Posts Tagged ‘Rice’

US/IRAN: Scowcroft, Brzezinski Urge Bush to Drop Precondition

July 23, 2008

By Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Jul 22 (IPS) – Two of Washington’s most prominent foreign policy greybeards praised Saturday’s direct participation in multinational talks with Iran by a senior U.S. diplomat but called on the administration of President George W. Bush to drop his demands that Tehran freeze its uranium enrichment programme as a precondition for broader negotiations.

Ret. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser under Republican presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who held the same post under Democratic President Jimmy Carter, urged Bush to go further by offering immediate rewards to Tehran in exchange for such a freeze.

And both men warned that repeated U.S. threats to use military force against Iran were counter-productive and strengthened hard-line forces in the regime led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They said an actual military attack — whether by the U.S. or by Israel — would likely be disastrous for U.S. interests in the region.

“A war with Iran will produce calamities for sure,” said Brzezinski, who pointed, among other things, to its likely impact on the price of oil and the likelihood that it would create yet another front to add to the two wars — Iraq and Afghanstan — in which U.S. military forces are already engaged.

“(Brzezinski’s assessment) may be a little more dire (than mine) but not much,” Scowcroft told IPS in a brief interview after the two men spoke at a briefing sponsored by the Centre for Security and International Studies (CSIS) here. “It would turn the region into a cauldron of conflict, bitterness, and hatred. It would turn Islam against us.”

Both men have been strongly critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East, particularly the decision to invade Iraq — although Brzezinski has been considerably more vocal than Scowcroft, who remains a close friend of Bush’s father. Both leading lights of the so-called “realist” foreign-policy establishment, they are currently collaborating on a book to be published in September.

Their joint appearance at CSIS, which was announced late last week after the administration had confirmed that undersecretary of state for policy, Amb. William Burns, would attend Saturday’s meeting between the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany) and Iran, seemed timed to demonstrate strong bipartisan support for continued and enhanced U.S. engagement.

Continued . . .

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US torture claims are unreliable: British lawmakers

July 20, 2008

Khaleej Times, July 19, 2008

(AFP)

LONDON – The British government should no longer accept US assurances that it does not use torture, a parliamentary oversight committee said on Sunday in a wide-ranging report looking at London’s human rights policy.

Ministers have previously taken at face value statements from their US counterparts, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush, that Washington does not resort to such practices.

But the cross-party foreign affairs committee said that stance should be abandoned given admissions from the US director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, that “water-boarding” had been used on terror suspects.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told parliament on two occasions this year that the practice, which simulates drowning during interrogation, amounts to torture.

Miliband’s position has “serious implications” for government policy, the committee said in its 214-page Human Rights Annual Report 2007-8.

“We conclude that, given the clear differences in definition, the UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the government does not rely on such assurances in the future,” it added.

Britain is a signatory to a United Nations convention that prevents the extradition of suspects to countries where torture is used. If adopted, a change in approach could affect such transfers.

The committee also called for Britain to carry out an “exhaustive analysis” of US government interrogation techniques and seek guarantees about whether US flights carrying terror suspects used British airspace or airports.

Earlier this year, the United States admitted that two “rendition” flights landed on Diego Garcia, a British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean where there is a US air base.

Britain, whose policy is not to allow such transfers where there is a risk of torture, had earlier accepted assurances that its territory had not been used for the extra-judicial transfer of suspected extremists.

Such flights should not use British territory or airspace, even if no detainees were on board, the committee said.

Elsewhere, the committee urged an investigation into claims that six British nationals were detained and tortured by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and interrogated by British security agents.

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