agreement adopted. The IAF got two things from al-Maliki. One was that there would be a national referendum on the agreement in July 2009. The second was the substantial support al-Maliki has been giving to the so-called “support councils” in Sunni tribes. That is, al-Maliki is offering both a bribe and a guarantee against future reprisals against the Sunni tribes who have been giving assistance to the American armed forces in the last year in return for material assistance.

Al-Maliki has emerged as the big political victor and shown himself to be a more able political maneuverer than most analysts had expected. Let us see what he has accomplished by passing the SOFA agreement, an agreement which the Iraqis are calling the “withdrawal agreement.” His first accomplishment was to hold the Sadrists in check by co-opting the Sadrist strategy – getting the Americans out of Iraq by making a deal with the Sunnis. Both SCIRI (the other mainstream Shi’a party) and the Kurds are grumbling about a possible al-Maliki “dictatorship” in the making, but they had no choice but to ratify the agreement. The Sadrists have preserved their position-in-waiting by voting loudly against the pact.

What’s in the pact? The key elements are a requirement that U.S. forces leave all cities and towns by June 2009, and leave Iraq entirely by December 2011. In addition, all U.S. military action must now be coordinated in advance with the Iraqis, and the United States may not use Iraq as a base to attack neighbors (that is, Syria and Iran).

Why did Bush agree? He had no choice. The alternative was for U.S. forces to be illegal after Dec. 31, 2008 and turn the whole issue over to Obama. The U.S. government was so frightened of U.S. congressional reaction to the details of the pact that they refused before the vote to release an English-language version of the pact. They did not want U.S. public discussion of the pact before the Iraqi parliament voted.

The terms of the pact contain some vague language and the U.S. military says it’s counting on its ability to interpret the language in ways that it prefers. It is said that Bush has thereby gotten a better deal than Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan. But this is not true at all. It is in fact worse. Obama’s proposal had been that U.S. combat forces leave in 16 months, but had set no date for “training” forces, leaving open the possibility of indefinite stationing of some U.S. forces. The SOFA agreement gets all forces out by December 2011. And Bush, not Obama, signed off on this.

In practice all U.S. forces will depart much sooner than December 2011. This is where the referendum comes in. It will be held in July 2009. U.S. forces must leave cities and towns by June 2009. If they don’t, the referendum will surely not pass. If they do, al-Maliki will still have to win the referendum. In order to do that, he will have to take a very tough line with the Americans. Any thought that the U.S. military can “interpret” vague language in its favor is a total illusion. In any case, the referendum may be in trouble, since al-Sistani voiced reservations after the parliamentary vote. Al-Maliki knows that if he yields an inch now to the United States, Moqtada al-Sadr is waiting in the wings.

So al-Maliki has all the chips, and Obama will have none. Obama will have to accede gracefully to the Iraqi demands. These demands will escalate, not become less, as the months go by.

And, by the way, the Ethiopians (U.S. surrogates in Somalia) have just announced that they will pull out their troops by the end of 2008. And President Karzai of Afghanistan has just announced that he wants a formal pull-out date for U.S. and NATO forces there. The general feeling in the region seems to be that talking tough to the United States is not only possible. It pays off. The thirteenth hour is approaching.

by Immanuel Wallerstein

[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global. For rights and permissions, including translations and posting to non-commercial sites, and contact: rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.336.286.6606. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically, or e-mail to others, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To contact author, write: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu.

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Obama’s first problem is US war crimes

December 1, 2008
From The Sunday Times, November 30, 2008

The president-elect has to take a stand on Bush’s dark legacy

Andrew Sullivan

Asmall and largely unnoticed spat among the transition planners for the president-elect, Barack Obama, broke out last week. It was the first genuinely passionate debate among the Obamaites and it centres on a terribly difficult and terribly important decision that will be among the first that Obama has to make.

How does he deal with the legacy of criminal actions of his predecessor’s administration when it comes to detention, interrogation, abuse and torture of terror suspects? That has long hovered in the back of the minds of those of us who supported Obama, in large part because he alone had the moral authority to draw a line underneath the criminality of the George Bush-Dick Cheney years and restore credibility and hon-our to America’s antiterror policies.

And so when it emerged Obama was planning to appoint one John Brennan as CIA director, alarm bells went off. Brennan had been close to George Tenet at the time Tenet devised what he called “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Brennan, a CIA company man who had left the agency for private employment, had made statements in the past couple of years suggesting some sympathy for the Bush-Cheney policy. “When it comes to individuals who are determined to destroy our nation, though, we have to make sure that we take every possible measure,” he said elliptically. Including torture?

When pressed, he kept emphasising the need for a “debate” without tipping his own hand about what he personally believed. Take this Brennan statement looking forward to a change in administration from Bush: “I’m hoping there will be a number of professionals coming in who have an understanding of the evolution of the capabilities in the community over the past six years, because there is a method to how things have changed and adapted.”

This plea for understanding for the Bush-Cheney era did not go down well with the Obamasphere – the network of bloggers who helped build momentum for Obama’s victory. The influential blogger Glenn Greenwald exploded in anger; the centrist Democratic blogger Scott Horton urged Brennan to clarify, and then urged Obama to reject him.

On my own blog The Daily Dish, I wrote that if Brennan were picked, Obama supporters “will, in fact, have to go to war with Obama before he even takes office. And if Obama doubts our seriousness, I have three words for him. Yes we can”.

Brennan, facing more protests, withdrew his name from consideration last week. In the first skirmish over the issue in the Obama era, the antitorture forces won.

But the question remains: what is to be done? It is not Obama’s style to launch into a prosecutorial investigation of intelligence officials or to open new partisan wounds by subjecting Bush, Cheney, Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld and others to war crime charges. He is intent on unifying the country, not further dividing it. He needs the professionals running the antiterror effort and, after eight years of Bush-Cheney, it is hard to find people not tainted by torture.

There is also the possibility that Bush himself might make a preemptive strike and, upon his departure from Washington, issue a blanket pardon for all his aides and underlings who aided and abetted war crimes in the past seven years. Leaving those pardons in place while prosecuting low-level officials or CIA agents would be deeply unfair.

That was the rationale behind the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which gave retroactive immunity for war crimes to civilians in the administration, but not to the military grunts who enforced the policy, and which carved out a continuing exception for torture to CIA agents.

So perhaps the sanest way forward is a truth commission, modelled on those in Chile and South Africa that maintained governmental continuity for a while but set up a process that allowed for a maximal gathering of the relevant facts and names. The president could appoint a powerful and respected prosecutor to begin the process. The commission would focus not just on the military and CIA but also on the Bush justice department and Office of Legal Counsel, and the abuse of the law and its interpretation that gave Bush and Cheney transparently phoney legal cover for war crimes.

At the end of the second world war, US officials prosecuted Nazi lawyers and civilians who tortured no one themselves but came up with legal flimflam to turn war crimes into legal policy. Why not apply the same logic to Bush’s legal architects – the men who declared the president was bound by no law and no treaty in subjecting prisoners to torture up to the very edge of death?

The commission would need strong subpoena powers and the full backing of the president. Only once the commission has reported, the decision on whether to prosecute or not could be made, with much wider public awareness, and much deeper examination of the facts and documents now hidden. There is much, after all, we still do not know – and that information may make the war crimes seem less or more defensible.

There are some limits on transparency, of course, because of the sensitive intelligence matters that are involved. But when war crimes are at issue, it is more important for a democracy to seek transparency from its highest officials than to engage in anything but the most pressing concealment of the most vital secrets. In international law, there are no pardons for war crimes. And if America is going to regain moral authority in the world, it has to demonstrate it lives by the same standards it expects from everyone else.

Bush has even signalled that he will pardon no one because he does not believe they have committed any crimes. But the transparent way in which laughably sourced legal “cover” was provided by Bush’s own legal counsel proves the Bush administration knew full well it was breaking the law, and was willing to force the justice department to put its imprimatur on such illegality.

And the evidence we now have, undisputed evidence, proves already that war crimes were indeed committed – by the president and vice-president on down. I mean: why else Guantanamo Bay and secret black sites if the president believed he was obeying domestic American law?

There is, in the end, a simple and sobering truth: these people have to be brought to justice if the rule of law is to survive in America. In his constitutional soul, Obama knows this. He also knows, however, the political exigencies of taking over a national security apparatus where continuity and lawful vigilance against terrorism remain vital.

How he bridges the demands of the law with the pressures of politics will tell us much about him. And because every act performed by the CIA will soon become his responsibility as much as President Bush’s, he has no time to dither.

The constitutional crisis is in some ways deeper than the financial one. We will find out soon enough if this really is change we can believe in rather than merely hope for.

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Behind the war in the Congo

December 1, 2008

Matt Swagler looks at how Western imperialism set the stage for renewed fighting in eastern Congo.

Socialist Worker, November 25, 2008

Congolese refugees take shelter in a camp in the town of Kibati, near the city of Goma (Remi Ochlik | IP3)Congolese refugees take shelter in a camp in the town of Kibati, near the city of Goma (Remi Ochlik | IP3)

THE LATEST fighting in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) isn’t the result of ethnic rivalries, as portrayed in the mainstream media, but the logical outcome of intervention by Western governments and profit-seeking corporations.

The U.S. is fueling both sides of the conflict–by backing neighboring Rwanda’s support for rebel forces on the one hand, and a United Nations “peacekeeping” operation in support of national DRC troops on the other.

Clearly, peace for the Congolese people is second to securing U.S. economic and political interests in the region.

As of November 11, Amnesty International reported that 250,000 people had fled their homes in response to the fighting, adding to the 1 million refugees already displaced in the province of North Kivu. Almost immediately, cholera outbreaks were reported at refugee camps overwhelmed by new arrivals, of whom 60 percent are children.

What else to read

The renewed violence in Congo and what’s at stake is discussed in “Balkanization and crisis in eastern Congo,” an interview with Congolese political figure Ernest Wamba dia Wamba in Pambazuka News.

Lena Weinstein’s “The New Scramble for Africa,” published in the International Socialist Review, documents how the world’s biggest economies are jockying for control of Africa’s oil resources.

A new book edited by Leo Zeilig, Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa collects essays and interviews that examine political struggle and social empowerment across the African continent.

Zeilig is also coauthor, with David Renton and David Seddon, of The Congo: Plunder and Resistance, a history that documents the devastating consequences of imperialism in the Congo, from King Leopold’s Belgium in the 19th century to the U.S. and other Western nations in the 20th.

The most prominent armed forces in the region are those of the DRC’s government, led by President Joseph Kabila, and the contending army of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), led by Gen. Laurent Nkuda, which has been in rebellion against Congo’s government since 2004, with the support of neighboring Rwanda.

Both sides have been accused of indiscriminate killings of civilians in recent weeks. On the evening of October 29-30, DRC troops were accused of looting and numerous murders as they retreated through the city of Goma. A week later, the Red Cross reported that the CNDP went from house to house in Kiwanja, executing over 100 young men.

On November 8, a senior Congo police officer described a preferred method of torture to the BBC: “You use car jump leads and attach them anywhere on the body, and as soon as you press the button, the current goes through, and they start to shake. It usually produced results.”

An agreement reached last week with Nkuda appears to have mitigated the violence for now, but the truce remains tenuous. The recent conflict has the potential to reignite a civil war that led to the deaths of at least 5.2 million Congolese between 1998 and 2004, an atrocity that is, as author Leo Zeilig put it, “the bloodiest conflict since the end of the Second World War.”

Continued   >>

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INDIA/PAKISTAN: Pleas For Sanity as Sabres Rattle Over Mumbai Mayhem

December 1, 2008


Analysis by Beena Sarwar | Inter Press Service

KARACHI, Dec 1 (IPS) – The pattern is all too familiar. Every time India and Pakistan head towards dialogue and detente, something explosive happens that pushes peace to the backburner and drags them back to the familiar old tense relationship, worsened by sabre-rattling war cries from both sides.

The relationship between the two nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours has been marked by tentative ups and plunging downs, particularly over the past decade. This decade is also marked by increasingly vocal voices for peace on both sides of the border who openly criticise their countries’ political and security establishments.

The fallout from the Mumbai mayhem is no different, if all the more ominous for having taken place in the midst of the global ‘war on terror’ with its ‘us versus them’ rhetoric that has contributed to escalated violence around the world and pushed fence-sitters onto one or other side.

On Wednesday a ten-man squad of Islamist warriors armed with assault rifles and hand grenades landed in the port city Mumbai and, after going on shooting spree, seized control of two of its finest luxury hotels and a Jewish centre. By the time commandos neutralised the attackers and lifted the sieges Friday, 200 people lay dead –including 22 foreign hostages.

Pakistan and India are part of the Indian sub-continent. They share a landmass, mountain ranges, rivers and seas, ancient cultures, history, languages and religions. Yet they have fought three wars since gaining independence from the British in 1947, after the bloody partition of the sub-continent into two countries — largely Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan.

The fourth major conflict between the two countries was the Kargil conflict of 1999 that the political leadership on both sides referred to as a ‘war-like situation’. The nuclear threat that underlined this situation drew the world’s attention to India-Pakistan relations, and the festering issue of the disputed state of Kashmir, as never before.

A year earlier, India and Pakistan’s nuclear tests of May 1998 had plunged the region into an unprecedented state of tension. The governments celebrated their nuclear capability, feeding rivalry, jingoism and nationalism on both sides that the media played up. There was far less coverage of those who condemned the tests and the governments’ encouragement of reactionary forces that equated religion with nationhood.

Those who protested were swimming against the tide, labelled as traitors and anti-nationals, and ‘agents’ of the other country, like Islamabad-based physicist A.H. Nayyar who has been active in the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy since the organisation was launched in 1995.

As Nayyar and pro-peace activists addressed a press conference condemning the nuclearisation of the region, charged-up young men who supported Pakistan’s nuclear tests physically attacked them with chairs.

Now, expressing his shock at the “mindless, horrible event” in Mumbai, he told IPS: “There are people in both countries who don’t like efforts towards rapprochement. They take the first opportunity to start blowing the bugles of war and instigate hostility.”

Continued  >>

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