Just Foreign Policy News
June 4, 2010
Track the #RachelCorrie on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/#search?q=rachelcorrie
With "Linkage," Turkey and Brazil Can End the Siege of Gaza
It appears that if Turkey and Brazil want to have effective input at the Big Table, they are going to have to play hardball effectively with the United States: they have to continue to show the U.S. that they have the power to obstruct the U.S. from getting what it wants if the US continues to ignore their concerns. If Turkey and Brazil could delay a Security Council vote on Iran, the US would have to negotiate.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/with-linkage-turkey-and-b_b_600997.html
Video: Interview with Al Jazeera’s Jamal ElShayyal:
Al Jazeera reporter who was on the Mavi Marmara: "There is no doubt from what I saw that live ammunition was fired before any Israeli soldier was on deck." Also, he asserts that Israeli soldiers refused a request from an Israeli member of parliament to provide assistance to 3 wounded who later died. Beginning at 3:43.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cQ69oKFtVg
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) The Rachel Corrie was holding in place about 100 miles off Gaza late Friday, awaiting daybreak, the Washington Post reports. The Obama administration so far has backed Israel’s assertion that it can conduct its own inquiry into the raid Monday, but the death of an American overseas can, in most cases, prompt a U.S. government investigation.
2) Turkey is on the brink of severing relations with Israel, the Washington Post reports. To prevent such a break, the Turkish ambassador to the US said Israel needed to apologize for Monday’s killings, agree to an international probe, and end its blockade of Gaza. Israel rejected the demands.
3) Israel was under pressure to allow an independent inquiry into its assault after autopsy results showed five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head, the Guardian reports. US citizen Fulkan Dogan was shot five times from less than 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. One survivor said six activists remained missing, suggesting the death toll may increase.
4) A letter signed by former US ambassador to the UN Thomas Pickering and other experts, calling on the US to negotiate on the basis of the fuel swap deal, was published in the Huffington Post. "We urge the so-called Vienna Group (Russia, France, the United States, and the IAEA) to seriously pursue this proposal as an opening for further diplomatic engagement with Iran on outstanding issues of concern," the experts say.
5) The White House said Thursday it was confident the UN Security Council would back toughened sanctions on Iran in the next week, AFP reports.
6) Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said Russia and China are against attempts to rush a vote in the Security Council on further sanctions against Iran, Reuters reports.
7) Now that the accounts of activists and journalists who were detained by Israel after the raid are starting to be heard, it is clear that their stories and that of the Israeli military do not match in many ways, writes Robert Mackey in the New York Times. The way these accounts diverge from that of Israel’s military would seem to make an independent investigation into the events crucial. Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf has written: "Israel has confiscated some of the most important material for the investigation, namely the films, audio and photos taken by the passengers [and] journalists on board and the Mavi Marmara’s security cameras. Since yesterday, Israel has been editing these films and using them for its own PR campaign. In other words, Israel has already confiscated most of the evidence, held it from the world and tampered with it. No court in the world would [trust] it to be the one examining it."
8) The IDF – while still refusing to disclose the full, unedited, raw footage of the incident – quickly released an extremely edited video of their commandos landing on the ship, which failed even to address, let alone refute, the claim of the passengers: that the Israelis were shooting at the ship before the commandos were on board, writes Glenn Greenwald for Salon. The edited IDF video was shown over and over on US television without question or challenge. Israel-centric pundits claimed, based on the edited IDF video, that anyone was lying who even reported on the statements of the passengers that Israeli fired first. In sum, that the Israelis used force only after the passengers attacked the commandos became Unquestioned Truth in American discourse.
9) The US and other rich countries are planning to abandon a pledge to double aid to the poorest countries in Africa by this year, the Guardian reports. "It is a scandal that the G8 are trying to quietly drop the promise they made to the world when millions campaigned to make poverty history," a policy adviser for Oxfam said.
10) Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget under Obama, the Washington Post reports. John Bellinger, a senior legal adviser in the Bush administration, noted that many of those currently being targeted, "particularly in places outside Afghanistan," had nothing to do with the 2001 attacks, and therefore such attacks are not authorized by the 2001 AUMF, contrary to the claims of the Obama Administration.
Afghanistan
11) Afghanistan’s first national peace convention urged foreign governments to end detentions and bombardments and to remove Taliban leaders from a wanted list, the New York Times reports. The concluding document and its united message could strengthen the position of President Karzai with his foreign backers in seeking negotiations with the Taliban, participants and some Western officials said. The document strongly urged the release of Afghan prisoners being held in Guantanamo and Bagram. It called for names to be rapidly removed from a black list – individuals listed as wanted by US authorities and who appear on the Security Council sanctions list of former Taliban government figures. "We are strongly requesting from Afghans and the international community to stop arresting people, stop searching houses, and stop bombardment on those areas where they are causing civilian casualties," the statement said. The US welcomed the result, the Times said. The most concrete recommendation was to form an independent, neutral commission of people accepted by all sides in the conflict – namely, the Afghan government, international forces and the Taliban – who could then begin peace negotiations. More than 300 women took part in the jirga and according to many delegates spoke out strongly in support of peace, while insisting that women’s rights achieved over the last eight years be respected.
Colombia
12) Writing in Colombia Reports, Pablo Rojas Mejia says the big gap between Mockus’ polling numbers and the first round election result is a blow to the credibility of Colombia’s polling industry. While a victory for Mockus in the second round may seem almost unattainable, the Green party has undoubtedly changed Colombian politics.
Bolivia
13) More than six thousand Bolivians, including President Morales, attended the Bolivian premiere of Oliver Stone’s new documentary "South of the Border," MercoPress reports.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Gaza-bound aid ship Rachel Corrie expected to arrive Saturday
Janine Zacharia and Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, Friday, June 4, 2010; 2:40 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/04/AR2010060402131.html
Jerusalem – An Irish humanitarian aid ship transporting relief supplies to the Gaza Strip was holding in place about 100 miles off Israel’s shores late Friday, awaiting daybreak to make the final push toward the Hamas-ruled territory in defiance of Israel’s insistence that it divert to an Israeli port, activists said.
[…] With the Rachel Corrie en route, Israel continued to feel the diplomatic repercussions of the botched raid, particularly with Turkey, which threatened to cut ties with Israel to a minimum. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan – whose popularity ahead of an election next year has soared because of his challenge to Israel – delivered some of his toughest remarks in a televised speech to supporters on Friday.
"I am speaking to them in their own language. The sixth commandment says ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Did you not understand?" Erdogan said. "I’ll say again. I say in English, ‘You shall not kill.’ Did you still not understand? So I’ll say to you in your own language. I say in Hebrew, ‘Lo Tirtzakh,’ " he said.
The Obama administration so far has backed Israel’s assertion that it can conduct its own inquiry into the raid and the circumstances that led to it. But the death of an American overseas can, in most cases, prompt a U.S. government investigation.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton identified the victim as Furkan Dorgan, 19. He was born in Troy, N.Y., while his father, Ahmet Dorgan, was pursuing an MBA at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The elder Dorgan received the degree in 1992, according to his Web site at Erciyes University in Kayseri, Turkey.
Furkan Dorgan apparently returned to Turkey at age 2 and held dual citizenship. Turkish media reports said he attended Kayseri science high school and had been accepted to a university for the fall. He wanted to be a physician.
2) Turkey close to severing ties with Israel over flotilla deaths
Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, Friday, June 4, 2010; 6:11 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/04/AR2010060403088.html
Turkey is on the brink of severing relations with Israel in the wake of killings of Turkish activists on board a Gaza-bound flotilla, the Turkish ambassador to the United States said Friday. "Israel cannot find any better friend in the region than Turkey," Namik Tan, the ambassador, told a small group of reporters. "And Israel is about to lose that friend."
Asked if he was saying Turkey would cut the ties it has had with Israel since shortly after the founding of the Jewish state, Tan referred to the massive protests in Turkey against the Israeli actions. Because of the emotions, he said, "the government might be forced to take such an action."
To prevent such a break between two close U.S. allies, Tan said that "first and foremost" Israel needed to apologize for the deaths. He said Israel also must agree to an international probe of the incident and end its blockade of Gaza, which is controlled by the Hamas militant group.
A senior Israeli official rejected the demand for an apology. "Israel is not going to apologize for defending ourselves," he said. "Our soldiers are not going to apologize for defending themselves from a murderous assault." He also rejected the call for the international probe and lifting the blockade.
[…] Tan also indicated that U.S. efforts to mollify Turkey have failed, saying that Ankara continues to be "disappointed" that the Obama administration has not condemned Israel’s actions. He said Turkey appreciated U.S. efforts to secure the quick release of hundreds of activists and the bodies of the dead, but that was not enough, especially after Turkey’s prime minister on Tuesday directly asked President Obama to condemn the deaths.
3) Gaza flotilla activists were shot in head at close range
Nine Turkish men on board Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times, autopsy results reveal
Robert Booth, Guardian, Friday 4 June 2010 22.00 BST http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/04/gaza-flotilla-activists-autopsy-results
Israel was tonight under pressure to allow an independent inquiry into its assault on the Gaza aid flotilla after autopsy results on the bodies of those killed, obtained by the Guardian, revealed they were peppered with 9mm bullets, many fired at close range.
Nine Turkish men on board the Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times and five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head, according to the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice today.
The results revealed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, who also has US citizenship, was shot five times from less that 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, said Yalcin Buyuk, vice-chairman of the council of forensic medicine.
The findings emerged as more survivors gave their accounts of the raids. Ismail Patel, the chairman of Leicester-based pro-Palestinian group Friends of al-Aqsa, who returned to Britain today, told how he witnessed some of the fatal shootings and claimed that Israel had operated a "shoot to kill policy".
He calculated that during the bloodiest part of the assault, Israeli commandos shot one person every minute. One man was fatally shot in the back of the head just two feet in front him and another was shot once between the eyes. He added that as well as the fatally wounded, 48 others were suffering from gunshot wounds and six activists remained missing, suggesting the death toll may increase.
The new information about the manner and intensity of the killings undermines Israel’s insistence that its soldiers opened fire only in self defence and in response to attacks by the activists.
"Given the very disturbing evidence which contradicts the line from the Israeli media and suggests that Israelis have been very selective in the way they have addressed this, there is now an overwhelming need for an international inquiry," said Andrew Slaughter MP, a member of the all party group on Britain and Palestine.
[…]
4) US Shouldn’t Dismiss Turkish-Brazilian Nuclear Deal
Thomas Pickering, et al, Huffington Post, June 1, 2010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-pickering/we-must-take-a-first-step_b_596419.html
On Monday, May 24, 2010, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran delivered a letter to the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) outlining Iran’s commitments to export 1200 kg of Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU) to Turkey in exchange for fuel assemblies to power the Tehran Research Reactor.
This marked a significant concession from Iran’s previous position, which demanded the exchange take place in small batches, inside Iran’s borders, and simultaneous to the delivery of reactor fuel.
The political paralysis inside Iran that scuttled the fuel exchange proposal when it was first offered in October seems now to have subsided.
The proposal currently being considered has the backing of Iran’s Supreme Leader as well as centrists, reformists, and leaders of the Green Movement in Iran, making it more likely that Iran will abide by the terms of its commitments.
Left unresolved in the current proposal is the troubling matter of Iran’s continued enrichment of uranium up to levels approaching 20%.
Additionally, even after a successful fuel exchange, the need for Iran to fully satisfy the IAEA and accept a more rigorous inspections regime will remain, as will concerns about the size of its LEU stockpile.
Notwithstanding these issues, Iran’s agreement to export a large portion of its LEU outside of its borders for up to a year is worthy of consideration.
If enacted, this proposal would begin the process of addressing a major – but not the only – aspect of the strained relationship between Iran and the international community, and would represent a first step in halting Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapons capability. We urge the so-called Vienna Group (Russia, France, the United States, and the IAEA) to seriously pursue this proposal as an opening for further diplomatic engagement with Iran on outstanding issues of concern.
The permanent five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) should take advantage of this opportunity as the first step in a broader dialogue that could include further confidence building measures, such as halting enrichment of uranium above 5%, as well as resolving regional security issues, protecting human rights in Iran, and other issues of mutual interest.
Signed: Amb. Thomas Pickering, Dr. David Kay, Gen. Robert Gard, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, Dr. Jim Walsh, Daryl Kimball, Dr. Farideh Farhi, Dr. Juan Cole, Dr. Trita Parsi
5) US hopes for Iran sanctions vote at UN next week
AFP, June 3, 2010
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gkr_xdnkFv3fIYaZ2yinCtCsnZMg
Washington – The White House said Thursday it was confident the UN Security Council would back toughened sanctions on Iran in the next week, despite the furor over Israel’s Gaza flotilla raid. Some Middle East observers have warned that the outrage over the raid by America’s close ally could detract from diplomatic efforts by Washington to finally pass a sanctions resolution against Iran in the Council.
But President Barack Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs portrayed progress towards a resolution as robust and said a vote could be coming soon. "We’ve seen sanctions introduced in the UN Security Council that we believe will be voted on next week and approved by the UN Security Council," he said.
[…] The United States had said on Wednesday that it hoped for a UN Security Council vote by June 21.
[…]
6) Russia warns against rushing Iran sanctions vote
Reuters, Fri, Jun 4 2010
http://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-49050920100604
Moscow – Russia and China are against attempts to rush a vote in the United Nations Security Council on further sanctions against Iran, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted as saying on Friday. "We are against forcing the voting process," Lavrov was quoted as saying in Beijing by Interfax news agency.
But Lavrov also added that work on the resolution was close to completion and that the economic interests of Russia and China had been taken into account in the draft. The White House and Western diplomats have said the Security Council is expected to vote next week on the resolution, which would impose new sanctions on Iran for failing to allay fears over its nuclear programme.
[…]
7) Reporters Dispute Israeli Account of Raid
Robert Mackey, New York Times, June 3, 2010
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/reporter-disputes-israeli-account-of-raid/
5:02 p.m. On Thursday, Al Jazeera English broadcast an interview with Jamal Elshayyal, one of the channel’s journalists who was on board the Mavi Marmara on Monday when it was intercepted by Israeli commandos enforcing a naval blockade on Gaza.
In his account of the start of the raid, which left nine activists dead and has sparked calls for an independent investigation, Mr. Elshayyal insisted that the Israelis had fired live ammunition at the ship from the air before commandos landed on the boat and said that he had seen someone shot and killed by a bullet that hit the top of his head. He said, in part:
As soon as this attack started, I was on the top deck and within just a few minutes there were live shots being fired from above the ship, from above, from where the helicopters were. […]
The first shots that were fired were either some sort of sound grenades, there was some tear gas that was fired as well as rubber-coated bullets. They were fired initially and the live bullets came roughly about five minutes after that.
Asked if the shots fired at the ship by the Israeli forces had seemed to come from ships nearby or the helicopters above, Mr. Elshayyal said:
It was evident there was definitely fire from the air, because one of the people who was killed was clearly shot from above – he was shot, the bullet targeted him at the top of his head. There was also fire coming from the sea as well. Most of the fire initially from the sea was tear gas canisters, sound grenades, but then it became live fire. After I finished filing that last report and I was going down below deck one of the passengers who was on the side of the deck holding a water hose – trying to hose off, if you will, the advancing Israeli navy – was shot in his arm by soldiers in the boats below. […]
There is no doubt from what I saw that live ammunition was fired before any Israeli soldier was on deck. What I saw, the sequence of events that took place, there was a pool camera, so reporters took it in turns to file, so after I had done my first file, I turned around to see what was going on and there were several shots fired. In fact, one of the helicopters at the front of the ship, you could almost see the soldiers pointing their guns down through some sort of hole or compartment at the bottom side of the helicopter and firing almost indiscriminately without even looking where they were firing. And those bullets were definitely live bullets.
Mr. Elshayyal’s account, of course, is only one part of the puzzle, and it will not be accepted easily by people who see his network as biased against Israel. That said, now that the accounts of activists and journalists who were detained by Israel after the raid are starting to be heard, it is clear that their stories and that of the Israeli military do not match in many ways.
On Thursday, Today’s Zaman, an English-language newspaper in Turkey, reported that the president of the Turkish aid group that helped to organize the flotilla said that a photographer working for the group "was shot in the forehead by a soldier one meter away from him." Bulent Yildirimhe, the president of the aid organization Insani Yardim Vakfi (known in English as the I.H.H.), told the newspaper on Thursday after he returned from Israel: "Our Cevdet [Kiliclar], he is a press member. He has become a martyr. All he was doing was taking pictures. They smashed his skull into pieces." The newspaper added:
Kevin Ovenden of Britain, an activist on the ship that arrived in İstanbul on Thursday, also said a man who had pointed a camera at the soldiers was shot directly through the forehead with live ammunition, with the exit wound blowing away back of his skull.
In another report, the newspaper said that Israeli officials had confiscated images taken by one of its photographers in the flotilla:
A photojournalist from Today’s Zaman Kursat Bayhan who was on board an international aid convoy for Gaza said he tried to hide a flash disk which included the photos from the moments of Israeli attack on the convoy under his tongue to prevent Israeli authorities from seizing it but his effort failed during a medical examination.
The report added, "Bayhan said the journalists in the ship including him tried to protect the video footage and photos they took," after the ships were seized by Israeli commandos, but "all the materials of the press members, including their passports and identity cards, were taken away."
The way these accounts diverge from that of Israel’s military would seem to make an independent investigation into the events crucial. That is particularly true since, as The Lede noted on Wednesday, Israel is apparently in possession of much more video evidence than it has yet released.
In a post making the case that Israel should not conduct that inquiry, Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli journalist and blogger, pointed out that journalists in the flotilla seem to have left Israeli custody without any of the video they shot during the raid that might bolster their accounts.
Israel has confiscated some of the most important material for the investigation, namely the films, audio and photos taken by the passengers [and] journalists on board and the Mavi Marmara’s security cameras. Since yesterday, Israel has been editing these films and using them for its own PR campaign. In other words, Israel has already confiscated most of the evidence, held it from the world and tampered with it. No court in the world would [trust] it to be the one examining it.
8) How Israeli propaganda shaped U.S. media coverage of the flotilla attack
Glenn Greenwald, Salon, Friday, Jun 4, 2010
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/04/israel/index.html
It was clear from the moment news of the flotilla attack emerged that Israel was taking extreme steps to suppress all evidence about what happened other than its own official version. They detained the flotilla passengers and barred the media from speaking with them, thus, as The NYT put it, "refusing to permit journalists access to witnesses who might contradict Israel’s version of events." They detained the journalists who were on the ship for days and seized their film, video and cameras. And worst of all, the IDF – while still refusing to disclose the full, unedited, raw footage of the incident – quickly released an extremely edited video of their commandos landing on the ship, which failed even to address, let alone refute, the claim of the passengers: that the Israelis were shooting at the ship before the commandos were on board.
This campaign of suppression and propaganda worked to shape American media coverage (as state propaganda campaigns virtually always work on the gullible, authority-revering American media). The edited IDF video was shown over and over on American television without question or challenge. Israeli officials and Israel-devoted commentators appeared all over television – almost always unaccompanied by any Turkish, Palestinian or Muslim critics of the raid – to spout the Israeli version without opposition. Israel-centric pundits in America claimed, based on the edited IDF video, that anyone was lying who even reported on the statements of the passengers that Israeli fired first. In sum, that the Israelis used force only after the passengers attacked the commandos became Unquestioned Truth in American discourse.
But now that the passengers and journalists have been released from Israeli detention and are speaking out, a much different story is emerging. As I noted yesterday, numerous witnesses and journalists are describing Israeli acts of aggression, including the shooting of live ammunition, before the commandos landed. The New York Times blogger Robert Mackey today commendably compiles that evidence – I recommend it highly – and he writes: "now that the accounts of activists and journalists who were detained by Israel after the raid are starting to be heard, it is clear that their stories and that of the Israeli military do not match in many ways." As Juan Cole says: "Many passengers have now confirmed that they were fired on even before the commandos had boots on the deck. Presumably it is this suppressive fire that killed or wounded some passengers and which provoked an angry reaction and an attack on the commandos."
Whether the Israelis fired at the passengers before or after landing on the ship matters little to the crux of what happened here. The initial act of aggression was the Israeli seizing of a ship in international waters which was doing nothing hostile; that action was taken to enforce a horrific, inhumane blockade and, more generally, a brutal, decades-long occupation; and whatever else is true, at least nine civilians were killed by the Israeli Navy, only the latest example of Israel (and the U.S.) using massive military force against civilians.
[…]
9) Report: G8 Preparing to Drop Africa Aid Pledge
Leaked draft communique for Canada summit contains no mention of 2005 Gleneagles commitment
Larry Elliott, The Guardian, Friday 4 June 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/04/g8-summit-gleneagles-canada
The west’s seven richest countries are planning to abandon a pledge to double aid to the poorest countries in Africa by this year, the Guardian has learned.
A leaked draft communique for this month’s Canadian-hosted Muskoka summit contains no mention of the commitment made at the 2005 Gleneagles summit to provide an extra $25bn (£17bn) a year for Africa as part of a $50bn increase in financial assistance.
[…] Max Lawson, policy adviser for Oxfam, said: "It is a scandal that the G8 are trying to quietly drop the promise they made to the world when millions campaigned to make poverty history. The UK government should do all it can to stop this betrayal of the world’s poor at the Canadian G8."
[…]
10) Report: US Special Forces Deployed in 75 Countries
U.S. ‘secret war’ expands globally as Special Operations forces take larger role
Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe, Washington Post, Friday, June 4, 2010; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/03/AR2010060304965.html
Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.
Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.
Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.
[…] One advantage of using "secret" forces for such missions is that they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral U.S. raids in Somalia and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.
Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed "things that the previous administration did not."
[…] Former Bush officials, still smarting from accusations that their administration overextended the president’s authority to conduct lethal activities around the world at will, have asked similar questions. "While they seem to be expanding their operations both in terms of extraterritoriality and aggressiveness, they are contracting the legal authority upon which those expanding actions are based," said John B. Bellinger III, a senior legal adviser in both of Bush’s administrations.
The Obama administration has rejected the constitutional executive authority claimed by Bush and has based its lethal operations on the authority Congress gave the president in 2001 to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons" he determines "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the Sept. 11 attacks.
Many of those currently being targeted, Bellinger said, "particularly in places outside Afghanistan," had nothing to do with the 2001 attacks.
Afghanistan
11) Afghan Gathering Ends With Appeal for Peace
Carlotta Gall, New York Times, June 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/world/asia/05afghan.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – Afghanistan’s first national peace convention concluded Friday with a direct appeal to the Taliban and other insurgents to break with Al Qaeda, while urging a series of goodwill gestures from foreign governments to end detentions and bombardments and to remove Taliban leaders from a wanted list.
After a muted start, the atmosphere of the gathering, called a jirga, was determinedly positive by the end and participants said they were convinced if the government takes up their recommendations Afghanistan could find a way toward peace.
"The result is good, it’s positive and it will bring peace," said Haji Bishmillah Khan from the southern province of Kandahar, the spiritual homeland of the Taliban. "We included points that are favorable for the opposition and that’s why we are expecting them to come to peace negotiations," he said.
The concluding document and its united message could strengthen the position of President Hamid Karzai, both with his foreign backers and within Afghanistan, in seeking negotiations with the Taliban and allow him to go the extra mile to meet the other side, participants and some Western officials said.
[…] Nevertheless, the head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, Staffan di Mistura, described the jirga as the first of a series of steps planned for the coming months that could create the necessary political breakthrough to resolve the military impasse in Afghanistan. "The Taliban are watching very carefully what is happening," he said. "They are not naïve, as you know, neither blind, and they are also in my opinion tired."
The concluding document opened with a request to all insurgent groups "for the sake of Islam and at the request of the Afghan people, to stop fighting and stop killing your brothers and be welcomed to the peace process."
"Those opposition groups who are killing our countrymen and bringing destruction to the infrastructure of Afghanistan, they should break their links with Al Qaeda," another point said.
The document strongly urged the release of Afghan prisoners being held in Guantanamo, Bagram airbase and Afghanistan’s central prison at Pul-i-Charkhi. It also called for names to be rapidly removed from a black list – that is individuals listed as wanted by American authorities and who appear on the United Nations Security Council sanctions list of former Taliban government figures.
"We are strongly requesting from Afghans and the international community to stop arresting people, stop searching houses, and stop bombardment on those areas where they are causing civilian casualties," the statement continued. Those insurgents who come forward to make peace should be given shelter and protection, they said.
The recommendations were well within the parameters already agreed to with the Afghan government before the start of the conference – for an Afghan-led peace process that encourages insurgents to break ties with Al Qaeda and international terrorism, renounce violence and respect the Afghan constitution. The United States welcomed the result.
"These discussions are the beginning of a process that we believe can help bring stability to Afghanistan and long-desired peace to its people," the American embassy said in a statement. "We will continue to encourage and support the Afghan Government’s efforts to foster national dialogue on the most critical issues Afghanistan faces."
In another sign of United Nations support for the process, Mr. di Mistura, of the United Nations, said he would be inviting a Security Council mission to Afghanistan soon to examine among other things the issue of removing Taliban members from the United Nations sanctions list.
The most concrete recommendation was to form an independent, neutral commission of people accepted by all sides in the conflict – namely, the Afghan government, international forces and the Taliban – who could then begin peace negotiations.
The commission would draw in more people in the provinces and districts to reach out to the opposition forces in every region. The jirga also called on friendly Islamic countries, in particular Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to continue their efforts at mediation.
Other more contentious issues were raised in the discussion groups over the last two days although those points did not appear in the final statement – among them calls to legalize the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan and give a timetable for withdrawal.
[…] Afghan legislators have long called for a Status of Forces Agreement for American troops in Afghanistan. NATO troops are present in Afghanistan under a United Nations mandate, but some United States forces remain outside the NATO force, under a less formal arrangement with the Karzai government.
More than 300 women took part in the jirga and according to many delegates spoke out strongly in support of peace, while insisting that women’s rights achieved over the last eight years be respected. Under Afghan tribal tradition when women appeal for peace, men are honor bound to listen.
"The government should not neglect our efforts," said one delegate from the northern province of Kunduz, who asked not to be named for concern for his own security. "We did our job and it is up to the government to do what they have to now."
Colombia
12) Lessons from Sunday’s voting: the failure of the polls.
Pablo Rojas Mejia, Colombia Reports, Thursday, 03 June 2010 08:16
http://colombiareports.com/opinion/the-colombiamerican/10076-lessons-from-sundays-voting-the-failure-of-the-polls.html
To my disappointment – and to the delight of Santos supporters – the Green Wave that swept through Colombian streets as well as domestic and international headlines just one week ago seems to have been mostly hype. Juan Manuel Santos, heir apparent to outgoing president Alvaro Uribe, won in all but one of Colombia’s thirty-two departments and one departmental capital. Even in Bogota, where Green candidate Antanas Mockus served two successful terms as mayor, Santos won by a significant margin. In total, Santos gained about twice as many votes as Mockus.
Perhaps we all should have seen it coming. Uribe, after all, is the most popular politician in recent Colombian history. However exciting Mockus’s proposals and however admirable his track record as mayor of Bogota, he is far too uncharismatic and distant from average Colombians to pose a real threat to the country’s powerful and deeply entrenched political establishment. On Sunday night, as Santos’s victory became certain, my conversations with other Green Party sympathizers did not center on how to move forward from this setback. Rather, our biggest question was how we were all fooled into expecting a close race in the first place.
[…] The country’s relatively young polling industry seems well aware that the first round results are a huge blow to its credibility. The gap between poll results and actual voting patterns was simply huge, about twenty percentage points. Recently, some pollsters have attributed that gap to a ban on releasing poll results in the week immediately preceding the first round of voting. They suggest that unreleased poll results from last week did indeed show Santos surging far ahead of Mockus, probably due to the latter’s mediocre performance in televised debates.
This explanation, however, is highly doubtful. Until the polling firms release the results for that week, we will not know the extent to which they reflected Santos’s actual margin of victory, but it is hard to believe that support for Santos would surge so significantly and so suddenly. Even more implausible is the suggestion that Mockus’ debacles in debates and public appearances are the main reason for his disappointing performance in the election. A candidate’s performance in debates has very little impact on his support in the short run, even in countries with a long tradition of televised debates and where debates are more widely viewed – such as the United States. Besides, Mockus did not do badly enough in debates to justify a twenty-point drop in popular support.
In other words, the main explanation for the gap between poll results and actual election results is simply that the pollsters failed miserably. For a number of possible reasons – a selection bias in the polling methodology, a sense among poll respondents that Mockus was the "politically correct" answer, and so on – the surveys grossly overestimated support for the Green Party. Longstanding doubts about the accuracy of the polls and about whether poll results should inform the national political discourse seem to have been on the mark.
It should be noted that Sundays’ vote was not all bad news, even for Greens.
Although he lost, Mockus still managed to gain an impressive following considering Uribe’s popularity and the fact that, a few months ago, the Green Party was a fledgling movement with minimal popular support. Indeed, Mockus has shown a viable path to challenging the political establishment, something that Colombian politics has not seen for decades. A Green victory in the second round may seem almost unattainable, but the party has undoubtedly and perhaps irreversibly changed Colombian politics.
On the other hand, the first round of voting also brought plenty of unsettling lessons. Fraud and voting irregularities, which were rampant in the legislative elections held earlier this year, were again widespread on Sunday. Although Mockus’s rise to prominence made this campaign season more exciting than previous ones, about half of the Colombia’s eligible voters chose not to go to the booths, roughly the same proportion as in 2006 and 2002. Finally, as mentioned above, the country should seriously reconsider the role and methodology of its young polling firms. Public opinion polls are an essential element of a modern-day presidential race, but, in Colombia, they are dangerously imperfect.
Bolivia
13) Oliver Stone and film "South of the Border" greeted by thousands of Bolivians.
Noted US political firebrand and film director Oliver Stone attended the Bolivian premiere of his documentary "South of the Border" Tuesday night at El Coliseo La Coronilla, an enormous indoor sports stadium in Cochabamba.
MercoPress, Thursday, June 3rd 2010 – 06:21 UTC
http://en.mercopress.com/2010/06/03/oliver-stone-and-film-south-of-the-border-greeted-by-thousands-of-bolivians
More than six thousand Bolivians, including Bolivian President Evo Morales, attended. Stone even walked away with the key to the city, bestowed on him by the city’s mayor.
"I don’t think in my entire career in cinema I’ve seen a crowd so big to see a movie of mine," Stone told the audience. "I’m honoured to bring this film to Cochabamba."
The event is part of a larger tour Stone has made through Spain and South America, where the film will be released this month. Cinema Libre Studio will un-reel the documentary in the US June 25, and Dogwoof will release it in the UK July 30.
[…]
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Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
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